Marketing in a Recession? YES!
by Rob Bedell, contributing writer to Entireweb Newsletter
Is the current tough market the right time to be slashing your advertising budget?
Not if you want your business to survive the economic downturn and lay the groundwork to thrive when the economy improves! Tough times may actually provide us our best opportunity to reach out to our customers with little or no competition because so many of our competitors are doing just the opposite of that in an attempt to save money.
During good times everyone has the money (and bravery) to seek out clients, creating an atmosphere of extreme competition where reaching the consumer with your message proves to be exceedingly difficult. NOW is the time to have faith in your product or service, to reach out to your customers and to secure your success now and into the future. And there are easy and cost effective ways of doing so.
There are some simple things that you can do. Everyone knows about the internet, but not everyone knows the free ways to get exposure on the internet. You can write an article about your industry, or a product, and submit it to one of the many sites that accept them. At the end of your article, you mention your business and have a link to your website. Each site has it's guidelines on how the articles are to be written, so make sure to follow them. This will help establish you as a leader in your industry as long as the information you share is helpful and not self-promoting.
Guerilla marketing is great in slow time. Have some flyers or postcards made. One of your employees or friends can design it or you can find an affordable place to do it for you. During your slow time, have your employees go to a busy area and hand them out. Now you are putting your message directly into the hands of prospective customers. Make sure you have an attractive offer that will entice people to visit your business. Obviously, this is mainly for businesses with a store front, but you can do guerilla marketing online as well.
Guerilla marketing is done differently online. With blogs and social networking sites, there are opportunities to market your business in a different setting. You can create blogs and check the response you get from each entry which can help you check what the market is interested in at any given time. Or you can find blogs that have an issue that your company can help with. Respond to the blog with your company information. You can set up an account with a social networking site, giving more information about your business and connecting to other businesses to network and exchanges leads.
Cross promote with other businesses, in other ways. If you're feeling the pinch of the economy, most likely other businesses in your area/industry are feeling it as well. Find other businesses that don't compete with yours and see about exchanging some flyers or a banner promoting each other's business. Or if your business is online, do a link exchange with other businesses. Do not over due the link exchange or Google may lower your organic search results. Be selective in who you work with both online and in the brick and mortar world.
Press Releases can be a very effective way to bring attention to your business. If you have something that impacts the community, then you can have someone write a press release for you. If you hire someone to do it for you, make sure they know how to write and distribute it. Again, remember the topic must be something that impacts the community and not just a self-serving piece promoting your business.
These are just some of the ideas that will help your business grow in any economy. There are plenty of marketing options out there. You just need to find the ones that work for you.
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The Best Salesperson: Your Website
by Ramon Ray, an excerpt from Entrepreneur.com
Date printed: March 20, 2008
I KNOW THAT a business's website is one of the most powerful sales tools a small business can have, but I've never thought of a website as a salesperson until now. Do it yourself and you might start looking at websites differently.
If you think of your website as a salesperson, you'll begin to think of it as more than just a glorified brochure. You'll even want it to be better designed, since you probably want your sales reps to look good.
To help develop your website into a salesperson, [ask these four questions]:
1. Does your website know everything about your business that it should?
2. Do you measure your website's success (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually)?
3. Do you offer your website "training" on your business fundamentals, new trends or economic changes in your local market or in the national business climate for your industry?
4. Does your website have all your current products, services and pricing?
You would never send a sales representative to prospective clients without ensuring he or she had all the needed information, so your informational expectations of the website should be no different.
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It's a New World of Competitors
by Andrew Wetzler of smartbiz.com - Internet Technology Resources For Startup & Small Businesses
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Answering the question of who are competitors of a particular business was much easier before the internet came along, as the traditional channels for creating visibility were very limited. In most instances, geography played a pivotal role in identifying the main players in any market and the Yellow Pages, local papers, television, radio etc. were critical to driving new prospects.
Competition was sometimes limited by exclusive relationships as well. Manufacturers were often protective of their brand and who could represent them. In the clothing industry for example, stores who sold higher end lines were often protected as manufactures would not sell to discounters. Those arrangements are the exception today as the web has broken down most of these barriers. In the automotive arena for instance, there were but a handful of local competitors for any type of vehicle. Today, a dealer can be much further away. A Google search for “Honda CRV” from my office in Boca Raton, Fla. yields a paid ad from a dealer in Atlanta. It’s highly unlikely that dealer had aspirations for selling vehicles beyond the greater Atlanta area, a few years ago.
This can be a good or bad thing, depending upon your perspective. For instance, it’s been detrimental to companies who could previously afford the biggest ad in the Yellow Pages, which gained them the lion share of the market, but are now competing with much smaller businesses who could be thousands of miles away. It’s been a bonanza for web savvy entrepreneurs (large and small) who have embraced the power of the Internet and search and who have adjusted their marketing plans accordingly.
It’s vital to identify who your competitors are, in order to effectively compete against them. For most of us, as a result of the web, we have a lot more competitive entities to focus on than we ever have before. Of equal importance is the fact that we also have a much larger universe of prospects who we can do business with, which presents the potential to grow a business exponentially.
With this in mind, there are three important exercises to tackle:
1. Use the search engines to identify who you are actually competing with today, on a keyword by keyword basis.
2. Study closely the websites that you identify in exercise number one to determine how your site stacks up, both in terms of the user experience and also with pricing / deliverables (as appropriate).
3. Commit to making whatever changes are necessary, to boost your site’s relative effectiveness, based on what’s been gleaned through exercises one and two.
These steps seem so simple and obvious, but they actually require a lot of work and an ongoing commitment, as the internet is so dynamic. New competitors arrive often, especially in lucrative markets, so there is no time to sit back.
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| The 8 Things Every Small Business Should Know About SEO |
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by Nick Stamoulis, contributing writer to TalentZoo.com
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most effective way for small business owners to compete and survive in the marketplace because it makes it much easier for current and prospective clients to find your goods and services. These days, when people are looking for something, their first instinct is to use the Internet as it’s the fastest and easiest way to find what they need. Search Engine Optimization:
- Levels the Playing Field – SEO levels the playing field like no other form of marketing because well-written, search engine optimized web content can place your website above the sites of large corporations with much deeper pockets.
- Is Cost-Effective – Unlike expensive print and broadcast media marketing methods that may or may not achieve the intended results, a properly executed SEO marketing campaign is cost-effective because it delivers results 24/7/365. There are no deadlines or expiration dates and your SEO marketing continues to deliver on your investment long after traditional forms of marketing have been forgotten.
- Allows you to Take Advantage of Niche Opportunities – SEO allows you to highlight the unique things about your business that set you apart from your competition. Niche opportunities that other businesses have overlooked can be used to your advantage and help you outrank other companies in your field.
- Gets your Website Noticed by Your Target Audience – SEO makes it easier for the people who are looking for your goods and services to find you. Your target audience in online right now making purchasing decisions and if your site is easier to find, you have a much greater chance of getting your message across and increasing sales.
- Lets you React Quickly to Emerging Trends – SEO lets you react quickly to important trends in the marketplace that larger companies are slow to respond to. While they’re sitting in meeting after meeting, smaller, more nimble companies like yours can capitalize on the opportunity and respond quickly.
- Achieves Tangible Results – Through the use of web tools that track traffic to your site, your SEO consultant can provide flexible tracking reports that give you tangible evidence of the results of your SEO marketing. These reports can be customized to track a number of factors of your choosing which provide invaluable insight into how visitors found your site, how long they viewed your pages, the links they clicked on while there, and so on.
- Transforms your Website into a Dynamic Marketing Tool – Well-written optimized content creates energy about your goods and services and engages your target audience like no other form of marketing.
- Highlights the Unique Nature of Your Business – The things that separate you from your competition are precisely the things that attract clients and factor into their purchasing decisions. Professionally written SEO web content showcases these differences and builds the foundation for future success!
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