Challenges solved for Small Businesses

From SEO, website creation, pricing strategy, CRM implementation, email marketing to helping with technology, our approach is built on years of business experience.

Website SEO

Challenge: Websites for 2 different clients had not been reviewed for some time and an initial SEO audit identified a number of issues.

Actions: Conducted keyword research and reported on opportunities, SEO audits, reviewed competitors and took action to compete in search for rankings, fixed errors, implemented improvements including user experience enhancements and reported on recommendations for future including link building opportunities to move the website up on the search engine rankings.

Results: User experience elements were improved on both sites with SEO site health scores increased along with organic traffic ( 25% average increase ).

More SEO Work

Secure Course Portal

Challenge: Client wanted to have a single secure portal for clients to log into all their courses.

Actions: Researched tools available and recommended Memberspace as the client had a preference to maintain her branding on course pages and keep clients on her website. Learned, developed and implemented the Memberspace tool, setting up a number of courses on the website and managing the implementation and ongoing support.

Results: Implementation went smoothly and although we had to do some work arounds to make it all happen there was minimal client impact. After some initial client support issues, we rarely need to help clients out at launch of a new course.

Website Transfer and Redsign

Challenge: Client wanted to move from a Wordpress site to a more user friendly tool and completely redesign the look and feel according to her design specification.

Actions: Moved a client from a Wordpress site to a Squarespace site while completing a redesign based on the client's specific style requirements.

Results: In 4 months we completely redesigned and moved this 200 page website. Even though most URLs changed there was no loss in SEO ranking or traffic from the move in fact it increased and all engagement measures have improved, bounce rate decreased by 21%, pages per visit increased by 66% and average session duration increased significantly by 110%. (Comparing the year before the change-over in 2018 to the same period in 2020).

Marketing and Communications

Challenge: Marketing and communicating effectively with clients and potential clients.

Actions:

Set up the Constant Contact email tool to integrate with the website and the administration software and set up templates for regular communications with clients.
Taught internal staff how to use the tool to it's best advantage
Redesigned marketing materials, signs, business cards, coupons and promotional items.
Set up parameters for mailing list segmentation
Wrote blogs and shared these on social media and email.

Result: Turned a struggling business into a success initially almost doubling sales from increases in new business and client retention .

Process Improvement

Challenge: Inefficient processes and a frustration with administration software.

Actions:

Review administration requirements and researched alternatives and provided owner with options.
Researched and added online registration forms to the website which were integrated into the administration software
Gained an understanding of the software and how to leverage the tool for more effective processes in the business.

Result: Administration time was cut in half allowing time for the business owner to focus more on the clients.

Social Media

Challenge: Social media activity use was non existent

Actions:

Set up the business with social media accounts in Facebook and Google.
Posted content on a regular basis.
Tracked what worked and what did not work.

Result: Facilitated communication of business events and celebrations in the client community. Increased customer retention and interaction, building a stronger community around the business.

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Pricing Strategy

Challenge: Clients Pricing and discount decisions were not strategic

Actions:

Set up pricing sheets for all services to help clients understand pricing.
Reviewed competitors pricing.
Reviewed sales and client data to look at client retention, long tern value of clients and profitability which informed the decision making process for discounts and general pricing.

Results: Improved profitability in some services through more strategic discounts.

Outsourcing

Challenge: The business was incurring high staff and overhead costs in storing, managing and distributing inventory for a function that was not part of the core business

Actions:

Reviewed and rationalized the product range.
Researched outsource options and implemented the transfer.

Result: By reducing the number of inventory items by 50% and outsourcing the warehousing function, saved 30% on these costs.

New Website

Challenge: Website design and functionality was a low standard

Actions:

Built a new website providing comprehensive answers to visitors needs, including a blog and a tips page.
Conducted keyword analysis, meta data updates and other SEO activities to improves visitor traffic.

Result: Business branding was improved with a more professional look and monthly website traffic was increased by 40%.

Website Design and Copywriting

Challenge: This micro business website had ceased to operate though technical problems.

Actions:

Designed and created a new small website from scratch using only a resume, a list and photos of work the client had completed and information gathered in a few short meetings.
The website emphasized the benefits to clients and functioned more like brochure as most clients came through referrals rather than search.
Created stories around the number of jobs this client had done for several clients that showed his long term relationships and commitment to clients.

Result: The business owner now sends prospective clients to his website as it tells his story more comprehensively which lead to increased business.

CRM

Challenge: These two clients kept their list a major marketing business contacts on a spreadsheet or in Apple Contacts which had become cumbersome and ineffective.

Action:

Researched and implemented a CRM solution that solved the problem.
Cleaned the data, combined multiply spreadsheet list eliminating duplicates and imported them into CRM solutions including Hubspot and Saleforce

Result: A more effective way to track and facilitate contact and activity with key target markets.

Website Restructure and Mapping

Challenge: The B2B Coach wanted a website review, a course portal and a way to offer payment plans, and one off payment through the website.

Action:

After a review of the website and a deeper understanding the client’s target audience, it was decided to leave the page design basically unchanged but change the messaging and structure of the website to align more with this target audience.

Results: SEO fundamentals were adhered to in this restructure including relevant URLs, and meta tags, and relevant keyword use with the addition of website menu items, pages and content that spoke to this target audience clearly. A map for these changes was provided to the client.

A course portal was set up and all options the client wanted to offer for courses were catered to and added to the website. Forms were reviewed and automations set up for a process to handle the administration of responses.

Social Media Advertsing

Challenges: Two clients were wanting to try some social media advertising and did not want to get another resource involved.

Action:

Set up and ran several campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Both clients had limited resources so I managed the whole process doing all the targeting, including remarketing, image selection, copy, headlines, CTAs and landing pages.

Results: I had done several courses on Facebook Advertising and was willing to try. The learnings from these campaigns were immense and included:

Not allocating enough budget to run the ads for long enough and adjust as the campaign went along.
For one company, having a bottom of the funnel objective, when we should have tried a list building campaign initially for one company, and a more top of funnel objective for the other.
Extended the planned geotargeting to be more international and this meant many impressions were sent to one developing country through Facebook’s AI. We should have gone with the original plan of just the US considering our limited budget.

Note From Sue:

For now I limit my role in social media advertising to advise in the planning, targeting, CTA options and measurement for these campaigns and let the experts, who do this all the time, handle the detail of the ads.