Beth’s Posts

How to Utilize AI Programs to Enhance Your Marketing

September 28, 2023 Beth Devine

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world around us, and these AI programs are making it possible for everyone to experience the benefits of this powerful technology. From writing and coding assistants to creative tools and productivity boosters, there is an AI program out there for everyone.

Would you believe me if I told you that that first paragraph was written by AI? Hello! A real person is typing now, but isn’t it interesting how with a simple prompt this AI could do my job for me? That’s what I want to talk about today. Not about how I want to be replaced but how this technology can help create more content quicker.

I’m sure you’re all keenly aware of the thousands of articles debating AI and the other half-dozen buzzwords surrounding these new technologies. From ChatGPT to Midjourney, there are dozens of companies vying for your eyeballs on their service.

But what if you’re not sure how this technology could be best utilized for your marketing needs?
Well, I did some research and I want to showcase one service (Bard) that could save you time and energy.

To start, I’d like to highlight some issues that you might be aware of with these experimental new technologies. It’s not all sunshine and roses but as my mother told me, “You should always hear the bad news first”, but if you stick around for the pros portion, you’ll find some great tips there.

Cons

Technical Accuracy
For manufacturers specifically, this is a big one. You could be dealing with terms or acronyms that could be very specific to your work that an AI might not know how to handle. This actually leads well into the second point where

Not False, but not specific.
I’m sure you’ve heard the tales. An AI program creating facts out of thin air with no idea where it got that info from. In my personal testing, Bard claimed things that were technically true but made for a bland story. In writing, specifics help ground and compel your audience and I often found Bard failed in that sense.

Repetition. Repetition. Repetition!
The program is great at finding different ways to re-phrase the same points and that’s certainly a skill, but in reading over what it gave me as a whole, it wasn’t an asset.

Alright, now that we’re done with the cons we can get to the good stuff. How could we use this for your website, social media, etc. content? As a writer myself, I don’t want to advocate for a program that could replace me, but in my eyes, this is a perfect tool to market your company. Let’s imagine a scenario.

You’re sitting at your desk with a cursor blinking at you. You’ve created an amazing product but now you need to sell it. How do you sum up years of work into a simple tagline, slogan, or about section? The blank document stares at you as the deadline fast approaches. You know what they always say, “The hardest thing is to start”, but you just can’t.

That’s why we’re here. To find a way to use innovative technologies to help brand your business. We’ve started to use AI programs like Bard as an idea generator. Let’s look again at the cons I brought up in a different light.

Pros

Technical Accuracy
Imagine you have a ton of text full of these explanations that span pages and pages, and you know the casual viewer of your website isn’t going to want to read all of that. You need to hook them in. How do you do that? We can submit all of that text to Bard and ask it to make a list of the key topics. It might not be able to provide details, but it’s able to highlight content a casual reader would care about to draw them in.

Not False, but not specific.
In fact-checking these claims, I stumbled upon a 2022 report full of statistics about manufacturing in Connecticut with dozens of interesting statistics and reports on the state of things. Would I have found this great resource if I wasn’t looking for the exact number of employees in the manufacturing sector in CT? Probably not! Now you have a statistic to write a more compelling story/blog post.

Repetition. Repetition. Repetition!
The repetition highlights what the AI thinks is important. In this online world, key terms are vital to all parts of the writing process to get traffic. That’s how these algorithms work, right? And an AI knows that. So, a particularly helpful thing I’ve found is that Bard is great at creating lists. These can be full of ideas that will allow you to submit a bunch of text in your prompt and have the program narrow it down.

These types of new technologies are what we use to help make more new content faster and more effectively. If any of this sounds interesting to you feel free to ask us for help!

In the end, there are so many ways to use programs like this to help create more content. To start, we use AI as a brainstorming tool.

Pay-Per-Click – What is it, Do I Need it and Can I do it Myself?

February 26, 2016 Beth Devine

Pay-per-Click or Adwords is a paid program that buys you ranking for your website. Most often referred to as Google Adwords, a good pay-per-click program can be effective across multiple search engines like Bing and Yahoo. This is an advertising campaign where you only pay if someone clicks on your ad.

If your industry is highly competitive, you don’t add content to your website frequently or are a fairly new company, getting on the first page of Google can be a challenge. Although we recommend investing in an overall content marketing program, it can take time for the search engines to rank your site. Pay-per-click allows you to have a strong on-line presence while you wait for your natural ranking to improve.

Can you manage your own campaign? Yes and No. Pay-per-Click programs give you the tools to create your own campaign however, unless you have a great deal of time to commit to becoming an expert, I would not recommend managing it. Search engines change their algorithms frequently. To run a truly effective campaign you need to have an thorough understanding of these changes.

We have worked with clients that have managed their own programs and once transferred to a company that does this alone have seen results that are twice as effective for half the cost. Managing a campaign is a combination of art and science and requires constant education to stay on top of it.

Please contact us at 860-432-8756 for help with your Pay-Per-Clicks (Adwords) Campaign.

How to Get Found on the Internet: Nobody Cares What I had for Breakfast

February 24, 2016 Beth Devine

Whenever we approach the subject of blogging with our manufacturing clients we get the same push back…

Nobody cares what we had for breakfast, or
Our customers already know that

We’d like to address these two misconceptions.

First, a company blog has nothing to do with what one consumes for the first meal of the day. The concept of blogging is often confused with a teenager tweeting or posting their mundane life updates on Facebook. When in reality, blogging is simply a way to add content to your website. Blogs can be presented in various formats from a written piece to a video blog. All formats can be useful as long as the information presented is educational and written with the audiences needs in mind.

Second, as far as “our customer already knows this”, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they know you do it. We can say with almost 100% certainty that every manufacturing client we’ve worked with for the past 20+ years has told us at one time or another, “I can’t believe my customer didn’t know I did this”. The reason they didn’t know was that the one time they shared with the customer all their capabilities, the customer only had the one need, so they didn’t retain information about the other services/products. Blogging helps to keep all your capabilities in front of them at all times.

Blogging is essential for several reasons…

Your search engine optimization depends on frequent updates to your site. The most recent content gets ranked higher and therefore, sites that publish more frequently get better ranking.
Adding content to your site helps to ensure you can be found on a search. If you don’t have the right keyword terms on your site, how are people to find you when searching those terms?
A good blog helps to establish you/your company as experts in the field. People are more interested in having a conversation with someone who obviously knows what they’re doing.
Blogs can be used to help you to stay in front of your customers and prospects on a consistent basis (can be used to as content for an e-newsletter).

Many of our manufacturing clients are concerned with SEO (search engine optimization) as they want to be found on searches that apply to their business. These days SEO is all about content. Therefore, content creation is critical and blogging is the way to go.

Please contact us at 860-432-8756 for help with your content creation (aka blog).

Also from our Blog: 5 Reasons to Blog for Your Business: Blogging Resistance Beware

Content is King… so now what?

March 22, 2013 Beth Devine

If you read anything about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) these days, the focus is on content. But what does that mean? Essentially it means that what you say on your blog or website is more important than any tricks you might use to be found. The more valuable content you have, the more Google and other search engines will show your listing. The key is to have the right content. So where do you start?

Keywords

The first place to start is with Keyword Terms. These are words or phrases your customers/prospects would use to find someone like you. Once you’ve come up with the list, be sure to check it against terms that are actually being searched. For example: I may want to use the term website optimization but find that search engine optimization is searched 10 times more often. This might alter how I phrase and organize my content.

Search Engine Optimization

Once your website is up and the initial keyword research and website content optimization has been done, you’ll want to keep up the momentum and continue with an on-going SEO program. The size and cost of your program will depend on the market you’re trying to reach (is it local, national or international), and the competitiveness of your product.

Your ongoing optimization program should include continually updating your website, blog and/or social medial with new content. In order to stay consistent and on-topic it’s best to have a plan. Create a calendar where you define topics, events, specials and promotions that you want to make sure are included in your online marketing. You can go back to the keyword research and find out what’s of interest to help you tweak your topic choices. The most important thing to understand is that SEO is an on-going program. It’s part of your online marketing strategy and is not something you can do once and expect it to continue to work for you.

Other Online Marketing Options

There are many things you can do to help with your online visibility. For starters, if you want to be at the top of the search engine results quickly—do it the old fashioned way— pay for it. A well-executed pay-per-click (PPC) program is a great way to improve your ranking while your organic SEO is gaining momentum. The key here is to set up your PPC program so you get the maximum return on your investment. We’ve partnered with a Google certified company that focuses exclusively on PPC. Like many things in business and life, unless it’s a focus, it’s unlikely to be done right.

Another way to help with SEO, is to make sure all your online profiles (Google Places, Bing Business Portal, Yelp, etc.)are complete and correct. I’m always amazed at the number of consumer businesses that don’t even have a Google local listing. A local listing will give a prospect an immediate snapshot of your business and help drive traffic to your website or directly to your business.

We’ve been working with our clients to take that a step further by adding a 3D Google Photo tour. If you have a shop or office you’d like to show off to your customers/prospects, we’ve partnered with local photographer Tim Becker to create 3D photo tours.

There are many ways to gain visibility online, but beware of SEO consultants who offer one-shot “I’ll get you on top of Google” plans. Their strategies may provide a short-term burst but are unlikely to prove effective long-term and may actually damage your search engine rank.

SEO is one component of the online marketing process. To be effective in the long-term, SEO and marketing should be worked at on an ongoing basis.

Search Engine Optimization and Your Website

November 6, 2012 Beth Devine

In real estate it’s “location, location, location,” and in Search Engine Optimization it’s “content, content, content,” which is why it’s imperative to consider your content when creating or re-designing your website. If the terms you want your customers and prospects to find you with aren’t in the copy of your website, there’s no way your site will come up when those terms are searched.

It’s important to invest a fair amount of time and effort into researching terms you think your prospects will use to find you. You may find that a term you feel is important isn’t the exact term they use when searching. In that case, their term is more important and needs to be included. It’s equally important to continually research terms pertinent to your industry when writing blog posts, since this is the most common method used to update website content.

The number one way to drive people to your website is through pertinent and useful information. The days of buying back links and bogus code are long gone. In fact, those practices can get you blacklisted. If through your content you educate your audience and become known as an expert in the industry, then when they’re ready to buy, you’ll be the first company that comes to mind. An optimized website will help them to find you, but it’s your expertise that will convert the visit to a sale.

Photo credit: katerha http://flic.kr/p/7WoYxX

I Have a Plan, Now What?

October 30, 2012 Beth Devine

We’ve all had the experience of running into an old friend and exclaiming, ”We definitely need to get together.” If you don’t get your calendar out there and then, it doesn’t happen. It’s the same with marketing campaigns. You need to have tasks on a calendar.

There are obvious marketing projects that get placed on a calendar, like public relations and trade shows, but many others aren’t. I would argue that every aspect of marketing should be on a calendar. For example, the key to search engine marketing is content, which is most often added through a blog. However, how many companies blog with consistency? Companies that attend trade shows put things like the show date and booth ordering deadlines on a calendar, but skip the pre-show marketing and post-show follow-up.

I propose that all marketing plans should contain a marketing calendar, because we all know…what doesn’t get put on a calendar too often gets pushed off until it doesn’t get done at all.

Photo credit: danielmoyle http://flic.kr/p/b4mSFp

How Much Is It?

October 19, 2012 Beth Devine

How Much Should I Budget for My Marketing?

One of the most commonly asked questions when discussing a website, multi-media production, or marketing campaign of any kind is…How much is it? For us, this is followed by “Depends on what you want. How much do you have budgeted?”

What we often hear is “I don’t have a budget in mind.” This is frequently the case with most small businesses in regards to all of their marketing and sales campaigns. It’s one of the few aspects in business that needs no budget but should happen just the same.

I wanted to blog about budgeting as part of the planning series, but wasn’t sure where to begin. Then Carolyn handed me an article in the Hartford Business Journal titled “How much should we spend on marketing?” According to the Small Business Administration, small businesses (under $5 million in annual revenues) should plan on spending 7% to 8% on a marketing budget. This means a $2 million business should be spending $160,000 annually, or just over $13,000 per month. Businesses that sell to a consumer base should be spending at least 17%.

As a marketing consultant, I may be kicked out of the club, but I must admit these numbers seem high to me. On the other hand, it’s a matter of determining how successful you want to be. Marketing is all about awareness. If your ideal customer isn’t aware you exist, it’s unlikely they will buy from you.

If you don’t currently have a marketing budget, start with small steps. Try 5% for a year. With a targeted marketing plan, you should see that investment pay for itself two or three times over in increased sales.

Photo credit: Philip Taylor PT http://flic.kr/p/bDwJ11

What is a Marketing Plan?

September 13, 2012 Beth Devine

It’s funny, but I’ve always thought of a marketing plan as a blueprint to your marketing projects. Over the years I’ve found that people have differing opinions on what a marketing plan should include.

Recently, I received a marketing plan from a client. It covered several topics, from positioning to the market environment. What it didn’t cover were the tools to be used in the marketing process.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s important to understand where you stand relative to the overall market, and to know things like point of differentiation and what your competitors are up to. But it’s also been my experience that most business owners know some of this already. What they lack is the time and expertise to create and implement a step-by-step marketing campaign.

When undertaking the task of creating a marketing plan, or having one created for you, be sure to determine what it is you want in the end. If it’s a better understanding of your market and where you stand, request that. If it’s a blueprint for all your marketing efforts, including a timeline and budget, request that. Both are important pieces of information to move your company forward.

Planning starts with the Voice of the Customer

August 23, 2012 Beth Devine

So I’m hoping my previous post about planning has at least gotten you interested in the subject, if not converted you completely into a planning fanatic. The next question is…Where to begin? I like to start with your audience. After all that’s what the plan is all about, right? Talking to your audience and providing them with information.

Before you begin planning your marketing, you must determine three things…

1. Who is your ideal customer?

Based upon your existing customers, you know who your ideal customer is. There are other considerations when defining your target market. There’s a great post on defining your target market at Success Designs (http://www.successdesigns.net/articles/entry/how-to-define-your-target-market/). Check it out.

2. What is it they want from you?

Most customers want so much more than just the product or service you provide. For example, many of our clients come to us because they’ve heard we know our stuff! However, when asked why they remain customers, most will say because in addition to knowing our stuff, we’re fun to work with. Now we realize that there are a few marketing firms out there that can help our customers, but it’s the FUN factor that differentiates us. Understand what your factor is and make the most of it.

In addition to the fun factor, our clients appreciate the information we provide. They are coming to us because they need help in an area that we, not they, are knowledgeable. Providing useful information is much more important than telling them how long we’ve been in business and what our credentials are (although those are available upon request). Before implementing any kind of marketing program, you need to craft a message for your best customer, not yourself.

3. How do they want to receive it?

Finally, how does the customer want to receive information from you? Are they someone who strictly does everything on-line, or do they want an old-fashioned phone call? It’s important to remember “the what” will help to determine “the how.” If you’re providing the customer with what they want, the delivery method is secondary.

So when creating a marketing plan, start with a little customer research. It will go a long way.

Plan is not a four-letter word!

August 16, 2012 Beth Devine

Well, it is, but not that kind. So why does everyone groan when I ask them about their plan? Are we all too busy to deal with a plan? Are we adverse to the idea of putting a plan in writing? Or are we just unable to plan? I think the answer is a little bit of all the above.

To emphasize my insatiable need for planning, let’s discuss what happens when you don’t plan. If you don’t plan to get an oil change for your car, it fails to run. If you don’t plan to order the materials you need to build your product, you fail to fulfill orders. If you don’t plan your day, you fail to get things done.

So why is it, when we don’t plan for marketing our business, we still think it will get done? Now I’m not saying it won’t happen, but will our efforts be effective? All aspects of marketing need a plan…

Website – what to you want from your site? – create a plan that will help you accomplish this.
Trade Shows – who do you want to speak with? – create a plan to make sure you see them.
Social Media – what do you want to say and to whom? – create a calendar to make sure you meet this requirement.

Without a plan, we tend to do what’s commonly referred to as “shot gun” marketing. Try this once, and that once, and something else once, and nothing ends up working. A plan is a means to focus on specific campaigns from start to finish. It will enable you to measure your marketing efforts to discover what works best.