It may be the season for ghosts and goblins, but ghastly creatures aren’t the only things that can haunt a small business owner. Making any one of the seven common marketing mistakes below can have frightening consequences for your small business. Find out what you have to fear from these marketing mishaps and how to avoid them. Mistake 1. Not setting goals for your marketing efforts Whatever type of marketing…
Does your business rely on seasonal customers? Whether you own a surf school, a patio furniture store or an ice cream shop, you know how slow business can get during the off-season. Try these marketing ideas to keep customers engaged (and buying) all year long. Offer off-season specials. There’s a reason desert resorts slash prices when it’s super cold or hot. Reducing prices during the off-season is the easiest way…
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. For many small business owners, August’s steamy days bring a brief lull before things pick up again in the fall. That makes now a good time to catch up on some marketing activities you’ve been putting on the back burner. Here are 43 things you can do during your August downtime that will have a big impact come fall. Your Customers Schedule catch-up calls…
Back in the early 2000s, I was at a party when one of the guests mentioned he was hooked on podcasts. “Huh?” was the primary response, as few of us knew what he was even talking about. My, how things have changed. Today, nearly two-thirds of Americans are familiar with podcasts, according to the 2018 Infinite Dial Study, and 44 percent of Americans age 12 and older have listened to one. Consumers…
Customer testimonials are still effective marketing tools. Given Americans’ increasing reliance on others’ opinions when buying everything from lipstick to enterprise-level software, testimonials may be more important than ever. Here’s what you need to know to generate customer testimonials with maximum marketing impact. How to Create a Customer Testimonial Strategy The goal of customer testimonials is to help convince prospective customers to take the next step — in other words,…
You’ve probably heard of “brand advocates” who help promote products they use on social media. (Maybe you even have some online brand advocates of your own.) But did you realize that your business has brand advocates off-line as well? The concept of brand advocates has been around for decades under many different names. Ken Blanchard called them “raving fans;” Apple dubbed them “evangelists.” Essentially, the idea is the same: A…
What can your small business do differently in 2018 to boost the results of your marketing efforts? Here are seven marketing resolutions every entrepreneur should make for the coming year. 1. I resolve to build relationships with customers. Consumers and B2B buyers alike have seemingly endless options for purchasing almost any product or service they could possibly want. With so much “noise” out there, how can your small business hope…