 Time and money are two of the scarcest resources known to small business owners - whether you are running yours with or without external funding. How you spend those resources fundamentally determines the success of the business. 'You should be on Instagram' is advice we've heard given to all manner of small businesses over and over but should you, really? There are products, services and companies that should not. Are your potential clients/customers there AND expecting you to be there to help them buy? There is a fairly simple and scientific method to work it out. When you have limited resources, spend them where they work to bring in sales. Anything else is a waste and will be a hit to your profits. When we help the smallest businesses work out which marketing channels to focus their resources on, we find the answers to three key questions:
Let's take an example of an accounting consultant Sounds too simple? It is smart, it will be effective and sustainable.
Why didn't we recommend Instagram, PR or advertising? Well, even if potential clients have Insta accounts, it isn't the first place people look for year-end bookkeeping services. Instagram requires a lot more time than the available resources so marketing via it for this consultant is a waste of precious time. PR then? To stay 'front-of-mind' and build trust, we are looking at repeatable tactics, not one-offs so PR is out. Then we have advertising. With a much larger budget, advertising could work to build awareness of the services but a) they aren't selling unique services so it would be like advertising every other accounting consultant too and b) advertising doesn't build trust, so it out on two counts. It can be just as useful to know where NOT to market! What you end up with is your Marketing Channel Strategy and the confidence to get on with it, knowing your resources are best reaching your target market. *Incase you think you should be on Instagram, please give it a cold, hard stare 🧐. Are your potential clients/customers there? Are you selling a product or service that your target market expects to buy (or be inspired to buy...) directly from seeing it there? Perhaps the most important question as it needs daily attention and skill level way above the other main social media portals - do you have the time, money, energy and skills to make it work for you? Being smart about where you should be and knowing what you need your audience to do needs just three answers. Get in touch with us if we can help you with yours. Using social media to build up the recognition of a brand and market products and services has become a popular strategy among small businesses, in part because it costs nothing except time. But is it effective for your business? Do you get sales from your hard work? Does it take up far too much time? Knowing which social media marketing tools, strategies and tactics work for a small business and which are a waste of time can make the difference between a business succeeding or failing. That is our job. We provide social media marketing support to the smallest of businesses, focusing on only those tactics that will turn into sales and growing the reach of your accounts at the same time. All you need to do is provide us the details about your business and explain us your business goals. We will take care of it from there!  Services you can use include: Social media set-up Collecting your current marketing materials, images and details relevant to your business, we will build great social profiles for you in each relevant social media platform. The profiles will reflect your business values and reinforces your brand. Profiles we build are where your existing and potential customers are. If you would like easy-to-use post templates, we can create you a set of them that makes posting much faster and will look awesome. Many accounts we see don’t use the right hashtags for building up sales. We can provide you with a selection of hashtag sets that you can use to reach your target market. Content creation The simplest detail about your business can be turned into an interesting content with creative writing skills and relevant images, making your current customers read more about your business and help new customers understand why they should buy from you. A set of posts created each month is a common way of us managing your content creation. For example, we can create and post 9 posts per month for you, giving you space to add in your own posts whenever you want while ensuring your profiles build up their reach. Planning ahead Getting your marketing content planned strategically in advance saves a lot of time and energy but most importantly, makes it much more effective. We work with you to build your marketing content around what is happening in your business and what is happening for your potential clients. With tools designed for big businesses but scaled down for us, we can plan, schedule and automatically post your content at any time of day and night. We can even share the system with you so you can add posts too. We will make sure that your marketing content is published to reach the right audience at the right time. Running social media marketing for you If social media marketing is what you need but you don’t have the time, energy or inclination to run it yourself, we are here to run it for you. Full responsibility sits with us and we report back on the progress, including tying in the activity we do with the sales of your products/services. Engagement and follower building *The most effective service we offer:* This is a very unique marketing service that we provide. Many social media marketing ‘experts’ miss this point but if we are running social media marketing for you, we make sure that we build up the number of relevant people seeing and reacting to your content. While you work on growing your business, we work to grow the reach of your messaging. Without this, sales won’t come from social media. Each small business is unique and each small business owner wants and needs different things from their marketing. Talk to us about your business. If you’d like to find out more about running your own social media marketing and/or have some coaching along the way, check out our online courses and coaching options at www.myownmarketingcoach.com  Knowing where to put your marketing effort saves many small businesses a lot of time, money and energy. Identifying the journeys your key customer groups usually take to the point where they buy your products/services highlights the gaps. Assuming your product and market are right for each other, plugging these gaps will increase sales. BackgroundThis Swedish tech startup has developed a system that uses artificial intelligence to put the products people are most likely to buy in front of them in ecommerce stores. It was bought out by one of its own customers and almost all the staff moved to the parent company at the point they brought us onboard. The industry With the growing number of e-commerce stores comes a growing number of competing products and the market is more and more competitive. The problemThe key challenges our client faced were:
How we jumped inThe client approached us from a referral by a member of their team. They investigated other options and chose Write in Danderyd for our broad expertise and, as a smaller organisation, so that they would be an important part of our business. The client’s goals for us The client identified two key goals for our time with them: Developing the marketing strategy while taking rapidly restarting the marketing tactics Normally, we would work to set the marketing strategy first and then action the tactics but, in this case, we had to run both concurrently to support the ongoing customers and potential customers already in the pipeline. What we did to help them
The second stage was to formulate a marketing strategy that fully supported the efforts of sales team, focusing on their current target market in the short-term and, longer-term, scaling effectively to reach wider target markets and reduce the risk of churn. The key to this side was the clear identification of the journey potential customers took before purchasing the system – which often included multiple people, time and contact points with the client. The journey of one target market group looked like this:  Identifying where marketing was important in the buyer journey and what current gaps there were helped us develop a clear strategy with tactics for the business.  Search engine traffic, for example, was one missing element. It was rapidly growing in importance for the client, as industry awareness of the product availability increased and potential customers searched for solution providers.
The client needed more leads coming into the top of their sales funnel and we identified search traffic as one important source of them. 
The next strategic area was the clarification of who the system was for – what attributes did the ideal customers have and how it was best to reach their trigger points for buying the system. We built ‘personas’ for each identifiably different target customer group, looked in detail to find out who they were, what level of buying power they had (to see if the client needed to present the system to additional people before a buying decision could be taken), what their technical knowledge level was (to highlight how content targeted at them should be written), their likely goals and their likely challenges. The final step was to identify each personas’ set of value propositions – what made this system stand out from the competition and how could they succinctly say it. We produced sets of value propositions for each target market group and then narrowed it down into the best, most useable statements that would help support the buyer through their journey.   Area 1 - urgent content marketing and website management
One of the first tasks we undertook was to move the company website from Word press to an easier to self-manage CMS system to allow the company more stability and ease of use. The original site was difficult and time-consuming to edit and the team wanted something that could change with them as they grew. We created a total replica of the original site in a system that then took 10 minutes to post a professional, on-brand blog post on instead of several hours and design skills. We ran a full website review initially and provided the client with a comprehensive list of changes and improvements to boost search traffic and the usability of the website. We worked with the team to start implementing these changes. Area 2 – strategic branding
Area 3 – sales strategy, tactics and materials Although not part of the original brief, sales support became our biggest area of work and we pivoted to meet this need. Sales support was provided in series of email templates, email processes, CRM system support, sales presentation design and content, flyer design and the printing and shipping of business cards out to an event.  We created content and materials to support partnership sales. We created email content for each target market to support the sales team in their efforts to built up requests for demos of the system. On our recommendation, a series was used, and results started to appear from the fourth email in the series. We worked with the client’s CRM system to get them automatically to the correct recipient. Area 4 – preparing for the future without us
What the project achievedIn this case, the client needed both a quick fix and a strategic plan. We supported them so that they could get internally back on their feet without disruption to the existing clients and prospect clients in the pipeline and left them with the tools, processes and materials to achieve their growth ambitions.
Do you have a complex situation which requires strategic and tactical support? Read more about the services we offer above and/or get in touch to talk us through your needs. Write in Danderyd is a full-service marketing agency that provides all the services the smallest of business needs to grow and thrive. What can we help you with?  We offer:
1. Content marketing  Content marketing works to pull visitors into your website and to reach them there, on social media and by email. It is the best thing for building up awareness of your business and for taking potential clients through their buyer journey to the stage when the book with or buy from you. In practice, this means putting new or updated material on your website, often in the form of blog posts and then spreading the news that the new material is there via the channels. For a small business, it can be the main source of new business. We can help you work out what content to put up, we can produce it for you or use content you have created and help you get it out to your potential and current clients. 2. Social media marketing  Social media marketing covers everything from creating text and graphic posts, keyword research and posting to engagement and follower-building activities. For the smallest businesses, posting when you have very few followers isn't where the focus should be. We can produce and publish your content and grow the number of people looking at it. We can do it as a project or as a regular activity, in as little as two hours a month. 3. Graphic design  People make decisions based on their first impression of a company, a person or a product so good design is crucial for business success. Small businesses need everything from a logo to social media images and they need them from the very beginning. We work with you to create everything from a logo - including versions of your logo for every use, printing stationery and the right sizes and formats for social media sites (each, of course, being different!) - to newsletter design, brochure design, websites, signs, event equipment and everything inbetween. 4. Website design and management  Web design plays a vital role in how your brand is perceived and how your website works can allow or stop people form booking or buying your products and services. Another important factor is how well the website works for you. Can you easily update it, add what you need to be visible and change the content without it taking forever? Does it look good when you make changes? We work with you to find the best system for you and your business and then get it setup and running. We support websites made in all systems and can help you with anything. 5. Search engine optimisation (SEO)  If your website isn’t optimised for search engines, they literally can’t see it and won’t show it to your target market. SEO explains what you site is about and who the targeted audience is based on the information the site provides. We provide SEO services designed especially for the smallest of businesses - so you don't pay for something you don't need (yet...!): WEBSITE REVIEW: A comprehensive review of your website, including user experience (what it is like for a stranger to use your site), design and content, plus all the above SEO elements. Included are specific tips under each section and the information you need to see and work on your on-page SEO. ON-PAGE SEO WORK: Working through each page on your website, we create and put in keywords, titles and descriptions for each one. We'll look at your images and add optimised descriptions for them too. As many or as little hours as you want and need LOCAL SEO: If your target market is right in your neighbourhood, there are specific cost-effective SEO tactics we can use to get you in front of as many locals as possible. OFF-PAGE SEO: Social media marketing and blog outreach are two affordable off-page SEO tactics that we can help you with. 6. Newsletter and email marketing  Potential customers/clients need to ‘meet’ you a good few times before they are likely to buy your products/services. Email is one of the cheapest, most effective and traceable approaches to get them understanding why they need to buy from you. We can get you set up and ready to reach out to your audience and use our experience and your past marketing to establish what your audience likes to receive by email. We can run campaigns for you or help you work out how to do it yourself. 7. PR and media  There are occasions where getting coverage in the media gets your message out to the audience you want and need. We work with local, national, and international journalists and target press for both the public and specific, targeted audiences. PR is perfect for book and research report launches, for example. 8. Events  Under normal circumstances, we help organise and run events around the world. Right now, we help publicise and host events across the internet! We can help with a whole event and we can help with just one element – signs and posters, social media promotion, online course systems and anything else. 9. Advertising  From billboards and posters to pay-per-click online advertising, we can help you with your paid marketing campaigns. We will also advise you to stay away from channels and advertising tactics that don't work for the smallest of businesses - we'll help you spend your budget in the most effective way. 10. Sales support  Most business owners know, to an extent, how potential clients turn into paying ones (and the same for customers in/on a shop). What is harder is working out the point where potential clients/customers drop out of their buying process - where are you losing potential business? We look for the entire journey the buyer takes and spot the gaps, supporting you with ideas, content and tactics to plug them and build up your sales. We can advise on marketing and sales automation too - getting technology to move potential clients through their journey without needing your personal attention. We can also work with you on specific sales campaigns, from filling the sales funnel at the top with new leads to converting prospects into buyers at the final hurdle. All with your small business in mind. Why choose us: Write in Danderyd’s marketing services are specifically designed to build and grow the smallest of businesses. That means the business you run from home, the consulting firm you have, the local business you’ve set up and any business that has less than 10 employees. Or no employees.
We pick and choose the best marketing tactics that work for the smallest of businesses. We don’t recommend or use tactics that take a lot of time, energy and budget to action. We don’t use tactics that need you to have 10,000+ followers on social media or an email list with 10,000+ addresses on it. If you have 10 email addresses, that is where we will start. Learn to market your business yourself Sometimes you need to market your business yourself and we support that too. We run courses and workshops (mostly online at the moment but IRL too!). Check out our selection and let us know if you’d like to learn about something we haven’t got a course for: My Own Marketing Coach. Contact us Every business is different. Get in touch with us to discuss yours. We see a lot of small businesses trying to market on social media. Creating great content and posting it, only for it to be pretty well ignored. If you have done any of our courses, you'll know we go on (and on...) about posting being no more than 20% of the job. The other 80% contains engagement and marketing building (getting more of the right kind of followers to read and react to your posts). Social media marketing is not for the faint hearted. Each social media portal is one channel and needs a marketing campaign with all its elements to make it a success. Plus a lot of time and effort. Hiring someone 'young' to manage your social media is not sensible. Neither is hiring a social media manager without checking that they are properly qualified - that means education (preferably marketing and not just social media) and experience that shows they can build leads or sales for a client. Using a posting system, like Buffer, Hootsuite or Later, helps you post a little faster and a little easier. It does not help you market your business. Social media marketing is marketing just the same. It needs to fit properly into the buying journey your potential clients/customers take and it needs to directly move them one or more steps closer to the buying decision. If it doesn't, it is a waste of time. Does social media really fit in your potential clients/customers' business journey? If you aren't getting sales from your social media efforts - saying that it is 'brand awareness' doesn't count - brand awareness is a step at the beginning of the process and should still add sales at the end of the process, if it is working - or you aren't sure social media is where your target market is looking for your service/product, get in touch with us and we'll work it out with you. If you are marketing on social media, here is our take on doing it yourself versus using us. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss any aspect of it.  As the real world changes, the online world does too. More than half the entire world population uses social media and its use increased as people started to get stuck at home. This poses a dilemma for small business owners. On the one hand, not 'wasting' money on marketing while businesses are closed, sales can't happen and income is so uncertain seems sensible. On the other hand, others see the value in remaining visible and protecting future sales. There are also those who have, in a positive way, taken advantage of the crisis to reach out to their target market and ask for their support through this period. Market forces usually keep the playing field somewhat level and that's been true in the healthy economic climate we have benefited from for years, up to January this year. Now it has now been shaken to pieces.  While saving money is sensible in a down period, being invisible isn't. Companies that best survive in recessions are those that market through it and therefore get sales as soon as recovery starts. It can be fatal for a company to ignore the competition's activities and lose their market share. If you have been busy surviving and marketing has had to take a back seat (or been left behind), here are some things to think about:
There are various cost-effective areas you can use to reach out to your target market: If this feels overwhelming or you don't have time to do this yourself, reach out to us. We have two ways that we can help you:
A garden services client of ours also sells Christmas trees. We run a social media marketing campaign for them each November and December, building up awareness and sales of the trees and helping fuel bookings coming in at the end of the winter. Whatever size and type of business you have, if you need help marketing it and want to grow your sales, get in touch with us.
Are you in a position where you can't sell anything right now? There isn't much we can say to make that feel any better but we can recommend a distraction that will set your business up to grow as life returns to normal. Now is the time to protect your brand recognition. There have been many downturns in the world's economies and, while many businesses have plans ready for downturns, forgetting to plan for the upturn can spell disaster. We know this from studying what happens to business before, through and after recessions. There are many cases of companies going out of business during the upturn. Surely that's something that can be avoided? Let's put it another way: If no-one is buying your service or product now and they aren't buying from your competitors either, then you are competitively equal. You aren't losing any more or less than they are. If they spend the next 4-6 months building up more recognition of their services/products and you do nothing, what will happen if, in six months time, someone needs just what you offer? Will they come to you? No. They will have forgotten all about you and you will have lost out to your competition. We don't recommend asking people to buy from you right not - and certainly not asking people to risk infection by doing so (grrrr....). Regularly reminding customers and potential customers about the services and product you offer is a great idea. (Even we do say so ourselves :)).  Use the same message over and over if you want to. You want my advice? (I hope so... :)) Say the same thing 20 times. I'm challenging you to do that. Pick a service that you offer or, even better, a pain point that you clients/customers have that you help solve and put the message out to your email and social media lists 20 times over the next three months. Do you accept the challenge?? :) Here is one of our message versions. Get in touch with us for advice - a call is free! 
However, this isn’t the main reason we recommend blogging for small businesses. The main reason is that search engines LOVE blogs and treat them in a different way. Without a blog or news or whatever-you-want-to-call-it section - it is the technical part that matters - search engines see your website as a static brochure. Add in a blog and they pull up each and every one of your posts in the search results so you get a lot more space on the results page but also push down the competition, out of sight:  Blog posts are also the best thing to use to promote your business on social media. They work far better than writing plain old social media posts and send potential customers to your website, where they can find out more about you, your products and services and how to buy them. Blogging for business is a training session we run to help you get your blog up, running and promoting your business fast.
In our two-hour sessions, we'll work through blogging techniques you can use to get the search engines sending you lots of lovely visitors and the right type of visitors at that. We'll look at the content on your website, talk about what to blog and take a good look at the technical stuff to make sure you get it right. The next sessions are on Wednesday 13th September - 12:30-2:30pm and Wednesday 15th November - 12:30-2:30pm. They are held in Stocksund (Danderyd) and are 350kr per person. If you would like to grow the traffic to your website and increase your sales, click here for the details of this course.
Wednesday 20th September - 12:30-2:30pm (5 spaces)
Wednesday 11th October - 12:30-2:30pm (5 spaces) Wednesday 22nd November - 12:30-2:30pm (5 spaces) Wednesday 13th September - 12:30-2:30pm (5 spaces) Wednesday 15th November - 12:30-2:30pm (5 spaces) Wednesday 4th October - 12:30-2:30pm (2 spaces) Wednesday 18th October - 12:30-2:30pm (5 spaces) All the sessions are two hours long and cost 350kr in advance (preferably by SWISH). For more information, click here or get in touch with us. If you want to join us but can't make the dates/times listed, let us know and we'll see what we can do. |
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