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.

Whenever 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.

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.

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.

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.

For some entrepreneurs, getting involved on social media like facebook or twitter is second nature. If you’re the kind of person for whom sharing across platforms and engaging others in conversations on social media is one of the most fun parts of running your business, then here’s some homework for you: come up with a plan. How can you leverage your connections and your natural talents to meet your business goals? It’s all too easy to get into a pattern where you’re spending a lot of time engaging in social media, and you’re making a lot of what seem like good connections, but it’s not doing anything for your sales. What are you doing wrong?

Start to focus on process

Often, the sales process is a complex one. There aren’t just the two steps of “someone finds you, then they purchase your product.” (If only it were that simple.) You need to think through what the sales process is for your particular product, and how your marketing and social media endeavors are feeding in to that process. Unfortunately, you may find that the two aren’t at all related, in which case you’re going to need to make some serious adjustments, in order to make your social media interactions worthwhile.

Be realistic - use numbers!

If your social media interactions aren’t leading directly to sales, that’s not necessarily a reason to switch things up, but you have to know what you’re actually doing. From an SEO standpoint, your conversations could be driving traffic, which could in turn lead to increased visibility on search engines, but you need to either have the expertise to track these connections, or hire someone who does. At Find it Local 411, our SEO services help to track what is considered a “conversion” or a successful interaction, and to distinguish that from a social media profile which just generates noise, and develop strategies to optimize your processes.

The difference between a useful conversation and noise is all the difference in the world.

As an entrepreneur, you have to fulfill several different roles, just in the course of a “normal” workday. From making sure your accounting and taxes are up-to-date to ordering your supplies to keeping your customers abreast of how their project is progressing, it’s easy to lose track of the basic essence of who you are and what you do. That’s where we, as marketing consultants can provide some of our most valuable services. When we construct a campaign to market your business, we always keep in mind the value proposition we’re making to the end customer: who you are, and what you can do to make their lives better. This is what makes a good brand stand out, whether you’re dealing with a local or an international market. Think of your favorite brands, that you use every day or week. Maybe they’re your car’s manufacturer, or your favorite downtown café. What do they have in common?

Chances are, it’s the ability to stand out. This isn’t an accident. Of course, everyone wants to stand out, but for those who truly do, it’s intentional, and well thought-out. Unfortunately, making great products is seldom sufficient for this. You need to tell people why and how your product is great, and you have to do so almost without them even realizing it. Not that you’re trying to fool anyone: you really are trying to let them know that your products are great. However, people don’t want to sit and listen to a sales pitch just to make a preliminary decision. They don’t want every advertisement they see to take them 2 minutes to peruse, and if it does, they’ll ignore them.

At Find It Local 411, we want to help you focus your marketing efforts around the things that make you special. Part of the process is to discuss with you a clear vision of how to present yourself, what you’ve done well for your current customers, and how you can do the same for new customers. We use this information to determine everything about our tailor-made marketing campaigns, from logo and identity design to web design and print advertising. Let us help you put on your best face.

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.

You’ve been here before: you keep wanting to budget the time and funds necessary to really market your business, to finally develop the niche you want to work in with the clientele you want, and make the move from cash flow neutral to cash flow positive. You keep wanting to strategize and more fully develop your business. But just taking whatever clients you can get in order to pay the bills—and working long hours to make short-term project deadlines—always seem to take precedence.

Fortunately, 2012 can be the year that you finally start to take your business in the direction you want it to go. The first step is to dedicate the time—just a few hours—to sit down, maybe with your business partner or a few of your closest associates, and determine where you want your business to be. Obviously, it’s important to set realistic expectations, and determine concrete steps from where you are to where you want to be.

Next, talk to us at Find It Local 411, and find about what we can do for you. It’s important to us that we help you put your best foot forward in your marketing and branding, whether we’re starting with a complete re-brand, or breathing new life into an ongoing campaign.