Google recently rolled out an update to their search engine called the Knowledge Graph. The knowledge graph aims to improve a users experience by helping them discover new information quickly and easily. The knowledge graph takes into account the fact that when you search for a phrase, you are not just searching for a combination of words but you are searching for things – people, landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art, etc. By focusing on “things rather than strings”, Google hopes to help you find the information you need more quickly. By using the collective intelligence of the web the search engine can begin to understand the world a bit more like people do.

So what does all of this have to do with small business? While I am sure there will be much speculation to come about how all of this will effect SEO, I think the real lesson is Google’s focus on continually improving the experience of their users (customers). For their search engine, this means helping you find what you are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

Does your small business have that type of focus? Do you continually look for ways to help your customers solve the problems you help them with faster and easier? I know I can always improve in this area.

One of the features of the knowledge graph update is a mechanism to ask the user what they meant by a seemingly ambiguous phrase. If you search for “Taj Mahal” you may have meant the monument, the singer, or the casino – so the search engine will ask you which you meant (click on image to enlarge)

Small business owners don’t need a team of Google engineers to build feedback mechanisms to help them improve their products and services. Sometimes we can get bogged down in all of the different and complicated ways we can solve a question when all we really need to do is ask questions.

Let’s all take a cue from Google and work to ask questions and collect feedback to help us continually improve how we serve our customers.

If you are interested in learning more about the Knowledge Graph, watch this quick video from the folks at Google.

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As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Small Business Week 2012 is rapidly approaching. During the week of May 20 – 26, several events will be help in Washington D.C. and across the nation to celebrate.

As part of the celebration, Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch will conducting a free webcast about 5 Ways to Use Online Tools to Drive More Sales. The webcast will take place on May 23rd at 11am Central time via LiveStream. You can register for this free webcast here.

National Small Business Week recognizes the impact small business owners have on each and every community. We in the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network want to help your business grow!

During this webinar, you will learn how you can use online tools to drive more sales, even if you don’t sell online. You will learn how to:

• Use Online Calls to Action: Leverage calls to action on your individual website to get more of your customers to act offline.
• Embrace O2O Advertising: Online advertising can easily be used to drive people to your offline business. Employ Networked Networking: The addition of online tools and networks have made traditional networking more effective.
• Form Local Social Groups: Create and facilitate local interest groups using online tools to dive awareness and sales.
• Get Online and On the Go: Take advantage of mobile use to drive on the go folks to your business.

Register Now for the Online Presentation – and stay tuned for more business building opportunities during National Small Business Week.

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In yesterday’s post about lead scoring, I mentioned that one of the basic things small business owners can do to help determine which of their leads are ready to engage in a sales conversation is to take notice of which leads demonstrate interest by their actions.

Here is how that works if very general terms. Actions are the different ways that someone can interact with your company. They are often associated with your website and\or marketing content – web page visits, file downloads, webinar registrations, clicking on newsletter links, etc. Each action is assigned a score to denote it’s relative importance as an indicator of sales readiness. For example, registering for a product demonstration usually receives a higher score than visiting the company’s career page on their website.

You can also assign a negative score if a lead exhibits a behavior that indicates a low level of interest, i.e., they used their hotmail account rather than their business email when they downloaded your whitepaper.

One of the frustrations small businesses owners have when starting out with lead scoring (or content marketing in general) is they have only one way to measure interest. They typically have a whitepaper that can be downloaded. They follow up right away after someone downloads the whitepaper but are disappointed when that person is not immediately ready to buy.

Some of these leads may not be qualified but even if they are, chances are they are being asked to make a decision too early in their buying process. They probably found your website during their research phase; that’s why they download your whitepaper, they are conducting research. They often “don’t know what they don’t know” at this point, making it very uncomfortable to have a sales conversation.

This is why it is important to have an understanding of your customer’s buying process. Once you understand their buying process you can create content that answers the questions your leads need to help them move to the next stage in their process. Using this framework, you can gauge where leads are in their process and what you should offer them next to continue to move them towards a sales conversation.

Even if you don’t have a formal lead scoring process, having an understanding of your customers buying process along with educational content that helps them feel comfortable moving to the next stage in that process will put you head and shoulders above your competition.

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Lead scoring is a popular topic in marketing circles but how important is it for small business owners? Lead scoring can be a powerful tool for improving sales. It can also help improve the alignment and communications between marketing and sales if those are separate teams in your business. Even if lead scoring isn’t right for your small business, you can still benefit from the thinking and preparatory work that goes into implementing a lead scoring system.

What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a way to quantify the value of your leads. It is often described as a way to determine if your leads are “sales ready” which is another way of saying they have reached the point in their buying process where they are ready to have a sales conversation.

Lead scoring can be (but doesn’t have to be) a complex process. As a starting point, small business owners should think about how lead scoring can help them determine if their leads:

1. Are the right people at the right companies. This is the demographic data (industry, company size, title, etc.) from your ideal customer profile.

2. Have demonstrated interest by their actions, i.e. multiple visits to product pages on your website, downloading e-Books, attending webinars, been receptive to follow up calls, etc.

Do I need lead scoring?
This is going to depend upon your particular business, what you sell, and how many leads you generate and manage.

If you’re a small business marketer who only needs to generate a handful of leads every month, lead scoring isn’t going to make a huge impact on your business. In fact, most small businesses need to focus on generating more leads before they focus on lead scoring.

When people talk about lead scoring, the conversation typically revolves around software solutions to help automate the scoring and follow up processes. However, there is a lot of other work that goes into putting a lead scoring system in place – understanding and mapping your customers’ buying process, creating content, developing follow up sequences, having a defined sales process, etc. All of these items are powerful marketing and sales tools for building your business and you can start putting them in place today so that when you are ready for a lead scoring system you will be better prepared for a successful implementation.

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Press releases, both online and traditional, are a powerful but often overlooked small business marketing tool. Many businesses think they have to wait until they have a “big story” before they think about using news releases. As with most marketing tactics, success with PR comes from being consistent, not from one big bang.

If you think you don’t have any news to share, here are 5 tips to ideas to help you create your next release:

1. Announce a new product or feature
Do you have a new product, service, or feature that your are launching? Announcing new products can be a great way to improve your visibility and attract new customers. If you resell products and services from other companies (i.e. software reseller), check to see if they have press releases that you can leverage by adding your local information.

You may also want to mail a copy of these types of press releases to your existing customers so they know what else you have to offer.

2. Apply for an award
Awards give your company credibility with your customers. Using online news releases is a great way to get the attention your award deserves. Don’t just wait for someone to hand you an award; find a list of awards and apply for some. Here is one such list of small business awards and contests.

3. Host an event
Successful events need publicity, and press releases are a great way to get the word out. Events like fund raising events can provide opportunities for several releases – you can announce the upcoming event, share the results, and follow up with a story about how the receipts from the fund raiser were put to use.

4. Announce an employee change
This is an old standby that is still effective. Sharing news about your employees shows that your business is growing and that you value your team.

5. Share your market research
Market research is an effective tool to build credibility and awareness. If you are conducting research to identify industry trends or to build support for a new product, repurpose that information to help demonstrate your expertise.

PR can be a powerful, low cost tool in your small business marketing toolbox – make sure take advantage of them.

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Our friends at Constant Contact and some of their partners (including Duct Tape marketing) are joining together to celebrate Small Business Week 2012 with their annual Get Down To Business events: a free, action-packed, nationwide series of business building events.

Learn about business-building tools and strategies, along with proven methods for engaging your audience through email and social media – all designed to help you bring in new prospects.

It’s also a great opportunity to meet and mingle with other small businesses and local influencers in your area.

Here is a quick video from Gail Goodman, Constant Contact CEO talking about Small Business Week

To see the full event details visit… www.constantcontact.com/sbw

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Referrals play a key part in every small business marketing system. In fact, for many business owners and professional service providers, a strong referral system may be the only marketing needed to meet their goals. In Duct Tape Marketing we emphasize the importance of referrals as on of the main players in our lead generation trio (along with advertising and public relations).

I often write about various tools and techniques for implementing a referral system on this blog. These tips usually consist of ways to identify referral partners, techniques for having conversations about referrals, and tools for helping us consistently stay in touch and follow up with our referral partners. But what about us, personally. Are we referable? Have you ever stopped to think about what makes a person referable?

Over the weekend I was listening to an interview with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach. In the interview, Dan talked about his concept of referability — being someone whom your best customers want to introduce to other people like them. He further outlined these 4 “Referability Habits”:

1. Show up on time.
2. Do what you say.
3. Finish what you start.
4. Say please and thank you.

Sounds simple, right? Simple, but maybe not all that easy to deliver upon day in and day out.

We hear a lot of talk about the importance of building relationships. Most of us think of this as common sense but we are often unsure how to go about doing it. I believe whether or not you follow Sullivan’s 4 habits will determine whether you make (or break) your relationships – both personal and professional.

Focus on relationships by making these 4 habits and integral part of your daily life and your business will rise along with your “referability”.

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John Jantsch, the found of Duct Tape Marketing, will be the featured speaker at the 2012 Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA) President’s Program in Anaheim at ALA’s Annual Conference.

John will be sharing his thoughts on how to apply the ideas he outlined in his books  Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide and The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself to libraries.

The first 200 to attend will receive a free copy of the revised edition of Duct Tape Marketing.

More information for this event can be found on the ASCLA Blog

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YouTube recently updated their audio editing capabilities, including the addition of a library of more than 150,000 backing tracks that you can use with your videos.

You can also mix music into your video at different volume levels – you can choose “soft background” or you can “completely replace” the audio in your video. The featured tracks feature makes it easy to find a song that fits with your video.

You can find these new features by going Video Manager | Edit | Enhancements | Audio.

Here is a short video from YouTube demonstrating the new features.

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Have you noticed the changes to the look and feel of your Google+ account? Last week, Google announced on the roll out a redesign which they believe will allow users to create a more customized experience on Google+.

New features include customizing apps and the navigation bar as well as adding more flexibility to profile pages and pictures. There is also a new Explore page that you can use to find out what others think is interesting and trending across the site.

I like the changes. In my opinion Google has done a lot lately to make sure that their user interfaces are clean and simple – allowing you to focus on easily accomplishing your tasks.  I think this latest update does is right in step with that design philosophy.

Personally, I didn’t see the need to change the profile page to mimic Facebook’s Timeline, but that probably not a big deal. You may want to check your profile picture. In most cases, the default is to enlarge your old profile picture so chances are is has a pixelated look.

The chat list that puts friends front and center on your page, which is nice. The static menu icons at the top have been replaced with a ribbon  on the left. The ribbon allows you to drag and drop to rearrange the order. You can also hover over icons to select from a set of quick actions.

What do you think about the new design?

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