sales and marketing automation | smallbizdream blog

Client Building Strategies for Tech-Savvy Event Planners

Finding new clients is one of the biggest challenges for many novice event planners. Aside from having a relatively thin portfolio, they also have to market themselves in a very competitive space. This is also true even among experienced planners, particularly those who have not adapted to modern technology. But for many tech-savvy event planners, there’s no limit as to the number of new clients they can generate using sales and marketing automation and building an online presence.

We’ll go through some of the ways you can grow your clientele much faster by adopting a technology-driven approach to building your events business.

Combining Web Presence and Automation

Event planning websites are a game changer in the events industry. Clients can quickly make decisions based on the information found on your website – events you specialize in, services, price range, hourly rates, event planning packages, and so on. You can also schedule a call or meet-up with your prospects any time of the day through your website.

Phone calls are pretty much a part of the business, even in this digital age. But by using sales and marketing automation, you’ll only have to deal with prospects who’ve been through your website after providing you with a little bit of information. Let’s take Small Business Dream as an example.

Say you have a visitor who had gone through your event planner landing page and you want to be able to categorize your prospective client according to event, budget, and tentative dates. Typically, you’re going to need a separate service for your questionnaires and emails. However, Small Business Dream is a complete system that comes with its own survey builder and email autoresponder to automate a number of tasks for you.

For instance, you can set your questionnaire to segment your visitors according to their chosen events and set a priority for each one based on their tentative dates and budget. This becomes especially important when you’re dealing with multiple clients. You don’t want spending a lot of your time on a low-budget client who is months away from the scheduled event if you have a high-end prospect who has an upcoming event in two weeks.

Small Business Dream simplifies the task by prioritizing each contact to make sure you don’t miss out on a big break or big opportunities to grow your business.

Building Your Credibility Online

Event planners spend hundreds of hours crafting the best experience for their clients. They understand the value of establishing a good name – not only to impress their clients but to turn each one into brand advocates. Customer referrals and word of mouth advertising still rank as some of the most cost-effective marketing tool to this day.

Experienced planners usually have the advantage over new ones when it comes to credibility. But there are workarounds for those who are still struggling to grow their client base. People are now moving towards online search and social media, so it only makes sense that we spend more time building traffic to our site and be able to network with other businesses.

First, you need a stunning website to showcase your previous work. If you don’t have a large portfolio and want to attract more clients, you can make your own templates by taking photos of your mockups in your front yard or lawn. Play with different angles and lighting conditions. You might also want to invest in a professional high-definition camera or take short online courses in photography and photo-editing software (preferably, you have someone on your team who can handle this task).

Next, connect with other businesses through LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Small Business Dream’s social connect allows you to find potential partners for your event planning business such as hotels and accommodation, resorts, catering services, florists, and ticketing services like Eventbrite. Network-building will help grow your business much faster than trying to do it on your own, especially if you need a little boost from long-established companies.

Adopting a Mobile Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Mobile marketing has shown a lot of promise for many businesses, thanks to the rapid growth of mobile users in the past few years. Business directories and mobile apps such as Small Business Dream business finder app enable small businesses to become more searchable. The likelihood of having new clients increases as more people download and use the app. We’ve figured out a way to encourage mobile users around the area to come to you after downloading our business finder app.

Aside from getting more eyeballs, it can also help establish your credibility for being top of the line in terms of aesthetics and quality service. Clients can rate their experiences with you as their event planner and help attract other users who might need your expertise. And finally, you can make use of Google and Apple’s push notification service to send messages on your clients’ phone screens in real-time. For instance, you can notify your prospect about your scheduled call or meet-up and ask for confirmation.

Conclusion

Finding new clients is a lot easier these days through sales and marketing automation. Small Business Dream can save event planners hundreds of hours for more productive and creative endeavors by doing most of the heavy liftingfor them. Learn more on how to get more clients at Smallbizdream.com and become a tech-savvy event planner today.

Keys to a Successful Dental Practice in this Digital Age

Are you spending a lot on traditional advertising to promote your dental practice only to find you’re constantly having too much empty space in your calendar? Did you know there’s a much better way that would enable you to grow your dental practice faster? Believe it or not, you can grow a successful dental practice that can earn you twice or even three times your current income by adopting a more tech-savvy approach to market yourself.

How a Dental Practice Turned into a Multi-million Dollar Business

Dr. Williams is a pillar in the community and one of Atlanta’s most sought-after practitioner, management coach and marketing guru in the dental industry. In one of his interviews, he revealed some valuable insights into the dental practice – how he grew from running a well-paying dental practice to building a five million dollar business.

He started out just like any other dentist. As time went by, his practice grew and became one of the best in providing care and quality service to people in the community. At that time he was averaging one and a half million dollars per year. But it wasn’t until he decided to move and start over that he saw his income grow by more than double.

His secret? Making his presence felt and taking an online approach to marketing. His website took off at the height of internet adoption in the late 90s and he became known to people as the tech-savvy dental practitioner in the area. It enabled him to expand his reach and quickly grow his client base, basically from scratch.

One proven technique he used which gave him 150 new patients per month was to build a sales funnel. Ninety percent of people who came to his practice became regular clients. It was effective because it allowed people to get to know him even before they met him. We’ll get into the specifics of funnel-building later in this article using Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation software.

Sales and marketing automation coupled with email, social media, and content marketing helped grow his dental practice from zero to five million dollars per year, much quicker than using the old school methods of traditional advertising. You too can become greatly successful by adopting a modern approach to promoting yourself and your dental practice.

Here are the keys to building a successful dental practice in this digital age.

Become a Perpetual Learner

Dr. Williams describes what he called “alpha dentist” as someone who’s eager to learn more and has that inner drive to be the best. A well-rounded dentist equips himself with all the necessary skills to become a competent hygienist, general dentist, pediatric dentist, orthodontist, prosthodontist, periodontist, and endodontist.

Learning these skills takes time and a lot of patience. But by being more versatile, as opposed to just doing basic dentistry, you’ll be serving a much broader audience and hence,bigger income for your dental practice.

Being a perpetual learner also means acquiring managerial and marketing skills necessary for scaling up, e.g. setting up additional operatories, hiring more staff, acquiring new customers, and so on. This includes creating systems (working on the business), and becoming a tech-savvy dental practitioner. Having these skill sets helps build your reputation as an expert on the subject and bring your dental practice closer to the community.

Grow Your Audience Online

Having a blog or website for your dental practice will set you apart from all other dentists who don’t have an online presence. People nowadays spend most of their time on the internet and social media. When they need a root canal, tooth alignment, or high quality veneer, they search the web for answers.

It also increases your credibility. People can see your track record online such as special trainings, before and after photos, and be able to find useful information about oral and dental health.

You can use your spare time setting up a website or blog, especially during slow months. People who are new to web design can benefit from sales and marketing automation software that comes with its own web editor like Small Business Dream. Choose a template specific to your industry and customize it to your heart’s content. However, if you don’t have much time for it, you can reach them and have it set up for you.

Promote Your Practice through Automation

Sales funnels and autoresponders is a big thing in the business world right now. They can be used in so many ways and in many different situations. For instance, you can use sales funnels to lead your visitors into your practice after signing up on your mailing list. For best results, we recommend that you have a website and/or micro-site, and a landing page.

Small Business Dream allows you to build your own funnel and automate certain actions based on a given response from one stage to the other. In your Introduction page for example, you can have them choose between getting more information on maintaining oral and dental health, and availing of your dental services. One of those responses can either build traffic for your site or lead to an immediate sale.

Autoresponders helps keep in touch with your clients, particularly on procedures requiring follow up such as root canal or tooth alignment. For instance, you can set up an email autoresponder to remind them about their schedule a day before the appointment and ask for confirmation. You can book your clients who answered “yes” ahead of time. This makes them feel important and cared for. You can do the same for other clients who only want checkups once every six months. Set up an autoresponder to remind them that they should have one already.

Establish Good Relationship with the Community

You’ll grow your dental practice twice as fast if you become a pillar of the community. Reach out and network with other people in the community. Offer free dental checkups in schools or free dental services for athletic teams. Make your presence felt and get involved as much as possible. Take this as an opportunity to market your skills and your dental practice and set yourself as a valuable asset to the community.

Conclusion

The digital age opens up a world of opportunities for practitioners in the dental industry. The future of marketing is here. We offer a much better way so you won’t have to settle for expensive ads that doesn’t guarantee a return on your investments. Get more ideas on how you can use sales and marketing automation at Small Business Dream and start growing your dental practice like never before.

How Small Businesses Can Benefit from Push Notifications

Push notifications have re-surfaced as a cost-effective way to increase and maintain customer engagement since its first launch in 2009 by Apple, and Google in 2010. Some of the reasons points to the recent explosion in the mobile markets and greater internet access. With consistent growth in mobile users, it’s only a matter of time before mobile becomes the new standard in customer acquisition and customer engagement.

Customers Have Gone Mobile

We bet, most, if not all of your customers are mobile users. Small businesses have been increasingly aware of this fact. According to Global Digital 2019 reports, 5.112 billion or two-thirds of the world’s population are mobile users. This, coupled with the rapid growth of social media makes mobile marketing not only useful, but a necessity for every small business.

Tech-savvy business owners are no stranger to email and social media marketing, yet many small businesses still haven’t seen the potential or shy away from push notifications. They work extremely well when combined with sales and marketing automation and, when it comes to real-time customer engagement, no method comes close to having a well-designed and well-executed push notification mobile marketing strategy.

How Push Notifications Work

One of the defining characteristics of push notifications is its ability to be seen through the user’s “heads up display,” which gives it a distinct advantage over email, SMS, and social media. These very short messages, typically 1 or 2 lines of text or around 80 characters, have been contextualized for the individual user. They can also be time-sensitive and thus relevant for a specific time only.

One example would be, “Hey Sarah, we have added 50 credits in your wallet for today’s year-end Sale. Shop now.”

There are several approaches to using push notifications as a mobile strategy for business in addition to email and social media marketing. Small Business Dream has created an app that is perfect for networking events. It allows you to push a button which will send the recipient a vcard with all your information while letting you collect some important data about that person. You never know where this connection will go or if this person will become a client, a partner, or a supplier.

Users on the customer’s side need to download and use the app in order to get notified via Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) or Apple Push Notification Service (APNS). They may or may not have the option to get notified upon install. Conversely, users may uninstall the app if they don’t want to be notified again. Use caution so as not to annoy your recipients and cause a lot of uninstalls.

Simple Push Notification Strategies You can Use

Before going on with the specific examples, be sure to observe the following when designing your push messages. They should be:

segmented
relevant
catchy
compelling
concise

Here’s some uses for push notifications for your small business:

1. Seasonal goods and services. Your messages can be tailored based on what’s currently in season. For instance, you can send push notification during hot summer days like, “Love the sun today? Stay cool and fresh with our stunning hats and sunglasses at 10% off.” This applies to special days as well, like Father’s day or Thanksgiving.

2. Markdowns on selected items. Your old inventory could be taking valuable space and you want to get rid of them as fast as possible to maintain your cash flow. You can get help by sending push messages to a specific category about a price drop. Your message can go something like, “Hey Mark, as a Nike fan, you can get 20% on selected items when you drop by at ABC Store today.”

3. Reminders for inactive app users. The nice thing about using a push notification service is it enables you to check on who uses your app more often and those who don’t (the app interacts with the app server and GCM or APNS with each launch). You can then use the data to send an automated push notification message such as, “Jeff, you have 50 unused credits in your wallet. And we’re adding 50 more because it’s Season End Sale. So hurry. Shop now.”

4. User feedback. Customer survey is an excellent tool for improving customer engagement, allowing you to segment your contacts further and be more relevant to your users. Know their preferences and ask about their experience using the product or service. Something like, “Hi Dennis, your experience matters to us. Tell us how you feel so we can better improve our service.” Insert a link below that says, “Take Survey Now” to take them to your survey page.

5. Geofencing. A bit more advanced, but if your app can pull this off, geofencing can work miracles for brick and mortar stores. By default, Google tracks your customer’s location, and you can use this feature to trigger a push notification message, say when a customer enters your store 5 times. Depending on which category they fall into, you can send a push message like, “Bet you’d like our men’s apparel on sale at 10% off.”

Conclusion

Push notification can work wonders for your business if handled well. Regardless of marketing technology, be it sales and marketing automation, or marketing strategies like email and social media marketing, your creativity and sensitivity to customers’ needs will set you apart from other businesses. It’s all about planning and execution. For small businesses that are struggling or want to increase their sales, download mobile apps like Small Business Dream that combines the power of sales and marketing automation and push notifications, enabling businesses to engage with customers on multiple touchpoints.

Turning Slow Months into Opportunities to Grow Your Business

Businesses aren’t always bustling with customers buying. Some businesses are in a lull during summer and post-holiday winter. People’s spending habits change. They go on summer trips, spend more time outdoors or they had to pinch the dollar after spending everything for the holiday season. But there are things you can do to prepare your business for changing spending habits to help see you through the dry spell. In fact, this could be an opportunity to set your business for massive growth in time for the “days of plenty.”

1. Improving the customer experience

You should always be working on ways to improve your customer’s experience. Set a priority system, if you haven’t done already. If you’re a brick and mortar store, move merchandise a bit to improve traffic and freshen your look. Set the vibe with posters, slogans, or works of art. Note how your customers shop, what they pick up, what they look at and where they wander. Anything you could think of to improve your customers’ overall experience, slowdowns can give you that opportunity.

Say you’re running a restaurant that serves Italian cuisine. Having replicas of Italian renaissance art or paintings of popular destinations can lend a traditional Italian vibe to your restaurant. Customers will start coming in, not just for the pasta, but for the whole experience. It’s one of the keys to Starbucks’ worldwide success as an iconic brand. People come not just for the daily dose of coffee; it’s the whole coffee experience they’ve grown to know and love.

Same goes if you have an e-commerce site or online store. You can use downtimes to improve your website by making it easier for customers to navigate or make buying and paying more frictionless. This brings us to our next point.

2. Working on your online presence

There’s no excuse for not having a web presence, particularly during slow months. Popular webhosting platforms have made it easier than ever to create your own. If you want to test it out, try using a sales and marketing automation tool that comes with its own page builder/editor like Small Business Dream. Unlike most generic webhosting platforms, Small Business Dream is made specifically for small business owners like you.

You don’t have to start from scratch. If you’re a restaurant owner, simply choose Restaurant from a list of templates, and you’ll be greeted with a web page specific to your industry, complete with background and featured images, sample text, and call-to-action. Slap your brand and logo to make it truly yours. Jazz it up with pictures of your mouthwatering dishes, and promote your site through email and social media.

Once you’ve established an online presence, you become more searchable, enabling your business to gain more clients through online visits, thus maintaining your cash flow even during slow months.

3. Empowering your employees

Use their spare time to level up and acquire new skills. Teach them how to be a sales and marketing pro. With cutting edge technology in sales and marketing automation, we can condense the learning process significantly. What has taken many top earners and marketing legends to master can now be learned in less than a year at just a fraction of the cost (before we have Internet, they had to spend hours finding leads and qualify each one over the phone).

Think of how many hours you’ll save by getting your team up to speed. They can reach their goal, say 10 to 20 leads per day, in just one or two hours instead of eight. Multiply that with the number of hours per week and the number of sales people in your team and see how your company can save hundreds of hours for other productive endeavors. This could mean more sales and bigger opportunities to grow your business.

4. Finding business partners

Successful businesses are built through partnerships. In retail businesses, this could mean finding the best suppliers that would allow you to get the highest profit margins, or in the case of auto repair shops, provide you with both high quality aftermarket and genuine OEM parts at a lower price. Having less customers during these slow months means you’ll have more time looking for these people.

There are many ways to find partners. One way involves finding business partners through social media. Of course, not everyone on social media are genuinely interested teaming up with you (some aren’t even real people, i.e., bots and fake accounts). You’ll need a tool to curate your “likes” or “follows” to see if their businesses do exist or if they really want to build serious business relationship with you. Small Business Dream offers a way to curate your leads through the Social Connect function. This allows you to find potential partners and weed out bad ones in one sweep.

A second option involves meeting up with people in business conferences, expos, and networking events. This requires social skills, a compelling business idea, and the ability to handle objections. This type of event allows you to network with likeminded people who you can partner with – or at the very least become a customer. You’ll have to own this skill through experience and gaining a lot of exposure in social events.

Conclusion

Regardless of the industry you’re in, you’ll find many practical uses of sales and marketing automation for your business. Struggling to find high quality leads? Train your realtors and insurance agents to set up sales funnels and survey pages to qualify unlimited number of leads. Other businesses like home improvement, dining, beauty care, and repair service, can also find lots of creative ways of using sales and marketing automation. Need more sales ideas? Small Business Dream can lend a hand through their mentoring services and help oversee your sales people.

As you can see, slowdowns doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being less productive; you’re simply channeling your resources to further your business goals over the long haul.

Technology is Changing How Real Estate Works – Here’s What to Do for Agents and Brokers

If you’re a realtor and you believe that the business will never change you’re in for a real shock. Technology is seeping into every facet of our lives and work and it’s changing the way we do things – even buy and sell property.

Beginning August, real estate agents and brokers in Toronto can collect data from sold listings databases from multiple listing service (MLS) to attract homeowners and buyers within the area.

This is big news for real estate, considering the fact they have the largest real estate board in the country. This could very well mean the rest of Canada will be on the same route and we’ll be seeing more websites like 99 Acres, One Flat Fee, and Nobul jumping into the scene for Canada’s real estate business to bring the real estate business online.

Sold Listings Are Now Considered Public Information

Homeowners and buyers are now able to make their own research online from past data such as price, location, specifications, photographs, and other relevant information about the property, as well as the real estate companies who listed them. This would help spur competition and innovation in the country’s real estate business .

Century 21 and Nobul are a few examples of online real estate marketplaces in Canada, the equivalent of Redfin and Zillow in the U.S. (Note: It’s possible to search for active listings in Canada in websites like Realtor.ca but they don’t include information on sold properties). Real estate companies can present sold data however they wish and continuously improve user experience.

Homeowners and buyers will still be in need of agents and brokers in ironing out specific details even with for-sale-by-owners (FSBO) transactions. So really, being able to search sold listings online shouldn’t worry people about downsizing or going out of job. They just have to be more creative and rethink their strategies.

How This Will Impact Real Estate in Canada

Sold listings is probably the most crucial piece of information about the real estate market because it helps us get a better picture of what’s going on in the industry. Which types of properties are mostly sold this year and at what price? How long have these properties been on sale? Which areas/provinces have the most number of properties sold? Is renting a more viable option to buying this year?

Looking at the charts, we can see why such need for transparency in the real estate business is more important than ever. It gives us some useful insight about, say, the recent decline in provinces that enjoyed spectacular gains in recent years (Greater Toronto with 2 years slump in home sales since 2017, and Greater Vancouver with home sales dropping by 31.6% last year).

It also helps address the issue of competitiveness in the real estate business by establishing a price point based on supply and demand (people will know which ones are easily sold and which ones take more time at a certain price level), eliminating a lot of guesswork and arbitrary pricing. This is key in provinces like Toronto and Vancouver where the cost of owning a home is “off the charts.” Compare that with Ontario and Greater Montreal where competition in the housing market is in full swing.

The Need for an Online Solution

Technology coupled with greater access to sold listings creates a perfect environment for competition and innovation to thrive in the real estate business. Here’s what you can do to stay in the game.

1. Maximize your online presence

According to a 2017 data from a NAR Research and Real Trends Report, 92% of buyers and sellers start online, with 70% of the buyers and 75% of the sellers finding their agent online, and it’s been going up ever since.

Much of your clients’ activity will be spent in online searches than office visits. Consider using online real estate marketplaces to fast-track your sales. More and more people are going to these sites to compare prices and find competent real estate agent or broker without physically going to the brokerage.

Alternatively, you can set up a micro-site as an independent licensed agent where you can offer listing in the MLS using a flat fee. Or you can market properties for sale by yourself through social media and have clients come to you directly. It’s easier to do using sales and marketing automation with site-building capability and social media integration such as Small Business Dream.

2. Use automation to stay in touch

The length of time it takes to convert a client from initial contact is way much longer than it used to – around 3 to 18 months. This is particularly true among millennials who are more receptive to customer education and whose number two priority is to own a house (the first and last priority according to survey is to save for retirement and getting married). Hence, you’re going to need a system to keep track of your clients even when you’ve stopped thinking about them.

We’ve had a similar experience before when we made a $30,000 sale with a client 12 years after making an initial contact with him through our Small Business Dream suite of tools. Same thing can happen in real estate. Having a system like Small Business Dream helps real estate agents and brokers stay in touch through email autoresponders, newsletters, and semi-automated messages and phone calls from the initial contact to the final sale and beyond.

3. Follow up on your clients

Creating a good impression on your clients goes a long way on your ratings as a real estate agent and will help you get more exposure over the long run. Touch base with them from time to time about their purchase and provide some useful tips on how they can keep it in pristine condition. It’s also a good way to stay top-of-mind to your clients. Watch the video to see some little-known secrets used by successful real estate agents.

Same applies for your clients investing in real estate who might be interested in getting more property within the area. You can sell more to your existing clients by simply following up on them after the initial sale using sales and marketing automation like Small Business Dream.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your real estate business at SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.