POST CATEGORY : Marketing

3 Ways to Make Your Small Business Look More Professional

As a small business, it can be difficult for you to feel like you can compete with larger, more established businesses in your same field. From the money they have to spend to the years they have on you of building their brand and reputation, it can be very discouraging when you have to go up against some of these big dogs. And if you’re not doing everything you can to look as professional as the bigger businesses, you’re not doing yourself any favors either.

Beauty shop business owner

But if you truly have something that your big name competition doesn’t, you deserve to be in the market just as much as they do.…

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Marketing a New Product: Strategies to Create Brand Awareness

As a new product designer or product-focused entrepreneur, the most important part of your job is, of course, coming up with a great product in the first place. But of course, this alone does not guarantee success and marketing that product should be approached with just as much thought and care as the initial design if you want it to go out into the world and take its rightful place alongside other items that are now household names.

Promoting new product

Once you’ve developed a brilliant product, you need to make the world aware of it and also make them see why they need it.…

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3 Tips for Updating Your Marketing Plan for the Coming Year

If you’re looking to grow your business into new areas and demographics this year, or even if you’re just wanting to get a greater slice of your market share—and who isn’t?—then you’re going to want to take a hard look at your marketing efforts. The time and energy you put into marketing, whether it’s traditional marketing or online marketing, is going to be what gets you cresting over the hill into new markets.

Creating marketing plan that works

So to help you make that trek a little easier on yourself, here are three tips for recalculating your marketing plan for the coming year.

Recap How Last Year’s Marketing Went

You can’t very well know where you need to go unless you know where you’ve been.…

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How Coupons Work for Small Businesses

Whether you are a small business that is just getting started, or you’ve been around the community for a little while, getting people in the door to buy your product or service can be a tricky thing. It’s important to spend money to make money, but when you have tight finances and your product is already costing you a good chunk of your budget, how to you make money?

Using coupons for shopping

You’ve tried to run specials before as well as get coupons out, but your success rates have been low and not many people even knew you were running a special. You not only wasted valuable advertising money, you also wasted time and effort, and the people who did take advantage of your coupons or specials didn’t make up for the cost of putting those specials on.…

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3 Marketing Areas to Think About When you’re Doing a Store Remodel

If you’re thinking about remodeling the storefront of your business, there has likely been some kind of event that has pushed you to making this decision. Whether you need more space, want to make better use of the space you have, have gotten negative customer feedback or anything else, choosing to remodel your business space can be hugely beneficial or a huge setback depending on how well you execute your plan.

Store remodel and redesign

One area that many businesses neglect to think about when beginning a remodel is how to spin this news from a marketing perspective. If your customers are going to be affected by this decision—which they will be—you have to think about how to make this remodel still work for your business, your customers, and your bottom line.…

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Understanding a Direct Mail List

A direct mail list is a great opportunity for a business to get, retain and create new customer. However, there is not a lot of clarity in terms of which lists work best, or how to actually find good lists. Another element of mystery is how you can find out whether or not your mailing list investment has paid off.

Direct e-mail list

Unfortunately, entire books could be, and have been, written on these different subjects so it would be impossible to cover all that ground. For now, therefore, let’s just take a look at the main types of mailing lists. And, for information, you can buy mailing lists here.…

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10 Tips on Building Your Email Marketing List (and Why it Matters)

As digital marketing has evolved we’ve seen more and more companies looking to maximize their audience reach and response through new channels, particularly social media. And while that makes sense – an ever-expanding amount of consumers are spending more and more time on social platforms – at the same time, businesses shouldn’t neglect ‘older’ methods which may still be just as effective, in particular, email.

Email marketing

Why email? In a study published by McKinsey and Company last year, they found that despite the rise of social networks, email “remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media – nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined”.…

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Your Business Website Isn’t Good – Here’s Why

As an ardent reader of SMBCEO, you know too well how important the Internet is for small-business success. Small enterprises rely on the inexpensive marketing of social media and the Web’s plethora of accessible, essential business tools. You even comprehend the necessity of maintaining a small-business website to supply your customers and clients with the vital information they need to seek your products and services. Yet, having a website isn’t exactly the same as having a great website — or even a good one, at that.

Anxious businessman worrying over his bad business website

Your website is the lifeblood of your online presence, which means you must ensure that it looks nice, performs well, and, ultimately, makes sales.…

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5 Tips for Swag Giveaways that Don’t Bore the Recipients to Death

When it comes to promotional products, the financial and professional services sector can be a bit boring. It’s true that quality promotional products matter; however, these won’t be effective in their own. You need to embed more value to the items.

Promotional product - USB

Sounds challenging? Fear not – with a little creativity, your swag can represent much more that the items’ value. Here are five tips for promotional product giveaways that fascinate, intrigue and delight the recipients:

1. Tell story

I used to work with a payroll company in getting their brand and message enhanced via content creation and marketing. As a thank you for my effort, they sent a box full of swag.…

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Marketing Toolbox: Ways to Build Your Residential Construction Business From the Ground Up

Some of the smartest ways to build a home construction business aren’t always the most intuitive. Here are a few ideas to get you going from the ground up using smart marketing tools that your competition isn’t.

Residential construction business

How To Find Your Target Audience

Think about the age, gender, location, and income of the families you want to be working with. Figure out where these people live right now, what the neighborhood culture is like, and how to connect your ideal customer with that neighborhood.

For example, in Chicago, you might have one type of customer that would want to live in Hyde Park.…

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