Why Articles Help Boost Your Business

You’ve heard us say it loads of times; “You can add articles as part of your membership and it will help make your business more visible”, but does it really make a difference!?

I’ve got an example for you from one of our members who has recently renewed. We were looking at their stats you see and we found that in their first year with us they received around 300 views of their business listing (and we’ll go into how you can make sure those views turn into clients in another article!) – not world shattering perhaps, but good visibility non-the-less.

But here is where it gets interesting…

You see, they didn’t just have a business listing, they also have been proactive in adding articles to the website too and this is the difference it’s made:

 During the 12 months of being with us, they posted 15 articles, just over one a month, and those articles have been seen just under 6,000 times!! Now, i’m sure you’ll agree, that is quite a big jump in the level of visibility for the business and well worth the effort getting them written and shared.

As you’ll know, at the base of every article is a link to the authors business listing and also their website so not only do you help people with your informative writing, you also enable them to build trust with you and your business and then they are easily able to contact you to find out more (again another article about writing an effective bio to follow!).

So, if you’re not already posting articles on The Holistic Directory then I urge you to consider doing so.

As you can see, even sharing one a month can have a dramatic effect on how much exposure your business gets, not only on the Directory website but also online in general. And we’ve not even mentioned the extra exposure you can get by adding offers and events!

If you’d like help with ideas on what to write or you’ve got the articles but either struggle to or don’t have time to get them added to the website then please send them to us and we will be happy to help!

You can contact us at support@theholisticdirectory.co.uk Have a great weekend and we look forward to seeing lots of lovely articles from you soon 🙂

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 Written by Sophie Jewry of The Holistic Directory

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 P.S. If you’re not a member yet and you’d like to get in on the action then check out our great value memberships online here: https://www.theholisticdirectory.co.uk/advertise/elite-membership

Marketing – Know Your Place!

One of the big mistakes that so many people make in business, large or small (or even ‘micro’), is understanding the value of ‘Positioning’. It’s a simple marketing strategy that every business owner can and should adopt. It costs very little, or nothing really, as it’s about making some simple decisions.

Let me explain…

Positioning is the fancy term we apply to the concept of deciding how you want other people to think about your business. It’s part of the fabric of your branding but it’s even more than this. It will help you to target the right audience, with the right message.

When we engage with a company, their brand and their products or services, we always adopt a perception of what type of business they are and how we choose to think about them. Positioning factors would include things like; being seen as budget, good value, or even exclusive and ‘high-end’.

Other aspects might be how a business like to relate to its customers; is it friendly and relaxed, or more ‘professional’ and traditional in the way it presents itself?

The reason this is important is because it defines the type of customer that it attracts. For example; if I run a therapy service, am I aiming for a particular type of customer? This could be on the basis of age, gender, needs, interests, locality, etc.

These features really do make up your business personality. And yes, every business has some form of personality and your aim is to make yours as attractive as possible.

However, the real key in position is to be clear about the specific target audience you want to attract. It could be that you want to specialise in certain areas, for certain needs or with certain types of services. This is the very opposite of trying to present yourself as a generalist. Very few customers are every attracted to a business because they are ‘generalist’, whereas we much prefer to spend money with people who we believe match our needs specifically.

So here are a few questions to help you find your best Positioning:

1.    How do we want people to perceive our value of service; top-end, budget, exclusive?
2.    What type of customers are we looking for; by age, gender, need and other demographic?
3.    Are we reflecting our best assets as part of our Positioning; and are we actively promoting these?
4.    How can we improve and refine our Positioning to be more specific in our marketing?

And finally…

How will we know when we’ve got our Positioning right; will we test it and if so how?

With these questions as a simple place to start I’d recommend looking at other businesses that are in your space, perhaps your competition, and look to see if they have any clear Positioning. How do you, and other, describe their business personality and is it working for them?

By Nial Adams
of Make Marketing Work and PUSH Academy

Big Promise – Awesome Guarantee (B.A.G)

What Big Promises do you make? Do you guarantee you can deliver? If not then do you think it’s fair that you clients should take all the risk on you? Neither do they, which is why turning prospects into clients can sometimes seem like an uphill struggle…

So, what promises do you make and how can you guarantee them?

Nothing works better than a [B]ig Promise backed up by an [A]wesome [G]uarantee in clearing the blocks that are currently preventing 90% of your prospective clients taking things further.

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By Joe Gregory of ReThink Press

Make 2014 The Year You Start Using Video

• Online video users are expected to double to 1.5 billion in 2016.

• Only about 24 percent of national brands are using online video to market to consumers.

• 52 percent of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions.
• 92 percent of mobile video viewers share videos with others.

Video is becoming more and more relevant for business for so many reasons. They encourage more interaction with your audience, they get people staying on your pages longer, they help your search engine rankings and if you’re building a YouTube presence alongside posting videos on your website you’re also increasing the ways you can be found online.

Videos can be informational, they can be fun, they can be whatever you want them to be. Take a few minutes out of your day to see what other people are doing and consider how you can start to bring more video into your business.

They don’t have to be hour long epic movies, you can use platforms like Vine ( https://vine.co/ ) to promote your business in just 6 second chunks (you’d be amazed how creative people can be with these videos – check out some inspiration here

Use your imagination, get a plan in place and start making them.

Remember, they don’t have to be perfect to start with, it’s better to have a non-perfect video online, helping you get found, than a perfect video that is never published!

However you decide to use video this year, be sure to have fun with it.

N.B. above stats from: http://digiday.com/brands/celtra-15-must-know-stats-for-online-video/

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By Sophie Jewry
of www.sophiejewry.com
and The Holistic Directory and The Brand Kitchen

Making 2014 A Success

Is this going to be your year?  Is this going to be the year that everything you have wanted in your business comes to you not just by wanting but by hard work and determination?

We all know the law of attraction, but you do know that you have to do something towards getting it!

A great start is a Vision Board and to set goals towards getting there. A Vision Board is great to see what you are aiming for whether it be more money, better health, better way of life, a nice car etc but you need to set your goals to help you and keep you focused along the way.  Review your previous year to see if you can make any changes towards improvements and goals for this year.

Now is the time to use a marketing planner, business journal, wall planner – anything that works for you, that you can put your goals, ideas, thoughts, promotions and campaigns, networking meetings, courses, workshops on to see you through the year.  Don’t stumble through every month, put ideas in your diary for marketing,  social media and blogging  each month.  They can always be changed or added to but it saves the blank mind every time you get to the computer to do the work!

There is a good saying that is now getting round businesses which is “Don’t just work IN your business, work ON your business”. This means that don’t spend all your time providing the therapies and working on other people, you must also work on your business – preparing marketing, looking at ideas, investing in yourself, reviewing and updating website, contacting your database and past clients – anything that will create new clients or reactivate old ones. If you can, find an hour to 90 minutes a day to do this especially first thing in the morning before your day starts, but if difficult try a couple of times a week or on the weekend.

You do have to put yourself out there and let people know you exist.  Remind them that you are there.  The more you do this and work ON your business the more 2014 will be a success for you!

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By Alison Brown
of Ali’s Therapy Academy

Heart Felt Social Media For 2014

Being in the holistic/ alternative health industry you would naturally call yourself a heartfelt business, helping and healing people all comes from the heart.

Sometimes Heartfelt businesses struggle with marketing because this part of the business usually comes from the right hand side of the brain, not the heart. What if for 2014  we could make social media marketing come straight from the heart, wouldn’t that feel a lot easier.

4 steps to heart felt social media marketing:

Helping Tweets

Instead of giving up on Twitter because you don’t know what to tweet, make a plan to tweet a helpful message on the hour every hour ( these can be automated ) Perhaps your practice helps people to detox their lives, how does someone detox their life? If you were to explain the whole process from start to end, including the right foods and drinks to have, relaxation techniques etc.. you’d have a lot of content.  Once you have your content you can then chunk it into tweets and start posting out onto Twitter, your tweets will reach people and help people. Try and include a link back to more information if you can and have a call to action, once that person has read more what else can they do? Can they book a consultation, a work shop, buy your book?

Remember to engage in between your automated tweets as there may be people who want to ask questions and because Twitter wants you to engage with your followers.

Hangout with them

I’ve often thought I’d like to juice or get into eating raw food, but I don’t really know where to start and I know there’s others like me. I need help, I like being in a classroom environment but because of my work I’m always in front of the computer and too busy to travel somewhere. If a Heartfelt business really loved me they would provide a Google+ hangout for me to attend! You can help and reach people like me by using Google+ to hold a hangout. Small private groups can attend on a hangout but if you want to reach out to the masses then hold a hangout on air which would be public for anyone to see. The beauty about a Hangout on Air is that it’s recorded and posted automatically to Youtube so you can carry on helping people long after the hangout has ended.

Help the joggers

Even though I’m always in front of the computer I will make the effort to exercise. Something I like to do is jog and when I’m jogging I like to listen to motivational speakers. The same content that you’ve used to tweet out or the content you shared in the Google Hangout could be recorded for a podcast, with a podcast you’re talking to someone directly, how helpful is that!

Give them a group

It’s well known that being in a group of people working together towards a goal is usually better than trying to do it by yourself. You can help people come together and give them a place to share ideas, motivate each other as well as support each other. Facebook is a great place to host such a group. As it’s a supportive group I would recommend to keep it closed, this means that it’s by invite only and the general public will not be able to access it. Giving them a group is helping your clients to help each other, I now belong to the  Raw, Juice, Smoothie and Foody Group  I shall be get plenty of tips and advice from others here, fingers crossed for a hangout in 2014!

Happy New year to you all Let 2014 be Heartfelt

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By Julie Bishop
Founder of JobHop    Founder of Specialist Social Media
Instructor for Love Social Media    Find Julie on Google+

Time To Take A Fresh Look At Marketing?

So the start of a new year is always a good time to adopt some fresh thinking and even better when you turn that into action.

I’m going to take a wild guess here but I’m thinking that when you hear the word ‘marketing’ you feel the same way as a lot of people I meet and talk to. “I really don’t get it”, or “I don’t know where to start” tend to be the most common reaction.

So if either of the statements above sums up how you feel as well, then relax, you’re not alone.

What I’d like to do is give you a really simple recommendation of the best place to get started. And it makes no difference if you’re completely new to marketing or you’ve been in business for years.

The very first thing I encourage you to do is stop focusing on marketing how-to ideas. And what I mean with this is don’t become preoccupied with yet another great idea for marketing activity. Before you start with the activity you really want to learn what makes marketing work in the first place. This is even more important if you’re currently spending money on adverts and promotions.

What you really want to be learning is how do you approach marketing in the first place. There are various elements, all of which are important, and here’s my list:

• What are you actually selling; not the product or service you offer, but the perceived benefits and what are these?

• What makes people want to buy what you have to offer? What emotions drive this action?

• Who are the types of people that typically buy what you have to offer and how do you know this?

• What makes your biggest competitors good at what they do – what makes them different to you?

• Why should people buy from you – what makes you and your business really different?

These five questions are all fundamental to deciding how to think and feel about your marketing. You need to get a clear sense of what each one means before you can start to think about any sort of marketing plan or campaign.

Above all, the really important thing here is to be totally honest with yourself. You’ve every reason to be so. If you find yourself stuck on any of these questions then perhaps you need to take a step back and start asking more questions; what do you know about your business and how well do you understand it?

So if marketing all seems a bit of a confusing subject, or something you still struggle to get to grips with, then use these five questions and gain a bigger sense of awareness and confidence before you dive it.

This is a great exercise for every business to go through once a year and the best time to do that is always now!

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By Nial Adams
of Make Marketing Work

Why Do So Many People Struggle With Marketing?

Let’s face facts; so many business owners and managers, and the self-employed, really struggle with marketing. And that’s to be expected. The good news is that it doesn’t need to be like this

There are three simple reasons why I believe this happens.

1) So many businesses, a much larger proportion than you might expect, actually don’t do any proactive marketing at all. They may benefit from a form of reflective marketing, where they have a foothold or reputation in the market but they don’t really control or influence it.

This is a bad thing in many ways, because they can’t improve it or enlarge it, but even more dangerous is that they can’t recover it should it start to decline. I’ve seen this happen a lot of the past few years. Especially as there has been a declining market in many sectors.

2) The second reason is that many businesses spend money on marketing ideas and actions without really knowing why or doing this as part of a plan. In truth, a large proportion of money in marketing is spent on ideas that are sold to business owners. They weren’t part of a thought-out process.

This is also a big problem, as it seems to suggest that marketing is just pot luck; keep buying ideas until one or two of them become successful. Yes, it’s true that marketing is a lot about trial and error but you still need to have a process to follow in doing this efficiently.

3) And the last reason is very specific. This is because the focus of the marketing is completely on the wrong thing. All too often business people focus on product and price, mistakenly believing that this is where they need to concentrate. It’s not.

I believe that marketing is an inside-out job. Before you can start promoting your products or services you need to focus marketing who you are and what you’re all about. People buy from people, no matter how big the company is. They want, above all, to feel a sense of trust, confidence and comfort. Then they are able to consider what value you have to offer.

This last of the three points is the one that will really help you to re-calibrate your whole approach to marketing and the way you design your business. So I encourage you learn more about this.

You can read my blog on this – “Are you focusing on completely the wrong thing in your marketing?”, where I explain one of the most powerful business concepts I’ve learned over the past two decades.

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By Nial Adams
of Make Marketing Work

Last Minute Promotions For Christmas

This is a busy time of year for most people getting ready for Christmas, with shopping, on their feet all day, feeling tired and stressed.

So hopefully you are looking after them to manage with this time of year but also help them when they are buying gifts for everyone!  Do not miss out on this marketing opportunity.

There is still plenty of time for marketing opportunities and promoting offers.

Did you know that Monday 2nd December is the busiest day for spending on the internet?  Do you have anything available on your website for people to buy – products, gift vouchers etc?  In your marketing offer that availability.

Promote your gift vouchers on social media sites, in your clinic/salon/treatment room and in your emails to your clients.  Also offer them in gift packages with products or to gift wrap them free of charge – you can make them into a scroll or Christmas cracker with Christmas confetti inside!, provide them in a Christmas Card.

If you have a salon/clinic/treatment room, have some ready made up for clients to buy straight away and also they are able to see what they look like.  Remember to have pictures of them available on your website and social media.

You can have Countdown To Christmas Offer.  These can be a different offers every day or every week towards Christmas like an advent calendar  (subject to what you are able to offer in products and therapies)  such as beauty therapies – eye brow shape, manicure, file and polish, massage, reflexology, onsite massage, eyelash perm/tint,  products, ready blended oils, candles, cd’s,  books, etc.

Provide a raffle for a luxury prize – maybe a head to toe therapy package – with raffle tickets at £1 and money raised towards your favourite charity.

You still have time to organise a open day/evening event at your salon/clinic or if you provide treatments at your home you could run one there.  I have in the past organised open evenings as a thank you to my clients and if they bring somebody new they get free raffle tickets.  At these evenings they can have taster treatments and drinks and nibbles are supplied with products etc available to buy.  Even in my own home I have had around 30 people attend! And all sent home after a lovely evening with a goodie bag filled with sweets, samples of products, a candle, marketing materials such as a bookmark, key ring and fridge magnet and a CD of calming music.

Have a think and research what others are doing.  This could be your busiest time of year!  Look after your clients and make them feel special and they will keep coming back for more.

Merry Christmas everyone and Happy New Year

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By Alison Brown
of Ali’s Therapy Academy

Give Enough Time To Your Marketing and Reap The Profits

If there’s one thing I do know about getting your marketing right it’s this: you’ve got to be prepared to give some time to it.

It’s not so much that people are bad at marketing, it’s more a case that they simply don’t do it. And I understand that. For most people it’s simply because they don’t know what to do, where to start or what the priorities are.

With the Winter very much on its way there may be a good reason to focus your efforts and concentrate on your marketing over the next few months.

That may mean a lot of time at your laptop but trust me it will pay off in the end.

So where should you start, well here are my Top Five actions that you can get on with straight away:

1. Stop and take a good look at all the things you have that you’d list as being part of your marketing. That will probably be things like your website, brochures, letter, business cards or packaging. You need to check that these are all consistent. Make sure that your branding and images complete a whole picture, rather than a jumbled and confusing collection of ideas. And check out The Brand Kitchen from Sophie for lots of sounds advice on this.

2. Think about your customers. Find out what they really look like and who they are. Try to identify the profile of your average customer, or at least put them in groups. Are they what you expect or are they completely different? Perhaps your best customer profiles are not what you thought your business would all be about.

3. Think about your product or service. When was the last time you actually did an audit on what makes this different and interesting. Perhaps you’ve changed something recently, or added new features to these, or the way you do business. Does your marketing reflect this? Are you including all the main points that your customers would be interested in?

4.  Think about the way you actually approach your marketing. Do you have a plan, are you confident that you know what you should be doing first? If not then start reading. There is a wealth of great ideas and advice out there. Seek it out and start taking your learning seriously. Learning new skills and ideas is one of the most rewarding things about running your own business.

5. Decide what you want. This may seem strange but ask yourself this question, and be honest with the answer. Do you want to get more involved with your marketing? Do you want to put it at the heart of your business? Perhaps you feel you want help or support. You might even want to engage someone to work with or for you on this. Just be careful though, marketing isn’t something you should abdicate your responsibilities on.

These five points cover most of the main subjects that makes marketing work. Each one is a large subject but you can still make a start with them. I’m not suggesting that you should try to do all at once. In fact, you should probably only concentrate on one or two at a time.

Once you’ve scanned this list, go back and look over it again. Decide how you feel about each area and start with the one that makes the most sense to you.

And above all give yourself some time. Investing time in your marketing is about investing time in your business and the time you put in will be rewarded. Marketing, just like business in general, isn’t something that comes together overnight. It can take months or even years before you really feel comfortable with it.

So get started now. Begin by opening your diary or calendar and prove to yourself that you’re serious about your business.

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By Nial Adams
of Make Marketing Work