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Must-Have Tech That Small Businesses Need

J.C. Granger July 26, 2019

My father once told me to “find a good mechanic and a good woman and keep them both forever.” This can easily be applied to software and technology as well. Since starting my small business, I’ve constantly been on the search for software that will make my life easier and can help me solve problems for my business, that won’t drown my wallet. Read below for the three software small businesses should absolutely be using.

Online Training Systems: When you’re a small business owner, you hit the gender-neutral glass ceiling of how much you do in 24 hours fast. And the last thing you want to spend time on is onboarding and training new employees. That’s why I use the automated training software, Trainual.

This is the ultimate training and onboarding tool and has been a complete game-changer for my company. Trainual allows me to add a new employee, assign them training processes (whether it is for internal processes or client communication) then alerts me when they are done. The best part? My employees aren’t training as they go anymore, they are trained before they go.

Project Management Tools: Project management software is some of the best money you can spend as a small business owner. I use Basecamp3. What sets Basecamp3 apart from other project management tools, is that it allows me to work with clients and my team – all on the record in one place — with fewer emails, meetings, and busy-work.

So, let me explain.

When not using project management software, it is more likely something is going to fall through the cracks. Whether someone doesn’t hit reply all on an email or a task goes unfulfilled for a client, the client isn’t going to be happy. When a client isn’t happy, the client cancels. When the client cancels, you lose money. Using a project management tool like Basecamp3 saves you from making small mistakes with the internal and external communication features – and ultimately saves you money, headaches, and stress from keeping everything on your email.

Online Billing Systems: One of the most important decisions you can make as a small business owner is what kind of invoice and billing system you implement. Starting out, I did tons of research and found that most billing systems, from PayPal to QuickBooks, charge the same 3% fee for every transaction.

That fee may not sound like a lot but do the math after a full year and you will feel your pockets start to burn a bit. Instead of using a system charging up to 3% for transactional fees, I use ChargeOver.com. ChargeOver.com allows users to import your own merchant processing system and has an easy-to-use automated billing feature. So now, I am paying only 1.5% for everything transaction. My advice: do your research on online billing systems. It could save you a lot more money to put towards your marketing funds or office space, or maybe even just more happy hours during the week!

J.C. Granger is the CEO of Infinity Marketing Group. Infinity Marketing Group is an inbound marketing agency headquartered in Denver, Colorado that specializes in helping SaaS companies achieve their lead generation goals.

Connect with J.C. on LinkedIn and download his free eBook, “3 Essentials of Inbound Marketing”.

The Rules of Engagement for Backlinks and Keywords

J.C. Granger July 3, 2019

I’ve been talking about the truth (and lies) software companies tell about SEO. There are three things we’ve already discussed-page ranking, the “complicated” label that SEO has and the role Social Media plays in your rankings. These lies are one of the reasons people bounce from SEO strategy to SEO strategy. It’s also why companies spend a lot of money in the wrong places of their SEO plan.

It’s also important to know that it’s not all about the keywords.

You read that correctly, keywords are just part of your strategy when it comes to your SEO strategy.

Keywords were the main focus of SEO for a long time. You had to have the right keywords placed on the right pages if you wanted to be seen, and that was about it. People shoved tons of keywords into every sentence they could. Here’s the thing- search engines get smarter and more complex every few months. Your keyword strategy should be reviewed every few months so that you can make adjustments and stay relevant.

Google takes around 200 factors into account when they determine rankings for websites. Keywords are still important, but there’s a lot more that goes into it than just making sure you use the word “dog” as many times as you can in your posts about dogs.

If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, you’ll want to look at:

Your domain age
Your page titles
How H1 tags are used
Semantically related keywords
Page-loading speed
The recency of updates (to your site and content)
Outbound links

While we’re at it, the reading level of your site, the layout of your site and a layout of your “Contact Us” page can affect your SEO rankings.

So while keywords are an essential part of your SEO strategy, there are tons of other factors you need to take into account. It’s the whole package they are looking at. So do your best to make that package the best it can be.

Asking about the different tactics that an SEO provider used to help you improve your rankings is really important. If they emphasize keyword density or other keyword-related practices, be a bit wary. They are not looking at the big SEO picture and they are not going to create a solid strategy.

Power loading links isn’t the answer either by the way

A while back, there was a huge focus on having a crap ton of inbound or outbound links- external or internal. It’s not that this statement isn’t wrong, it’s that it’s too general and highly misleading when it comes to getting you the results you need. The number of links is important, but what’s more important, is where those links are coming from. I can link to a ton of sites all day long on my blog, but it’s not going to get me a seat at the table when it comes to Google rankings.

Backlinking is only going to help you when you link from “high-authority” websites like Mashable, TechCrunch, or Wired. That’s because everyone is linking everything, so quality starts to emerge as the defining backlink. If Google thinks your page contains excellent information based on that link then that’s a plus. If that information helps them to figure out exactly what your page is about, even better.

So remember, that one link from a high-authority domain to your page could be the boost you are looking for, whereas tons of links from low-quality sites that are not providing any real value might not do anything. In fact, it could even hurt your rankings if you have those types of sites linked to yours, so be careful.

If an SEO expert tells you that you need tons of links, you now know that’s not true. If “links” are their focus, they may engage in link buying or other strategies that are not so Google friendly. That can result in penalties, and you don’t want that to happen. It should also be noted if it’s really bad, Google will slap you hard and lower your rankings even more. So don’t over link.

Having links= OK

Having the right kind of links=Gold

So if you’re not ranking high on Google search results and you want to benefit from having stronger backlinks and keyword strategies, shoot us an email at info@infinitymgroup.com or message me on LinkedIn.

J.C. Granger is the CEO of Infinity Marketing Group. Infinity Marketing Group is an inbound marketing agency headquartered in Denver, Colorado that specializes in helping SaaS companies achieve their lead generation goals.

Connect with J.C. on LinkedIn and download his free eBook, “3 Essentials of Inbound Marketing”.

SaaS Pricing Models: Where Should You Start?

J.C. Granger June 27, 2019

In the world of SaaS, there is an overwhelming number of pricing models available, that it’s almost impossible to know where to start. Being the founder of a SaaS marketing firm, I’ve marketed or implemented almost every type of pricing model there is. However, the one pricing model that is beyond the best, is something I like to call “Benchmark Freemium.” According to Hubspot, the freemium pricing model, a combination of free and premium, is “a two-tiered user acquisition model that splits users into either a free tier or a premium tier depending on whether or not they pay for an account.” But there is a twist to Benchmark Freemium: your software or service is free until you’ve hit a designated benchmark.

Have you ever heard of Slack?

I’ll give you an example. Slack, a cloud-based messaging software for companies and organizations, has one of the most brilliant pricing models I’ve ever seen. Slack offers its software for free, all features included. That is until you reach 10,000 messages. 10,000 messages sounds like a lot, but is it? Slack carefully decided on this benchmark, because when you hit 10,000 messages on Slack, you’re already hooked. You’ve seen the value. You’ve adapted Slack into your day-to-day processes and most likely, you can’t go back to your pre-Slack office days.

The biggest advantage of using the Benchmark Freemium pricing model is that once your customer hits the benchmark, it’s almost guaranteed that the customer has already adopted your software into their systems. The conversion rate of trial users becoming paying users is almost always north of 90%. However, in order to attain this kind of success, you must choose your benchmark wisely.

One rule with SaaS pricing models: Never set your benchmark on a timeline.

Believe me, everybody is over the two-week trial periods. Instead, follow Slack’s example and set your benchmark on usage. Trial and test to see what is the right amount of usage before you start. If you set that benchmark too low, your users may have not used the software enough to convert the user. If you set that benchmark too high, you could potentially be losing money by not acquiring that paid user sooner.

Need help setting your benchmark for the Benchmark Freemium pricing model? Get a full understanding of your usage numbers with a pricing model expert.

J.C. Granger is the CEO of Infinity Marketing Group. Infinity Marketing Group is an inbound marketing agency headquartered in Denver, Colorado that specializes in helping SaaS companies achieve their lead generation goals.

Connect with J.C. on LinkedIn and download his free eBook, “3 Essentials of Inbound Marketing”.

SEO is Really Complicated (but it’s not)

J.C. Granger June 24, 2019

In my previous post, I talked about the number one lie that I’ve heard regarding SEO, and that’s the “promise” that you’ll be in the number one spot in a Google search. Although it’s one of the biggest lies out there, it’s also not the only lie. Here’s another lie- it’s tough to improve your search engine results without hiring a professional.

I’m sure right there you said, wait a minute Jason, what the hell? “Aren’t you in the marketing business and don’t you own a marketing agency?”

Why would you have even started a company, and why is professional SEO such a massive industry if it wasn’t complicated and downright something only a trained professional can do?

First, I’m not going to lie to you. Improving your search rankings, in general, is a pretty simple thing to do. There are specific things that Google places a lot of weight on when it’s determining search rankings for websites. Things like relevancy, backlinks, the format of your website, and the overall authority that it has compared to others in your industry.

Sure, people specialize in things because this allows them to train their minds to figure out all of those I mentioned, efficiently prioritize them, and then roll them out. It does take a lot of hands-on experience to understand how to go about the process in the most efficient and “graceful way”. Most business owners don’t have the bandwidth to do that.

But what you do have the bandwidth to do is make your website as relevant, and authoritative as possible, which right there is one of the biggest things that an SEO makeover does. So you’ve already done a lot of the hard work.

SEO Takes Time

I’m not going to lie- SEO takes a lot of time. By a lot of time, I’m not just talking about it taking a few months or a year. SEO takes a lot of work over the lifetime of your website/business. SEO is ever-evolving. To be on top of it means keeping track of constant updates, managing and building your own content, making technical improvements, having a consistent backlink outreach strategy, and a host of other things.

So SEO is hard, but it’s not super complicated (at least not until you get into the extremely small details). It’s no joke, it takes a lot of work, and it does need a dedicated person being a taskmaster for it. So if you don’t know how to manage your time and effort on SEO best, you’ll end up wasting both.

That’s where an SEO expert comes in. An expert can tell you where your strategy needs to focus its energy and what’s going to get the most return on your investment because they’ve done it before and it’s what they eat and breathe.

In short, SEO isn’t all that complicated per se, but not complicated doesn’t mean it’s easy.

So if you’re not ranking high on Google search results and you want to benefit from all that free organic traffic, shoot us an email at info@infinitymgroup.com or message me on LinkedIn.

J.C. Granger is the CEO of Infinity Marketing Group. Infinity Marketing Group is an inbound marketing agency headquartered in Denver, Colorado that specializes in helping SaaS companies achieve their lead generation goals.

Connect with J.C. on LinkedIn and download his free eBook, “3 Essentials of Inbound Marketing”.

Let’s Get Personal: How Content Personalization is Changing in 2019

J.C. Granger June 17, 2019

Have you ever talked about a product, but never searched for it online, then later received an ad for it? There’s a reason for that. According to Evergage.com, 92% of marketers are using your personal information to customize their marketing strategies according to your behaviors and preferences. With help from Google Analytics and CRM platforms, marketers can easily identify key insights about their customer database. Everything from age and location to the products and services you book online is being recorded to provide customers with the ultimate personalized experience.

You might be thinking: “I already know this.” For years, marketers have used attainable information of their customers to target them with emails, social media ads, and website landing pages. But in 2019, marketers are using this information and more in ways that have never been done before, to provide their customers with unique and tailored online campaigns. Read below to find out how marketing personalization is changing the way brands are connecting to their customers online.

AI-Driven Personalization

In the Digital Age, computers may be decreasing in size, but their power and popularity are increasing at a rapid rate. Good-bye to the days of marketers segmenting email lists by hand and adding personal touches to content themselves. Now, machines comb through their customer database and implement AI-featured algorithms to find the best techniques to segment and personalize their database.

In 2019, we can expect to see much more personalized product recommendations, individualized incentive programs, predictive content modeling and automation in marketing strategies and advertising campaigns. Companies can stay ahead of this trend by investing in AI technology solutions in email marketing, chatbots, and programmatic advertising.

Voice-Activated Searches

With Amazon’s Alexa to the Google Home and now even Facebook’s Portal, virtual assistants are popping up in homes everywhere. According to TechCrunch.com, 2018 reached an all-time high, with close to 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning one, up 54 percent from 2017 alone. The cloud-based smart speakers are being used for music, online searches, streaming videos, and even playing Jeopardy. And if you’re ever wondering if these machines are listening to you, you might not be wrong. While the machines start listening based on “trigger words”, they are still recording your requests and conversations once “triggered.”

So what does this mean for marketing? Marketers are making their products and services easier to search, buy, or use with voice-activated commands. They’re using this information to help create a language that you use and to make the most engaging experiences possible on voice-activated smart speakers. Although these smart speakers do not run paid advertising now, brands have found ways to ensure their brand is mentioned first in specific searches. With voice-activated marketing not going away any time soon, it is important that brands start looking into how to optimize their brand with smart-device speakers.

Facial Recognition Marketing

The new facial recognition capabilities of the latest smartphones are putting customers front and center in marketing campaigns. With the growing popularity of facial mapping and augmented reality features, marketers are now testing and creating immersive marketing experiences for their customers. For example, cosmetic companies like Sephora and Orly are releasing apps that give their users virtual makeovers with their products and Nike launched a campaign that allowed users to control the movement of virtual shoes with their facial expressions.

Not only do facial recognition features allow marketers to experiment with more innovative campaigns, but these features are providing tons of insight into their customers. Mood detection and facial expressions can provide data on how the customer reacts to products or campaigns, which can be applied to more customized advertisements that will perfectly fit the emotions, interests, and preferences of their audience.

With all of the new and innovative trends in data personalization, 2019 is expected to have some killer campaigns that will feature voice, facial recognition and more. To keep up with customer expectations, brands need to look into campaigns that are providing more intimate and personalized online experiences. How are you going to stand out with your marketing campaigns in 2019?

J.C. Granger is the CEO of Infinity Marketing Group. Infinity Marketing Group is an inbound marketing agency headquartered in Denver, Colorado that specializes in helping SaaS companies achieve their lead generation goals.

Connect with J.C. on LinkedIn and download his free eBook, “3 Essentials of Inbound Marketing”.

Do Financial Goals Matter? (Hint: They Don’t Mean Crap)

J.C. Granger June 3, 2019

Goals are weird. There’s a significant emphasis on having them in every part of your life. We even have a whole month that’s basically obsessed with setting new goals for your life and your business. The other day I was talking with a friend, and he asked about the financial goals that I had for Infinity for the year. I sort of blew his mind when I replied: “I don’t have any.”

Read (And Obey) My “90 Day Rule” Or You’re Completely Screwed

infinityadmin May 30, 2019

The world is full of rules. Some of them you need to follow, and some of them are more of a “guide” so that you don’t make the same dumb mistakes other people have. Well, the 90-day rule is one I promise that you should be following if you want to build your business and find success. It’s also pretty brutal, but here it is: if you don’t get the results that your client wants, no matter how much they paid you, the amount of money spent is utterly irrelevant in this equation. If they pay you $500 bucks a month or they pay you $500,000 a month, it doesn’t matter. If you don’t get your client the results they expected you would in 90 days, you’re screwed.

Yep. I said it. You’re screwed and here’s why you’re screwed…

It’s because everyone has a clock ticking away inside their heads as much as we all want to ignore it. This includes every client you have now or will ever have in the future. To help you fully understand this rule, here’s an example that we can all understand- your child is off playing on the playground, and you’re kicking back on the bench. All of a sudden you’re like, “Hey, where’s my kid?” That little timer goes off in your head, and it tells you that you’ve not seen them and you should have. It creates some panic, fear, anger and maybe even distracts you from what you were doing just before the timer went off.

For a parent guarding their kid, it’s about 90 seconds, but when it comes to a client safeguarding their businesses success, it’s 90 days. The feelings, however, are all the same.

If you don’t think you can do what they want to happen or at least get them on a solid road to those results in 90 days, don’t take them on as a client. I assure you, it won’t be worth the money.

Wait? What did you just say?

I realize that you just thought in the back of your head that’s crazy because you need clients and you need to make money. It’s okay. I used to think that way too.

Here’s the thing- if you make a promise of improving SEO and getting them to page one and you honestly have never done that before, it’s going to smack you in the face pretty fast when you realize you can’t reach that goal.

Sure, you might make some progress but if this goal doesn’t meet the client’s expectations you’ve just shot yourself in the ass. You’ve overpromised SEO results and set that company on a path that says in 90 days they are going to see SEO magic happen but you know you can’t do that, you only hope you can. It’s like telling a kid you’re taking them to Disneyland but instead, you pull up at a Chuck E Cheese (WTF Mom).

This is why I tell our prospects “Give me your budget and give me your goals.” This way I can see if the things I am going to promise to deliver are even possible. When I have everything in front of me, I can assess if I can or cannot produce what you expect to the standards of my company. If I can’t produce it in 90 days I won’t accept you as a client because I know that you will more than likely cut and run, be upset, and in some cases, you’ll tell your friends and colleagues that my company didn’t deliver. You want to make sure that you are providing good value for your clients and over promising is not going to deliver the results either of you wants, and no one wants that to happen.

So here’s a quick tip.

Although I usually give tips geared to software companies and tech companies, this applies to everyone. No matter what your business is if a client hires you to provide a service to them and you do not give them measurable, reasonable results in the first 90 days, you’re screwed, and after a few years of doing this, you won’t be in business much longer.

Make sure that what you’re offering and presenting to the world as your capabilities will allow you to provide measurable results that’ll make them happy in the first 90 days. If you do that, you buy yourself more time. If you can get them to a specific mile marker, they will extend your time so you can “finish the race”, so to speak. Client relationships are like time trials. That’s how it works when it comes to any service base. Of course, if you have the tools or resources that you can knock their socks off with, and you can give them instant results, start with that. It’s okay to wow them, but it’s not okay to overpromise.

Smart businesses that serve others need to have measurable outcomes and defined parameters of what the organizations they serve can expect. So providing your clients their “ask” in that first 90 days is a must or you’re (as I clearly like to say)…screwed.

So if you’re reading this and are struggling with your marketing efforts and want some help from a company that you know won’t take you on unless they can get you results in 90 days or less, contact us at the info below. Happy to help.

J.C. Granger is the CEO of Infinity Marketing Group. Infinity Marketing Group is an inbound marketing agency headquartered in Denver, Colorado that specializes in helping SaaS companies achieve their lead generation goals.

Connect with J.C. via Linked in or by email at JC@infinitymgroup.com. Download his free eBook, “3 Essentials of Inbound Marketing”.

3 Ways Your SaaS Can Utilize Video Marketing Right Now

infinityadmin March 6, 2019

If you’ve been wondering where you need to up your SaaS Company’s game, there’s been a ton of talk this week about video marketing. Did you hear that LinkedIn is the latest to jump on the live streaming content bandwagon? Although some think they are late to the game, I think they’ve been smart to wait. This is going to be huge for their channel and guess what? It could be huge for your company too. If you’re looking for creative inspiration on how to include video in your SaaS company’s marketing strategy here’s what you need to know.

Which Devices Should SaaS Companies Target More for Marketing: Mobile or Desktop?

J.C. Granger November 28, 2018

When looking at marketing for your SaaS company, many people think that the focus should be mostly on mobile marketing. This is because these days people are using their phones for just about everything. With that said, it’s important to really look into the specifics of a SaaS company and the “why’s” behind someones need for what you offer.

Here’s How Your SaaS Can Double Its Revenue Through Co-Marketing

J.C. Granger November 21, 2018

When creating a marketing plan for your SaaS company, it’s always smart to find new ways to get more bang for your buck. Co-marketing allows two or more companies that provide services to the similar group of people to work together and create ways to reach a new audience. This allows you to do less work and reach a bigger audience while costing you half the amount of money you would normally spend. Who doesn’t want that?

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