Here’s the thing – we love dollarshaveclub.com. Not just for their interesting and innovative business strategy, but for their decisive and bold marketing. We like it so much, we had to write a post about how much we love it and what your company can take from it to apply to your future marketing endeavors.

Awesome Video

The first thing you see when visiting Dollar Shave Club is their hilarious and effective video. It’s simple, random, funny, entertaining, and a great pitch. It has a smack of the Old Spice commercials as well as a perfect taste of dead pan humor. Most importantly, its distinctive.

Ok, it’s hilarious, but so what? Well, that’s a great question. There’s a lot to be said for this video. It’s dead simple. Literally filmed within their apparent warehouse, they clearly didn’t spend a great deal of money filming or producing the video. But that’s what’s great about it. The message, content, and humor create a clear, memorable, and distinct message that clings to you. Within moments you want to share the video to all your friends. And that, is exactly why we love this website. It’s sharable. Practically begging you to handle the marketing free of cost to Dollar Shave Club. Imagine how many hits they’ve received on their website from their video alone? And as we all know, traffic is a very, very good thing.

The Website

Did I mention the website is downright gorgeous? It hits on every single trend in the web design community: texture, banners, large text, custom fonts, and usability. It screams something clearly and loudly – “We have a brand. We know who we are.”

A website defines you as a company and in most cases acts as a first impression for what you do and what you’re all about. This means, having a pleasing, usable, and effective website is hands down the most important first step you can take in building a brand. You’re site should look unique, be easy to share, and drive users to contact you to take the next step.

The Social Media

I keep talking about sharing, and you’re probably asking, “What the hell is he talking about? Why does that matter?” Well thank you for bringing that up, its a perfect time to make the most important point about this company. On every single page, in every feasible place you will find social media buttons. They are tasteful yet ubiquitous. But much more importantly, Dollar Shave Club has a brand and message that you WANT to share. They aren’t spamming you with like buttons, they’re saying “hey, we know we’re awesome, tell your friends about us.” Well guess what, you tell your friends, and then they tell their friends, and their friends tell their other friends. Now you’ve got an internet sensation on your hands.

So what does all this mean for your company? No, please don’t put social media buttons all over your site. Seriously. Don’t do it. Its tacky. Instead, spend time coming up with meaningful, genuine, fun, and consumable content that people will want to tell their friends about. Create a Tribe – a group of people who are advocates for your brand. Help them tell their friends about you with great stuff and a great website and reward them for being apart of your Tribe.

So go visit dollarshaveclub.com and tell your friends. Hey, while you’re at it, before you leave click the little like button over their on the left! See that was pretty easy huh?

[Dollar Shave Club]

Buy Ads on the Big Sites

The mega-big sites like Google and Facebook are bigger than ever. They have hundreds of millions of users and that includes most of your customers and future customers. If you’ve never advertised on Google or Facebook, 2012 is definitely the time to start. Here’s my recommendation:

• Set aside a small portion of your marketing budget to perform a few test campaigns.
• Buy some targeted ads on Facebook or Google Adwords.
• Adjust the targeting to find out what will drive the most traffic to your site.
• Find a good mix and do MORE of it.

Go Guerrilla on the Smaller Sites

2012 is the perfect time to get personal on the smaller social networks, blogs, and social apps. There is less competition for people’s attention on smaller or newer sites. Just be sure to be real and contribute to the community (don’t just spam people).

Collect More Information About Your Customers Than Ever Before

In the information age, data is basically the same as cash. Have you been collecting customer email addresses? (you should have been if you’re a regular visitor to this blog) Start reaching out to customers on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social networks. If you’ve got a great brand, people will WANT to connect with you.

Time to Get Serious About Content Creation

The day is rapidly approaching where you will be totally irrelevant online if you’re not creating useful and interesting online content. Believe me… your competitors will be doing it soon. Your customers have questions and needs. It’s time to create content that addresses those needs. Start with text content and then move on to video, podcasts, apps or anything else you can think of.

Combine Online and Offline

Most of your customers is currently carrying a laptop, tablet, or smartphone on their person. Why not take advantage of this? When customers come to your retail location, have them spread the word online. Offer discounts or other incentives for customers who ‘like’ your page on Facebook or ‘check in’ to your location on Foursquare (or other services).

Think Mobile

It’s amazing to me that there are still a lot of high-profile brands that don’t have mobile versions of their websites. In 2012 if you have a website, then you MUST have a mobile version as well. Once you HAVE a mobile website, then you should definitely start using QR codes and other forms of mobile marketing.

Think Local

If you thought local was a big trend in 2011, then that’s NOTHING compared to what it will be in 2012. Basic stuff like updating your Google Places page and having your local locations on your Facebook pages is not enough. Everyone’s doing that! You’ve got to be actively soliciting reviews from customers, participate in local networking, and solicit links from local media.

Ditch The Stuff That’s Not Working

Okay people, it’s 2012. Why are you still placing ads in places that aren’t trackable? If advertising in print publications, the yellow pages, or billboards is actually working, then by all means keep doing it! But, at LEAST use some sort of tracking like a unique URL that people can go to, or a trackable phone # so that you can tell what’s working and what is not. 2012 might be a great year to drop the marketing initiatives that AREN’T WORKING!

Get Crazy with Customer Engagement

Your customers are online doing… stuff. Why aren’t they doing YOUR stuff? Why aren’t you providing interactive things for your customers to do on your website? Why aren’t you soliciting their opinions with surveys? Why aren’t you offering cool contests for them to participate in? Why aren’t you listening for feedback on Twitter and Facebook?

 Measure Like You’ve Never Measured Before

In 2012 there are more marketing options than ever before. How are you going to know which ones to keep pursuing if you don’t measure? You should be checking your website traffic early and often, adjusting your tactics to take advantage of what’s really working, and always be trying new things, because the thing that’s working now probably won’t be the thing that works in 2013.

It doesn’t have to be this way! Today’s websites are typically built using a Content Management System (CMS) which allows website owners to easily add and change pages, engage visitors and search engines, and keep the website alive and vibrant. WordPress, which is the CMS that we use for all of our clients’ websites, because it has the largest development community, is flexible and secure, and is extremely efficient and easy to deploy websites on the platform.

This list is not WordPress specific. Most content management systems will allow you to perform the marketing functions listed here. However, if you don’t have a website that is built using a CMS, you can always contact us and we can get you all fixed up.

Okay, enough chatter. On to the list ->

1. Add Pages for ALL Your Services

Lots of websites have a ‘services’ page. It lists everything the company does, and for an average website this is totally fine. But, if you want to have an above average or GREAT website, you should create a page for each service you provide.

Why you ask? Having unique pages for each service is great for your visitors and for your SEO (search engine optimization). If someone is searching for someone to perform a specific service for them, a long list of services is fine and dandy, but a page specialized for EXACTLY what they need is much much better.

2. Start a Blog

The key to maintaining an active user base on your website is to be constantly creating new and interesting content. The best way to organize lots and lots of content is through a blog. Blogging creates tons of high quality content that engages visitors and search engines. Blog content can also be repurposed for email marketing, print media, ebooks…

3. Create Landing Pages

What is a landing page? definition via wikipedia

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.

How about a real world example… You own a company that does professional floor cleaning in Bloomington, Indiana. You buy an add on Google adwords that displays whenever someone searches “Professional Floor Cleaning Bloomington Indiana”. When someone sees the ad and clicks on it, they’re taken to a specially designed ‘landing page’ on your website. You’ve optimized this page to sell your services to the customer so it is likely that you will convert them to a customer.

4. Market Your Site via Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have millions of users. These users are constantly sharing links and discussing brands. Isn’t it time you got some skin in the game?

The first way to start getting visitors from social media sites is to build up your own following and share links with that following, but that’s not exactly scalable. The next thing to do is to include sharing buttons like the ‘Facebook Like’ and ‘Tweet’ buttons that are prevalent on the web. These buttons allow your visitors to share the pages on your site with their followers, then some of their followers will visit your page and share with their followers. Creating feedback loops like this can be a powerful source of traffic to your site… so why not do it?

5. Perform Some Simple Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are complicated. They’re basically designed by mathematicians and computer scientists. However, properly optimizing your website is NOT rocket science.

If you’re serious about marketing your business, you need to be serious about marketing on the internet, and if you’re serious about marketing on the internet you need to get serious about search.

Today’s content management systems provide tons of tools that help you adjust content, title tags, keywords, internal links, and all the other things that effect how search engines rate your site. There are also tons of SEO blogs that tell you exactly what to do to get traffic.

This is a list of some of the top SEO blogs on the web. I found it by doing a simple Google search. Everything you need to know is on these blogs. Don’t have time to learn SEO? Hire Tribeswell to do it you.

6. Post Videos

2 ways to leverage video on your website:

The easy way: Repost cool videos that you find on the web (like on Youtube) on your blog or website and write your own commentary. Your visitors will appreciate that you found something cool for them.

The hard way: Either learn to create and edit video (and trust me with today’s technology it could not be easier) or pay a video production company to help you create videos for your website.

7. Create Photo Galleries

A picture is worth a thousand words. Therefore a gallery with 10 pictures is worth 10,000 words. There are tons of great-looking photo gallery tools that can display galleries on websites. Most cell phones now take great pictures. Put the two together and you’ve got a great compelling reason for people to visit your website.

8. Let Fans Connect With You via Social Media

Every visitor is a chance to connect with a future customer. However chances are they won’t buy from you the first time they’re exposed to your brand. But, they might fan your business on Facebook or follow your company on Twitter.

Your website should make it EASY for visitors to become fans and followers so that down the line they are more likely to become customers.

9. Run Surveys

Want to give your customers an incentive to visit your website? Why not ask their opinion? You’ll get people to come to your site, you’ll get valuable information about how your business is performing (in the eyes of your customers), AND they might even share your site with some friends via social media.

There are great tools available to do this including: Simple form-building tools like Form Assembly, form building WordPress plugins, or purpose-built solutions like Survey Monkey.

10. Convert Visitors to eMail Subscribers

The #1 fastest cheapest and most effective way to build traffic to a website is email marketing. But, are you making it easy for people to get on your mailing list? Are you providing incentives so that people actually WANT to join?

The great thing about having a website that’s built on a CMS is that you can do cool things like offer eBooks or other downloads in exchange for signing up for your email distribution list. You’ll keep your email list growing and vibrant and your visitor will receive the added value of premium content.

If you do it right, it looks like this…

What do you think? What types of things would be good to add to this list? Have you tried any of these strategies? Are they working?

I popped on to Google+ today to find a dialog box stating that gchat had been added to the service. My first reaction was that it was pretty cool. It instantly added the conversation I was having in Gmail to Google+, which is kind of convenient… Your conversations go with you wherever you go.

However, I’m friends with lots of people on Google+ that I’m don’t necessarily want to talk to every day and now they’re all added to my Gmail chat list. I would prefer that this hadn’t happened. I use Google+ and Gmail for very different purposes. Gmail is all about productivity, connecting with clients, and staying in touch with close friends. Google+ is more about media consumption and staying in touch with what’s happening in my extended network.

Add to this the fact that Facebook has already had chat for a while and it TOTALLY SUCKS and I’m not sure that having your chat client and social network all in the same place makes that much sense.

I’m sure there are some settings I can change to get it exactly how I would want it, but still…

What do you think? Do you like the new feature? Was it a good move for Google+ to take?

The fact is… with today’s technology, almost ANY small retailer should be able to EASILY compete with the big box stores. The other fact is… a lot of small retailers simply choose not to use social media, ecommerce, or location services to effectively acquire new customers.

I love small business. Most of my clients are small businesses. I am a small business. However, we all need to face the realities of the world. There are big companies out there that have huge buying power, huge marketing budgets, thousands of stores… they have a lot of advantages over us.

But… we are faster, we can execute new ideas more rapidly. So, here are 10 strategies that the average small business can adopt to start being more profitable right away.

1. Get to Know Your Customers – Start using a CRM & Email Marketing

If you are a small retailer, then you have a lot fewer customers than a big box store. That means that in order to be really competitive you need optimize the relationship you have with each and every customer. Then you can send targeted marketing messages via email (which is an extremely inexpensive way to send marketing messages), and sell more to each customer.

High tech email marketing software (like Mailchimp, which is what I use), can help you organize your contacts, monitor who is responding the most to your marketing messages, and optimize your campaigns and lists for continued success.

Best of all, it is super-easy to get started. Go to your locally-owned dime store (if your town still has one), and buy a notebook. When customers come in, ask for their name and email address and write it down. Tell them you’ll send them a coupon just for signing up for your super-exclusive gold-star customer program.

2. Become a Master of Ecommerce

The cost of running an Ecommerce site has dropped pretty substantially. A lot of small retailers could drastically increase their business by having a good website built that can also sell products.

There are a few pretty obvious advantages to selling online.

1. The location of your customer is irrelevant, you can sell to anyone anywhere.
2. It’s always open. If your customer wants to shop at 3 in the morning they can.
3. You can suggest related products, offer free shipping at a certain order size, or any number of other tactics to increase the number of products each customer buys from you.

3. Sell Your Products on Amazon

Last year, like many other men out there who don’t like shopping, I did the majority of my Christmas shopping online. Particularly on Amazon. Instead of driving around in the freezing cold for hours and going from store to store, I kept a tidy list and bought everything all at once from Amazon in the comfort of my home office. It was heavenly.

One thing I noticed was that most of the items I bought were not shipped directly from Amazon, but from smaller merchants.

Amazon is a great equalizer. If you get good at selling there then you can let Amazon do the marketing for you and simply ship product whenever orders come in.

This post explains how to get started selling on Amazon.

4. Master Location Services like Foursquare or Facebook Places

Millions of people regularly ‘check-in’ at the places they visit. If you can get more people to ‘check-in’ at your business, you can greatly raise your brand awareness, and get more customers in the door.

The key is to create incentives for customers to ‘check-in’ at your location. You can offer discounts, or put customers who check in into a drawing for a gift certificate. Use your imagination, and if that doesn’t work, go on Google and type “foursquare small business promotion ideas”… there are 279,000 pages of results. I’m sure you’ll find some great ideas.

5. Create Information Products

If you own a small retail business, you probably have a TON of knowledge about the stuff you sell that the average person would find useful. If you create an eBook with this knowledge, you can sell it to make some extra money, or give it away in exchange for people’s email addresses and you can then add them to your email marketing software and sell them products down the road from your online store (some of these ideas work better if used in conjunction with each other). Here are some ideas:

• If you own a furniture store, create a home decorating guide.
• If you own an archery shop, create an ebook full of bow-hunting tips.
• If you own a record shop, create an ebook with information about turntables and vinyl maintenance tips.
• If you sell cameras, create a comprehensive guide to taking great pictures.

6. Feature Your Best Customers

If you feature a customer and tell their story in a blog post or on Facebook or in your Email marketing (ask their permission of course), they will share it with their online friends. It is likely that their friends will share their interests and some of them will likely become customers.

Here’s how I recommend executing this strategy. First, get a website that has blogging functionality. Then write the stories of your best customers (with their permission). Having this content on a website that you OWN will help you get more search engine traffic.

Then share links to the story on Facebook and Twitter and include a short excerpt in your email newsletter with a link to the main article. Internet marketing works best when your website is the hub of your marketing system with all other sources driving traffic there.

7. Become a Total Social Media Ninja

Get good at social media. Connect with your customers on Facebook and Twitter. Post cool and useful links. Post your ideas.

Social media websites are free. Using them effectively is not brain surgery. Start with Facebook and Twitter. Just don’t talk about your own company too much. Be real. Be normal. Don’t be a marketer on social media. Just be a person.

If you have a large following online (with high-quality followers), marketing your business will be a whole lot easier.

8. Make an Online Documentary About Yourself

Online video is not just the wave of the future… it’s also the wave of the present. You can buy a pretty decent video camera for 500 bucks, a Mac (for video editing) for $1200, and you can take a video editing class as well or just look for free tutorials online. Basically you can get up and running with a full video production setup for less than it would cost to do a commercial on your local cable station.

Today’s video tools are really good, really cheap, and really easy to use. If you get really good at creating video content (also it would help to become a total Social Media Ninja), you can get a ton of traffic to your website, tons of exposure for your brand, and lots of new customers.

9. Become an Early Adopter

I noticed a trend when Twitter came out, and I’m noticing it again with Google+… If you are an early adopter of an online social network, you will have a lot of influence, because it is less crowded.

Keep your eyes open for new technologies and social websites. Don’t be afraid to jump on the bandwagon and try something that isn’t proven. The fact is… once it’s been proven, it will be crowded and thus, more difficult to get exposure.

10. Become a Photojournalist for Your Business

You can buy a really nice professional camera (preferably a DSLR) for $500 – $1000. Use it to take pictures of everything your business does. Post pics on your website, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or anywhere else online that your customers might see them.

You can also get really good at taking product pics for your online store or Amazon store (or Etsy store or Ebay store, they didn’t make this list, but those are two more great places to sell your products online).

DSLR cameras also take awesome video, so you can use one camera for both still shots and video. The key to getting good is to practice, read online tutorials, or take a class at your local jr. college.

Some Final Thoughts

None of the ideas on this list are free. They all take money or time or both. The real question is whether or not your business can afford to NOT take these ideas seriously.

The world has changed. Those who choose not to adapt will likely go out of business, or at the very least see their profitability diminish.

You can either use the Internet as the most powerful small business marketing tool that has ever existed (which it is), or you can ignore it and let the big box stores roll over you like a steam roller.

The choice is yours.

For example, right now I’m getting a lot of traffic for the term merry christmas. I don’t really sell any merry christmas type products or services. I just wrote a post 2 years ago called “Merry Christmas from Tribeswell – Free Christmas Music Download”.

Chances are, few people who come to my site from this search term are in the market for ANY of the services I provide, but that doesn’t bother me, because…

The more traffic you get, the more traffic you get.

The more hits you have on your website, the more social shares you earn, the more links you obtain… all of this will pump up your other content. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a blogging keyword strategy or take care in writing your posts… you should, but the fact of the matter is, these random traffic spikes are still beneficial.

What about hits that are out of your geographic range?

Many businesses that I consult with work in a defined geographic range. When they write a blog about something, it might get views from all over the world. This is still a good thing. It increases the likelihood of links and social shares, and the authority of your blog or website.

Traffic is always a good thing.

WordPress

I wouldn’t have a business without wordpress. World class CMS, thousands of amazing plugins that do almost anything, a massive development community… WordPress just keeps getting better and better. At this point there are few websites that make sense on any other platform.

Mailchimp

Eight words… Free accounts for lists up to 2000 people. This is the killer app for email marketing. It is beautifully designed. It has tons of unique and useful features. It’s actually fun to use. Beautiful templates. I can’t say enough good things.

Facebook

Have you heard of it? There are amazing things that you can do with Facebook pages these days, and amazing ways to integrate Facebook into your website for marketing. Facebook continues to be a great source of traffic for this site and all of our client’s sites.

Youtube

If Youtube were JUST a place where you could upload HD videos (in an incredibly intuitive way), and embed them on your website, it would still make this list… But, it also has an awesome social community, it’s the world’s second biggest search engine, and is supported by every major mobile device. For me it is the only solution for online video.

Google Analytics

There are a lot of ways to track your website traffic, but few that are this good, and NONE that are this good and this FREE. There are very few sites that need more features than you get for free with this product.

Hubspot Website Grader

Need a quick snapshot of how effective your website is at any given moment? Go to www.websitegrader.com. I use this tool every time I start working with a new client. It pulls data from all over the web to let you know exactly what you need to do to start increasing your marketing effectiveness.

iStockPhoto

If you’re going to be doing a lot of Internet marketing, you’re going to need a steady supply of quality stock photography and artwork. iStockphoto is the biggest and the most cost effective.

Enough is enough. It has been months now and Google+ is still not available for my Google apps email. What is the deal, Google?

I set up a Google+ profile a while ago with my personal Gmail account, but unfortunately I can’t have both open in the same browser. So to use Google+ I have to switch to another browser… or log out of my email (which I never do).

This is lame! I like Google+ and I would use it a lot, but screw this. It’s not convenient. And frankly it’s not worth aggravation.

There, I said my piece. I’m out!

Brand Building

Brand building is is where all your marketing begins. It’s where you tell the world who you are and what problems you solve and why people would want to buy from you. You can (and should) do this in lots of ways.

On a basic ‘branding’ level you need to establish the visual iconography of your brand. What are your colors, what are your fonts, what images do you want people to associate with you? What is your logo. While these things are very VERY important, this is not what I mean by ‘Brand Building’.

Brand Building is where you consciously make a name for your company in the business landscape. Traditionally this involves…

• Advertising your company and products on TV, radio, in print periodicals, on billboards, having an attractive storefront, etc.
• Going to trade shows and networking events to promote your company.
• Hiring salespeople to call on customers.
• Getting shirts, business cards, cups, hats, pens, etc. with your logo on them.

Power on the Internet

Power on the Internet is 100% about content and connections. Your company must have a strategy for creating content on an ongoing basis, and a strategy for connecting with individual fans, users, visitors, etc.

You must create lots and lots of content to sell your products. Creating a lot of great content serves several purposes.

• It helps you with search engines… and these days if you’re not winning a lot of searches then you’re pretty much invisible to a large segment of the population.
• It provides you with a lot of content to share on social networks. Shared content is a great way to connect with people who like your brand and for them to share it with their friends.
• Lots of content that is regularly updates gives people a reason to keep coming back to your website or blog, creates demand for new products, and increases the amount of trust people have in your brand.
• Your online content can also be used to increase the effectiveness of certain brand building activities (i.e. a print add that says ‘go to our website to watch a video about this product’ or even a QR code that takes the viewer right there).

Direct Marketing

So far you’ve built a brand that people love and want to share, and you’ve started building some assets online. Now it’s time to get organized. It’s time to organize all the data you have about your customers, fans, potential customers, website visitors, etc. so that you can sell them more!

There are a ton of inexpensive relationship management tools that vary in their level of complexity and functionality. I would recommend starting with a simple email marketing program and moving on from there. Here’s how it works…

• Gather all your contacts into two spreadsheets. One will be for customers and past customers, and the other will be for everyone else. Import both lists into whatever email marketing software you like (I like Mailchimp, but there are dozens of other options as well).
• Use what you know about your customers and past customers to develop direct response campaigns to convince them to buy more products from you. You want to get them in the same frame of mind that they were in when they bought from you the first time.
• Use the other list to promote all your other online content, offer specific specials or incentives, or announce new products.

1. Post a link to one of your blog articles on Facebook and/or Twitter. Dig through your archives and find an old gem that’s worth highlighting.
2. Send a short email to a past client that you haven’t talked to in a while.
3. Write a recommendation on LinkedIn.
4. Invite your friends to become fans of your business on Facebook.
5. Pin your Business card up on a public bulletin board. You never know who might see it.
6. Post a cool picture of something in your office on Facebook (use your mobile phone to get it up in under 60 seconds).
7. Post something intelligent on your Facebook or Twitter page.
8. Spend 60 seconds looking for long-lost friends, colleagues, or relatives on Facebook.
9. Check in to your business location on Facebook, Foursquare, or Gowalla.
10. Write a quick thank you note and drop it in the mail.

Got an idea to add to this list? Leave it in the comments below.