Tag Archives: objectives

Are Facebook Pages Worthless or Are You Doing Social Wrong?

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Often, we tell business-owners that just because someone liked your Facebook page doesn’t mean your posts show up in their news feed. Usually, they are shocked to know this.

This blogger on Forbes found out the hard way:

Once we started posting on our Facebook page, we were shocked, shocked, to see that not all the users that liked our page were seeing our posts. For example, with over 6,000 likes on our page, a typical post would only be seen by fifty to several hundred people. To reiterate, only 1% to 5% of the people that liked our page saw our posts.

But does this mean Facebook pages are a bad investment for small businesses, as the title of that post says? No. 

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On Focus and Taking Our Own Advice

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Let's focusWe’ve been feeling like imposters for the last few weeks. You see, whenever we talk to a small-business owner or startup founder, we advise them to focus. To go after one customer segment. To highlight one benefit. To talk in one voice across their marketing channels.

How can you “focus” on more than one thing at a time? How can you “highlight” 37 services? How can you, with the constraints of a small business, manage more than one brand and ensure that your audience doesn’t get confused by conflicting messages?

But we’ve been doing all of this ourselves. We’ve introduced ourselves as “marketing consultants, and we also have a product” or as “we’re building a product, and we also do consulting services.” We’ve been dividing our time between servicing clients and working on the product.

If your feet are on two boats, what happens when the boats gather speed?

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Tracking Website Metrics on Google Analytics, Part 1: Visits, Page Views, Time, Bounce Rate, Pages

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If you have a website for your business, you must track visitors to your website and what they are doing. There are a number of tools available for tracking this, and the most popular and one of the most useful is Google Analytics. (Here’s how to set up Google Analytics if you haven’t yet.)

In these two posts, I’ll explain some important metrics you should be looking at in your Google Analytics data (or any other website tracking tool you are using).

The first thing to do, after you have logged into your Google Analytics account and selected the website you want to view data for, is to adjust the date range to your liking. The date range you select at the top applies to all the graphs and tables inside Google Analytics. I usually set it to current month or current week. You can change this any time you want, so feel free to try out different options. Click on compare to get all data for the previous period as well.

Set Date Range in Google Analytics

Now let’s get started.

Visits: Total Visits, Unique Visitors, Page Views, Pages per Visit, Time per Visit, Bounce Rate Continue reading →

Presentation: Measuring Marketing Performance

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On Saturday, we conducted the second of a three-session workshop on marketing for small-business owners for members of the Pune Open Coffee Club.

Unmana presenting at Marketing Measurement workshop for entrepreneurs

We talked about setting marketing objectives based on the business challenges you are facing, and how marketing can — and should! — help not only with getting the word out about your business, but nurturing your followers and leads till they become customers, and nurturing customers and encouraging them to stay with you.

I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions we had: and if you were there, thank you for being an active participant! And here’s the presentation.

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Marketing Objectives and Measurement Workshop on March 23 in Pune

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This is the second of a three-part workshop with Pune Open Coffee Club. The first session was for business-owners to define their marketing strategy, the second will be about setting objectives and measuring performance, and the third will be about reviewing performance and using that to change what you’re doing.

We have a few slots open for the second session, so if you want to come, apply here. Participants who haven’t attended either the first or the second session will not be invited to the third. You won’t get much out of just the third workshop without the context of at least one of the other two.

Marketing Measurement Workshop Session

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Presentation: Defining Your Marketing Strategy

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On Saturday, Nilesh and I conducted the first of a three-part marketing workshop with Pune Open Coffee Club. The first session was on defining your marketing strategy.

If you missed the session, here’s the presentation.

Want to work on the exercises in the presentation? Get the template here.

Interview with Bhaskar Sarma, B2B Marketing Consultant and Copywriter

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Bhaskar Sarma, B2B CopywriterBhaskar Sarma of Pixels and Clicks is a copywriter specializing in B2B technology businesses. He is also a fantasy fan, judging by his marketing blog posts that reference Tolkien and Dr. Who. He talks to us about copywriting and social media for B2B.

My questions and comments are in bold.

How and why did you become a consultant?

I came into consulting and copywriting through a pretty roundabout fashion. Before my current gig and after getting my BE in computer engineering I was a tech journalist, an infosec consultant and a volunteer with a non-profit running schools in remote mountain villages near Mussorie. I decided not to get back into the corporate rat race and opted to work for myself, travel when I want and choose my own clients and projects.

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Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: All About Startups

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Do you have it in you to be an entrepreneur? Successful entrepreneurs possess five key traits.

Women selling vegetables in a local market

But once you’ve started your business, what is your goal? Joel Gascoigne of Buffer shares some interesting thoughts.

And over on Women’s Web, I write about eight things a new entrepreneur should do.

Read HubSpot’s article on 7 common SEO myths: and if you’re building on any of these, please stop.

HubSpot also tells you when to — and when not to — outsource your marketing: think twice before outsourcing social media or content creation!

Marketing Lessons from a Professional Photographer

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We recently talked to a professional photographer who is also a friend, about his marketing needs and challenges. Meeting Mehul brought home one of the biggest reasons why we wanted to dive into consulting with small business owners: there is so much we can learn from them.

Here are some of the marketing lessons we — and maybe you as well — can learn from Mehul.

Indian wedding photography -- grains of rice

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A Complete Guide to Content Marketing for Small Businesses

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What is content marketing — and why should you care?

“Content Marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.”

— Copyblogger

For small businesses, content marketing is an excellent way of getting visible, getting found online, getting people to like you, and ultimately, increasing your sales.

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