At the beginning on this year I set a few goals for myself. One of the goals was to blog about marketing, business, or leadership once a week for 52 weeks. Today is the midway point of the year and I am on track to reach my goal, having published 26 new blog posts. I wanted to blog weekly for 2 reasons. First, to sharpen my thinking and expertise in marketing. Second, to generate more sales for my business. So far, my sales leads have increased by 122% and my revenue has increased 42%. Here’s how it happened.
A Focus on Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Early on in our business I recognized that our new customers were either people we knew personally or people who were referred to us by our family, friends, or past customers. This is called “word-of-mouth marketing”. Word-of-mouth marketing is the main way many small business owners and freelancers get new customers – especially those offering a service.
At the beginning of the year I asked myself how I could grow my business through word-of-mouth marketing. The main strategy I developed was to blog regularly.
Here’s what I did:
– Blog about marketing, business, or leadership once a week
– Publish the blog post on Fridays (and if Friday was a holiday, then publish on Thursday). The only exception to this was if there was breaking news in the marketing world (i.e. WestJet’s new logo or Microsoft purchasing LinkedIn), then I would publish my week’s blog post immediately.
– Share the blog post on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. On Facebook, I shared the blog post first on the Coracle Marketing business page, and then I shared that same post on my personal Facebook account.
Blogging gave me an avenue to add value to the people in my network through my writing. Blogging was also a gentle reminder to those around me about the work that I do. I don’t need people to read my blog post (and most people don’t). I just need them to remember that I have a marketing company and that I can help businesses with their marketing.
There were two instances this year that friends contacted me immediately after I published a blog post on Facebook. They had seen my blog post in their news feed and it had prompted them to contact me.
Despite how I think I talk about my marketing business so much (and some of you might agree with me), there are still many of my friends that don’t know what I do. I like referring people to consider buying from my friends’ businesses, and I think my friends like referring people they know to us as well. Blogging regularly helps my friends understand what I do. And that has given my word-of-mouth marketing a boost.
Having Accountability With My Blogging Goal
I shared my goal of blogging 52 times this year on my blog, on social media, and also in my business group. I am part of a group of business owners that meet once every 2 weeks. At the beginning of the year we all shared goals we made and every time we meet we ask each other how things are going with our goals. This has been extra motivation for me to stay on track.
I remember one week early in February where I had pushed off blogging all week. It was Thursday night and I was tired. The last thing I wanted to do was blog. So I decided I would give myself a pass… no one really keeps their new year’s resolutions anyways right? As I lay in bed that evening I thought, “If I give myself a pass this week, then it will make it that much easier to give myself a pass in future weeks.” Wanting to stick to my goal, I jumped out of bed and whipped up a blog post at 11:30am. That post, “The Second Most Important Page on Your Website” was actually my 2nd most read post this year (second only to the WestJet post that went semi-viral due to my guerilla marketing tactics).
Focusing on My Strengths
There are many ways to increase sales: networking, cold-calling, advertising, SEO, email marketing, word-of-mouth, blogging, etc. I don’t do well at networking events (unless I go to an event where I already know people – which is my new networking strategy. It’s a blog post for another day). I’ve never tried cold-calling and I wouldn’t be very good at it. SEO doesn’t generally work well for a small business like ours (in fact, I’ve only had one customer find out about us through a Google search).
But I am a pretty darn good blogger. Well, a decent one at least. If you read our story on our website, you’ll know that this company started out of my wife and my personal blog. While I am not the strongest of writers (my wife usually copyedits my blog posts), I do have plenty of ideas for things to write about. From over 10 years of blogging, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to write efficiently and effectively, and how to use social media as a platform to reach my audience.
It’s not enough to just blog. Social media is a main reason this strategy worked for me. Facebook is my main social media platform. I got a Facebook account relatively early (2006) and have been intentional about becoming friends on Facebook with people I’ve met. I check Facebook several times a day, post several times a week, and engage with people regularly. Because of this, whenever I post something on Facebook there are usually 900 – 1,000 people that see it.
Blogging and social media is what I’m good at, so it makes sense that I use these skills to boost my sales efforts.
122% Increase in Sales Leads
The numbers speak for themselves. Blogging weekly was really the only difference in my sales and business development activity this year. I didn’t do any more networking. I didn’t do any advertising. I didn’t do any SEO work. All I did was blog regularly.
From July to December of 2015, here were the sales leads I received:
– 8 referrals
– 1 from a Google search
From Jan to June of 2016, here were the sales leads I received:
– 6 friends
– 13 referrals
– 1 from a Google search
Not only did I have an increase in sales leads, our business has also increase its revenue by 42% (year to date).
Now you might be wondering why my revenue didn’t increase by 122% as well. That’s a good question that I asked myself too. The answer is because of the increase of sale leads, I was able to turn down the businesses that were not a good fit and refer them to other people. This is the first time in the history of our business that we’ve been able to turn away business, which I think is a healthy thing. The reality is that we can’t serve everyone that comes our way and we shouldn’t. There are specific businesses that we can add tremendous value to and my hope is to focus on serving those customers.
The blogging and social media strategy I have implemented this year has brought about real growth to our business. Would it work for your business too?