As we prepare for the height of the holiday season, one in which spending is predicted to be lukewarm at best, local businesses can get smart by planning and implementing thoughtful marketing campaigns that provide consumers relief where they need it most: their wallets. With Black Friday quickly approaching, time is of the essence to get a plan in place and begin implementing it.
While it can seem a bit overwhelming, there are plenty of low-cost options to keep a small business fully engaged with its customers and achieve a high return on investment.
To start, it’s smart to get into the heads of customers to glean their holiday shopping plans in order to provide them with what they need.…
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If you are a baby boomer like I am, you probably remember the 60s television show, Bewitched. Mrs. Kravitz was the busybody next-door neighbor of the sitcom’s main characters, Darren and Samantha Stevens. Mrs. Kravitz was extremely nosy; always peeking through the curtains to see what was going on at the Stevens’ home. If there was anything strange activity or unusual behavior, she knew about it (Samantha practiced witchcraft, so strange or unusual was an understatement.) The point is, she was extremely observant and clearly saw the goings-on where no one else did.
I have always tried to do things for my email newsletter list to reduce opt-outs and create long term subscribers. I have people on my first email list for 3,4,5 years. Getting email newsletter subscribers is not that hard. Keeping them is yet another thing. These five worked really well for me:
Twitter has not only received quite a bit of press in the past year, but it has also become an important tool for many trying to market their business, product or personal brand. Of course, people and businesses alike are doing this with a varying degree of success and some have a much better handle on the whole social media for marketing thing than others. Here are a few tips to improve your Twitter experience if you’re floundering or if you’re not seeing the results that you had hoped.
In tough economic times, businesses are looking to cut corners and boost ROI in every way they can, and often the first thing to be cut is the marketing budget. The irony of such an approach is that marketing is necessary to achieve consistent sales and growth. Rather than completely cut marketing from your company’s budget, the smarter choice is to optimize your marketing strategy and calculate returns, and hiring a PPC management firm can help “¨you do just that.
Small businesses are famously agile and attuned to the wants and needs of their customers. But as they begin to grow, or as market conditions begin to change, staying on top of customer requirements can be a tricky feat. If relationships become too tenuous, an aggressive competitor will prey on those weaknesses and poach “at risk” customers.
Social networking technology has made it very easy for people to share their opinions, rate favorite products, and communicate with others. This activity is happening every day, everywhere, and for practically every product that exists. No matter how big or small your company is, if you have customers, you can bet they’re talking about your brand or product somewhere. So what are you doing to influence that conversation?
Names matter … especially when it comes to your online business.
