Fancy getting your small business on TV for free? I’ve got wind of a good incentive from online business-to-business marketplace Alibaba. The company is about to make a TV commercial which is estimated to reach around 20 million people and it wants small businesses that have used the site to create a video of themselves to audition to appear in the commercial.
If you’ve used Alibaba or know someone that has, this is your big chance for some free exposure, so visit http://www.alibaba-tv.com/welcome for more.
Criteria from the website:
1. Video yourself telling a favourite story about a supplier you found through Alibaba.com. (You can use a mobile phone or webcam – the quality’s not important.)
2. Be sure to include details of your business, what it is you buy, who you buy it from and why it’s been good.
3. Keep it short but sweet – the more entertaining, the better.
4. Upload it here.
A team of Alibaba judges will then watch your videos to pick the four most interesting videos.
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The UK’s top retailers are failing to fully exploit the potential of email marketing. This is according to the annual ‘Hitting the Mark’ email marketing report from dotMailer, an email marketing provider. The company has also issued some basic tips which businesses of all sizes should deploy to make the most of email marketing.
dotMailer rated the UK’s top 36 retailers out of 100 against various email marketing criteria, including the exploitation of social media and mobile channels. Under one in five (17 per cent) of email campaigns studied included any ‘share on social network’ links and half did not include a ‘forward to a friend’ option.
The report also criticised retailers for not personalising emails, with just three of the 36 email campaigns it surveyed containing any kind of personal salutation.
dotMailer advises companies to take on board the below when instigating an email marketing campaign:
- Include forward to a friend and ‘add to social networks’ links – only 17 per cent of the retailers assessed included ‘add to social networks’ links in their email messages. Viral and word-of-mouth marketing can provide lucrative opportunities to spread marketing messages, drive traffic, collect contact data and increase revenue – at little or no cost to the marketer
- Add links from your email campaigns to your social media pages and blog – Email can be a powerful and highly effective tool for driving traffic and signups to your organisations social media sites, helping to build further engagement and sales opportunity
- Personalise your greeting – Opening an email with a personalised greeting can significantly improve both open and click-through rates by engaging the recipient and helping to establish one-to-one communication. 92 per cent of the emails we looked at failed to do this, a big increase on the 70 per cent in 2009
- Check renderability before sending – 19 per cent of recipients will delete an email unread if it fails to render (display) correctly. There is still more work to be done in this crucial area with only eight per cent of emails we studied rendering correctly in every type of email account
- Make sure your template has a good balance of text to images - as well as helping your campaign to pass spam filters, this ensures an email is readable when images are switched off by the email client – a simple step that can increase open rates by up to 40 per cent
- 6. Initiate some action – the key to the success of an email campaign is to help recipients answer these three questions: Who is it from? What’s in it for me? and What shall I do next? Make sure you provide clear guidance on what you expect a recipient to do once they have read your email, for example click through to a product page, forward it to a friend, or contact your team. A third of retailers failed to provide a clear call to action
For more on how to use email marketing, listen to our email marketing top tips podcast. Have you experimented with email marketing? What’s your experience been?
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Leadership and common sense lie at the heart of start-up success, according to a panel of speakers at last night’s SmallBizPod Thrive event in London’s Soho. If you’re unfamiliar with SmallBizPod, I would thoroughly recommend you log onto the site or look it up on iTunes. Founder and editor Alex Bellinger was the first to launch a regular podcast dedicated to small business and he gets some big ticket interviewees.
The speaker panel last night included venture capitalist Julie Meyer of BBC’s Online Dragons’ Den, Pimlico Plumbers’ founder Charlie Mullins and Mitesh Soma of online pharmacy, Chemist Direct.
Getting started
When starting out as an online retailer, Chemist Direct’s Soma explained to the gathered small business owners how he got started on a shoe-string budget.
“We used some pay-per-click and optimised our website as much as possible,” he told delegates. “Referrals and good write-ups were most effective at generating awareness. A lot of dotcoms that went bust spent a lot of money on advertising, but we didn’t want to do that. We used low-cost approaches, such as link building and supplier referral.”
Soma’s site is backed by Atomico Ventures, the venture capital (VC) firm established by the co-founders of Internet phone company Skype, which he believes has helped him further develop Chemist Direct.
“They could help out a lot with their expertise, but it is difficult to get funding nowadays,” he said. “To get funding you need to have a clear proposal, a good team and a good track record helps. VCs can be more selective now.”
Recipe for success
For Pimlico Plumbers’ Mullins, there is nothing better for your business than recommendation.
“We do 1,800-2,000 jobs a week, 70 per cent of which are repeat customers,” Mullins said. “We have our own marketing and PR department but you just have to do it yourself to start with. You could be the best company in the world but if no one knows about you it’s no good.”
Meyer agreed with Soma that the key ingredients to get funding and operate successfully as a small business was to have a clear proposition, a good team and, preferably, some demonstrable track record in business.
“We look at the quality of the enterprise, track record, what has the entrepreneur brought to life, have they got that spark or magic, and what’s their leadership ability?” Meyer concluded. “We separate the ‘tourists’ from those that seriously want to create companies. All throughout history capital has followed the idea. The money finds the idea; it always does and always has.”
Further listening
Listen to our interview with Alex Bellinger into how to make a good podcast.
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Podcasts are fantastic ways to plug knowledge gaps on any subject you like, from learning languages to getting started in business. If you’ve got an mp3 player then you can get downloading and listening to podcasts, and the iTunes store contains thousands of free podcasts – including ours – for you to browse through and download. A lot of them are really quite dire, but some are really worth a listen.
For your small business marketing needs I recommend the below:
- Internet Marketing: The Site Visibility crew turn it on here with some great tips and high-level interviews on digital marketing
- SmallBizPod: Regular podcasts with some great entrepreneurs with book reviews, useful tips and upcoming events
- Internet Business Mastery: Aimed at the entrepreneur who wants to set up a Web-based business
- The Digital Marketer: Quite literally ‘quick and dirty tips’, these are great to source ideas for further exploration
- Duct Tape Marketing: This long-running marketing blog contains some great content and interviews for SMEs. Give it a spin
If you’re thinking about running a podcast and want to hear some really well put-together productions and then have a listen to these:
- Stuff You Should Know: I’ve always advocated that two people in dialogue make the best podcasts, and Josh Clark coupled with Chuck Bryant make the perfect pair here. Entertaining, witty, informative while sticking to a tight schedule so you don’t drift off
- Radio Lingua: Former teacher-turned-podcaster Mark Pentleton has built a successful business with his simple language learning techniques. I’m working my way through Coffee Break French right now…
- Guardian Bike Podcast: I expect great podcasts from the BBC and others with broadcasting traditions, but the Guardian has been – for me – the best of the broadsheets to expand into digital. This special interest podcast tops the lot for me
Listen to our podcast with SmallBizPod’s Alex Bellinger on how to create a podcast for your small business. You can subscribe to RunMarketing’s regular podcasts with some great industry names here.
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Stephen Davies
Have you ever thought about using the online presentation site Slideshare.net as a lead and traffic generation tool? The site allows users to upload PowerPoint presentations and share them with visitors from around the world, effectively enabling you to showcase your company to potential customers and partners.
It’s probably better suited for business-to-business firms due to the demographic of Slideshare’s users and in this podcast we talk to independent online consultant Stephen Davies about Slideshare best practice. Stephen’s presentations on Slideshare have received around 30,000 views in the last four years.
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Alicia Navarro, CEO, Skimlinks
Affiliate marketing has exploded in recent years as the Internet increasingly becomes the key battleground for advertising spend. So how can small businesses and start-ups benefit from affiliate marketing, both as a publisher looking to generate extra revenue streams and as a small business looking to advertise?
RunMarketing speaks to Alicia Navarro, CEO of affiliate marketing specialist Skimlinks, about affiliate marketing best practice.
Further reading:
Skimlinks’ affiliate marketing FAQ
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I use some microstock images such as this, from Polylooks.co.uk
As more and more small businesses engage with social media, so the need for images to accompany blogs and campaigns increases. But how many small business marketers are aware of when they can – and can’t – use images they get from the Internet?
According to a survey out this week I conducted with a client of mine, online photo agency Polylooks, more than a third (37 per cent) of the UK’s creative professionals – heavy users of ‘microstock’ images – admit to using images they do not have consent to use. This means that either they didn’t buy them via stock image agencies or credited those who have provided their work for use under creative commons agreements. Most of these did not feel guilty, either.
It is crucial to make sure that you understand what terms like Rights Managed and Royalty Free mean when using other people’s images from the Web to avoid any potential legal wrangles. If you’re blogging for your business, make sure you listen to our podcast on SME blogging best practice.
]]>It was one of those days yesterday with not one but two reports into the state of social media being unveiled to the public. One, by digital media website eConsultancy, focussed on the current state of social media use across several sectors while the second by BtoB magazine makes bold predictions for social media in 2010.
So what about social media and small business? According to eConsultancy’s report, small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are embracing social media at a faster rate than the big boys, chiefly because the decision-making chains are that much shorter. Of these, nearly half (46 per cent) say that they believe that social media “provides tremendous opportunities for business”. This compares with just 16 per cent of those working inside companies with £150 million-plus annual revenues who feel the same.
The BtoB research says that six in every ten marketers plans to increase their budgets for social media in 2010, which correlates handily with eConsultancy’s own figures on increased social media budgets for next year (86 per cent expect to up budgets). But this is all a little bit obvious, like the stories we’ll see next month that 2009 was the biggest e-tail Christmas ever (until 2010, and so it goes on).
For me what really matters is how SMEs use social media, because the jury’s still out on how far social media on a shoestring can take you. There are great benefits, chiefly:
- Search engine optimisation
- Direct interaction with customers and media
- Thought leadership
But the biggest ‘flagship’ great examples of social media as a marketing tool have generally involved big budgets in the form of viral videos, for example. I’m still waiting to see some really good examples of small business social media on a shoestring and welcome any suggestions. Social media is something that you can do yourself as a small business and RunMarketing aims to help small businesses arm themselves with knowledge to do just that and avoid this alas all too common eventuality:
Further Reading:
RunMarketing’s basic introduction to social media
RunMarketing’s podcast with specialist Jenni Lloyd on social media for business
3WPR’s presentation on social media marketing
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A speaker at Social Media 09
RunMarketing attended the Social Media 09 conference in London yesterday and came away with mixed feelings. As you’d expect, speakers with the budget to present were able to showcase big ticket social media campaigns and display PowerPoint presentations with funky YouTube video virals, professionally-generated photos for Flickr and subsequent graphs showing upturns in traffic, buzz and search engine ranking.
What was missing was a great example of how to do social media without an immense budget behind you, as is the case for small businesses. The closest we got was a slightly disappointing presentation from Tepilo, a sell-your-own-house website set up by TV presenter Sarah Beeny and her business partner.
The company explained how it used Twitter to promote its concept to the wider world, which is where, for me, it all fell down. Beeny is a celebrity with 16,000+ followers on Twitter. It’s doubtless that her influence has helped contributed to Tepilo’s 2,000+ followers. That’s not a significant number in Twitter terms, so how can small businesses and start-ups that don’t have the added benefit of a TV celebrity on hand attract a crowd?
Social media does not need to be expensive. Indeed, the only investment is often time. We’d love to hear examples of good SME social media campaigns done on a shoestring. Also, be sure to check out our social media guide for small businesses and this podcast with social agency, NixonMcInnes.
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Alex Bellinger, SmallBizPod
Podcasts are growing in popularity and provide fantastic content for websites, so long as you do it right. They also enable you to add a human touch to your website; you can speak directly to your audience about your product or service. To get advice on how small businesses and start-ups can use podcasting to great effect, RunMarketing spoke to Alex Bellinger, founder of small business podcast, SmallBizPod.
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