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Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Online Video For Your Small Business

September 14th, 2011

Maria Helm

Online video is a great tool for building brand awareness. It a great tool to reach new customers and increase sales. You can spend a lot of money on a sophisticated video marketing campaign, or you can pick up your camcorder and do it yourself. In fact, an unpretentious and honest-looking video may be more effective than a slickly produced commercial product.

You can place your video on YouTube free or post it on your website. The latter gives you more control and eliminates the possibility that your competitors’ videos and ads will show up next to yours.

What should your online video be about? Will it be easy to do? Businesses can promote themselves via three themes:

Showing what you do. The what-we-do video basically features your company’s elevator pitch – your “about us” page on your website. Introduce yourself, how long you have been in business and the services or types of products you offer. Keep it short – two minutes max. Finally, tell customers how to work with you: online, at your shop or both.

Testimonials: short and sweet. The secret to good testimonials is to keep them concise. Find the three most important reasons a customer loves you and shoot three separate videos. Then do the same with another customer. It is more interesting to have separate customers listing different reasons they recommend you than a series of customers all saying the same thing.

You’re the expert. How-to videos are effective for improving your search results on Google and other search engines. What are the top questions your customers ask? Those should be the subjects of your how-to videos. For example, if you sell gloves, discusss how to select the right size. If you fix washers and dryers, explain how to keep them clean.

Let videos help tell your company’s story. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how valuable a video could be for your business.

Photo Credit: Torley

Posted in Marketing

Tags: brand, Marketing, Online video, Small Business

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Have You Nudged Someone Lately?

August 3rd, 2011

Maria Helm

As I was getting ready for work one morning about a year or so ago, I was listening to Good Morning America. They did a segment on the book “Nudge”, co-authored by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler. The book was written in hopes of making small, little behavior changes to help benefit those who have a hard time losing weight. The idea behind the book, according to Richard Thaler, is a nudge which he describes as any small feature of the environment that captures our attention and changes our behavior – tiny and painless cues that can influence people to make better choices

Now, how does nudging relate to marketing? Nothing is more frustrating than sending out a regular email campaign only to find out through your email provider report the number of high unopened emails and low click-throughs. This may be discouraging, but not to worry. Even if your subscribers don’t open your email, its presence in their inbox leads to a solid impact on brand awareness and sales. The act of influencing your audience through the understated impact of unopened emails is called nudging. Here’s how it works:

As the recipient scans her inbox, she decides what needs attention now, what can wait and what she’ll delete without reading.
Even if your recipient doesn’t open your email, seeing your brand name in the “From” line and your pitch in the “Subject” line can influence her buying decisions. So, write powerful subject lines that encourage recipients to take action.

What types of “nudges” will you make with your marketing campaigns?

Photo Credit: mindgraph

Posted in Marketing

Tags: E-mail, Marketing, Nudging, Pitch, Tips

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How to build an online presence without a website

June 10th, 2011

Maria Helm

Well, we’re on the second half of 2011, and if your small business isn’t online for a portion of your marketing you stand a chance of being left behind. Over 90 million American adults are online every day, and over half of that use the web as their primary way to search for local businesses – so if you are not online potential clients will find someone who is.

Don’t have a website yet? Not to worry. Here are three tasks you can do to get your small business online today even if you don’t have a website yet.

Create a free business listing on consumer/business connection sites such as Biznik, Yelp, MerchantCircle, and Local.
Create a free business listing on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Create a free business listing on different online Yellow Pages.

These are easy and cost nothing to setup, but if your time doesn’t permit or you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, have a friend help you or hire a virtual assistant to do them for you.

It doesn’t matter what type of small business you own. You can be a dentist, restaurant owner, chiropractor, hair salon owner, etc. What matters as a small business is having an online presence, even if it’s minimal, in order to remain competitive.

This is just to help you get started today without a website, but ultimately, a website is very important for your small business presence.

Photo Credit: Danard Vincente

Posted in Marketing

Tags: Entrepreneurs, Marketing, Small Business, website

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Achieving Success with Email Marketing Sign Ups

February 23rd, 2011

Maria Helm

In the less than 1% chance you hadn’t noticed, consumers and business clients alike have lost all tolerance for spam. Firewalls are going up everywhere. Software applications and ISP providers, now police junk mail. Families and businesses are installing filtering devices. Legal controls have also kicked in, such as the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act. But even when following the letter of the CAN-SPAM law, which restrains but doesn’t outlaw spam, e-mail marketers may still antagonize thousands of their potential customers by using unscrubbed, bulk e-mail lists.

To effectively harness e-mail marketing these days, you need to first secure the recipient’s prior consent, a nod of interest. You should be using only permission-based, “opt-in” lists.

There are many smart ways to motivate customers to sign up for your e-mail marketing newsletter or messages. These strategies can build the kind of lists that fuel results.

1. Identify the customer need — and then fill it. People will give up personal information only in exchange for something they value, whether that’s your must-read, in-the-know newsletter, unique entertainment, or dibs on buying the latest hot release. You need to research what your target customers consider valuable and compelling. And then deliver it. Be sure to make it clear that you indeed have what they want.

2. Target your messages.If you sell bicycles, you wouldn’t advertise in a cooking magazine, would you? So how come so many marketers send out bulk messages to bulk lists? It’s mostly because e-mail marketing is so cheap that mailings to thousands become tempting. Spend some time finding out which customers on your list are bicycle mavens and who also happens to love cooking. Then segment your lists and messages accordingly.

3. Make it easy to sign up. An invitation to join your e-mail list — along with the benefits it offers — should appear everywhere your marketing does. Put an opt-in form on the home page of your Web site. Every time a salesperson talks to a customer, ask for an e-mail address. Include the invite on direct mailers, at live events, and in all media advertising.

Posted in Marketing

Tags: Communications, E-mail, Email marketing sign up, Marketing, Opt-in, Small Business, Tips

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Your Marketing Bucks: Is it Worth the Bang?

December 29th, 2010

Maria Helm

When it comes to getting bang for marketing bucks, too many business owners close their eyes, throw up their hands and resign themselves to guesswork. But if marketing efforts are ruled by luck or instinct, at best, you squander money. At worst, your sales head south.

In today’s business climate, make sure that your marketing tactics can be easily measured– easily tracked, quantifiable promotions such as coupons, survey-driven Web promotions and partnership bounce-back promotions.

Here are five other ways to benchmark your marketing campaigns without breaking the bank or overburdening your staff (or yourself ).

1. Get a handle on costs and customers. With business having slowed, many owners are so laser-focused on sales that they forget the other crucial stuff. What could be more important than sales? Well, profits. Sometimes, the more you sell, the more you lose. Before planning marketing campaigns or mounting promotions, analyze the cost of marketing versus the profit it must yield. How much, for instance, will it cost to acquire a new customer? Who is your potential new customer? What will get that potential customer’s attention? Most importantly, after getting attention, what will drive a response and close the deal? Find out.

2. Set clear goals and define success. The return on marketing investments you seek is likely predicated on your overall strategy. Benchmarks, after all, are set against a standard — be it an industry or individual ruler. Formulating a marketing strategy that articulates a set of outcomes has to be the starting point. After that, “return on investment” for marketing can mean many things, including: Before spending a dime, make sure your expectations make sense for the marketing you plan.

Posted in Marketing

Tags: Marketing, Small Business

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