Marketing Guides for Small Businesses Marketing Guides for Small Businesses

Today’s episode is about the Marketing Hourglass. The Marketing Hourglass is similar to the sales funnel but starts before a potential customer would be considered a prospect and continues two steps after the sale. The Marketing Hourglass is a practical way to understand how your customers become your customers and what type of marketing and content you can provide at each stage. It provides a lot of clarity to the marketing madness you may find yourself in.






If you’d like to learn how understanding the Marketing Hourglass framework could help your small business, tune in to this episode.






We’ll explore:


The five stages of the Marketing Hourglass–Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer– and different marketing tactics and content that can be used during each stage.


How using the Marketing Hourglass framework can help you build an overall strategy and launch a product or campaign.


How the Marketing Hourglass can help you create an end-to-end customer journey.

Imagine if there was a way to get your brand in front of prospective customers who visited your website but haven’t filled in a form or called you.  And imagine if they viewed a particular product or service page, that you could influence them even after they’ve left your website using messaging related to the product or service they showed interest in.  It sounds impossible and a little too good to be true, but it’s very real and top brands use it all the time.  






It’s called retargeting or retargeted advertising (or sometimes remarketing). Whatever you call it, it is a hidden secret weapon in your marketing toolbox. In today’s episode we’ll take a look at what retargeting is, its benefits, and how you can start leveraging this low-cost secret weapon right away to help your business grow sales and conversions.






We’ll discuss:


What retargeting is and how it actually works. 


Why companies need retargeting.


How you can use other types of advertising like search campaigns or social campaigns to help make your retargeting most worthwhile.


How you can create retargeting campaigns that go beyond brand exposure.


Different types of retargeting and what platforms you can do retargeted advertising on.


How retargeting can be one of the most cost effective forms of advertising. 

As a small business owner, you’ve probably heard that one of the keys to growing your business is producing great content connect you with a larger audience. “Content is king,” we hear over and over again. We know we should be producing quality content regularly, but as a small business, how do we generate ideas for all of this content? How do we set aside time to create it all?


In today’s episode, we look at how you can create a small business content strategy that helps you grow your audience without needing a huge budget or large content team.


Join us as we discuss:


What kind of content works best at each different stage of the marketing funnel.


Content ideas for the awareness stage of the funnel.


What other types of content, beyond blogs, you can use for inbound marketing.


What content repurposing is and why its important.


How to decide what content to repurpose.


What evergreen content is and how to use it across channels.


How you can use infographics in your small business’s content across different platforms.


What user-generated content is and how your small business could use it.


What kind of video content is feasible for small businesses. 

Email newsletters are the daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletter you receive from a company. Some of them are full of deals, others of announcements, others share tips or case studies, and others dive deep into one topic. 






There are many ways to set up your newsletter. The key is to determine the best style, content and cadence that works for you and your ideal customers. And, most importantly, to keep sending regularly. Today’s episode is all about email newsletters for small and medium businesses. 






Tune in to learn:


Why your business should consider starting a newsletter if you don’t already have one.


How to determine where to start when creating an email newsletter.


How frequently you should send your newsletter.


How to decide the best format and content types for your newsletter.


Why businesses tend to stall on sending out their newsletter regularly and how you can avoid this pitfall.


What easy and/or free email newsletter software systems exist and why you should use one.


How to use newsletter analytics to help determine if a newsletter is a useful tool for your business.

Having an email list you can use for marketing still remains one of the most important things a business can have in their marketing tool kit, but growing that email list seems daunting to most small businesses. In this episode, we’ll discuss clever ways to grow your list for both email and text message marketing.






In this episode, you’ll learn:


How to build an email list and why having one is so important. 


How you can use online tools to build your email list.


Different offline tactics for building your email list.


How to craft an irresistible offer to get people to opt-in and share their email address or cell phone number.


What types of lead magnets work well for most small businesses.


How a sales funnel can help you build your email list and how you can create a high converting sales funnel opt-in.


How to drive traffic to your lead magnet.


How to move people through the buyer’s journey after they opt-in.


The differences between text message marketing and email marketing for building and engaging your list(s).

Anyone who has worked in a large organization understands that there’s often tension between sales and marketing.  The sales people complain about the quality of leads they get, where their tradeshow booth is located, or the lack of sales support materials to help them land customers.  






At the same time, the marketing team sends what they believe are highly qualified vetted leads and think they have equipped the sales team with the materials they need to help move customers through their buying journey.  






Often there can be built up animosity between the two camps. But marketing and sales are each vital and are part of the same continuum, the customer’s buying journey. Join us for this episode to learn how you can ensure your sales and marketing teams are working together to maximize your efforts to move customers through the entire buyer’s journey.






We’ll discuss:


Whether sales and marketing generally have different goals and thus different priorities.


How a divide between your sales and marketing teams can impact your small or medium-sized business.


Signs that indicate a problem between your sales and marketing efforts.


The difference between the customer buying journey and the sales process most businesses are familiar with.


A framework for a buyer’s journey that is on a continuum from the buyer’s perspective and how it can help you combine your sales and marketing processes.


What sales support or sales enablement is and why it is important in the customer’s buying process. 


Common examples of sales support that a marketing team or agency could provide.


What you as a business owner can do to help align your sales and marketing teams.