23 Sep 07 Use Twitter to tell customers about sales in your business.
If you know your customers and have a their contact info Twitter may be a great way to tell them about new items and sales in your store.
Twitter is a free service designed to let you stay in touch with friends (customers) no matter where or what they are doing. The way Twitter works is you send a message from your cell phone or computer and Twitter sends it out to your list of friends and posts the message to your Twitter page.
SOme of the compaies that have implement a Twitter stragey to increase sales include Amazon.com, Orbitbooks and more. Even if you don’t have a website Twitter can be used to tell you customers what is going on in your business.
So here is how Twitter would work for your friends(Customers). Let’s say you sell special womens bags and you have a group of customers that want to know about when new products come in or you have a sale. You invite your customers to receive special information from your business and collect their contact information. Then when you have a sale or special info you want people to know about you can use Twitter to send the message to the customers cell phone via a text message.
This is just another way way your business can use the Internet to find new customers and tell existing customers about exciting events, products and specials.
Dedicated to your success
13 Sep 07 The Key to Business Success is in the Data
Today, I watched on CNBC a show called “The Age of Wal-Mart”. The story focused on the successes of Wal-Mart, what they do to be successfull, what data they track, what they know about their customers and more. The story got me to thinking about how a small business coluld use similar technology to get the same data and grow their businesses.
One of the most obvious success technologies Wal-Mart uses is knowing their customer. Here’s what I mean. When you buy from Wal-Mart. they keep you receipt transaction for two years and analyze that data to see what the trends are for a particular product. You could do the same thing in your business if you use a POS (Point of Sale) System in your business and collected the same data.
As importantly Wal-Mart knows alot about how their marketing works. Now grant you, Wal-Mart has tons of money to track this information and pay people to compile and analyze this data, but with a small change in marketing you could do they same by using automated systems.
For example, when you create any marketing material, insted of driving the customer to the phone or the store, drive the customer to a landing page on your website. This landing page should be specifically tailored to this product and shoudl allow the customer to enter their contact information so you can continue to market to them.
This use of offline marketing drives traffic to an online system that can be connected to free software that tracks all types of data. This is truly Wal-Martesque.
BY driving customers form an offline ad to an online collection device (webpage) you can use a free product like Google Analytics to track all types of data about your customers.
For example, you can track where your customer lives by using the geographic tracking in Google Analytics. You can track what they like about your data, how long the customer spends reading your markeeting material and even if they want more information.
Combine this data with the data from your POS system and you’ve got Wal-Mart success. You can fine tune your marketing message, test pricing, test messages, test shipping or coupons and more. You can track the entire process all they way thru the sale.
This is the secret to Wal-Mart’s success and you should use similar systems to increase your businesses chances for success
Dedicated to your success
09 Mar 07 News Marketing WIll Help Grow Your Profits
Last week the stock market crashed and one of my clients released a video on Youtube.com explaining what happened and MARKETING his services. My client sent an email to prospects in his list that had not purchased his service and from that email online he found 4 clients at $7500 each for a total of $30,000 just from an email explaing what happened after the market crash.
Did you make an extra $30k last week? Did you take advantage of a news event to explain what happened and why now was the time to buy your product or service? If not, why not?
News events are an ideal opportunity to reach out to previous customers, prospects or to upsell to existing clients and video is an ideal medium to use. Think about it, why not use the same medium that the news uses (TV) to market to your customers. Hear are suggestions for News Marketing from Last Week.
“Just because the Market Crashed doesn’t Mean that Your Diet Should Crash”
“Diversity Your Investments with Gold”
“Soothe Your Angst from the Crash with a Great Steak Dinner”
Ok, so maybe the headlines need some work, but the point is that you could have easily created a video explaining what happened (just read an article) and why your product or service will help fix the problem. You could use this strategy for every type of event.
Here are some upcoming news events to plan for;
March Madness
Baseball Opening
Hockey Finals
BasketBall Finals
Flower Show (Spring Festivals)
First day of Summer
Each one creates an opportunity to talk to your clients and prospects take advantage of them.
Dedicated to your success
Dwight
04 Mar 07 Are your Offline Marketing Strategies Working?
Are you advertising your business on television, radio, newspaper or some other media and wondering if that media is producing results. Do you wonder if the thousand of dollars you spend marketing your business is actually bringing in more money than you spend. Has your Yellow Page sales person gotten you to spend more and more money without providing EVIDENCE of results.
If your answer to any of these question is YES, than just one change to your marketing message will fix the problem. Just by pointing your offline marketing prospect to an online landing page will help you determine if the money you are spending offline is actually working. You can actually tell if the message is working for each media and adjust your spending decisions accordingly.
Thats one of the benefit of offline to online marketing. Just by pointing your prospect to an online landing page for each media will help you tell which media is actually working.
Now, I don’t mean sending your prospect to your website where they have to hunt and peck around to find the information they need, I mean sending them to a targeted specially created webpage that is focused specifically on the offline marketing message. Just that one change to your marketing will give you the tools to prove the effectiveness of your marketing and PROVE to the offline sales person the effectiveness of their media.
If you want to learn more about how to create targeted landing pages targeted that will prove if your offline marketing is actually working, complete the form below for a free 15 minute consultation about Offline to Online Marketing Strategies.
