The Messengers

Working with outside agencies like PR firms, advertising agencies, and marketing agencies can cause a lot of problems for entrepreneurs and small business owners.

Should you hire an outside agency at all? If so, do you need an advertising agency, a marketing company, or a PR firm? Do you need to hire more than one? All three?

Many business and individuals are guilty of failing to follow the most basic of cyber security steps to protect their own information, and the personal information of their employees and customers.

Far too often we see the lack of simple procedures result in data breaches, stolen credit cards, identity theft, financial issues, and massive headaches for everyone involved.

Many entrepreneurs and businesses spend far too much time, effort, and money on logo design.

While your logo holds some importance, it’s not the make-or-break endeavor that many make it out to be.

Whether it’s spending too much on logo design, or agonizing over details that won’t matter at all to your business, mistakes happen in the logo design process all the time.

On the other hand, there are a number of important elements when it comes to choosing a logo designer that need to be considered, but don’t need to cost a fortune.

Deploying your website is just step one in the long process of maximizing that shiny new domain name you just purchased. All of the effort getting things just right is wasted if you’re not measuring the performance of your website, and then making changes based on the results you see.

Modern analytics tools– the most common and accessible being Google Analytics– make measuring your website’s effectiveness simple. 

Unfortunately, even for many who see the value in analyzing their analytics data, they’re often left overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that’s presented to them

To some, direct mail sounds like an outdated marketing method. But with the oversaturation we’re seeing in digital marketing mediums, it’s as (or more) effective than ever. In fact, for many marketers, it’s the single best direct response marketing medium they have.

Keeping your website up-to-date can be one of the most difficult tasks for a small business. Very few small businesses and entrepreneurs are able to dedicate personnel to this task, which means it usually falls by the wayside until it gets so bad it can no longer be ignored. At that point, it comes time to make a decision on whether you’re looking at an update or a complete, ground-up rebuild.

It would be nice if there was a rule we could follow, such as “if it has been X years since you did Y, you need to start from scratch.” Unfortunately the real answer isn’t so straightforward.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, can be one of the hardest aspects of digital marketing. But with the majority of people picking from the first page of Google’s search results when they need a service or product, organic search optimization is a critical part of any comprehensive marketing strategy.

And with paid search engine advertising being more prominent than ever, navigating the Google landscape can be more confusing than ever.

No matter the particular marketing piece, the goal is to drive the user/reader/listener/viewer to take an action.

Your design might be a masterpiece, but it's unlikely to drive revenue to your business if your only goal is for it to look nice. Driving action is about designing for results, not aesthetics alone.

Real marketing is designed based off real data. When designing an interactive piece like a website, using heat maps or tracking click-through rates can help determine what parts of the design are actually working, even if you’re not personally thrilled with the way they look.

Design is subjective, data isn’t.

Facebook advertising can be incredibly valuable ... but it can also be daunting or, even worse, a complete waste of money if not done properly.

We often see money being thrown at the platform without measuring any meaningful metrics. Other times it's someone that's excited they can spend $5 to boost a post only to realize they heavily underestimated what they need to spend to get the results they really want.

Marketing on Facebook is a mix of determining and managing realistic budgets, targeting the right people, and creating content those people actually want to see and engage with.

Promotional items can be largely hit-or-miss.

On one hand, your t-shirts, pens, and notepads could do a great job at keeping your company name in your customers’ minds, hitting the most important marketing element there is: Frequency.

But on the other hand, you might just end up wasting your money on stuff that nobody actually wants. You could end up spending thousands just to have these items go right into the garbage.

While giving a free t-shirt with your logo on it to every customer might seem like cheap and easy advertising, it doesn’t mean anything if that customer never wears it.

"The most underrated skill in business is being nice." - Mark Cuban

We've seen firsthand how true that is. Cultivating positive working relationships with your customers, vendors and employees seems to be an underdeveloped skill for a lot of people these days. Whether it's because we're always too busy to take the time or too disengaged with the people directly in front of us or on the other end of the phone or screen, far too many people forget that it simply pays to be nice to your fellow human beings.

In an increasingly-mobile world, a custom mobile app for your business might seem like a surefire way to drive revenue and make what you offer more convenient for your customers.

Unfortunately, most people underestimate the time and costs that actually go into designing, building, and maintaining an app. It’s not just the upfront costs either; an app needs to be designed for both iOS and Android devices, and rigorously maintained to support hundreds of devices and remain compatible with the newest software updates.

Modern marketing is all about effective storytelling.

Fortunately, the tools to tell those stories have never been more accessible.

The problem is, the inexpensive nature of many of those tools leads many to believe content marketing is cheap and easy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Content marketing can be an invaluable tool, but doing it right requires dedication, perseverance, and patience.

Without investing in quality content and active and consistent promotion (and sticking with it through the rough beginning stages), putting something like a blog on your website can be more of a hindrance than a help.

Many small businesses often feel like their biggest threat is competition, especially from large corporations.

While competition certainly plays a role in the success or failure of any business, very few businesses fail because of competition alone.

On the other hand, one of the biggest threats all businesses face is time. Most businesses fail because they fail to innovate, change with the times, and keep up with advancements in technology and consumer demands.

A lack of foresight into the developments that can make your business obsolete is a greater threat than any competitor could ever be.

 The Messengers are back, this time with special guest Messenger, Darrah Brustein.

Darrah is the founder of Network Under 40, an Atlanta Georgia based business meant to help young professionals with networking and relationship building as they enter the workforce.

She’s also a founding partner at Equitable Payments and a contributor at Forbes and Entrepreneur.com.

It’s inevitable that every entrepreneur, business owner, and professional is going to experience failure.

What distinguishes successful entrepreneurs is the way they handle failure when it happens. They learn from it, analyze where they went wrong, and make sure to never make those same mistakes again.

The perfect advertising campaign is a well-balanced mix of creativity and clarity. The idea is to make the message memorable while not losing the clarity of the product or service you're selling in the process.

Often, marketers or businesses lean too far to one side of that formula. This means that their advertising is either too uninteresting or too crowded to actually grab someone's attention, or too complex for anyone to easily understand the message.

In today’s digital landscape, photo and video are the two main driving forces behind modern marketing campaigns. No matter how good the copy is, supplemental photos and video will always play a huge role.

Many business owners and entrepreneurs believe they can cut costs by doing their own photography, either by investing in a nice DSLR camera or just using the HD cameras that come equipped on high-end smartphones.

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make when working on marketing is worrying too much about what they like and not enough about what their customers or prospects will respond to.

When creating a marketing strategy, it’s imperative to put yourself in the head of the client, and realize that your wants and needs are a distant second to the wants and needs of the people you're trying to reach.

Boasting open rates that approach 100% and action rates nearly 20x higher than email, text message (SMS) marketing is a much more efficient way to communicate with highly-engaged customers and prospects.

Strict opt-in controls coupled with simple and effective opt-out mechanisms are currently keeping the medium from being watered down the way email has become.

 We’ve noticed a trend that a lot of businesses believe customer service is an easy place to save on costs.

Customer service is one of the primary areas in your business that needs to be invested in, not an opportunity to cut costs to the bone. 

Many small businesses make the mistake of either looking at the wrong metrics when analyzing their social media platforms or outsourcing their social media altogether with the expectation that they can just be hands-off and having any presence on social media is better than none at all.