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Marketing as a conversation with your customers

mobile-text-marketing

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.

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Posted on May 15th, 2012 at 10:00 am
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Economy Marketing, Small Business

The fine art of being yourself

happy-faceWhenever you’re engaging customers on behalf of your business, whether it’s in advertisements, on your website, on social media, or in person, it’s easy to try to change who you are, to try to be what you think the customer wants. In one sense, this is a good instinct—customers won’t click on an ad or engage in a sale that they don’t think will get them something they want—but if you find yourself doing this, you may be missing a few steps, trying to skip right to the end. Yes, customers want something from you, the same way you want something from them, but it’s important to remember that you’re not just pushing a product. In any business, to some extent you’re selling yourself. In the way that you deliver your products and promote them to your customers, you’re developing a brand.

Think about it this way: if your business is as successful as you want it to be, you could be doing this for the rest of your life. Are you going to be happy if you continue to work the way you are now? If you’re trying to change yourself depending on your audience, the answer is probably no. If you think that you can’t be genuine and still make the sales that you need, think again. If customers sense that you’re being genuine with them, and that your true excellence is coming through even in your social media and advertising, they’ll respond to that. (The other side of that coin is that if you’re not being genuinely who you are with them, they’ll notice that, too.)

Keep in mind, we’re not talking about being unprofessional, or talking about your personal life on your business’s social media, and we’re not discouraging putting your best foot forward—quite the opposite, in fact. What we do at Find It Local 411 is to try to find the best parts of your work and your brand, and to promote those and help you develop them.

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Posted on May 8th, 2012 at 10:00 am
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Small Business

Test your marketing smarts: ask your customers

client-meeting

In running a small business, there’s a good chance that you’ve developed a relationship with some of your clients, or you may even be getting the majority of your business or referrals from only a couple of sources, depending on the business you’re in. While it can be helpful to diversify, so that you’re not entirely dependent on one or a few clients, the good news if you’re in that situation is that you’ve gained their trust. They like you. If that’s the case it can be a good idea to use that rapport to ask your clients a few simple questions about what they like about you, how you present yourself, and how you can do better. If the relationship you have with them is good enough, they might be more than happy for the opportunity to chat with you over coffee, or at the very least respond to a few questions via email.

What you can gain from this exchange is twofold: first, you can learn more about how you’re meeting your existing clients’ needs, and get some ideas about how to improve that. Second, you can benefit from your client’s perspective, which could prove to be invaluable. In business, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of believing that others perceive you the way that you perceive yourself. If you trust someone enough to ask them for an honest assessment of your business and how you’re running it, that’s an extremely valuable connection.

If you’re not sure that you have the kind of one-on-one rapport with your customers that allows you to ask those kinds of questions, a healthy (although less helpful) alternative could be to construct a questionnaire to email to your customers. You could include it in your newsletter, or put out a link to it on social media. If you’re asking people to do something for nothing, it’s also a good idea to put them into a drawing for some kind of prize if they fill out the questionnaire. (Questionnaires are easy to create using Google Docs).

At Find It Local 411, we love using all the information available to help our clients put on their best face for their clients. Get in touch with us to find out how we can help you create your next marketing campaign.

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Posted on April 24th, 2012 at 10:00 am
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Small Business

Seasonal marketing strategies


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.

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Posted on April 10th, 2012 at 10:00 am
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Economy Marketing, Small Business

Building your business around your strengths: the value of specialization

When you’re running a small business, you’ll probably want to take any client who comes in, or any opportunity to expand your operations. While it can be good to get your foot in the door in a new opportunity, it’s also important to make sure that you don’t overextend yourself into areas in which you’re not at your most effective, and making compromises which diminish your brand. What do we mean by that?

In business, your brand is who you are. It’s how other people perceive you and your work. It’s not even necessarily something that you can absolutely control, but you do have responsibility for it. If you don’t take ownership of your brand, it’s easy for it to become an accidental, clumsy identity, or worse, something that your competitors define. If you’re always working to fill gaps and doing many things, there’s a good chance that you’re not bringing your true excellence to bear in any of them. Think about how that effects your brand: you’ll become known for being not very good. Maybe adaptable, maybe affordable, but not good.

From a business standpoint, it can be very difficult to find your niche, and really focus on doing only what you’re best at, especially because running a small business always involves being able to do many things well. The trick is to make sure that all of the things you do well are done only as complements, to support what you do excellently. If you’re too busy with what you do well, or worse yet, stuck doing what you do poorly, to be able to devote your best efforts to what you do excellently, then it’s time to rethink your business model, and perhaps bring on the right personnel to compliment your strengths.

When we craft internet marketing campaigns for our clients, we always work hard to get a sense of who our clients are and what they do best. In advertising, you sometimes only get one shot at getting your potential clients’ attention. You want to make sure of two things: first, that you’re working to attract the right kind of client, who needs what you do best, and second, that you’re actually focusing your marketing those strengths.

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Posted on March 14th, 2012 at 8:27 am
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Small Business
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