All I Want for Christmas [Small Business Marketing Themed Wish List]

Small business marketing is probably the last thing on your minds this time of year, but hear me out. The holiday and vacation coming up for a lot of us, we’ll be settling down for some much-needed R&R. With Christmas just around the corner, I’ve put together a festive list of things that all small businesses should include on their Santa wish lists this year. That is, of course, assuming that you’re not on the naughty list.

This past year brought us a lot of advances in technology for small businesses. For email marketing, we saw Yahoo clean up old email address that weren’t being use and Google introduce their tabbed inbox for easier message organization. Social media advances gave us apps like Vine for video, Snapchat turning down an acquisition by Facebook, and deeper integration of Google+ into YouTube. And if 2013 was the year of content marketing, then 2014 is bound to be the year of content distribution.

So without any delay, here’s my Christmas wish list for Santa this year.

Item #1: Easier Facebook Visibility for Brands

With a lot of businesses now aspiring to grow their fan base on Facebook, the amount of clutter is ever growing on the social network. In an effort to reduce this, Facebook has tuned their algorithm to show you what they think you’ll be most interested in seeing. This is great for the end user, but for businesses doing honest work, it can be upsetting to know that only 10-15% of your Facebook fans will ever see your post.

Facebook has made some advances this year to help fix this problem by doing away with their EdgeRank algorithm and replacing it with “Story Bumping.” But the greater problem still remains that while a page might have “Likes”, brands are faced with having to simply pay to get their posts seen.

For the record, I fully support brands that actually post informative and relevant content to Facebook. Those who are simply self-promoting their business shouldn’t have their posts show up in my News Feed.

Item #2: Relationship Feature for Non-Paid LinkedIn Users

I learned a few months ago that my LinkedIn account was a bit different from everyone else’s. I pay for a premium subscription and with that, I now have access to a nifty little feature to help you keep track of your connections.

On any person’s profile that I am connected to, I now have the option to add details about my relationship with a certain person. So all the people I have met at tradeshows and conferences can now have a note about them written by me so I can keep track of where I met them. It even lets you add in the name of the person who made the initial introduction. This is very helpful for when you get over 500+ LinkedIn connections.

Item #3: More Authorship Verification

With the amount of content that is being produced, it’s getting harder and harder to find the right content and from a verified source. While news outlets and journalist bloggers greatly benefit from a feature like this, small businesses can now start seeing the value behind this too.

Let’s say that a small business sees the value of writing regularly to a blog, but they are only interested in reaching their current customers. The way Google has everything set up now makes it so people you email are now connected to you through Gmail and Google+. Meaning that if you have your authorship set up correctly on your blog, when someone searches for a topic you wrote about and you’ve emailed with them or are connected to them on Google+, your blog post will have a better chance at being seen by someone who already knows you.

Item #4: Fewer Ads from Microsoft Bashing Google

You’ve seen the ads. “Google reads your emails.” “They steal your information.” Bla bla bla. While clever marketing on the part of Microsoft, it also highlights just how desperate they truly are. Launching political attack ads on their competitor? Rather childish.

Let me clear things up for you. Yes, Google reads your emails. This is how they are able to keep spam out of your inbox. They also read your emails for keywords and trends so they can show you more relevant ads too. And if you care so much about this, you always have the option to opt out of all of these services that Google provides. For the record, this is exactly what Microsoft does as well. It’s all part of business, nothing exclusive to Google and Gmail. They’ve been doing this since 2004 when Gmail launched and just remember…you’re not paying anything for it!

And in terms of sharing your personal information with government institutions, Google fights publically and transparently for your protection in this regard. On the other hand, you have Microsoft purposely building in backdoors into Skype to monitor your communications. I’ll go with the lesser of two evils here.

Item #5: More Content Marketing that Helps Rather Than Sells

My favorite content marketing story of all time is from a guy named Marcus Sheridan. Back in 2009, he was in the pool business and they were struggling from the economic downturn. While most pool contractors are very secretive about common customer questions like price, materials, etc., Marcus took all of those questions and took to his blog. He answered those questions verbatim and took over the Internet at the pool expert, thus saving their business and then some.

This right here is exactly what content marketing is all about: help, not sell. Give consumers the information they want and need up front to help them make an informed decision and in the process, brand you as the resource on a particular subject.

Item #6: Better Tools for Content Distribution

Lastly, with small businesses racing to be a content producer and looking to help, not sell to their customers, we’re running into the problem of how to distribute all this content. Sure, content marketing is only one aspect of a complete marketing strategy, but targeting the right audiences and making sure they can find helpful, relevant information is important.

Currently, I’m trying out a product called Outbrain. It’s a content distribution tool similar to Google Ads. It connects to my blog, I pick relevant keywords and websites that I could see being good lead sources for us, and then I pay to have the posts promoted on those sites. I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this but so far, I’m seeing decent results.

With all of this in mind, I want to wish you all a safe, healthy, and happy Christmas and holiday season! See you in 2014!