Sales and Marketing
Pinterest Tips for Small Business
For a small business owner, there’s no marketing like word-of-mouth marketing. When your customers are talking about your business with their friends, and bringing new customers to you, that is the most effective form of advertising—and the cheapest! And social media have the potential to function like word-of-mouth advertising on steroids.
Creating Top of Mind Awareness
As a small business entrepreneur, your goal is always to find more customers. But when you are marketing your company and developing your business’s brand, you can’t just think about the short term and immediate effects; you have to consider the long term, too.
Building a Brand: How Three Successful Sites Did It
At the beginning of the year, AG Beat released a very cool list of 60 brands to watch during 2012. Not all of their predictions were correct—KeepSum, which many thought would be the Groupon of real estate, has been offline for a few months now—but many of them were spot on. Three in particular—OpenCongress, Klout, and Pinterest—did so well during 2012 that they have now become household names. But what did they do differently than the other 57 brands, and how did they do it? What stars aligned to bring these three to the limelight?
3 Simple Steps to Maintaining a Successful Company Blog
Chances are pretty high that if you run your own company, it probably has its own blog that more often than not serves as a reflection of the business itself. A company blog shows readers what sort of business you’re running and gives them an inside look at just how you run things. As such, the company blog develops a voice all on its own that’s often pretty conversational as well as informational, so it’s important that your customers are finding the answers to the questions that they have and keep coming back for more with your blog.
Marketing Help from Your Vendors
You need every marketing edge you can get. An oft-overlooked opportunity is using your vendors to fuel business growth. While you’re already getting services of course, you can get more if you’re willing to pay more and incentivize your vendors to help you.
How to Write Ads
It’s easy to say you want to put together an ad—but it’s a lot harder to write a compelling one that customers will remember. You might not think of yourself as a great writer, but by following some basic guidelines, you can create effective ad copy.
The Marketing Plan: Essential Elements
Have you thought about your marketing plan? To compete in a crowded marketplace, you have to go in with a plan that you’ve thought about and put together carefully and intentionally. No matter what stage your business is at, you should have a plan for your marketing efforts.
How Can I Get Free Local Publicity for My Business?
You can’t afford a Super Bowl ad for your small business, but that doesn’t mean you’re shut out of the media. You can take advantage of free local publicity to bring in new customers and build a trustworthy brand that people believe in.
Educate Your Customers
It may sound strange, but educating your customers should be the centerpiece of your marketing strategy. It’s one of the best ways to increase sales and turn people into long-term customers. We all like to do business with people we trust, and sharing relevant knowledge builds trust quickly.
The Brand of You
Everyone talks about brand. But in a small business, the most important brand you can build is the brand of you. All the little details of how you run your business will communicate your brand to customers, much more than the things you say your brand is. That brand is you.
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