Small Business Marketing

If you are generating leads for your small business, but they aren’t converting into sales, its likely to be a combination of some of the issues below. A B2B sale rarely fails because of a single issue. It is usually the result of several small issues that prevent your prospect from feeling confident enough to move forward.

No Clear Business Need

The prospect may like your product or service but does not see it as a priority. If the problem is not costing them time, money, customers, or opportunities, there is little urgency to act.

The Value Wasn’t Clear

Prospects buy outcomes, not products. If they cannot clearly see how your solution will improve their business, reduce costs, increase revenue, or lower risk, they are unlikely to proceed.

Decision-Makers Were Not Involved

In many B2B sales, the person you speak to is not the final decision-maker. If key stakeholders are not engaged early, the sale can stall or disappear altogether. In the MSP space, the traditional first touch, and usually the main contact going forward is the Office Manager. That person may not be the final decision-maker, even though they probably hold a lot of sway.

Lack of Trust

Businesses want confidence that a supplier will deliver. Weak credibility, limited case studies, poor reviews, or inconsistent communication can make prospects hesitant.

If you would like us to review your evidence set, click here.

Budget Constraints

Even when a prospect wants your solution, they may not have budget available, or another project may take priority. Of course budget is often made available if the value and business needs are made very clear.

This is probably the most frequently used excuse for not making the purchase, whether it is true or not.

Poor Timing

The need may be genuine, but the timing is wrong. Organisational changes, busy periods, staff shortages, or economic uncertainty can delay decisions.

If poor timing is genuine for one, or more, of your prospects, this makes 11 even more important. Agreeing with your contact when you should follow up next, and then doing it, is a valuable way to deal with this.

The Return on Investment Wasn’t Demonstrated

Decision-makers need to justify expenditure. If the financial or operational benefits are unclear, they may choose not to proceed.

Too Much Perceived Risk

Prospects often ask themselves:

• What if it doesn’t work?
• What if implementation is disruptive?
• What if we choose the wrong supplier?

If those concerns are not addressed, they may stick with the status quo. You can see more detail about perceived risk here.

Competitors Were Better Aligned

A competitor may have offered a more relevant solution, stronger relationship, lower risk, or simply communicated their value more effectively.

The Buying Process Was Too Complicated

The B2B sale is rarely a simple process, on both sides. Complex proposals, lengthy contracts, unclear pricing, or too many steps can create friction and slow momentum.

Insufficient Follow-Up

Many opportunities are lost because communication stops too early. Prospects are busy, and decisions often require multiple conversations and reminders. There a plenty of statistics out there about following up on sales opportunities, with this one probably our favourite: 80% of sales require 5 or more followups, but most sales people stop after 4!

No Sense of Urgency

Without a compelling reason to act now, prospects frequently postpone the decision. In many cases, “not now” eventually becomes “not at all.”

Internal Politics

Different departments may have competing priorities. A solution supported by one team may be resisted by another, preventing agreement. The more you can demonstrate how your product/service delivers across the company, the more likely you are to get the sale.

Expectations and Reality Didn’t Match

If the prospect expected one thing during the sales process but discovered limitations later, confidence can quickly disappear.

The Prospect Doesn’t Fully Understand the Offer

Sometimes sales are lost because the buyer never fully understood what was being offered, how it would be delivered, or what results they should expect.

Ensuring the story is consistent and clear throughout the marketing and sales process really helps here. If they become a prospect based on the story early on and the story stays the same, the sale is more likely to occur.

The Most Common Underlying Reason

Many lost B2B sales can be traced back to a single issue: the gap between the value the seller believes they communicated and the value the buyer actually perceived.

If a prospect clearly understands:

• the problem,
• the cost of not solving it,
• the value of your solution,
• and why your business is the right choice,

the likelihood of closing the sale increases significantly. The challenge is ensuring those points are understood from the buyer’s perspective, not just presented from the seller’s perspective.

Creating more website traffic is a key goal for most small businesses, as more traffic means more business – right? Most of the time, yes, but not always. There is good website traffic and then bad traffic. Here are 15 tips on how to attract the right traffic to your website…

Good Website Traffic

In a perfect world, every person who visited your website would get in touch, as they want to buy what your small business sells. In reality, a 1-2% contact rate is going to deliver a great flow of leads into your business. There are a number of different ways to recognise good website traffic, so you can do more to encourage it.

Bounce rate

Do you know the bounce rate on your website? If you don’t you need to as it tells you whether you are making a good first impression. Google defines a bounce as:

The percentage of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further.

If you haven’t got Google Analytics on your website, click here to set up your account and get your web developers to add it.
A healthy bounce rate is 15 – 40%. If it is above that, you are attracting the wrong visitors, or you are not giving them what they are looking for on the first page they land on.

How to improve your bounce rate

1. Look at what pages have a good bounce rate, and which don’t
2. Is there a big look or feel difference between the content on the good and not so good pages?
3. Use Search Console to identify the keywords that are generating natural, or paid, search for that page.
4. Shape the content so the viewer is getting better information when they land on those pages.

Returning Traffic

How much of your traffic is returning? If viewers are returning to your website, it suggests that they are interested. Google Analytics shows you two stats to help this: New vs. returning and Depth of Visit.
To increase the amount of returning traffic, look at the pages that are being returned to and create more content like that. Alternatively, consider using remarketing as a way of getting people back to your site after they’ve visited.

Engaged Traffic

If your website is grabbing the attention of your visitors, they will stay and read more of the content before getting in touch. Again, two numbers to keep an eye on: Length of visit, and Number of Pages Visited. The longer the visit and the higher the number of pages visited, the better.

How to improve website engagement

1. Look at what pages have a high Exit Rate. They either do not have useful information or they don’t clearly show the viewer where to go next.
2. Review your website routing. Is it logical and giving the viewer a good route around your website?
3. Are there appropriate Calls to Action on the website. Too few will mean people don’t get in touch and too many will seem desperate, and put people off.

Traffic that is making contact

Do you know how many people are calling you (is there a phone number on the website?) or completing a Contact Request form? These are the lifeblood of your small business, giving you a flow of leads you can convert to new business. Without a steady flow of new leads, you are going to struggle to achieve your growth and performance targets.

How to increase the number of people who contact you

1. Add a phone number. Too many websites lack a phone number and so will stop people getting in touch.
2. Ensure they are links to your Contact Us page on every page of the site. For some landing pages, you may want to add a Contact Form to those as well. Not too many though (see above).

Are your mailing list and social media working?

Do you know how much traffic hits your website from your social media activity or your email marketing? If these marketing channels are part of your marketing mix, you will be investing considerable amounts of time on them. You need to know whether the time is being invested wisely. Google Analytics will show you how much of your website traffic is coming from these channels.

From the right keywords

Google Analytics, Search Console and other premium tools, such as SEMrush or Moz, will tell you what keywords are driving traffic to your website. You want to drive more traffic from the right keywords, but ensure that the wrong ones (cheap, free, in another geographic region, etc.) are not driving traffic.
For Google Ads, this is simple; you simply add negative keywords to your campaigns so that Google doesn’t show your Ads to people who type them into the search bar. For natural search, this isn’t quite as easy.
You cannot block natural search, but you can ensure that your content and metadata doesn’t include the negative keywords you want to avoid. If “free” or “cheap” are being used in different parts of your website, in conjunction, with your service or product offering, you run the risk of getting natural search traffic that you don’t want.

The Bad traffic

Bad website traffic isn’t just a waste of bandwidth. It’s a waste of your time too. If you are getting enquiries coming in from people who are expecting something different to what you are selling, they take up time before you qualify them out. Let’s look at this in more detail.

Traffic that Bounces or leaves quickly

Google may not use bounce rate data directly within its algorithms, but it does pay attention to how long people stay on your site after a search. If they see lots of people leaving very quickly, that tells them your site isn’t providing what people are looking for when using the keywords they searched on. Google will then move you down the rankings for that search term.

Traffic from outside your target area

If you only sell to companies in the UK, the last thing you want is traffic, and potentially enquiries, from outside the UK. Appearing in their searches is simply wasting their time. Enquiries from them are wasting your time. Nobody wins.

Stopping this type of website traffic isn’t always easy. Probably the easiest way to limit the amount of out of area traffic is to talk more about the area you want business from. You’ll see on our Contact Us page a map showing where our clients have been based. We’re actively looking for clients across the UK, so we use the map to show this. Look at how your website content shows where you want to work. Include an address on the site (not just in the Privacy Policy page) so it is very clear. Add a telephone number so the search engines can pick up your area dialling code too.

If you are a small business owner and you’re not using email marketing within your marketing mix, you’re almost certainly missing a trick. Here’s 10 ways that email marketing can help you within your small business.

At SME Needs we recommend Mailchimp (we are a Mailchimp Partner) as our preferred tool, but our clients use a range of other email marketing platforms. All of them can help you in these ways; its just that we prefer the functionality and intuitiveness of Mailchimp.

1. Email marketing is one to many

Perhaps the most obvious way an email marketing tool helps you is by giving you the ability to communicate with many people at once. Having a mailing list gives you the ability to not only send lots of emails at once, but also personalise them with merge fields (first name, company name and much more). The rest of these are more about the why than the function…

2. A great way of maintaining relationships

You know 100s of people. Your customers, prospects and your network can easily add up to a lot of people. Maintaining relationships with that many people without email marketing is going to be difficult. Imagine the number of calls you’d have to make or the time it would take to write individual emails to them.

But it is vital that you maintain these relationships. The last thing you want is for people to forget about you just before they identify a need for what you sell.

3. Helping you sell more to your current customers

Whether you’re an e-commerce business or a B2B services provider, email marketing is a great tool for helping you sell more to your current customers.

As a B2B services provider, you will have very few customers who are buying ever service you offer. Email marketing, using segmentation to ensure you send campaigns to the right people, is a great way to promote other services they can benefit from.

For e-commerce businesses, there are huge numbers of ways email can be used:

• Abandoned baskets (see more below)
• Regular reminders
• Associated products
• Tips to use what your customer has bought (improves brand satisfaction)
• And many more…

You can see more about how we help e-commerce businesses here.

4. Superb for nurturing your pipeline

Not everyone who subscribes to your mailing list is yet ready to buy. Most will be researching, looking for information. But once they subscribe, you want to help them into, and through, your sales funnel.  A series of nurturing emails will help people to understand how you can help, provide things for them to think about, and share evidence that you can deliver on your promises.

5. You should only be sending relevant content to people

The people in your mailing list will vary. Some will be customers and some prospects. Some will have bought from you and some have not yet bought. Even those who have bought will have bought different things. If you want to promote a particular product, you don’t want to send that campaign to people who have already bought it (unless it is something that is used regularly). Being able to use the data stored against each contact allows you to segment your audience and only send campaigns to relevant people.

The more relevant your email’s content is to the reader, the more likely they are to react how you want them to.

6. Are you collecting reviews and testimonials?

People will frequently look for reviews of your products or your business when considering buying from you. The more review you have, generally, the better. Once someone has bought from you, setting up an automated email marketing campaign to ask for reviews and testimonials.

Particularly suitable for e-commerce businesses, you can easily set a campaign to go out X days after a purchase. One small business client of ours is adding a couple of reviews a week because of the automated campaign we set up for them.

7. How are you recovering abandoned basket sales?

30% of the total retail market in the UK is now online. People add items to e-commerce baskets every day, but they may not be yet ready to buy. 69% of baskets are abandoned. Setting up abandoned basket campaigns that go out a little while later can remind people so they return and buy from you. Combined with remarketing PPC ads, these emails can make a significant difference to your sales.

8. You are following up events, aren’t you?

You invest time and money putting on events and attending trade shows. So you need to maximise the value you get from these events. Far too many companies fail to follow up with the people who attend events or that they talk to at a trade show. You can see more about how to follow up on a trade show here.

Sending an email out to people the day after the event to thank them for attending is a great way to build your brand and to start getting them to do something you want them to do. That may simply be to arrange a time to talk; it may be to buy something. Setting up a series of emails, particularly to people that weren’t previously on your mailing list will start getting them into your sales funnel and encourage them to buy from you.

9. Do you know when someone has engaged with your email campaign?

Once you’ve sent your email campaign, particularly sales campaigns, you’ll want to follow up on the phone. If you use Outlook (or similar), you have no knowledge of who did what with your email. When you follow up, you want to do so to the people most likely to engage/buy. Tools such as Mailchimp give you a list of:

• Who opened your email campaign.
• Who clicked, and what they clicked on.
• A rating on how they have engaged with other email campaigns recently.

The time saved using the data provided can be huge. It also means that you can have relevant conversations because you know what they are looking at.

10. What are they doing after that first click?

Moving slightly away from the email marketing tool, there are other digital tools that help you follow up even more effectively. At SME Needs we recommend CANDDi as we believe it provides great data, good value and really helpful people.

Once someone clicks on your email campaign, they land on your site, but what do they do next? If your follow-up conversation relates to the pages they looked at on your site, imagine how much more effective that conversation will be?  Once CANDDi knows about their first visit, they can also notify you when that person (on the same device) returns to your site. You can find more about CANDDi here.

Next Step…

If have already have an email marketing account set up, you’re probably doing at least some of these. If you want to know how to do more of these, or simply want someone to review how effective your email marketing is, either click here or simply give us a call on 020 8634 5911.