Tag: Marketing

Telling Your Story

What is the best way to tell a story about your business? In today’s world there are many methods for getting your message out, but how do you tie it all together?

In the below ad by Google, you can see their ecosystem is truly built to help businesses from soup to nuts. Even with Google+ being a question mark, it’s hard to see a business thinking that they should only invest in posting status updates on Facebook or Twitter.

Too often companies miss great opportunities to create excitement for products and services by not taking full advantage of the web. This doesn’t mean that a company should be sending out loads of twitter messages and doing weekly Google+ Hangouts.

For example, take a bike shop. Maybe you have a long time customer who just got that dream bike. Take a photo of them just getting the bike and include it in your next newsletter (or post it on your Google Places/Bing Local page). By highlighting both the long time bond with the customer and the quality of the product you sell you will be creating a story about your company and what it means to be a customer at your store.

Telling the story about your business doesn’t need to be time consuming, but by taking a little time every now and again, you can gain that edge over your competition. So how do you tell your story?

Tags Branding, Marketing

Marketing Mobile

Small Business and Mobile Marketing

Post author By admin
Post date May 25, 2011
No Comments on Small Business and Mobile Marketing

How important is mobile to your small business? Network Solutions did a survey and found that while most SMB’s are aware of the possibilities, few of them are actually using mobile for marketing.

The first line item is a tricky one. Text messaging can be seen as an invasion of privacy for some mobile users, so this probably isn’t the best place to start.

Listing your company with a location-based website, however, is a quick (and most effective) way to get a mobile boost. Setting up an engaging profile with Foursquare, Google Places and Facebook Places is a good way to start (see our previous post on setting up a Places page). This is an easy one and should be way higher than 19%.

Placing ads, creating an app and making your site mobile are all a little more involved both from a time and money standpoint, so it’s easy to see why the actual usage numbers are so low. Still, if you’re in a business that gets foot traffic, you’re missing out if you don’t have a mobile plan.

Another point to consider is making your inventory or portfolio easily seen via the customer’s phone. Potential customers might not always feel like walking into your store, have the time, or are walking by after hours. Not engaging these types of customers is a quick way to lose out on potential sales.

Here are the stats from Network Solutions.

One in three searches on mobile is local. After searching for a business: 61% call the business, 59% visit the business; 88% take action the same day.

Jumping into mobile marketing sounds easier than it is, I get that. Most small business owners are already stretched thin just keeping up with the day-to-day. But the numbers on mobile just keep rising, so at some point, you’re going to have to take the plunge or get left behind. For the future of your business, make it sooner than later.

-Patrick

Tags Marketing, Mobile Phones

Branding Marketing Video Marketing

The Long Ad?

I recently went to a Banff Film Festival that was visiting near my home town. Prior to watching the film they showed 1-2 minute ads that tied into the spirit of the film festival. While no one likes to sit through loads of advertisements prior to a film, most of these were enjoyable to watch. Could this be the start of a new trend? Conventional wisdom says that advertisements need to be 15 seconds, but to accomplish this advertisers push annoying content at you. I’m sure by now you have perfected closing down unwanted video advertisements that appear when you load a website. Recently TED pushed back against this belief and has added interesting advertisements after their media. Often the videos are ones that you will stick around and enjoy watching and maybe even share them.

It takes a lot for me to visit a website after watching a video. This clip was the one of the few that spurred me to visit their site.

Dulux Walls from Jodie Sibson Potts on Vimeo.

This one has a great ending.

Nokia ‘Dot’ from Wieden + Kennedy London on Vimeo.

So take a few minutes and watch rest of them, and try not to be moved.

-Patrick

Tags Advertisements, Marketing, Video Marketing

Marketing

Local Search

When setting up an account on Google Places, Yahoo! Local, Bing Local, or any of the other similar pages, keep in mind that there is no way to transfer the accounts to someone else. Should you sell the business or have any other reason to want to transfer control of the account to another person, you will need to shut down the listing and and they will have to create a new one. This means losing all of your reviews and other information which can be a huge loss if you have built up a good reputation with your customers.

Two things to remember:

Don’t create the listing with your personal account. (i.e using your personal Gmail account for Google Places) Create a new account which can be transferred.
Don’t let a Consultant or Agency create one for you. The account needs to be independent of their accounts since they won’t be able to transfer it back to you should you want to make changes to your listing.

If you own multiple companies, create multiple accounts to service each of the companies. While this is more work, it will make things much easier in the long run.

-Patrick

Tags Local Marketing, Marketing, SEO