Wrong…

How would you like an easy way to capture your ideas to start to collate all the data, the information you need for the best online marketing strategy, and marketing year you’ve ever had?

[Transcription]  Hi, Peter Butler, Smarter Websites.

When I talk to business owners, a lot of the time I find out that they sit down to start to prepare to set up a marketing campaign or a series of marketing campaigns. Wrong. Personally, my ilk (bent) is that when we’re out and about we have ideas, the ideas aren’t the problem.

It’s a matter of capturing the ideas and then to start to build on that, add information slowly.

Look, whether you use a whiteboard, Post-it notes.

I use Trello. It’s a beautiful little platform. I’m a raving fan for those who know me. Trello, have a look at it. It’s free. This whole section here is called a board. This board is my Marketing, Blog Posts, Email Marketing. These are lists and these are cards. Each individual one is a card.

How I’ve set mine up and you work how you work, but this is actually where I come up with the idea, right. I just create a card, give it a title. I make notes within the card and this is where I’m starting this year.

I am going to make sure that this year, I take action, massive imperfect action. This is the year of that.

Now this video won’t get edited much at all, I’m just going to get it out there, get it up because I’m sick of trying to get it perfect and I know so many business owners don’t move forward because look, I’ve just got to do this, I’ve just got to do that, whatever it is.

Look, you’re better off just getting it out there even if it’s imperfect because at least you’re in action.

I captured the idea in this particular list and I had elements of information. I’ve got snippets of information in each one of these. This is a new thing that’s happening with Chrome and I’ve captured some website links, some information and so forth, and I’m starting to collate the information.

When I’ve got enough information and I’m really inspired to move forward with it, remember, I’m just capturing ideas.

Look, this is a big scroll list. There’s no shortage of them and I’m sure most business owners are in the same position. Once I’ve created that card, collated a little bit of information, I want to move it on. I move it over to here. This is my blog post, email topics. I’ve moved it onto the next stage.

When I’ve added some information, so video marketing, I’ll just share a few of the blog posts, the information that’s actually coming up that you’re going to get information about and, hopefully, it’s going to add value to your business.

Remember I said massive imperfect action so that’s one of my team members checking in for this morning and we’re going to edit that out and I don’t care.

Video marketing, there’s a new video plugin for Genesis. That’s not  yet, but it’s moved along. What I also do is in this particular list, this is the delivery order. This is the email campaign we’re doing right now so blogs, emails, brain storm, strategy session.

The next one that’s going to come out the following week is smarter reviews.

Now, I’ll just share a little bit about that. You’ve got to make it easy for people to become raving online fans. The best way to do that is to get them in an online platform, whether it’s LinkedIn, Google Reviews, and True Local and so on. If you actually focus on Google Reviews, there’s massive SEO benefits. Social reviews is social signals and it is just so powerful.

The whole point being that people are now doing more due diligence than ever before and you really do need to set yourself apart, and the old catch phrase what others say about you is infinitely more powerful than what we say about us. There’s a lot of service providers providing online platforms now. It’s the new thing. The trouble is it’s on another online platform and we can actually incorporate this into your website.

Anyway, enough of that. We’re going to do a blog post about it.

This is my delivery order. This is the email we’re talking about now. What are my notes there? Do video showing My Trello Marketing Board, show snippets of each sort of like, teaser, but actual added value share. It’s a good takeaway so you can go and do this. I make no money and, hopefully, it adds value to your business.

We’re going to then roll out the smarter reviews email.

I’m going to talk about email signatures.

This is something that does my absolute head in. You’ve got to make it easy for people to get a hold of you.

We’ve recently been doing some renovation work and some of the people that I’ve been communicating with, getting quotes from, they got a lousy email signature. I’m going to go and get their number. I go back to the email. Oh, my God. It’s like seriously, people, make it easy for people to find you and get hold of you.

I’ve got another local business owner who’s just had their signature redone by a graphic designer, absolutely gorgeous and you want to see what they’ve done wrong. It’s actually embarrassing and I’ll share the detail of that in that blog post.

Owning your own domain name, that’s coming up soon as well.

I own peterbutler.com.au. Hello?

Why would you not own your own name, especially given that in today’s world with due diligence, imagine this, you’re vying for a gig. You’ve got a proposal out there and that person is looking at two people. How are you going to differentiate yourself? You need every edge and this is one way to do it. It makes it personal and people want to do business with people they know, like and trust and this is one way to achieve it.

Anyway, back on track. These are also posts that we’re going to do for our membership and managed support services. You can see I’ve got some sort of structure to this.

As I said just to refresh, this is where I capture the initial idea. I then populate some information and then, I move it along over to here. I capture ideas from my members here. Then I go from here over to there so that I can get the delivery order and then once they’re sent, they will get moved along to there.

I’m hoping that this adds value to what you do in your business and gives you a platform or a tool or some ideas, inspiration to start to set up your own marketing for this year because the bottom line is we need every edge we can get.

Now if we’re able to, if you need help with setting up a marketing strategy, hey, give us a shout out. It’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at.

That’s Peter Butler, Smarter Websites, helping business owners achieve local world domination. Get marketing.