Ok so you are up and running with one or more marketing and advertising campaigns, business is flowing and you are feeling pretty good about yourself. Now ask yourself these questions, which marketing method is the most cost effective? Which method bring in customers and which is totally wasteful?

If you know the answers to these questions then give yourself a pat on the back, however if you are like most small businesses in Ireland then you probably haven’t a clue. You are subscribing to the spray and pray method of marketing, you know that if you fling enough mud then some of it will stick.

The problem with this way of trying to grow your business is that it is hugely wasteful in terms of time and money. What if you knew that the advert you took out in the paper each week actually wasn’t bringing you in any customers they we all in fact coming from your website? If you knew this information you could cancel the adverts and divert the money for this to enhancing the website further. Or what if you found out that a large percentage of your business came from your Golden Pages advert, then perhaps it would be worth considering in other Irish business directories.

So how do you go about finding out how effective a particular method of advertising is? The answer is that you need to implement a way to track and measure responses specific to each advert. In other words you need to be able to pinpoint exactly where each lead and in turn new client came from.

To do this isn’t actually that difficult you just need to incorporate some kind of unique direct response mechanism into your marketing. For example you may have one telephone number that you just use in your Golden Pages advert. Or you might run an advert in a paper that requires prospects to send back a coupon which you have a special tracking code on.

Once you start capturing this information it is possible to track exactly where each enquiry came from, you can then track exactly what process was used to convert that prospect to a customer.

Over time this will allow you to build up a very accurate picture of which is the most effective way to attract and convert customers. From this information it becomes very easy to then drop marketing methods which are not paying there way and ramp up the ones that are.

The one piece of advice I give to all business startups and established businesses when asked what would be the best thing to do to promote their business is just do something. 

So often we come accross business owners who are so unsure of how to market their businesses that they don’t do anything. Instead they sit in their office or business premises and make themselves think they are busy by tidying up, or surfing the internet, or doing some other non essential mundane task. The fact is that if you want more business then you have to do some kind of marketing activity. Often it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do something.

So next time you have time on your hands or are doing a non essential task ask yourself if what you are doing is adding to the turnover of your business by increasing sales if not then you probably should not be doing it.

As the owner of any business you have to realise that your primary role is that of salesman and marketeer of that business. It seems simple when you think of it that without a steady supply of clients and customers you do not have a business.

The best way to do this is to pick two or three things you are going to do to attract business, you can choose from the list below, or come up with your own. Then draw up a tracking spreadsheet in excel or in your diary and commit to taking a certain amount of action each day. Over time this will add up and you will have a consistent flow of new business. Go on try it!

Here is a list of simple things you could do each day:

1. Send out 10 postcards per day to new prospects introducing your services.
2. Call up 3 of your passt clients each day and ask if there is anything else they need help with.
3. Go to 1 networking meeting each month and meet some new contacts.
4. Drop a letter and business card into each of the businesses in your nearest high street.
5. Give each new customer/client a discount voucher to give to a friend.
6. Contact your local paper and offer to write a monthly article on your specialised topic.

This is just a handful of ideas that you can use. If you would like some more ideas specific to your business then just contact us

But remember the most important thing is to do something. Like Nike say ‘Just Do It’

If you are like me then more and more you rely on data and files stored on your computer to run your business. Add to that all of my personal files like digital pictures of my family. It would really be a nightmare if I lost this information.

I have always known that I should be backing up the files on my PC, but up until now I just haven’t got around to it. I had looked at a few options but to be honest the hassle of manually backing up files was something that always came bottom of my to do list.

Well I can now smugly say I have found a solution and implemented it and it has been virtually painless, and now for less than 11 cent per day all of the files on my PC are now continuously backed up as I work automatically, without me having to do anything. What a nice feeling! Hopefully I will never have a need to restore files but it sure does feel good that it is one less thing to have to worry about.

Check out this handy online backup from Carbonite for yourself.

I had a question the other day from friend of mine, asking me how to get his website listed in Google. In terms of getting it to appear in Google there are two ways that it can be done.

The first is Google adwords, this is when you search for a term in google and matching adverts appear in a list of boxes on the right hand side.

The way this works is that you have to pay google every time someone clicks on your advert. The amount you pay depends on a number of factors, mainly how relevant your advert is to the search terms i.e. how often it is clicked and how much competition you have.

You bid how much you are willing to pay for a click, from a few cent per click upwards and can set a daily limit. For example on my hire a hot tub site I have picked keywords like hottub and jacuzzi Ireland etc. Typically I spend less than €50 per month, but really the sky is the limit depending
on your budget. The other way to get into google is under the main search results (this is known as an Organic listing).

This is much more complicated as it is based on a number of things like how popular your site is (number of other websites which link to it), how much content you have relevant to the search etc. Generally this happens over time so it can take months or years for this to work.

For a new website I would advise you to pay for the ongoing google adwords to get you up and running and then hopefully over time the site would grow in popularity as you add content etc, and then you will get a better organic listing in Google.