Category Archives for "Dickiebird Blog"

0 How to Choose a Perfect Business Name

A good business name is important. Follow these 7 ways to come up with a great name for your business from day one, no matter what your business does.

Read the full article at: businessblueprint.com.au

What’s in a business name? A lot of people ask me about choosing business names. Here are three tips from Dale Beaumont:

1. Name by Desire, eg. ‘Lean Cuisine’, ‘Die Hard Batteries’

2. Name by problem, eg. ‘Never Late Electrical’

3. Alliteration, eg. Weight Watchers

4. Own a word, eg. ‘Apple’

5. Make up a word, eg. ‘Google’, ‘Qantas’

6. Word-mash, eg. ‘Skype’ (Sky + peer to peer)

7. Word-Twist, eg. ‘Netflix’, ‘Fiverr’

Have a look at Dale’s post and get creative with your business name.

0 Producing great content for your blog at scale (3/6)

After strategizing and planning your content, it’s time for phase 3 of the content marketing lifecycle. Learn how to produce great content for your blog. 

Read the full article at: blog.scoop.it

In terms of lead generation the evidence is there: the more you blog, the more leads you get. 

How to do this at scale is the question: A good content curation tool (software) means a curated blog post takes 30-minutes on average. That’s a lot less than the 3-4 hours it takes on average to craft a fresh post.

One original blog post vs. six curated blog posts. You can guess which strategy will get more leads: The curated content strategy. Check out Scoop.it Content Director if it’s curation software you’re after. 

0 What is a Marketing Content Hub? Would it work for your brand?

This post examines the benefits of the marketing content hub—a branded resource center to help visitors find the information they seek.

Read the full article at: feldmancreative.com

Content marketing hubs are like creating a magazine for your brand on your website. They focus on the interests of your prospective customers.

The great news is that they attract a lot of Google traffic, and individual stories are a perfect match for sharing social media.

Content marketing hubs need to be paired with some kind of lead capture: Ask website visitors to leave their email address to get free updates. That way you can grow your list of prospective customers and build your audience.

0 Don’t Make The One Mistake Most SaaS Companies Make

Imagine if you could get more enterprise SaaS customers for your software. In this post, we cover 7 tips to landing more coveted “whale” customers.

Read the full article at: www.getdrip.com

Many SaaS businesses make one fundamental flaw: They assume if you build great software and customers will come flying through the door. However, it takes more than great software to get more business customers online.

Here are a few tips from our observations and experience:

Don’t let your website become a leaky bucket: Offer a free lead magnet on your website in exchange for a prospect’s email address is the most common way of doing this. For example, if your target is restaurants, you could offer a well-researched pdf doc of ‘7 ways to stop your restaurant going broke’.

Embrace email marketing: With your email list, you can start to build a relationship with prospects. Great email marketing allows you to nurture and educate your prospects, building trust as you go.

Segment your marketing. Business customers have very different needs to regular B2C customers. Make sure the needs of your business customers are catered to – it gives them confidence to do business with your SaaS. This is especially true if your business offers an Enterprise version of your SaaS – buying cycles for high-ticket items could take 18 months or more!

0 How Small Businesses Can Find Their Hottest Prospects With Mailchimp Email

Hopefully you’ve read my previous post ‘Dickiebird Hot Tip: A Quick Email Follow Up Technique That Could Land Your Next Big Client’ – otherwise you might find this piece a little too practical.

Here are the practical steps about how to dig into your Mailchimp email list and find your hottest prospects.

Step One

Send your email via Mailchimp – make sure it’s a good one that’s useful and interesting and one that prospects will open. If you haven’t got time to put together a decent email, get in touch and we’ll put you in touch with people who do a great job.

Step Two

You’ll need to check Mailchimp every day after you sent the email to see who’s opening and clicking on your emails. Chances are, it will be a prospect you haven’t heard from for some time.

Action > Check Mailchimp every day

Step Three

By default, Mailchimp opens to your dashboard and looks like the image below.

Action > Click on the blue subscriber number

 
 
Step Four

The screen below will come up. By default it shows you the readers who opened your email the least amount of times.

Action > Click twice on the ‘Opens’ tab at the top of the list

Step Five

Now you have a list of prospective customers who have opened your email the most. You can see the person at the top has opened the email 42 times! The others have opened it at least 10 times.

Step Six

Create an individual follow-up email to your hot prospects in your regular email provider (not Mailchimp and not a group email). This may well open the door to new business. I wouldn’t suggest you start your follow-up with “I see that you opened our email 42 times, clicked three links and forwarded it to 2 people”.

In your follow-up, try something more subtle, such as an email to say “Hi Joan, it looks like you got our latest email about swimming pool fitness. As we haven’t been in touch for a while, have you got any questions about your pool or landscaping project”? We’re only an email away, so please call or email if we can help in any way”. Make sure you have your phone contact details at the bottom of your email.

Action > Send individual email to your people with the most opens

The Fortune Is In The Follow-Up

If your product or service is high value eg. over $2,000 per customer per year, that simple follow-up might net your business $5,000 plus.

In my experience, it’s something worth trying, and at worst, you’re providing customers with more personalised communication – it’s a simple courtesy that most businesses overlook.  

The manual email follow-up method might not be cost effective for everyone – for example, if your product or service is only worth $50 per year. In this case, if you have Marketing Automation in place, you can create a simple rule that follows up with an email like the one above.

You can read more about Marketing Automation in my previous post. Otherwise, get in touch with any questions about setting up professional Marketing Automation for your professional service or software business.

I’d love to know if you’ve tried follow-up email or automation. Let me know about your experiences, successful or otherwise.

0 Dickiebird’s 2016 Prediction: Don’t Miss Our Top 3 Tips On Marketing Automation

Read the full article at: blog.getdrip.com

Online marketing geeks like myself know that email marketing has a remarkable Return on Investment (ROI). Year on year, email consistently outperforms social media channels as a place to build relationships and ‘convert’ people on your email list into paying customers.

There is a long list of reasons why email is the reigning heavyweight champion of ROI. The current debate between email vs. social media is generally agreed – for now at least (clue: they each have their place in the online communication world).

So, what is Marketing Automation and why do we think you’re missing out if you’re not using it?

Wikipedia defines Marketing Automation (MA) as:

“Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.

As expected, the definition is fairly wide and doesn’t really tell you why it’s so vital for your business.

Now that’s out of the way, let me share my top 3 reasons and features that make Marketing Automation the ‘New Black’:

1. Email Lead Nurture: MA allows you to meet new prospects and actually give them some useful information, pretty much for free once you’ve set it up. Even if members of your email list don’t buy from you right now (or ever), at least you’re building a relationship with trust and authority in your area of expertise.
2. Relevance: MA allows you to ‘tag’ and communicate with leads via email according to actions they’ve taken. For example, if a prospect has visited your life insurance page, you can send them a sequence of emails about ’10 things to consider before you take out a life insurance policy’.
3. Lead scoring: In conjunction with tagging, lead scoring allows you to see how likely it is that a prospect might buy from you. For example, a customer has opened your emails 12 times, forwarded it to their wife, and has visited your life insurance page twice. They would be assigned a high score and it’s highly likely they’re interested in your product or service – you’d be wise to get in touch.

The above are just a handful of examples of the benefits of Marketing Automation via email. Other examples include online advertising in the form of re-marketing or annual reminders for dental clients or insurance renewal clients.

Just make sure you do your research when it comes to Marketing Automation – no-one likes being talked to by a robot. Serving the needs of our clients and customers is the main reason most businesses exist.

If we learn to address those needs, we can embrace Marketing Automation as a powerful ally. It takes a bit of work setting it up, but I promise, you will reap the rewards if it’s done well.

PS: There are some powerful new features in Facebook re-marketing that are beginning to rival email – it’s a complete game-changer, but I’ll leave this for another post…

0 Animal Farm Website Launches a Fresh, New Look

Hands on animal experience Animal Farm: Hands-on animal experiences in Nelson Bays, including rare breeds conservation, education & activities for children.

Read the full article at: www.animalfarm.co.nz

We’re very proud to share the new Animal Farm website. Animal Farm is a reasonably new and special Nelson / Tasman hands-on animal experience that attracted over 37,000 visitors in it’s first year. Not bad for a start up!

What makes the place great is the ability for kids and adults to interact with the animals. Not only are the staff super friendly, but the animals are too.

Dickiebird and Avoca design worked with Animal Farm to produce a fresh new website that has a host of features due to their unique visitor requirements. To name some of the tech features: variable annual pass purchase, multiple languages, weather app, dynamic blog, etc. But, that’s enough about the tech, suffice to say, it gets the job done and looks great.

Recently, we were over the moon seeing Animal Farm as a finalist for at least three categories in the Nelson Chamber of Commerce Business Awards. With their dedication to service excellence, they certainly deserved it.

Animal Farm owners, Vicky and David Pattinson responsive to guest feedback and the place gets better and better all the time. Recently, over 150 new trees have been planted and plans for a new barn/cafe are underway. They are some of the hardest working people we know!

We were very happy with the outcome, and with David and Vicky’s dedication to a website that can grow and adapt as Animal Farm’s business grows.

Dickiebird continues to support Animal Farm with their online marketing. We applaud David and Vicky and their team for their dedication to an excellent, interactive attraction which is an asset to our region.