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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Today on episode 48 of the be a marketer podcast, it's another ask Dave episode, and I'm answering your questions about how to review your marketing tools and approach, and what simple actions you can take to boost your productivity. This is the be a marketer
Intro Voice:Be a marketer.
Dave Charest:I'm your host, Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact. And I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore how to find the time to be a marketer. Remember friend, you can be a marketer and at Constant Contact, we're here to help. Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining me for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:Today, we have a question from Erin, and Erin is an electronic communications coordinator at her church. So as you might imagine, that entails a lot of communication about the services, office updates, events, volunteer opportunities, offerings, mission trips, donation drives, sermons, suppers, and workshops, just to name a few things going on typically at your local church. Now Erin's question Now, Erin, one, thanks for the question. And I love this question because these are questions
Dave Charest:that I'm actually answering in
Dave Charest:the current keynote sessions that I'm doing on the foundations of the online marketing success. And, you know, I really talk about this process of what I've seen work for many of the successful business owners that I've talked to over the years, particularly Constant Contact customers, and they really go through this process of reviewing. They review what they're currently doing, and then they make a plan to implement new things or make changes and improvements based on what they're seeing and based on what their current goals are. And then they actually sit down and they once they have that plan together, they actually put time in the calendar to execute on that plan. And then, of course, we'll talk about some ways that they think about adding some efficiencies to what they're doing using the technology available to them.
Dave Charest:So I wanna start with review here. And so, really, this is all about figuring out, do you have the right tools and approach in place for what it is that you're trying to do? And for the sake of time, I'm gonna really focus on 3 things here. I'm gonna focus on your website. I'm gonna talk about email marketing or text marketing, really, having an own channel, and social media.
Dave Charest:And so, again, really here, this is really thinking about what it is that you're doing now, what tools are you using, and how are they kind of working for you? So it's a good opportunity to check-in. And so when we start thinking about things like our website, so a couple of questions come to mind. One, is it mobile responsive? I think this is really important because oftentimes, one, a mobile responsive website just means it adapts to based on whatever screen size that's kind of viewing it.
Dave Charest:So if someone's looking at it on a tiny screen, they can still find the information they need and navigate that in a good way. If it's on a big screen, it still looks pretty good. And I think the important thing here to recognize is with the mobile responsive website,
Dave Charest:it actually starts to look a
Dave Charest:little bit more modern too. And that can be, one of those things that kind of sets you apart, particularly when people come to your website, and it's one of those things that have been around for a while and has a kind of dated look to it. But the next big question is really, is it doing what it is that you want it to do? Right? Are people getting the information?
Dave Charest:Are people easily able to find those things? And you really sometimes need to make sure that you're talking to
Dave Charest:the people in your community to find out whether or not people are
Dave Charest:actually getting the information that they need. And I think the next big clue is really are people taking the action that you want them to take. Right? Are they taking that next step? So what is it that you want people to do when they get to your website?
Dave Charest:So some things to think about there. The next big question, right, are you using an email tool or and or text marketing? Because this is a way for you to connect with your members, your constituents, whatever you want to call it, the members of your parish. You're able to talk with them directly. And this is important because when you're thinking about what it is that you're doing in the online space, and we'll talk about social media here in a minute, is that, you know, it gets very difficult to make sure that you're connecting with people in the ways that you need to connect with them because everything's algorithm based.
Dave Charest:And the reality is not everybody sees everything that you do on those channels. And so when you have those channels that you own, this allows you to connect directly with your members. And so the big question here is, okay, as you're reviewing that, do you have a plan to send regularly to these people so you're keeping them abreast of the
Dave Charest:things that they need
Dave Charest:to know about what's going on with your church. Okay? Now, social media. Big question here is one of the things we often find is people there are so many channels available today and people feel like they have to be on all of them. And oftentimes what we find is that leads to people doing a little bit here, a little bit there, but not really doing anything meaningful on any one channel.
Dave Charest:And that can be a problem because you end up just spinning your wheels and wasting a lot of time because you're trying to feed the beast, right, as I've called that before. And when you're doing that, you're not really getting the most benefit you can from using that channel. And so I think the big question here is, okay, if you are using social channels, good.
Dave Charest:I mean, you should be using some of them. But the question to ask is where are most people engaging with you? Because that kind of
Dave Charest:gives you an idea of like, okay, here's where we see the most action or here's where most people are. Here's where we have the biggest audience. That kind of gives you an idea of maybe, like, hey. Maybe this is the place where we wanna hunker down and see if we can get this working really well for us. And then always the big question is, are you, from those social channels, looking for ways on occasion to move people toward those own channels, to the email, to the SMS channel, whatever it may be.
Dave Charest:Now I want to talk a little bit about just an overall approach that we consider when we're thinking about what to do online. And ultimately, the goal here is to increase the word-of-mouth for your business and, of course, in this case, your church and just raise awareness. Build the community and get more people involved in
Dave Charest:the things that you're doing.
Dave Charest:And so at Constant Contact, we talk about this approach called engagement marketing. And essentially what it means is that whenever anybody connects with you, wherever that may be, that could be in person, that could be online, that could be on a social channel, within an email, on your website, wherever it is, you always want to try to do your best to provide a great experience for the person engaging with you in that location. When you do that and you create this great experience for them, that's also a great opportunity to entice them, to connect with you, to stay connected. And it's when they are connected with you continually think about engaging. And it's through those engagements and, again, keeping top of mind that you're able to get people to come
Dave Charest:back to you. And the
Dave Charest:thing that changes here a little bit is, of course, with the social visibility that is now available as people are engaging with you on the social platforms, platforms, it increases your reach and allows you to reach new people and then bring those people into your fold. And so it's this constant engagement marketing cycle that we talk about here that is you providing a great experience, enticing people to connect, engaging with them, and bringing them back to you and then exposing your church to other people so that they know that it's around and that they can become involved as well. Okay. And so that's really the approach that we're thinking about here when we start to think of that. And so, you know, when you think about what it is that you're doing online, well, you know, are you trying to do something similar?
Dave Charest:Are you trying to get to this place where you're able to increase the word-of-mouth for your business in a digital realm and just in general? Okay? So once you kind of get a level set of where you're at and what you're doing, it's then, alright, thinking about, okay, what is the plan
Dave Charest:that we need to put
Dave Charest:in place here now to then make improvements? Right? Are there things that maybe we're missing that we need to implement? For example, do we have an email sign up form on our website? Right?
Dave Charest:When people come there, is a way for them to get on the email list? Are there things you need to improve? Maybe you're thinking about, yeah, we're sending emails, but not a
Dave Charest:lot of people are actually responding to them or
Dave Charest:they're not coming to the events that we're talking about or they're still saying they don't know about information that we've sent out, like those types of things. And so you might wanna say, okay, there are some specific things here that we want to improve and this is all, of course, based on what it is that your goals are going
Dave Charest:to be. So I'm going
Dave Charest:to talk about some things that specifically that I think might be worthwhile for Erin specifically to look at when you think about some of the things that you're doing. And so again, in this website, email, and social realm, I'm gonna start with
Dave Charest:the website. And sometimes it's all about simplifying. And, you
Dave Charest:know, we mentioned mobile responsive. Simple way to tell whether or not your website is mobile responsive is if you're looking at it on a computer or you're looking at it on a mobile device, you can tell right away. But even just grab the corner of your browser window and resize it, drag it to make it smaller or bigger. And if the website moves with you and you can still read everything, it's mobile responsive. If it doesn't, that may be something that you wanna think about.
Dave Charest:Now, look, I know sometimes a website can be a big undertaking, and so that might not be the focus or the thing that you wanna really hone in on because, it could involve a whole bunch of moving parts that you just don't have the bandwidth to take on, and that's fine. So take that with a grain of salt, but oftentimes it's about simplifying that information. We talked about the laundry list of things that you have going on, you gotta get the word out about. Right? And so this could lead to having just a lot of information on a website that can, from users' experience, remember, we wanna create a great experience for someone, can oftentimes be really overwhelming.
Dave Charest:And so in many instances, less is more, so you can get people to where they need to go to find the information versus kind of dumping everything on there and making it kind of like a mishmash of things that they have to kind of sift through to be able to process. And we process things a little bit differently online than we do in person. And so oftentimes, those things can feel like distractions that stop us from doing things rather than getting us to do things. So something to think about there. The next piece I would mention is email.
Dave Charest:I think this is another place to simplify. We are probably doing some really great things in terms of thinking about the different types of audiences that you have, and you have different lists within your email program, within your Constant Contact account so that you can get specific information to specific people about the specific things that they may be interested in. And I think that's always a great place to start. Now, as we mentioned, all of the things that you have going on, the difficult piece, and I know this is difficult because you feel like you have to put everything in an email. And the reality is oftentimes you don't.
Dave Charest:And the big question to always ask yourself before you send an email or as you're putting together your email is what are the three things that the person receiving this email must know right now? And it forces you to really say, okay, well, if I needed to let people know about these things, well, these are the 3 things they have to know. Now the reason I say this is because oftentimes, again, the email gets a little bit like the website sometimes where you've got tons and tons of information that you start throwing in there And then one of the features within your Constant Contact account is called the heat map. When you look at the results of your email, you
Dave Charest:can go in there and
Dave Charest:you can actually see where people are kind of engaging with links within your email. And not everything is a link, I get it. And sometimes it's just about sharing information, but it shows you a little bit of this idea of you see where people are kind of scanning over and and actually just no longer engaging with content. It's the more you have content in there, the more you go down that page, the less you see people engaging and interacting. And so you're really, although you're putting it in there, you're probably still hearing things like, oh, I didn't know about that or I didn't see that or I didn't know about that thing.
Dave Charest:And so, again, the big question, what are the 3 things that someone must know right now so that you're simplifying things and you're giving them that information and the person receiving it again has a better experience where they can process that information versus kind of flipping through a giant email with a lot of information that becomes very difficult to consume. Now on social, something I would say here is when we start to think about really where people start to take actions, email is really that driving force. Email's that thing that somebody is really interested in what it is that you're sending to them. They wanna know that information, and that's the thing that can really drive people to do things and take the next step. I think social is more about engagement and entertainment in many ways or letting people
Dave Charest:see things and get a
Dave Charest:sense of what your community is like. And oftentimes, we don't really lean into those strengths of the channel. We kind of do some things across all channels the same way, and we wanna make people aware of, like, an event that we're having or something like that. And so we start using kind of, like, event language or or putting up information like that. And it's not that you don't necessarily wanna do that, but you really need to find a better mix of thinking through how do we show the community?
Dave Charest:How do we show people at those events? How do we show people having a good time? How do we show what the community looks like? The types of people that we're trying to attract. When you do that, you're gonna find a couple of things.
Dave Charest:1, people are gonna start to see what it's like to be part of your community, but also people are going to engage with those more. Because think about when you go to an event or somebody creates a photo album or something like that and somebody sends it to you. Oftentimes, the first thing we do is start looking for the pictures of ourselves. Right? Can we find ourself in there?
Dave Charest:And people want to see those things and engage with those things and share those things. Right? And so you get into this place where people start engaging with that content more, which again increases your social visibility and allows people to almost invoke the FOMO of things. So you start seeing, oh, I wanna be part of that event or I wanna be where these people are. And so, really, I think social is really about focusing more on people and communicating and using your email program to really push people forward in terms of taking those next steps.
Dave Charest:So a couple of things there to think about. Now,
Dave Charest:once you kind of get to this place, we move into the execute part of this. Okay. So here are the things that we're going to do. Here are some things we're gonna change. Here are some things that we're gonna work on.
Dave Charest:Really, you gotta make sure you get everybody in an agreement. If there's other people that need to kinda sign off on this, you wanna make sure that agree on what is the most important things to work on. What are the things that we need to do? Identify the problem. We need more people coming to this.
Dave Charest:We need more people knowing about this. We keep hearing people aren't aware of this thing or so agree on what the problem is that you're trying to solve and then agree on the most important things to kind of focus on and then, again, pick 3 things. It's all about simplification. Yes. There may be a lot
Dave Charest:of things that you need
Dave Charest:to do. Focus on 3 things, get those things in the calendar, work on those things, and move forward with them. Okay? This is what we see. Review, plan, and execute.
Dave Charest:Do those 3 things and continually go back to that cycle of 3 things, and you'll start moving forward and making improvements that you need to make. Now, a couple of things to think about here just in terms of boosting productivity. And, of course, there are a lot of things within your Constant Contact account that allow you to do that and allow you to start to it's just about taking advantage of them. Right? And allow you to really start making good use of those things so you're not having to do everything manually.
Dave Charest:So you're not having to basically be able to take advantage of things that are good for you in the long run that you just
Dave Charest:may not be doing. And so, a couple of things I
Dave Charest:want to mention. 1, in your Constant Contact account, you have what's called a welcome email. Now this is a very important thing that I think a lot of people that I'm always amazed of how many people that actually don't take advantage of it. And this is as if someone were coming into your church and said hello to you, and you you ignored them in many instances. Right?
Dave Charest:Somebody's joining your email list. They're becoming a member of the email list. This is a great opportunity to welcome them, give them some information, start that relationship off on a right foot or cement that relationship even more. So use that welcome email, and this is something that will work for you. It's automated.
Dave Charest:It can be a personal letter. It can be a personal welcome from somebody within your church organization, something like that. That really sets the tone for the information that they're gonna be receiving in the future from you. When you do this, when somebody signs up whenever they join, whether it's today, tomorrow, or 3 months from now, they're gonna get that same experience. You don't have
Dave Charest:to do anything other than set that up the first time. Another simple way to make sure
Dave Charest:that people are seeing more of your information is to use a feature called resend to non openers. And so when you're scheduling your email, this is another automated thing here that happens is you send your email as you would normally. So let's say you send it weekly and you're sending it on a Wednesday. You can say, hey. Typically, we say 48 hours is the time that we're where the people are gonna open that email, open the email.
Dave Charest:So let's say on that 3rd day, if somebody hasn't opened that email, you can automatically set up within that send frequency for the email to go out again. You can change the subject line, and people will receive that email again who didn't open it. And so it just gives them another opportunity. And we've seen people get more opens, more clicks by doing that. And so it's a simple way.
Dave Charest:You click a tick box and you choose when you're gonna send it at what time. Really simple way to get more engagement on those emails that you're sending. Another way to start saving yourself some time and boosting your productivity is also taking advantage of the content generator within your Constant Contact account. You may have events. You may have things coming up.
Dave Charest:You may have things that are on repeat, things that are happening all the time that get a little bit difficult to think of new ways to talk about them and to get the word out about those particular things in new and interesting ways. So the content generator can really help you create some options there, or at least get you going in the right direction if you wanna add some more flavor or, you know, be a little bit more personal in those things. But it's a great way to save yourself some time even thinking about how you're doing some things from a social perspective, the content you're creating to generate some insight or get people aware, I should say, generate awareness about those events or things you have going on. It's an easy way to kinda solve that blank cursor or the blinking cursor problem where you're just kinda staring at the screen saying, like, alright. What do I write here?
Dave Charest:So take advantage of that because that's gonna help you create that content in a much quicker way and help you do that right within your Constant Contact account. Now speaking of the social accounts and then putting things on social media, also think about connecting your social accounts within constant contact. If you've got a Facebook page and Instagram, you can connect those things right within your Constant Contact dashboard, so you can start to see how people are responding to you. You can engage with people right through there, and you can post things, you can post images. It creates this simpler dynamic where you can do everything right from within your Constant Contact account.
Dave Charest:The other thing I'll mention is to take a look at also is your dynamic segments within your Constant Contact account. Now you're doing a great job, of course, putting your list together or thinking about the different groups of people or the groups of information that people may need to think about or want to be to know about. And so you're not sending everything to everybody. But the other thing to think about is dynamic segments. Now you can go into your Constant Contact account and you can create segments based on activity, and you can actually see a few things in terms of maybe who your most engaged people are.
Dave Charest:And those those lists will update dynamically for you. So as people move into that engaged bucket, you'll start to see, you know, what that means. And then those just might be people that you think about like, hey, if we would need to get the word out about something or if we need a little extra push or we need a
Dave Charest:little extra help, those might be the people that you want
Dave Charest:to go to in order to see if they can help spread the word or do something like that. And so those are some ways that you can think about boosting your productivity. So this was a longer episode than typical in terms of these Ask Dave questions, but we had a lot to cover there. And hopefully that gave you some good things to think about here. So I wanna recap some things.
Dave Charest:1, review what it is that you're doing now. Take a look at that. Make sure those things are in place that you need to be able to be successful at what you're doing. Then put a plan together based on your goals. Think about what it is that you're trying to achieve and then what
Dave Charest:are the pieces that you need
Dave Charest:in place to help you do that. And then lastly, take that action. Use the tech where possible to make you more efficient when you do that. But you gotta really put that plan in a calendar and move forward so you can take those steps to take action. So, Aaron, I hope that helps.
Dave Charest:And thanks again for sending in your question. Really appreciate it. Friends, if you have a marketing question for me, I'd love to hear it. So if you're a Constant Contact customer, you can head right over to the Constant Contact community to post your question for an upcoming Ask Dave episode. I'm gonna include a link to that for you in the show notes.
Dave Charest:Alright, friend. We'll talk to you next time. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me directly at dave.charest @ constantcontact.com.
Dave Charest:If you did enjoy today's episode, please please take a moment to leave us a review. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.