• How can technologies get integrated into your business?
• Use some of the most powerful marketing tools available on the internet.
• Data capture and data analysis are easier to do now.​

At one point or another small businesses run into an often under recognised challenge; marketing. Most companies see the value, but where do they start, and will it be expensive? Fortunately for small business owners, starting the marketing journey is now easier than ever.

Today, technology has provided avenues to simplify almost every facet of doing business. Developers have created hardware and software tools that allow a company to almost entirely automate their marketing journey, from the first email or post all the way through to a full-blown marketing campaign. The best part is, it’s cheap and entirely in-house.

Email marketing is still the best place to start. It is simple, effective when done intelligently and it is easy to measure results. With tools like PoweredLocal’s Wi-Fi marketing automation system, the AWeber marketing platform and a solid landing page builder like Leadpages, most of the work is done for you.

The first thing you need to kick off your email marketing is a list of customers that will likely engage with your content. The ideal customer is someone who actually visits your business and has taken an interest in it, which is where PoweredLocal comes in.

Capturing the Data

PoweredLocal offers businesses a chance to take control of their own data and remove their dependency on third-party providers. We provide free Wi-Fi routers that, if your customers opt-in, will collect a small amount of high-level data, such as their email address and name.

It is important to offer a fair incentive to capture data that your customers will agree to provide. With our Wi-Fi routers, you can offer any visitor to your venue free internet in exchange for an email address and the right to send some marketing content from time to time until the user opts out.

Our network benefits your customers too; once they have signed in to the PoweredLocal network, they can choose to automatically connect to any PoweredLocal router in range of their device without having to fill out a sign in form. Our vision is that one day your customers will be able to move through Australia’s capital cities without needing to consume any mobile data at all. We’ve already connected over 2,000 venues across the country and growing fast.

Building Your Content

Now that you’ve developed your database of qualified contacts, you need to decide on the content you would like to produce. The best place to start is often a company newsletter, but this can be a time-consuming process, so there are also firms like Speedlancer that can do this for you. If you don’t think that your business is in a position to launch one, then start with some basic marketing emails that promote a special offer for those who were willing to receive your content.

It’s always a good idea to offer your customers rewards for their loyalty wherever you can. The modern customer likes to feel a connection with a brand, so offering something exclusive in your email marketing is a great idea. Think about things like gift cards, reward points or exclusive offers to subscribers

Now comes the fun part, design and distribution. This is where AWeber comes in, it is a website that allows you to store your database, create beautiful emails, distribute them to your contacts and collect all your measurement data.

I know I keep coming back to this, but email marketing is all about providing incentives for engagement; you can’t just spam an email list and hope you get cut through or conversions. You need to generate content that your customer will get value from.

AWeber has a drag-and-drop email building feature that allows you to craft high-quality marketing emails without the need for any code or technical skills. It takes no time at all to build a great layout and fill it in with your own branding and content.

AWeber also uses a comprehensive email tracking feature that allows you to monitor and measure the success of your campaigns and improve your strategy. This allows you to segment your database based on open rate and even converted sales.

With this level of data, in time you will be able to target separate segments of your database to drastically improve results. All that’s left is to find a way to convert them into a sale.

Converting Your Leads

Depending on your business and what you are trying to achieve, a web page is often the most affordable and simple way to convert your lead into a sale. Again, there are tools out there to make this process significantly easier, like Leadpages and LeadChat.

Leadpages is a landing page builder that, like AWeber, has a suite of templates and a drag and drop feature that will make you look like a born web developer. You can create a landing page form a template, customise it to suit your branding and messaging, then drag in a shopping cart to convert your leads to sales.

Use tools like LeadChat to not only place a live chat widget on your website, but also staff it with salespeople who work for you 24/7. That way, even if some information is missing from your site that the person wants to know, they can engage with the chat agents who can then convert them into buyers.

Another amazing feature of AWeber is that it integrates perfectly into hundreds of software tools, like LeadChat, PoweredLocal and Leadpages. You can set up your landing page as another avenue to steam leads into your database by integrating a form from AWeber into Leadpages within minutes. You can then add sign up buttons to your landing page which, when clicked, will open up the sign-up form from AWeber and add that contact to your database.

Leadpages also uses a suite of analytical tools that allow you to track your traffic and conversions. Combined with the data you capture through PoweredLocal, LeadChat and AWeber, very soon you’ll have a powerful database that you can use to better understand your customers and more accurately tailor your marketing activities.

It is always good to ask yourself what you would do with your email if another business had sent it to you? What do you get out of it? How is this information or product useful to me? When you put yourself in the customer’s shoes and couple your marketing strategy with the right technology to make things easy, you’ll be firing off amazing campaigns in no time and seeing the results.

About PoweredLocal

PoweredLocal is a social Wi-Fi company that helps bricks and mortar businesses to drive Word-Of-Mouth referrals from their existing customers, while building a database of these customers. It does this by providing free Wi-Fi services with data capture and analysis.

Michael founded PoweredLocal with his oldest friend Gary Tramer, having together founded and exited a string of technology businesses.