DISCLAIMER: I apologize in advance if this makes you want cake while at work today.

Marketing, like baking, takes a lot of work, preparation, testing and learning from mistakes. Most bakers do not produce award-winning cakes on their first try. It takes years of practice, learning, trial and error, and time. The same applies to marketing. Other than very rare occasions, companies do not hit home runs with their first marketing campaign. Lines don’t form down the street after one ad for a local mom and pop shop. It takes a lot of hard work, “hustling,” and dedication to get a product or company off the ground. Below are 5 ways marketing is like baking a cake….

Ingredients: While baking, you have to have the correct amount of ingredients. The same is true when launching a marketing campaign. There isn’t a silver bullet in marketing that will produce a line around the corner to your business. A balanced campaign between multiple advertising channels has proven to be a better approach. You can’t invest all of your advertising dollars into one TV commercial and expect business to explode. Look at most brands like Coke, Nestle, and even some of your mom and pops, they all have a wide range of advertising that range from print, online media, sponsorships, to TV ads.

Presentation: Who wants to eat a cake that looks caved in or burnt? Generally the first reaction to a cake is how it is presented. The same applies to your marketing. If your ad is cheesy, looks home made or cheap, your target market will feel the same about the product you are offering. It doesn’t take much to make your business look professional. A consistent look, professionally laid out ads and a well working website will place you leaps and bounds ahead of the competition who are penny pinching on their presentation. Guess who gets my business between the professional looking company and the home made looking company?

If you would like a cake as professional looking and tasting as the one above, I have the girl for you! E-mail me.

Flavors: Not everyone likes Vanilla, therefore cakes come in a wide variety of flavors. The same is true when it comes to marketing. Not everyone is moved to buy for the same reasons. Some buy because of design, some buy because of price, and some because of functionality of the product. Leverage your selling points in several different ads and see which one proves to bring in the best results.

Time: “If you’re looking, you’re not cooking” is a famous cooking line. If you’re opening the oven to look at the cake every 30 seconds you’re letting all the heat out and the cake doesn’t bake. You have to give the oven time to bake the cake. The same rule applies with marketing. If you advertise for a week, you may not get immediate results; it doesn’t mean it’s not working though. Marketing takes time, hard work, and dedication. Think of brands that have lasted throughout time, they are still advertising today to continue to build their brand, and I guarantee you that if they would have pulled all of their ads down after a few weeks of “not working,” they wouldn’t be where they are today.

Feedback: “How does it taste?” is generally the first question out of the mouth of a baker when you are trying his or her cake. The reason is they are looking for feedback and they want to in a sense measure the results of a certain type of cake. Generally, when you walk into a bakery, the baker can tell you which cake people like the most. Can you tell someone which ad or advertising channel works the best for your company? Measuring, monitoring, and testing your marketing is, in my opinion, just as important as the choice of marketing channel and layout of the ad itself.

First off, if you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, do that now. If you need help installing it, I will be happy to help you (will@mediaplug.biz) There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be measuring the amount of visits to your site/blog and drawing conclusions for improvement.

Inside of Google Analytics (and most other analytics programs) is a metric labeled “Bounce Rate”. No, this isn’t how many times someone watched the “Can I get a What What” video by Jay-Z on your website. It’s the amount of people who simply came to your website, in theory did absolutely nothing, and left. The bounce rate is shown as a percentage. A 65% bounce rate means that 65% of your visitors came, threw up, and then left.

What is a good bounce rate?

A “good” bounce rate depends on several factors: traffic sources, type of website, calls to actions, and your own acceptable conclusions.

Traffic Sources: Bounce rate depends on traffic sources like direct traffic, referrals (other websites like twitter, facebook, linkedin, and partners who post your link), and SEO.

SEO should provide the lowest bounce rates given the point that visitors are searching for your product/service and finding your website. If your most popular keywords are proving to have the highest bounce rate, you have a bit of a problem. You can’t have people leaving left and right on your best keywords.

Here’s a screen shot of the bounce rate based on referrals from my blog (willhardison.com) to my company’s website (mediaplug.biz).

As you can see only 16% percent of people coming from my blog (keep in mind this blog collected dust for months before 10 days ago) to my company’s site bounced. I personally feel that 16% is pretty good bounce rate. They also spent an average of 2 minutes on my company’s site and viewed about 4 pages (pretty much every page of my site).

Type of Website: A blog should have a lower bounce rate than a landing page selling a product simply due to the fact that there’s more content on a blog to explore.

Calls To Actions: Take a look at the first sentence of my blog post. I tell you to go install Google Analytics if you haven’t done so already. If you click on the “Google Analytics” link you will be considered a bounce. So keep in mind what you are asking your visitors to do on your site.

Your Own Acceptable Conclusions: Percentages, ratios, and measurements are just numbers. You must draw your own conclusions based on the data. If I tell you that a terrible bounce rate according to industry standards  is 41% and above, but you’re making thousands off of a site that has a 53% bounce rate, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Have you noticed that I haven’t mentioned any actual figures of what constitutes a good bounce rate? That’s because I believe it’s a personal decision and conclusion as to what a good bounce rate is for YOUR website. You’re not going to win over everyone, so don’t run yourself ragged trying to lower your rate from 35% to 31%.

Now, it’s Monday, so I say you kick the week off with a little Jay-Z.

Monitoring your brand across the internet is one of the most important aspects of social media marketing. If your customers are trash talking you on some obscure message board hidden deep in the internet forest, you should probably know about it. How would you defend your brand or put out any fires? Here are 5 easy, and FREE ways to monitor your brand across the internet:

1. Social Mention http://www.Socialmention.com: A great free tool that allows you to search across every facet of the internet from blogs, microblogs, and even video.

Terms to understand on socialmention:

Strength: Is the likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media.

Sentiment: The ratio of discussions that are positive to those that are negative.

Passion: The likelihood that those talking about your brand will do so again.

Reach: The measure of the range of influence.

2. Google Alerts http://www.google.com/alerts: Another great tool offered by Google that allows you to set up an alert when your search phrase is mentioned in a Google result. Alerts also allow you to pick sources, how often to send results, and which results to send.

3. Twitter Search http://search.twitter.com: Many people don’t even realize that you can search Twitter. If you use a tool like Http://www.hootsuite.com you can save your search results right into a stream for constant updates.

4. Monitter http://www.monitter.com/: Very similar to Twitter’s search, in fact it’s pretty much identical, but it allows you to watch and monitor several searches at one time.

5. WorkStreamer http://www.workstreamer.com/: Add your company and it pulls information across the internet based on the company. You can divide the content out by platform as well. Very neat tool.

I hope these tools and tips are helpful! I’m sure there are plenty of other free or low cost tools out there, and if you know of any please share in the comments area of my blog.

Oh and by the way, these tools are also great to monitor your competitors as well, but you didn’t hear that from me!

So let’s say you just attended an awesome conference like Social Crush where everyone was using a common hashtag like #socialcrush and you want to follow all of the people who used #socialcrush in their tweets. Remembering everyone’s twitter name and going back through twitter streams can become time consuming. Who has time to sort through hundreds of tweets and follow everyone? I sure don’t. That’s why, thanks to my friend @noahwesley, we have http://www.followblast.com a tool that allows you to connect to twitter, search a hashtag, and follow everyone who has used recently used that hashtag in a tweet. Follow Blast will also sort through people you are already following so it will only suggest those you need to follow.

Here’s a step by step on how it works: (click on the images to see them larger)

Step 1: Load up http://www.followblast.com

Step 2: Authorize Follow Blast to hook into your twitter account by putting in your username and password.

Step 3: Search for the hashtag. In this case, we’ll use #socialcrush

Step 4: The list of people will automatically populate. You can either click “follow all” or follow individuals one by one.

This tool is great for engaging with people who share a common interest, attended the same seminar/workshop/event as you, or talking about a topic you are interested in. I hope this tool helps you build your twitter following with people who can add value to your stream.

A triggering campaign, also known as a drip campaign,  is an event or a series of events that are triggered upon an action. We mainly see triggering campaigns as e-mail newsletters, but they can consist of numerous marketing practices. This is a great way to stay in front of potential customers. Here’s a story on how a basic e-mail triggering campaign works.

Mr. Potential Client (we’ll refer to him from now on as Mr. Potential) logs on to your website. He pokes around…checks out the about page, looks at the services you offer, and decides that he likes your product/services but is still on the fence about buying. Mr. Potential clicks on the “Contact Us” page and notices that you have a newsletter. First, let’s stop the story right here…folks, take the time to come up with a catchy name and a great reason why someone would sign up for your newsletter. For example, I’ve seen “Have Awesome Delivered to your Inbox”, “The Daily Dose”, or you can create a group or a club like “The Insider’s Guide” so that Mr. Potential feels special. Back to the story. Mr. Potential notices the newsletter and decides this is a nice way to stay in touch with the company so he decides to sign up. After signing up (here’s where the triggering campaign kicks in) an e-mail is sent automatically to Mr. Potential welcoming him to the newsletter and explains 3 tips or industry related information that further builds his confidence in your company. We’re done right? Not exactly. In your campaign settings, you have set the campaign to send out 2 more e-mails at later times, 10 days and 25 days later. Now Mr. Potential will receives 2 more informative e-mails highlighting ways in which your company can help his company grow. Mr. Potential Client drops his first name and now just goes by Mr. Client.

E-mail Services that allow triggering campaigns:

A dear friend of mind smacked me upside the head yesterday….in a good way. We started to discuss a “power circle” as most people call them, I  prefer to call it a ground of friends who happen to pass business to each other. I proceeded to invite my friend to be apart of my “power circle” explaining that “It’ll be great, I’ve got 15 people who I trust and can invite to this group. We’ll go around the room and say who we are, what we do, and who we are looking for. And then, people can go out looking for referrals for everyone, and they’ll come back and pass the leads to others. We can also do presentations each week where one person gets to talk about their business in front of the group for 10-15 minutes”And that’s where he stopped me with “It sounds like another attempt at a networking group that will ultimately fail” I looked back at him and questioned “Fail?” His reply, “Yeah, most of these groups fail because no one ever gains any trust because everyone sells to each other and no one is buying. I don’t want to attend another networking group where the goal is to pitch someone’s company. Business is built on trust and relationships, not on sales pitches. I want to be educated. Teach or show me the opportunity costs of me not having a well organized website. Discuss how the latest Health Care bill will affect small businesses. Don’t sell me on why you are the best (insert occupation here) in the tri-state area because I’m not buying from that guy.”

Man, did this hit me hard. He’s a genius because he is completely right. Take a look at the next networking event that you attend, take a step back. Look at what’s going on, everyone is scurrying around trying to make their next sale. Heck, I went to a networking event this evening and I have a stack of business cards piled up next to me from 10 Tom, Dick, and Harry’s who want to follow up, e-mail, call, and book an appointment just so they can tell ME how awesome THEIR business is so that I’LL buy from THEM.

I’ll be doing things differently from now on, and I’m excited to see the changes.

While out networking, do you get tired of Chatty Cathy who throws up all over you about their business for 15 minutes? Have you ever stopped to think about how much that person could be costing you in positive connections that could very well lead to sales?

Something to think about, limit your time while networking to 3 minutes per person. That allows you to meet 20 new people an hour. 3 times a week, you just met 60 new people. How long would it take you to get the attention of 60 people a week by cold calling?

*A side note, take into consideration the amount of people at the event. If there are 10 people at the event, obviously you’ll want to spend more time with each person than if there was 100 people in the room. Don’t get caught up in conversations with people that you already know. Spend 75% of your networking time with people who you don’t already know.

Ok, back to the topic. Here is how to handle the situation of only spending 2-3 minutes per person.

1. Approach your prospect, more than likely they’ll have a nametag on, and say their name followed by the question “Tell me about your business/job and who you are looking to meet?”
2. They’ll rattle off their 30 – 60 second commercial and then ask you in return “What is it that you do?”
3. You give them your polished 30 – 60 second commercial and now you are two minutes deep into the conversation. (This is where it can get out of hand)
4. Now you have to make a decision. Is this someone worth getting to know? Are they a good strategic partner? Are they going to start selling their services to you? This is where you either say, “Hey Mr. Networker is was a pleasure meeting you this morning. I hope you make some good connections this morning. I’ve got a few more people to meet.” OR you say “Hey Mr. Networker is was nice meeting you this morning, sounds like we could possibly be good strategic partners. If it makes sense to you too, why don’t we set up a time to get together for a one-to-one meeting.”

There is no need to get into a 15-minute conversation during the event about that person’s business, how they started, where they worked before, where they grew up, and where they went to high school. During the networking event, that is all irrelevant. You’re there to make the most of your time and meet as many connections as possible.

If you haven’t heard yet, networking is the new wave in developing referrals and clients. It’s also a fun and effective way of keeping a pipeline full of new business.  If you’ve never ventured out to the networking world, it can be a fairly intimidating environment if you’re not prepared.

Before starting to network it’s important to have a few things in place. One, figure out exactly the type of contacts you’re looking to meet. Two, how you can help introduce others to people they need to meet? And three, your elevator speech or what you want others to know about your company.

Whether you have an extroverted or introverted personality, there is a place for you at networking events. Those with outgoing personalities don’t have much of a problem with approaching individuals and striking up conversation.  On the other hand, introverted people might find that challenging. In that case, offer to be a volunteer at the event or a visitor host.  This will make it easier for you to approach people and for them you approach you.

Another option that some people are starting to use is online networking. With online networking there’s no need to leave the comfort of your office. For an example of this you can check out www.introduceme360.com .  The downside to this type of networking is that it diminishes the chances of building deeper relationships with people and earning their trust. This is why face-to-face networking is still the best option.

1. Amazing customer service builds credibility, trust and confidence, which can lead to customer loyalty.
2. It can help the marketing and sales budget. It costs less to keep existing customers than it does to create new ones.
3. Delivering amazing service creates a buzz, word-of-mouth marketing and referrals, again helping the marketing budget.
4. Delivering amazing customer service can lead to existing customers buying more.
5. Customer service saves money. When you do it right the first time, you don’t have to fix it the next time.
6. Customer service can give your company an advantage over competitors.
7. Amazing customer service can make price less relevant.
8. Customer service focused companies are usually employee-focused companies, thereby creating a better place to work.
   That means lower turnover, which could mean savings in hiring, training and more.
9. Customer service superstar companies are usually more profitable than the ones that aren’t.
10. Customer service helps get and keep customers… because without customers, you don’t have a business.

*This list was published by expert and author Shep Hyken.

First of all, your online reputation is what comes up when you type your name into Google.  If making a good name for yourself online is important to you, it’s time to take a proactive approach to getting your name out there with the reputation that you want.

For me, the first things that come up are my Smaller Indiana, LinkedIN, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.  It’s important for me to constantly manage my online reputation because you never know what’s being said or put online about you.

I’ve been using GoogleAlerts for a while now. If you subscribe to GoogleAlerts, you’ll receive an email as soon as your name enters Google’s index. Google Alerts cover news stories, video comments, blogs, and pages found on the web.

GoogleAlerts is just one of the tools I’ve found useful. If anyone has other tools they use, I’d be interested in learning about them