Depending on the nature of your business, there’s a good chance that you rely on repeat business from the same customers, at least to some degree. That can have a big effect on choosing what marketing tools to use in order to grow your business, and how you use them. To begin with, it may be helpful to conduct some form of customer survey to see what works and doesn’t work for you, among your existing customer base. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new things in order to improve customer loyalty and profitability—remember, these are the people who keep your business going—but also be sure that you’re not discarding the things that make them loyal to you in the first place.

One good way to secure customer loyalty and learn a lot about how your customers like what you’re doing is to use a mobile text messaging platform, such as YouTextIt. Bear in mind that customers are often willing to give you their number and allow you to occasionally send them text message marketing, but only if there’s something in it for them. Particularly to get a text message marketing campaign off the ground, it’s best to offer some form of coupon or discount. For example, you could say that “every Monday this month, we’ll send subscribers a unique coupon code.” That will encourage people to sign up, and also to come back in once they get the coupon. Once that’s off the ground, you can use the messaging system to run promotions on certain products or services, or to let your customers know about changes that you’re making. YouTextIt’s second-to-none reporting will allow you to know how effective each of these campaigns are, and you can use that data as if it were a survey—without even asking your customers a single question.

The bottom line is that if you rely on repeat business, or you’re interested in creating some, YouTextIt is a powerful marketing tool that you can’t afford to ignore. Its versatility makes it ideal for a wide variety of applications (check out all the different businesses which use it), and the expertise we use in setting up the campaigns and helping you run them is so involved that it’s like having your own marketing department.

Every small business is a little different, but chances are if you’ve successfully run yours for long enough, you’ve learned what to expect in some areas. In particular, most businesses have a busy season, as well as slower seasons, which could vary greatly from business to business. You probably already plan your staffing and inventory around how busy you expect to be during a certain season, but what about your marketing?

When crafting a marketing campaign or a set of marketing tools such as a web site, we always try to focus on what the goal of the marketing campaign is. This sounds obvious—and it is—but we’ve found that it’s often so obvious that it gets overlooked, or taken for granted. It’s easy to think that because the goal of marketing is to increase sales, and you’re marketing, then you’re effectively working towards that goal. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the case.

When you stop to focus more tightly on your goals, you can begin to create more nuanced ones. For example, if your current marketing is enough to keep you busy during one season, perhaps the best way to help your business is to target your marketing and products toward the “off” season.

With the right focus, it could even become another busy season.

Selling your products online can be a daunting task, especially if you’ve never done it before. It can seem like an unwelcome distraction when you’re working hard to keep things moving smoothly off the web, and if you’re not the tech-savvy type, it can seem like an impossible hurdle to overcome. But at Find It Local 411, we’re all about helping our clients overcome seemingly impossible hurdles, and build their business in ways they didn’t even know they could.

Where to start

Depending on your needs and products, the easiest place to start could be putting your products (or even just the most popular ones) on the Find It Local 411 Marketplace. It’s a great introduction for those who want to get their feet wet selling online, and it’s easy to scale it up to sell your whole line of products there! Best of all, it’s completely free to set up an account. Check it out! When you’re ready to take it to the next level, we’re there for you again, with our complete suite of web design and development, plus a wide variety of marketing services to get your products and your brand out there.

Why you need to do it

We love helping businesses thrive locally, but that doesn’t mean that people everywhere shouldn’t be able to use and enjoy your great products. Also, we don’t have to tell you that sales in certain products and regions can fluctuate from time to time; wouldn’t it be nice to have sales someplace else pick up when your local sales take a dip? Better still, there could be entire markets for your product that you haven’t tapped yet, because they have no way to find you—until now, that is.

Whether you’re just starting out marketing your products online, thinking of re-vamping your store’s functionality, or marketing your products to a new audience, our online shopping, design, and marketing team can help you get your business to where you want it to be.

It’s a new year for you and your business, full of challenges and opportunities and surprises. As a new year begins, it’s a good time to sit back and reflect on the successes and failures of the past year, and chart the course for the year to come. Since at Find It Local 411 our expertise is in internet marketing, here are some common marketing mistakes to avoid making in 2012:

1. Ignoring your marketing needs. Because marketing is usually a separate activity from the rest of your business, it’s easy to drop it by the wayside when other concerns come up. Remember: if you’re too busy to keep up with your marketing needs, you can always ignore them. Just don’t expect to stay busy if you do.

2. Shooting in the dark. Ok, so you’ve got a healthy marketing budget put together, but you’re not seeing any results a few months in. How can this happen? Quite simply, there’s a lot of different ways to put your advertisements out there, and if you use the wrong one, you could be reaching the wrong audience, or no audience at all. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to develop an intelligent marketing strategy, if you know where to begin.

3. Assuming that what you’re doing now is as good as it gets. You may be doing well already, but it’s still a good idea to evaluate where you are, and what you could be doing better. Your customers are constantly changing the way they live, and the best ways to reach them and appeal to them are also changing.

4. Not trying to expand your horizons. There could be whole segments of business that you’re not reaching, because you’re not even trying to reach them, and it hasn’t even occurred to you that they’re out there. Think outside the box!

5. Sticking to what you know. (This can often go hand in hand with the other mistakes written above.) As an entrepreneur you’ve had to wear many hats on a daily basis, and probably do a lot of your own marketing work; but you could be ignoring some of the best opportunities, simply because they’re outside of your areas of expertise.

Whatever your marketing needs, Find It Local 411 is here to help. We’re determined to make sure that you know how effective your marketing efforts are, and how to find and reach the audience you need. With years of experience crafting and implementing marketing strategies for clients in a wide variety of industries, we’re confident that 2012 will be the year your marketing really takes flight.

Every company is in many ways unique, both in the composition of the people who work for it, and in the people that it serves, its customers. When devising a marketing strategy, there are two important factors to consider:

1. Who are you?

2. Who are your customers?

Who you are, as a business, can be broadly defined as the product you produce, and the way in which you deliver them to customers. As simple as it sounds, it’s important to go about answering these two questions as if you don’t already know the answer, because there’s a good chance that you don’t actually know the answers as well as you thought you did. With a small business, you may find upon closer examination (or you may know right away) that what you started out doing and how you had planned to do it has evolved to better meet the conditions of your market, and therefore that your initial line about who you are and what you do no longer applies. This isn’t a bad thing—an entrepreneur is nothing if not adaptive—but it is worth taking stock of. You’ll probably even find that you’ve been doing a lot of things right without even thinking about them.

Who your customers are is tricky, because again you may enter into the thought process with a number of potentially false preconceived notions about the answer. Perhaps the easiest mistake to make in crafting a marketing strategy, which could lead to the complete failure of the strategy, is to assume that your customers are coming from the same place that you are. This usually takes the form of assuming that they know something about your product that they don’t (but often, they’d love to).

You need to sort out, to the best of your abilities, the answers to both of these important questions, because otherwise you could end up getting your marketing in front of the wrong audience. Talk to Find It Local 411 about effectively finding the answers to these questions. We take the time to help our clients develop the strategies which will help them bring their products and customers together, and refine their marketing and sales processes.

Using social media to connect with your customers can be an incredibly powerful tool for bringing in business, and it should not be ignored. However, if implemented poorly, it can also be a waste of time and resources which could have been devoted to more effective marketing tools, so it’s highly important to do things right from the get-go. Here are a few guidelines for maximizing the potential of social media.

1. Integrate your social media with your other marketing tools. Your Facebook or Twitter page shouldn’t look generic; it should be an extension of your brand. Find It Local 411 can design you a page that will continue the unique look of your website, newsletters and print design. If you’re launching a new social media account, tell your customers about it in your other marketing! Your newsletters, mobile marketing, and blog should all simultaneously announce your foray into the social world. If you’re running a brick-and-mortar store, put a sign in the window. Your customers will love being in the know, provided you make it worth their while, which brings us to…

2. Sweeten the deal. In general, people don’t follow a business on Twitter or Facebook, or sign in on FourSquare just because they like being there (though that definitely helps); the generally accepted practice for social media is to reward the customers who follow you for their attention. You don’t have to break the bank or suddenly start selling your products below cost. A small promotion can go a long way when it comes to securing customer loyalty.

3. Make it fun. People have their social media accounts for fun. Sure, they might do business through them in some ways, but they still expect it to be an enjoyable experience, and they should. This can be helpful for you, too, because running a business can be stressful. Let running your social media account be fun for you, too. While this can be helpful for you, it can also make great business sense. Customers like dealing with people, even electronically. They respond to being treated genuinely, and with respect.
Getting into social media can be tricky, but it can also be highly rewarding. Find It Local 411 can help you make the most of this powerful marketing tool, and give you lots of advice on how to make it work for your specific business. Contact us. We love making your customers love you.

Marketing directly to your customers via mobile marketing might once have seemed cutting-edge or even gimmicky, and outside of the bounds of what would be reasonable for your business, but that time is long gone. Now, people are using their mobile phones for so many things that not having the ability to reach them through mobile messaging might as well mean not being able to reach them at all.

It Works

Snail mail often goes to the trash unopened, and emails can sit in the inbox waiting for days or even weeks for someone to get around to reading them, but 97% of text messages are opened and read. With the right call-to-action, this could be your most powerful tool for connecting with customers. Mobile marketing is also highly effective for customer surveys and voting, which can be a fun way to get customers to sign up for more updates, as well as a truly indispensable way to get feedback from them about what’s working and not working about your services.

It’s Personal

Mobile marketing is only a part of the full suite of services you get with Find it Local 411. From print advertising to your web site to email newsletters, these can all be integrated with an expertly-crafted mobile marketing campaign. As with all of our services, we never create a one-size-fits-all campaign. We start by asking what you need to accomplish, and help you decide the best process to get there.

With Find It Local 411, your customers will come to expect the high quality, personalized experience that you can always expect from us. We’re experts in helping you put on your best face, and we love helping you make your customers happy.

Direct email marketing can be a great way to reach a large customer base, to let them know of the exciting things you’re doing for them—if it’s done right. The bad news that if a mailer is poorly executed, or poorly timed, your message can fall on deaf ears, no matter how great it is. The good news is that Find It Local 411 has the expertise and technology to make direct email marketing one of the best things you can do for your business, and we’d love to put them to work for you.

With us, you get the complete package

From graphic design of your e-newsletters to data entry to helping you develop winning marketing strategies, Find It Local 411 is equipped to be your go-to resource for email marketing. Even if your email list currently exists as a stack of paper contact forms from a trade show, or business cards from a drawing, we can handle all of the details!

Results, results, results

We’re always focused on the bottom line for our clients, which is getting them the marketing services they need to grow their business. We’re focused on results just as much as you are, because we want to keep you as our client. We can use a number of metrics to help you keep track of how effective your email marketing campaigns have been, and work with you to develop new strategies and adapt to changing conditions in the local economy.

Email marketing can be a great tool for a wide variety of industries and business. Whether you’re an optometrist offering a special on eye exams, a restaurant letting customers know about your new location or menu items, or an online retailer offering a rotating set of weekly deals, Find It Local 411 has the tools you need to keep track of your customers, and keep them informed!

Ever get the feeling that your newsletters aren’t reaching your audience? Even when you have a large subscriber list, and you’re putting out great, informative content, sometimes your open rate can be low, and it can feel like you’re talking in a crowded room. Often, how you present your content can be as important as the content itself, because if you don’t get your subscribers’ attention, it won’t matter how informative and useful the information you have to convey is. At Find It Local 411, we’re experts at making sure that your newsletters stand out in a crowded inbox.

Focused on your goals

The first thing we consider when we’re beginning an email newsletter design is what your goal with the newsletter is. Are you promoting new services and products? Are you providing information as a perk to your members (thus showing them that they’re important to you)? Are you keeping people aware of growing trends? We help you to ensure that the key message, and any associated call to action, is front and center, so even if your readers skim the rest of the newsletter, they get the most important part of the message.

Putting on your best face

It’s important to us that no part of your messaging, from your web site to your social media presence to your e-newsletter is generic. It has to come as an extension of who you are as a business, and remain consistent with your overall identity. This overarching approach informs our visual design, meaning that your newsletter will look just as good as any part of your marketing. We can even include video content embedded directly into the email, so that you can address your audience in a more personal (and unique) way.

With Find It Local 411, your identity and your message are what’s important to us. We have the tools to help you reach your audience in the best way possible, and we love helping your business succeed.

You’ll hear a lot of discussion of marketing and advertising that focuses on how your ads and website look, or how catchy your tagline is, or what your call to action is, and these are all important aspects of a marketing campaign. Professional web design and a marketing campaign that focuses its efforts to where they are most needed are incredibly important. What is also important, and what is easy to overlook, is a relatively new (and increasingly important) marketing tool: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

What is SEO?

Simply put, SEO consists of an ongoing effort to make you more visible on the web, so that when someone searches for your business on using a search engine (like Google, Yahoo, or Bing), your business is in the top search results. Studies have shown that the vast majority of people who use search engines only click through to the first few results, so getting your site toward the top is crucial, and SEO is the process of increasing your site’s visibility to search engines, and on the web in general.

It Starts With Keywords

Let’s say you run a dry cleaning business called “Scrubbed Suits,” in Valparaiso. You want potential clients to find your business on search engines, but the majority of the time, they don’t know anything about you or your business. They’re not going to search for the name of your business, or your address. They’re going to search for “dry cleaning in Valparaiso,” or any number of other combinations of keywords, which are unique and user-generated. At Find It Local 411, we begin our SEO process by determining which keywords are valuable to your business, and who’s searching for them. We then integrate those keywords into your web identity, and make sure that search engines and their users are able to locate and use your site.

It’s About Traffic

Traffic to your web site is divided (generally) into four categories: direct traffic from users manually entering your web site’s url into their web browser, traffic from links to your site on other web sites, search traffic, and ad banner-generated traffic. Ad traffic is generally paid for on a per-click basis, and for some keywords (generally the most competitive) the cost per click can be very high, and getting the traffic your site needs could stack up quickly. AdWords (or other pay-per-click services) are often still a sound investment, but smart SEO is necessary for directing qualified organic traffic to your site, and can be a far more cost-effective way to draw a higher volume of traffic.

Chances are you’re already running an efficient business which provides excellent services to its customers. What you need now is to get out there and grow your business, and Find It Local 411 is there to help, with a full suite of services designed to raise your profile, and your sales.