Reading, hearing, and seeing a business testimonial has a great impact on whether or not a client will choose your business for their needs. The average consumer reads 10 online reviews before making a purchase decision. This is why it’s so important to continually collect business testimonials from your customers.

In today’s episode, we are going to go over

-Social Proof & The importance of testimonials
-Where to get reviews to have the most impact on your business
-The magic of video testimonials
-The Best way to collect testimonials
-How to ask for good reviews.

Ever wonder how a business makes it through the first five years when so many close their doors after year one?

This episode is a follow-up interview with Dr. Erica Abraham of Axon health. We interviewed her about their business at the end of year one and we caught up with her again at the end of year two to see what has changed and talk about how things are going.

The marketing industry is constantly evolving and changing. What you did 6 months ago will not work exactly the same today because software changes. New tools come onto the market and platforms that you use to generate awareness change as well.

This is why I am dedicating one episode per month to sharing and updating you on the latest marketing news, trends and just interesting things I find in my marketing travels. You can listent to the episode with your favorite podcast platform or you can head over to Youtube and actually watch it (got visuals too!) I hope you enjoy the Monthly Marketing Update November 2022.

Recessions don’t have to be scary or times of famine for a small business. If you are prepared and Recession proof your business they can be a time of great growth for your business. The key is being prepared. Often times business get stuck in a rut when income is good and customers are plentiful. This is the time to create your recession plan. Here are the top things you need to do to create the recession proof your business plan

1 – Keep your marketing budget at the same level and if you can increase it.
2. Build strong relationships with your existing customer community.
3. Upsell to those existing customers.
4. Create incentive programs to keep current customers and gain new ones.
5. Join a BNI – this type of group is your BFF during a recession.
6. Create products and services specifically for the recession
7. Don’t be tone deaf.
8. Look at your expenses and cut out what you really don’t need.

Take a listen to the episode where I dive into each one of these topics to help you create your Recession Proof Your Business Plan.

Search engine optimization has matured over the last several years to include near me SEO or local SEO. This is specifically for businesses that service a smaller geographic area than a whole country or multiple countries. It could be as small as one town to a state or two.

There are additional SEO steps that need to be taken in addition to traditional SEO to optimize your business for near me SEO:

-Completely setting up your Google My Business Listing
-Use location-based keyword phrases in multiple places on your website
-Use the location-based keyword phrases in your H1, Title, and Meta descriptions
-Write blog articles for your local audience – include topics specific to your region
-Get listed on local directories
-Keep your location information consistent everywhere it is listed
-Use Rankmath’s local schema feature to optimize the backend of your website.

Marketing for small businesses is about generating leads. You need a constant stream of people to talk to you so you can sell your product and services. You need awareness so that people know who you are but once they discover you, you want them to make contact, and become a lead. This is where the good call to action come in.

The smart marketing tip we are sharing in today’s episode is about maximizing how leads contact you by focusing on your call to action. We talk about what call to action are, and where to put them so that you get the best click-through rates or connections from your marketing efforts.

Many retail merchants feel like using one of the large shopping apps like amazon, Walmart, eBay or Etsy is the only way to grow their business. The problem with these marketplace commerce sites is that they retain ownership of the customer relationship and can shut you down without notice or reason. When your shop is your livelihood this is a pretty scary thought.

When using a site like Shopify which is your website hosting platform for your site, you build and maintain the relationship with your customer and don’t have that fear of losing your site due to marketplace rules. You can still get that marketplace experience by enrolling with the Shop App by Shopify. Today’s episode is all about the Shop App and how you can be part of a marketplace for small business owners who use Shopify to sell their products and services.

Innovation is a big buzzword in the world of corporate business and fortune 500 but we don’t talk about it a lot in the world of small business owners. Small Business Innovation is something we as small business owners can do to differentiate our business, we don’t have to do things the way the competition does them.

One way to get new ideas and concepts for your small business innovation is look at other industries and do cross-industry innovation. Today’s episode is going to introduce you to the concept of cross-industry innovation and how to use it for your small business innovation.

Google Ad Sense announced that they are now following the Coalition For Better Ads best practices for ad placement in 2022. We don’t know what that means yet.

I think the google ad sense update is an opportunity to test out adding ads to a website whether it’s your business website or a blog that is dedicated to earning revenue through ads to start creating content and displaying ads in an ethical way.

In this podcast episode, Im going to review what this update is and give you my thoughts on what this will mean over the next 12 months

Writing effective product descriptions is hard. You want to write descriptions that will help a buyer understand how your product solves their problem quickly. Knowing what people want to see before they decide to buy and how they want to see it can create confusion for a business owner. But Google has given you a guide on how to do just that.

Google’s Best Practices on Writing Product Reviews is also a guide on how business owners can write product reviews that get ranked higher in search which leads to more people seeing and buying your product. We share with you the best practices and how to interpret them for Product description writing.