Location based check-in type services are this year’s overhyped topic – with good reason. While you may not understand why someone wants to be the mayor of their barber shop, you do need to recognize the behavior that social location services such as Gowalla,Foursquare, Yelp! and Facebook Places represents for the local business.
Shoppers these days are using the Internet to find everything locally and increasingly using mobile devices, services and apps to effectively bypass even the web to find a merchant. What that means is that local small businesses need to find ways to tap into the behavior and not necessarily try to ride the hype wave to Foursquare fame.
Below are five ways the local small businesses can capture their own personalized version of social location behavior and tap what may be the ultimate online to offline combo to produce sales.
Create virtual rewards programs – Rewards programs such as those offered by most coffee shop via punch cards or large retailers like Eddy Bauer have been around for years, but smart offerings by folks like PlacePop are making the punch card concept an easy virtual or online play. Merchants can offer their own version of a check in and capture rich data on their most loyal customers.
Ride the group buying craze – If you’re not familiar with group coupon buying services like Groupon, then Read more…
5 Ways For Small Businesses To Get In The Location Game
By: Posted on: September 13th, 2010
How to be All Things to All Customers
By: Posted on: August 27th, 2010
There is one indisputable fact that marketers who sell soap already know about their customers that you probably don’t. Men and women buy soap differently—that’s no surprise. But while you might be tempted to focus on packaging or different scents… it turns out the key to getting repeat purchases is knowing that for women, it is the scent of the soap that is the most important, and for men it is the lather. Sell a great smelling soap to a man with no lather, and he won’t believe it worked as well and stay away from it. There are presumably scores of evidence and research to back up this basic soap fact—yet even if there weren’t you could read this point and immediately understand it to be true.
Soap is a simple product and the lesson that selling it offers for your small business is simple too: find the one ingredient that matters most to your customers and then find a way to focus on it. Sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Now consider home pregnancy tests. Most of them are the same, but what marketers of THOSE products know is that people generally buy them in two emotional states: hope or fear. Depending on which emotion they are buying with, the packaging is different.
What we are talking about here is basic Read more…
23 Clever Little Tactics For Online Lead Generation
By: Posted on: August 23rd, 2010
There’s plenty of ways to generate leads online. In fact, there’s probably an infinite amount of ways to generate leads online.
All it takes is a little creativity and an overarching strategy and you’ll be hard pressed to find that your work isn’t paying off in spades.
If you’ve gotten the strategy down, here’s 23 ways to get the creative juices flowing…
23 Creative Ways to Get Leads Online
1. Landing pages are crucial to online lead generation. Make sure the pages where you capture your leads have all the elements of a great landing page. Most of the tactics on this page will require a landing page of some form or another where the potential lead will enter their email address.
2. Use strong calls-to-action to make every page on your website lead (eventually) to one of these landing pages.
3. Write a special report that provides a solution to a problem your customers have. The goal here is to answer a small problem within a big problem. The big problem should be solved by buying your product. Require and email address to read it.
4. Write a white paper that does basically the same thing as above. You might be surprised at the results of labeling it a “white paper,” though. Read Mike Stelzner’s book if you need help. Again require an email address.
5. Put together Read more…
The Role of a Logo Design in Social Media Marketing
By: Posted on: August 17th, 2010
We are always looking for ways to improve our marketing campaigns on social media websites. There is one important factor that, we, at times, neglect and this is why we don’t get the results we look for. This important factor is known as “Logo Design”.
Your logo will be on your website and it will give your business a face through which you will be recognized. So, when people will see your logo on social media sites, they will be able to associate you with your company instantly. Those who neglect this important marketing factor can’t really enjoy the power of this highly effective medium.
Secondly, those who don’t know you (I am talking about your target market here), when they will see your logo on social media websites, your high quality logo will entice them to learn more about your business.
Having said that, let’s now briefly discuss the role of a logo design in social media marketing:
Your Logo Design Promotes Your Business Silently Yet Powerfully:
How do you expect your market to know that a certain video was uploaded by you? Or, you are active on a particular social networking site? In every video or conversation, you can’t introduce yourself and your business. So, it’s your logo design that does the promotion for you silently and effectively.
Your Logo Design Prevents You from Becoming Read more…
5 Site Metrics Every Small Business Should Track
By: Posted on: August 12th, 2010
Many site small business owners’ eyes glaze over when people start talking about analytics, click through rates, and abandonment funnels. Really, there’s a lot of jargon that goes with measuring a site with analytics.
Small business owners should be paying attention to their site analytics because the data provides useful insights into their site traffic, which ultimately leads to more sales. If you’re not paying attention to your site analytics, your business is leaving money on the table.
The problem with most analytic packages is that they’re large and confusing, providing tons of data without much instruction. Fortunately, there are only a few really important metrics that small businesses owners should track to get the best results. It’s like the 80/20 principle: these are the 20 percent of metrics that provide 80 percent of the most value to small business owners.
The Tools
First off, you’ll need to install tracking software. It’s usually only a matter of installing a bit of javascript in the footer of your site’s design. If you don’t know how to do it, your designer should be able to very quickly.
There are tons of stat programs out there, but Google Analytics gives me almost everything that I need to track. It’s robust and free, so it’s the perfect analytics program for small businesses.
Setting Up Goals
After you’ve set up Google Analytics on your Read more…
3 Easy Ways to Master Your Facebook Presence
By: Posted on: August 10th, 2010
The latest stats on Facebook are staggering: more than 500 million active members and 500,000 interactive applications. The site says members are spending over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
For business owners, it’s clear you need some type of presence on the world’s number one social networking site. However, once you sign up, what’s the next step?
First, you should create a Facebook “like” page (formerly called “fan” pages). It’s fairly simple. Just create your page, edit your information, and push it live. The real challenge with your page is to get people joining, and coming back for more. I’ve had an Amber Mac Like Page for many months, but it wasn’t until this year that I truly understood how to make the most of my presence there.
Early this spring I sat down with a friend on Facebook’s strategy team. I asked him to spend an hour with me to demystify the page experience, and give me some insider tips for Facebook success. I learned a lot within these sixty minutes that changed the way that I approach my own Facebook Page. Here’s a summary what other businesses need to start doing now.
1. Fill the wall.
Many companies spend time prettying up their pages, diving into the Info, Photos, and Notes tabs, but the truth is that very few people actually venture out to Read more…
Brand Building Ain’t What It Used to Be
By: Posted on: August 2nd, 2010
Because the overwhelming majority of your customers are going online to find suppliers, products and services, that’s where you should focus your brand-building efforts. Naturally, you have a website to promote your brand, but a website alone is not enough. To raise the visibility and increase the strength of your brand, choose programs that offer both branding and lead generation benefits.
Branding is often undervalued. The mantra at many companies is “leads and sales, leads and sales,” with most marketing investments going toward lead generation activities. In addition, marketers often believe that branding results are difficult to measure.
The Internet has relegated these notions to the garbage bin. With a comprehensive online presence and investments in the right marketing programs, you can gain 24×7 visibility, build brand value, increase opportunities for sales, and measure the results of your efforts.
Another assumption is that “branding is nice, but it doesn’t help the bottom line.” Not true. In fact, if you don’t have any brand value, it’s easy to be considered a commodity. Take Nike(NYSE: NKE), for example. Without brand recognition, would customers be willing to pay a premium for its sneakers? Probably not.
You want your company’s products and services to be unique and to be known for benefits that you alone can deliver. How can branding help your company? There are three main ways, each Read more…
25 Ways to Engage Contacts in Social Media
By: Posted on: July 30th, 2010
What is it? What is it good for? Engagement.
One of the primary selling points of social media is the concept of engaging a potential customer or partner in your product or service. So how do you accomplish engagement on a personal level?
25 Ways to Engage a Potential Customer Using Social Media
1. Start a blog. This seems like an obvious one. This should be one of the first things you think about doing when contemplating using social media as a marketing tool. There should always be a hub where your contacts can interact. The so called “hub.” Wordpress is a great tool to start blogging. Get on it!
2. Join Foursquare and Use it during the business day. Foursquare is a service that allows you to update your location to the people following you on a regular basis. I do not recommend using this tool after business hours (could turn a little creepy) but it can help your contacts get an idea of what you do on a daily basis. Even if you are just sitting in your office for most of the day.
3. Join LinkedIN and recommend your partners. Most of us are already using LinkedIN (if you are not click thislink for great information on LinkedIN). When you start to recommend the people you love working with it will help spread Read more…
Do It Yourself Online Reputation Management Toolkit
By: Posted on: July 26th, 2010
Listening to real time conversations for opportunities, leads, and reputation management is now a standard marketing item on the to-do list.
While there are services such asRadian6, Trackur and Jive Software (Filtrbox) that provide this kind of tracking for a fee, there are a number of tools that any do-it-yourselfer can employ to capture much of what’s being said about their brands, people, products, and industries in real time:
1. Google Alerts
This one is certainly not new, but I still find people who don’t tap into it. Google Alerts allows you to set up as many custom searches as you like and have Google alert you via email or RSS when any mentions of those search terms hits their radar. Not 100 percent foolproof, but very good.
2. Google Reader
Google Reader is an RSS reader, which means you can use it to subscribe, capture, read and display anything that produces an RSS feed. Most people use it to sort and read blogs, but anything with an RSS feed will show up here, so you can filter a great deal of content, including tags in bookmarking sites such as Delicious. Every customer and competitor blog feed should be in here.
3. MyReviews Page
Rating and review sites such as Google Places and Yelp have become essential marketing tools. Monitoring reviews is a big part of managing and building reputation on these Read more…
Misfit Entrepreneurs
By: Posted on: July 21st, 2010
Imagine Walt Disney at the age of nineteen. His uncle asks him what he plans to do with his life, and he pulls out a drawing of a mouse and says, “I think this has a lot of potential.”
Or Springsteen. In a concert he once told the story of how he and his dad used to go at it — how his father hated his guitar. Late one night, Springsteen came home to find his father waiting up for him in the kitchen. His father asked him what he thought he was doing with himself. “And the worst part about it,” Springsteen says, “was I never knew how to explain it to him.” How does he tell his father, “I’m going to be Bruce Springsteen?”
Someone interviewed me a few months back for an entrepreneurship project, and he mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable. It’s not the first association you’d make with an entrepreneur. Words like “driven,” “ambitious,” and “persistent” usually come to mind. But the moment he said it I knew he’d hit the nail on the head.
Vulnerability. It is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know.
There’s a misfit in each of us, and it’s the most delicate, precious thing that we have. Sadly, Read more…
