Tag: marketing

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PR

Offline-Online Promotion For Small Businesses – Part 1

Small businesses identified by the number of employees they have. The following are criteria of a small business:

  • financing for the business provided by one individual or only a few individuals;
  • business’s operations are geographically localized, except for its marketing function (may not hold true for online businesses, but nevertheless);
  • the number of employees in the business is usually fewer then hundred.

Small businesses in USA, according to Small Business Administration:

  • represent more then 99.7 percent of all employers;
  • employ more then half of all private-sector employees;
  • pay 44.5 percent of total US private payrolls;
  • generate between 60 and 80 percent of net new jobs annually;
  • produce 14 times more patents per employee then do large patenting firms.

Nevertheless, small businesses have very limited means of self-promotion, comparing to the big guys in the industry. However, just like big guys, they can promote themselves in fashions that are both affordable and efficient. For example, for local retailers an online promotion of their web site would not do any good.

Most of our clients are small businesses. They often share some insights on how offline promotion helps them save or make money. One of the ideas they came up with was to print address labels and mail remainders of their dealer promotion packages to the potential customers instead of dealers. Receiving an attractive custom-printed brochure, booklet or wall calendar can make all the difference for some. Printing of cheap address labels was made very affordable by online merchants and local print shops and company has already invested in printing those promotional packages anyway. Idea was a huge success, and such mailings became one of the favorite promotional tools of this company.

Categories
business zealus.com

WordPress or Joomla?

When choosing a Content Management system for your web site it is usually a good idea to ask yourself – what is the problem you are trying to solve?

Most people (as I noticed on several message boards) make same mistake – they try to figure out what software they need to make money online. “I want to create a community, what software do I need?”. First of all – what kind of community is it going to be? Writers? Photographers? Make-up artists? Everyone has a different requirement, and different level of knowledge. Photographers are a little easier to please, as they are used to complicated and cumbersome camera controls, but try to cater same interface to a community of models and make-up artists (same industry, after all) and you will be hit with an outcry for mercy.

Management 101: Before offering a service think – what is the problem the service is going to solve. If you have the answer to this question – you will find tools in no time.

Categories
sales zealus.com

Small business survival – 5 DON’Ts

During the course of creating e-Commerce web sites we get a lot of similar questions. This post contains five major DON’Ts for starting E-commerce entrepreneur. This is not, by any means, a concise guide, just answers to most commonly asked questions.

Don’t be afraid of Google, Yahoo and anyone else. It has been said numerous times – don’t think about search engines, think of your target audience. If you are in the business of selling widgets – write couple of good reviews on latest widgets, provide decent photos, build a reputation of a vendor who knows its widgets and not just sells stuff. Google likes good content as do your customers. One reason why I prefer to shop at Amazon and NewEgg – is because I can read reviews (including those of customers) and see lots of pictures.

Don’t be afraid of competition. Whatever you do (or decide to do) – there always will be a competition. Think of the ways you can do better then competition. Target niches, provide more information, stand out. If you sell what everyone else sells (like knock-offs, replicas and such) – be one step ahead, write a review, describe why people buy knock-offs, why yours are better then a shop next door.

Don’t forget to follow-up. This way your customer will know that you are serious seller, even if you sell one dollar widgets. Sending e-mail is as inexpensive as it could be. Even follow-up e-mails can be automated (schedule sending of an e-mail in your e-commerce system to your customers, 7 days upon successful finalizing of the order).

Don’t force your customer to register in order to check-out. Always offer a no-registration check-out option. You still be able to collect all the information about a customer you need, but you will save them a minute or two during checkout process and (this is more important) save them a hassle of remembering their password next time they are at your virtual door. They will register once they realize they return often enough.

Don’t overwhelm  your customers with all the current promotions and e-mails. Maintain a database of how many times you have e-mailed each customer. Try this trick: if you have sent out around seven promotions and a certain customer never visited any links from those e-mails – generate another e-mail that will ask the customer if he/she wants to unsubscribe from future e-mails. Unsubscribe automatically if no responce is given. Chances are hight that all your promotional correspondence ends up in Spam bin, so there is no reason to overload your servers or pay for e-mail delivery for this customer. On the other hand – it may alert customer and enact him/her to actually confirm subscription and look closer to your deals.