I don’t want to sound up myself or like I’m blowing my own horn here, but all my blogs have gone a little quiet over the last 2-3 months as I have just been inundated with growth and have almost doubled my income from earlier in the year.

At first it was exciting, but as it’s broken through and held steady in the very low 5 figures p/month range for the last 2 months I started really scratching my head. Sure, there are good times and you make hay while the sun shines.

But it’s been a bloody long summer! When can I assume that I’m safe here on third base?

Last week I had the best week ever from my businesses. They are not all online businesses, but all the marketing of these businesses takes place online. My weekly marketing budget is $50.

This is by the way because, if you hadn’t guessed, I’m a small business marketing consultant - and I’m not too shabby, obviously. You can hire me to help you with each and every part of your online marketing, though demand is fairly heavy. Email me at kurbpromo@gmail.com if you need affordable small business marketing strategy and implementation.

This week, though I’m still pretty tired without having had a whole day off for a while, it looks like I’m going to do a similar figure again. To me it’s significant because I never thought I’d be doing so well!

Y’know? I thought, probably like a lot of people, $100k, that’s a good goal to aim for. That’s good money, and it’s good money for someone like me, knocking on 30, and heading up the curve to my peak.

And so I DO seem to be doing really well! Ever since I got back from tour around mid september, everything just took off, or well, just really levelled up, profit consistently rolling over that 2k mark each week, when earlier in the year (when I still had some time for myself and my music over the week) it had just been here or there.

And the most suprising and freaky part for me is really that I haven’t lifted my marketing game significantly in fact I was away playing gigs for 3 weeks and I’ve been flat out running operations since!

So in saying that, it’s nothing new, it’s built on the solid online marketing foundations I’ve established over the last year or two. Which is nothing too fancy, nothing too complex, nothing overly technical or some visionary concept.

I mean I did have clear plans about how I’d be pushing my marketing forward, I just didn’t have the time, because it’s management skills, particularly personnel management that is shaping up to be my big challenge as I grow my businesses, but I have also addressed my framing recently - whereby rather than shooting for some arbitrary goal, now I just want to fulfill my true potential, and that’s not really about a dollar figure.

Effective Small Business Marketing Strategies:

But for you guys today, in my usual style, I just want to talk honestly about the real and actual reasons why I could possibly have erupted into this sudden growth spurt. I am certain there is no one determining factor but it is actually a concert of elements working together, let me see if I can pin them all. Some are strategies, some are concepts, some are more opinion based.

PPC - Pay per click online advertising: I love ppc now, my own obsessiveness took me to a certain stage but now i’m starting to learn more advanced techniques and seek information outside my experience, I’m actually getting pretty good. As I said PPC takes up almost all of my $50 p/week marketing budget so is anywhere between 2000-6000% profitable. PPC is an art, I see a lot of people just tipping money into it without embracing the dedicated testing and sculpting of your campaign that brings such strong results.

The scary thing for me of course is I only spend $50 p/week. What happens when I double my budget?
Video Promotion + Branding: A few comparisons can be drawn between my video content and my website. Neither would win a design for visual sumptuousness or being utterly immersive in their engagement, but it’s obvious that to a certain extent these platforms are functioning successfully.

Even though my videos are fairly poorly executed in terms of professional standards, there’s a deeply engaging brand connection going on there. I couldn’t tell you what the proportion is, but there is a certain portion of my clientele that are engaging with the videos I have on my site, because unlike many others I’m using video to establish inital trust and authority simply just by fronting up.

Remember it was Woody Allen who said “80% of success is just showing up.” In a new media situation such as online video this is still true. For now.

Without being too analytical, it’s very much a Micheal Hill thing going on. For those outside of Australasia, Micheal Hill became a huge jewellery magnate on the back of Micheal Hill’s self fronted TV ads, where Micheal himself simpy described the specials in a near monotone and signed off, “Micheal Hill, Jeweller.”

We all know about personal branding, but when you run a small business and you’re leveraging online marketing, microbranding is all about creating trust. I know for a fact that there is a portion of my clients who call me simply because of the videos. Because I looked like I was an OK guy. I believe that when people see those videos, they see that I’m someone that is fronting up and can be trusted.

Customer Service: I always knew that my customer service would turn a corner and I would start retaining customers, simply because I really hate how often I’ve had to let clients down and it’s such a stressful experience. I never realised just how much more efficiently my business would run when I wasn’t constantly overstretched just meeting the most basic demands of my clients. Stress makes me panic and get negative, but remove it from the equation and I can really show a lot of stamina. A 12 hour day for me is nothing . . . unless someone yells at me! But also, it never really hit me that as the marketing I was doing would continue to generate the same response, the growing amount of customers I’d retained would begin to add to the total turnover I could expect, and recently business from repeat customers has gone up to 25-30% of total business. This has given me a lot of confidence because I know I’m competitive on price I just have to invest into improving customer experience to ensure I retain enough customers to continue growing in the short term.

Also, I got my very first volunteered testimonial last week to!
Stories: Stories are the life blood of marketing. Stories are what take a commodity and turn it into a message that consumers can understand and find value in. Some people are going to respond to the story that my video tells: That I’m young, I’m fronting up for my businesses as a young entrepreneur who is committed enough to present myself and the services I offer to the world on youtube. Some people are going to respond to the less flattering story of some dude that doesn’t know a whole lot about lighting shooting a bad video in his office.

So in terms of identifying the customers who are going to get the best value out of the service I provide, I’m looking at where stories can enhance my brand. That’s why I recently added a piece to one of my sites explaining why our prices were the cheapest - explaining that when you compare my businesses that I run from my spare room and garage with my cousins help to a big workshop or office or shop space with a big staff, it’s easy to understand. That the brand I’m building is that we’re committed to affordable and fast and most importantly to me is that I always work with clients so they can go ahead with their project - without adding costs - and that’s what I call a commitment to problem solving.
Targeting and Access: Another point I came back to with PPC was that I can’t understand how I’ve moved into doing more corporate cd and dvd presentation packs, and it’s common for a company to place an order for a large number of discs in very basic packaging, and of course these are ideal jobs for us in terms of high profit and low effort.  It’s also highlighted that the customer service issues are always with the musicians who tend to have quite high expectations about what their money gets them.

I think this is clearly from using PPC which exposes us to more companies looking for immediate solutions on Google, whereas a year ago a lot of that was still coming from Myspace and of course they were all bands.

Now that I’ve increased capacity I have also initiated a branding exercise to emphasize convenience and to target the urgent market - Almost overwhelmingly my clients are working to some kind of deadline that they are desperate to meet, and a part of that is that I’m quite accessible in Grey Lynn which is one of the closest residentialareas to the CBD, and I’ll often stay up working on such jobs after midnight to make sure they’re done.
Experience and Efficiency: All these factors have come into play but at the end of the day, it’s a sign of maturity - this time last year I was squandring a lot of my gains because my management skills were so poor but now that I have got more experience and try to avoid negative customer experiences, I’m under less stress and that’s translating into a much higher productivity rate.