Today’s ever-changing competitive environment requires small businesses to periodically revisit and evolve their marketing strategy in order to be successful. We assist businesses in evaluating their advertising, promotion, and sales efforts. Business advising may include:
- Assisting clients with determining a marketing budget and performance evaluation strategy
- Working with the client to create a marketing plan to address messaging, identify target market(s) and channels to promote business and increase sales*
- Assisting with assessing ROI for a client’s marketing
- Performing an automated review of a client’s web site to address content and coding areas for improvement (see below for a redacted example e-mail to a client)
- Discussing the elements of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and demonstrating keyword tools for the best words and phrases to use on the web site and other channels
- Working with the client on developing a sales strategy, measurable sales tactics, and potential customer leads.
*The KSBDC is not a marketing agency, nor do we intend to compete with private industry marketing professionals. Our role is educational, and thus we strive to teach the elements of marketing that will enable a client to move forward effectively when they create their own marketing collateral or when they work with their creatives and other professionals. We are not in the business of creating graphics, logos, content or other creative work – but we can help you find some great professionals in those fields!
CASE STUDY
Your Kansas SBDC Advisor works with you.
Executive Summary: KSBDC Business Advisor conducted a Woo Rank website analysis of client’s site.
Challenges: The site was missing several key sections of code such as the meta description and thus wasn’t displaying properly in search results. Additionally, there were coding errors that would result in client’s e-mails not being delivered.
Web site analysis example (identifying business info has been redacted to protect client confidentiality):
“I ran your site through Woo Rank. The whole report is attached. Please don’t view the numerical score as an academic grade. The highest score I’ve ever seen was for a local bank, and they had a whole marketing staff; their score was 69 or 70. Some things popped out:
a) Your title tag (which is shown to people when they do a web search – it’s half of what entices them to click on you, with the meta description (below) being the other half) is a bit of a mixed bag: <<redacted>>
From Woo Rank:
“HTML title tags appear in browser tabs, bookmarks and in search results.
It looks like your title tag is a little outside the ideal length. Since they are one of the most important on-page SEO elements you should make your title tags between 20 and 70 characters including spaces (200 – 569 pixels). Make sure each page has a unique title and use your most important keywords. For internal pages start your title tags with your most important keyword(s).”
b) There is no meta description. The meta description is comprised of two additional lines of text that are shown to searchers. That gives you a little more real estate to get them to click on you.
c) Google reads the site like we read a newspaper. Your headings (think: headlines) do not represent your product/service, nor do they match keywords that would likely be used in a search, but they do represent your value proposition:
d) As Google reads the copy on the site, this is what they mostly see (content was redacted to ensure client confidentiality):
e) There are a few errors to be found, but I would fix the DMARC issue first, as that is stopping (or will stop) some of your e-mails from being delivered:”
