The top 5 marketing mistakes to avoid in 2012

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.

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Posted on January 4th, 2012 at 10:13 am

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Economy Marketing, Internet Marketing, Small Business

Choosing the right marketing solution

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.

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Posted on December 6th, 2011 at 12:01 pm

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Economy Marketing, Internet Marketing, Neighborhood Businesses, Small Business

A quick primer on social media promotions

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.

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Posted on November 29th, 2011 at 12:28 pm

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Economy Marketing, Internet Marketing

What to Look for in a Website Design

We’ve done enough web design for a broad spectrum of clients over the years that we’ve learned a lot about the process.

When you hire someone to build a professional web site for your business, it can be daunting to work out with your designer what you need from your site, how it should be presented, and how much it will cost. It’s even possible that when you begin the process, you don’t know exactly what you need out of a web site, or what realistic expectations should be moving forward. Fortunately, we’ve been through the process enough times that we know what questions to ask and what to tell a client to expect in terms of costs and deliverables. Here are a few things to look for in a site design that will hope you narrow in on what your priorities are.

1. A Good Site Will Focus on Your Strengths

If the majority of visitors to your site are going to be looking for your flagship product, they won’t want to click through three pages, or learn more about your brand before they can find it. The difference between telling a customer more after you’ve got their attention and making them work to find what they want could be the difference between a closed sale and a walkaway.

2. A Good Site Is Easy To Use

If done wrong, a site’s design and usability can be in conflict with each other at any given time. When that happens, it may not matter how good it looks if it’s not going to make the conversions your business needs. It may seem counter-intuitive, but making sure that the information on your web site is properly organized can be a lot of work, and it’s well worth the extra effort to make the finished product intuitive for users. At the end of the day, a site which doesn’t help you sell your products or services is a worthless site.

3. A Good Site Is Brand-Conscious

It’s important that you’re projecting the same image across platforms, from your social media pages to print advertising to your web site. This covers the copy which is written on the page, the visual look of the site, and the overall “feel” of the presentation. If you don’t have a good handle on what your unified brand is before you start the process of creating a web site, that’s worth mentioning to your designer. We’ll happily help you develop and hone your branding while working on your site.

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The top 5 marketing mistakes to avoid in 2012