Email Marketing is Dead!

by | Feb 19, 2013 | Marketing

Email Marketing is Dead!

email marketingAnd other untruths about small business marketing that may be keeping your local small business from prosperity. It’s true, email marketing is easy and cheap. But that doesn’t mean that you should be shoving it at the In Box of every email address you can get your hands on.

Because that my friends is SPAMMING which is icky and frowned upon by most civilized people.

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Visual Learners and #Pinterest Marketing

by | Jan 29, 2013 | Communications

Visual Learners Rejoice!

 

visual learnersOr maybe we should say visual learners have a choice. Either way, I have long been intrigued by the concept that there are different types of learners. I’m not sure that teachers knew, or necessarily cared, about that when I was in school a million years ago. It was more of a one size fits all approach to learning then.

But having seen all of my own children navigate through grammar school at this point, it’s obvious that the studies are telling us something. The implications of the fact that there are multiple types of intelligence and various styles of learning need to be taken into account when we communicate.

Imagine the impact this could have on your business marketing. If I told you that it was a fact, approximately 65% of the population are visual learners, what would that mean to you?

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Sponsorships

Sponsorships

by | Dec 11, 2012 | Marketing

Sponsorships: To Show or Not To Show – that is the question.

SponsorshipsSponsorships are a great way to grow your business but you have to be ready. And you have to analyze the opportunity in the right light to determine if any given sponsorship is worth your business marketing dollars. Every piece of marketing that you do should have a strategic purpose and plan to maximize return on that investment. Sponsorships are no exception.

Here are 7 business marketing tips to help you get the most out of your sponsorships.

  1. Local Sponsorships – According to Jeff Slutsky, author of No B.S. Grassroots Marketing: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Take No Prisoners  Guide To Growing Sales And Profits of Local Small Businesses [Man that title is incredibly long but a great book], “Most sponsorship money is a total waste.” Here is why Jeff makes that statement. At the local level, many sponsorships are done for some worthy local cause like Little League or a Walk-a-thon. These opportunities may more appropriately belong in your charity budget, not your marketing budget. Unless this type of opportunity directly targets your ideal market, it’s not worth it.
  2. Promotional Products – These are the “junkareel” as my father-in-law calls them, that you get bombarded with everywhere. They should always be (though sometimes aren’t which is a mistake) imprinted with the business or brand name that is giving them away. These items truly are junk unless they are tied to sponsorships in some way that makes the recipient remember your business. Don’t give me a flashlight if you sell flowers. Give me a packet of sunflower seeds, watering can (suitably imprinted with your company name)  and directions on how to plant and grow them this summer. Then run a contest in August on your social media where customers post photos of their sunflowers and pick a winner for some prize. Be creative – get it? Make them remember you and push them back online to interact.
  3. Business Trade Shows – These range from small events at the local mall or grocery store to county or regional events up to the larger national and annual events. Price tags rise with the size. The first thing you have to consider is the target market. Will your ideal customers be attending? At the local level, if your customers will be at the show, you may want to consider participating even if your business doesn’t fit the show. It’s okay for the flower shop to have a table at the Chocolate Expo if their ideal market will be there. It’s about exposure to the market.
  4. National Trade Shows – This can get expensive, especially if they are in big convention centers where you have the extra costs of union workers and their rules. You may need an electrician to bring power to your booth, movers to take your stuff from the loading dock to the booth location and more. Don’t forget the booth itself. The bigger the show, the more important your booth’s look and feel in order to stand out. Do a detailed budget and make sure to research all the extra costs associated with the location and don’t forget staffing costs. It might be an opportunity that could launch your business to the next level, but you must budget and plan.
  5. Speaking Engagements – Speaking at an event is a great opportunity to get in front of your target market and other thought leaders. At the small shows, you can volunteer and probably speak for free. The larger national shows may offer the opportunity to speak for a fee. This is an expense that is worth it if you have planned carefully how to leverage the interest your business will receive as a result.
  6. Breakout Sessions– If speaking isn’t your thing, you may want to consider sponsoring someone else to speak. But you must make sure that the speaker is interesting enough to hold the audience’s attention and offers relevant information that your target market will appreciate. This is an opportunity to be helpful and relevant to your clients, not to put them to sleep.
  7. Follow Up – Here is where the whole idea of sponsorships breaks down. It’s in the follow up. You have spent all the time and money making sure your promotional products are right, your ideal market will be out in force, you or your surrogate speaker are engaging and relevant, everyone remembers you and your business and life couldn’t be better. Right? Not if you aren’t ready to follow up afterwards. The entire follow up system has to be reasoned out and in place before you ever agree to a sponsorship opportunity. Follow up is where the magic truly happens and where you get your return on investment.

My local business is making the leap to national sponsorships in April 2013 and we are excited about it.

ikalynn.com will have a booth at the annual Be The Change event in Orlando which brings around 1000 of my ideal clients, entrepreneurs and business owners over the age of 40,  together to learn about starting or growing a business. These are my people and I’m excited by the possibilities of sponsorships in my business.

Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday

by | Nov 27, 2012 | Marketing

Cyber MondayFrom Black Friday to Cyber Monday – The Sales are On!

I’m sure you’ve all heard of black Friday and cyber Monday. Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving as we call it here in the United States. According to Wikipedia, the term was coined in Philadelphia. So many US companies would give their employees the Friday after Thanksgiving off, that it caused a massive and usually disruptive surge in vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the city of brotherly love. The term Black Friday was used publicly in 1961 in Philly, and was not a term of endearment used by the police force there, because of the inevitable disruptions that happened. But eventually, the term began to see a broader use around the country circa 1975, along the lines of shopping and shopping sprees that would occur because so many people didn’t have to go to work that day. Now, I had always heard that the name happened because it’s the day that US retailers head back into “the black” or into profit on the balance sheet. Some retailers generate all of their profit for the year during the Christmas shopping season, which officially begins on Black Friday. But no matter how the name came about, it stuck. So if you have successfully survived Black Friday intact, I commend you.

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Pervasive Communication

Pervasive Communication

by | Nov 20, 2012 | Communications

Pervasive CommunicationPervasive communication is the fancy pants way of labeling CHAOS in communications. Maybe that’s not entirely fair. You see the Internet has given us access to the world’s largest water cooler. Anyone who has been around the water cooler a couple of times knows, that the conversation is often scattered and quick — non-linear — bits and pieces of the bigger communications picture.

While older generations perfected direct communication through sharing written language and spoken language, culture has changed to the point where those same generations may not even recognize communication as we use it today.

Let’s take my favorite social media – Twitter – as an example of the pervasive communication phenomenon.

Twitter is a social media platform that was based on SMS texting technology. That technology was limited to 140 characters of text that could be sent in one message. Only having 140 characters severely limits your ability to write in complete sentences and get your point across.

Let’s try an example: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. ” This famous opening to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is 30 words and 175 characters (yes spaces do count).

Now if Lincoln were to tweet this same sentence on Twitter, it might go something like this: “87yrs ago the USA was born – liberty and equality for ALL! TY forefathers. You ROCK!” which is only 84 characters leaving Lincoln’s followers 56 characters to comment during a retweet.

Lincoln was engaged in traditional written and verbal communication that was heard live on November 19, 1863 by approximately 15,000 people and reported by newspapers around the United States the days following,  increasing the audience substantially. By today’s standards, based on Barack Obama’s Twitter following, Lincoln would have had upwards of 4 Million followers in 1863. His tweet could have potentially been seen, in real time, by 267 times the original 15,000 people.

That’s just one way pervasive communication has changed our language and the reach of that language.

Pervasive Communication is not a death knell.

Just because our communications practices have become more chaotic and non-linear does not mean they’re not effective. It also doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore the methods. They are imperfect and certainly not as beautiful as the Gettysburg Address, but they occur in greater quantity in more places than we ever imagined. And that is an opportunity.

Your strategy can be simple. Start by listening to what and where your ideal customers and clients are having conversation. There is a search function built in to all social media platforms. Google Alerts can help you set up other ways of keeping tabs on your business name or your personal name.

My recent guest on ACT LOCAL Marketing, Fred McClimans, encouraged businesses to simply monitor social media for their name and respond when mentioned. That’s really simple while keeping your business on top of things in the eyes of an increasingly savvy pervasive communication inspired public. Fred also mentioned how online is THE place where word of mouth escalates dramatically. “Word of mouth is dominant,” he states.

Word of mouth definitely carries a lot of weight with consumers. Pervasive communication has made word of mouth easy to spread. Bad word of mouth will move like a virus through the online world, but good word of mouth moves fast too. Much faster than traditional face-to-face local communication mediums.

Rather than peg pervasive communication as the ubiquitous (I just love that word) sludge gumming up the wheels of communications, see it as an opportunity to engage with your clients, customers, vendors and employees on their terms. Don’t be the last one to take this new style of communication seriously, because that’s asking to be left behind. Or as our good friend Abe Lincoln said, “Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”

 

Thanks to @fredmcclimans for his thoughts on pervasive communication, 11-19-2012 on ACT LOCAL Marketing.