Marketing and Advertising for Small Businesses

It’s not easy being a small business owner in the 21st century. Large corporations are present in nearly every small American town, often offering lower deals than a small business owner could even imagine. However, small businesses still have shot — not only of surviving, but a shot at being incredibly successful in this cut-throat world. By utilizing the most recent methods of advertising, such as social media outlets, combined with the tried and true traditional advertising methods, small businesses can cater their marketing plans to suit their needs, their clients and their budgets. This will give them a greater presence in the community, while subsequently growing their small business into a success.

Utilize Social Media
One of the best ways for small businesses to advertise their services and shops right now is to utilize the many benefits of social media. All small businesses should have a Facebook page where they can connect with their customers, offering them insight onto the latest happenings with your business — including sales, promotions and the hot new products you have available or a great new service you are offering. Customers are shown to enjoy connecting with their favorite local businesses online, because it is a quick reminder to them about the latest sales and specials. One of the biggest benefits of social media is that the accounts are free — be it a Facebook or a Twitter account, your small business literally cannot afford not to have a presence in the social media world that is dominating today’s society like nothing else.

Take Advantage of Shop Local Campaigns
While corporate stores and global companies dominate the business world today, there has certainly been a movement by much of the American public to get back to basics and begin shopping local again. In the midst of economic hardship, Americans have learned that the important thing is to keep the local economy moving. Small businesses should take advantage of shop local campaigns, and promote their businesses within those campaigns. Be sure to offer specials and deals on Small Business Saturday — which now takes place every year during the busiest shopping weekend, the weekend following Thanksgiving and the kick-off to the Christmas shopping season. Customers who are interested in finding out more about the local shops in their town will easily be able to find, locate and subsequently shop at your store or utilize your services. It’s a great way to connect with the local people in your town who care about their local economy.

Include Offers in Traditional Ads
While there are plenty of ways to advertise in the digital realm, small businesses today shouldn’t ignore the staying power of traditional advertising methods. Consider taking out advertising space in local newspapers, magazines and other print publications, and in addition, advertise online as well. The best way for small businesses to have successful traditional advertising campaigns is to include offers within the advertisement itself. Draw people into your store with a great deal or special on a product that they can get at a larger store, but not at this great price. This is an easy way to get a response from potential customers, and bring them into your brick and mortar location. Once they are there, they will likely spend some time looking at your other products and services which will most likely bring in even more revenue than you originally anticipated.

Trim Your Ads
While it is important to run advertising and marketing campaigns in local print publications and on local websites, it is not always the size of the advertisement that matters in the end. Often, repetition and the number of times a customer sees your ad is more effective and important when it comes to a successful small business advertising campaign. Instead of purchasing one or two large ads that will only run once, consider purchasing a smaller ad space but having that same advertisement run multiple times. Customers will continue to see your advertisement on a weekly or daily basis, which is more likely to keep you and your business at the forefront of their minds. The more they see the ad, the more likely they will be to stop by and check out that great offer you have been promoting for several weeks.

Network with Other Small Businesses
Another way to have a successful advertising campaign as a small business is to team up with the other small business owners in your area. Consider running a joint deal, or a special sales day on your block, so that customers can get the most out of their time and money when they head to your shop downtown. If you are a florist, consider running a deal with the local bakery — perhaps a Valentine’s Day special where guys can get their special ladies a great treat and a beautiful bouquet for one low price. If there are several local businesses in your area, consider holding a special sales day — perhaps one Saturday a month all the businesses could run a 30 percent off coupon, or hold special sales and deals throughout the day. Customers are more likely to come visit when they can take care of several things at once.

Reward Returning Customers
Your returning customers and regulars are your most valuable asset as a small business. Consider sending them the latest promotions a bit earlier than the rest of the public will receive them, perhaps by starting up an e-mail list. Another way to reward existing customers is to offer promotional cards that reward frequent buyers. If you are a local coffee shop, offer customers a free card where they can buy ten drinks and get the 11th drink free. This will keep them returning in order to reap their rewards, and also benefits them as a regular customer. Regular customers are the ones who will be passing along recommendations for your business by word of mouth, so it is important to take care of them and offer them the excellent customer service that they deserve.

Running a small business might be one of the hardest jobs in the world, but it can also be one of the most rewarding. Business owners need to know how to get the biggest bang for their advertising dollars, and also need to know how to locate their target customers. By utilizing more modern methods of advertising without forgetting the importance of traditional methods, small business owners will be far more likely to have successful advertising campaigns. These campaigns will ensure that they get to continue to do what they love for many years to come.

When “Sassy” Marketing Goes Wrong

If you want your marketing to work, you have to know who you’re selling to and then focus on that target in presenting your offer and building your copy.

This is Marketing 101, but the marketers at JC Penney seemed to have missed that class.

This fall, as parents everywhere tried to find affordable school clothes for their kids, JC Penney decided to introduce a borderline offensive t-shirt line aimed at girls aged 7-16. The t-shirts had pithy sayings meant to be funny or ironic, but were way off the mark.

Among the sayings on the t-shirt were “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.”

And the advertisement for that t-shirt online was, “Who has time for homework when there’s a new Justin Bieber album out? She’ll love this tee that’s just as cute and sassy as she is.”

Was that copy aimed at all the mothers and fathers who are buying clothes for their little girls? Because if it was it missed its mark by a mile!

JC Penney was deluged by complaints about the t-shirt line and made the decision to discontinue selling it, but the damage has already been done.

Thousands of people signed an online petition to tell JC Penney to “Stop selling clothing with sexist messages for girls.”

And there is little question that JC Penney lost more than a few customers who were offended.

We’ve all seen ironic t-shirts that say things we might not say in public. In fact, companies like Achtung T Shirt make their profits with these types of shirts. But the difference is that most of these T-Shirts are sold to adults or at least people over the age of 18, not children. And they generally aren’t sold at a family-friendly store like JC Penney.

Reinforcing the attitude that girls are just “cute and sassy” and more interested in Justin Beiber than doing their homework diminishes both girls and women and in the end, may diminish JC Penney’s bottom line.

Is this the message a family-friendly store wants to send to daughters, nieces, sisters and girls everywhere? Would you want your daughter to wear this shirt, no matter how old she is?

Marketing is More than an Elephant Carrying a Sign

In the world of marketing, many different terms get tossed around and when they are, the real meanings can get lost.

For too many people, when they think of marketing, they think strictly of advertising and promoting their business, but marketing means much more than that.

About marketing, Peter Drucker said, “… it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of the final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view… marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise.”

There’s a well-known metaphor that makes this idea particularly clear.

The metaphor goes like this, “If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying ‘Circus Coming to the Fairground Saturday,’ that’s advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed, that’s publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations. If the town’s citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions, and ultimately they spend a lot of money at the circus, that’s sales.”

All of these factors are parts of the marketing of the circus, not just the advertising and promotion.

Is this how you view the marketing of your business or are you more concerned with costly advertising and promotions?

The best marketing strategy for any business is outstanding customer service that leads to happy customers and future referrals. This has nothing to do with what we consider advertising, but there’s no better advertisement for your business than a happy customer who tells their friends about your business.

So when it comes to your marketing strategy, are you looking at it from the final result, your customer’s point of view? Or are you wasting time painting signs and walking an elephant down the street to nowhere?

Does the Power of Your Vision Make You A Leader?

It’s been 100 years since he was born and more than a decade since he died, but David Ogilvy continues to influence the world we live in. Ogilvy was known as “The Father of Advertising” and he pushed the boundaries like no other advertising executive before him.

What Ogilvy did was make advertising interesting. He said, “You cannot bore people into buying your product, you can only interest them in buying it,” and if you look at advertising that came before Ogilvy, you can see that was a groundbreaking notion when Ogilvy came up with it.

But Ogilvy isn’t just an important figure because of the impact he made on advertising, he remains important because of the impact he made as a leader, not only changing the face of the industry he worked in, but leading the change of the society around him.

Much has been written about Ogilvy and he was, depending on what you read, a snob, a perfectionist, rude, impatient and even egotistical. No, Mr. Ogilvy was not a perfect person. But he was, in many ways, a perfect leader.

Ogilvy knew that if your ideas were powerful enough, you must lead, and his ideas were not only powerful, they were groundbreaking. He made advertising smarter, more interesting and something people would talk about at the dinner table.

Along the way he obsessed on details, he was certain about virtually everything and he had a huge ego, but he was also the smartest person in the room (when it came to advertising) and everyone knew it.

The people who worked for him may not have liked him, but they loved him because they respected him, his knowledge and his vision.

What does Ogilvy’s story tell us about what it takes to make a leader? Often leaders aren’t made, instead people become leaders because they are in the best position to lead, whether it’s because they have the most knowledge, passion or attention to detail.

David Ogilvy had all three of those qualities and whether the people that worked for him liked him or not was irrelevant. They trusted his vision and his ability and their commitment showed in the work produced by Ogilvy’s agency over the years.

So if you are in a leadership position, ask yourself, does your team follow you because of your vision and ability, or because you sign the checks?

Jay-Z, The Oprah of Rap

My quest to read every book even remotely related to business continues with my latest, Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went From Street Corner to Corner Office by Zack O’Malley Greenburg.

This book isn’t a self-serving autobiography but a no-holds barred look at what took Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter from a poor kid growing up in the projects of New York City to one of the most well-known entrepreneurs and artists in the world.

Jay-Z didn’t help the author write this book, so it doesn’t necessarily paint a positive image of him, but it does present a very interesting take on the world of business and entertainment and how they are intertwined.

Like any budding entrepreneur, Jay-Z needed some advice and found words that were worth a fortune from former business partner and fellow entrepreneur Damon Dash.

In the book, Dash explains to Greenburg that he shared two important principles with Jay-Z, don’t let other people make money off you and don’t give free advertising based on your lifestyle.

The second point is very interesting because, for years rappers talked about driving Escalades, drinking Cristal or wearing a Rolex, but they weren’t getting paid for it. Dash and Jay-Z were able to find a way to use that image for their own gain and, in the process, changed the way entertainers exploited their image for profit.

In other words, Jay-Z has been able to leverage his “what’s in it for me” attitude to help build his image and brand.

Jay-Z has said, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man” and armed with those two principles he made that a very true statement.

“As much as Martha Stewart or Oprah, [Jay-Z] has turned himself into a lifestyle. You can wake up to the local radio station playing Jay-Z’s latest hit, spritz yourself with his 9IX cologne, slip on a pair of his Rocawear jeans, lace up your Reebok S. Carter sneakers, catch a Nets basketball game and grab dinner at The Spotted Pig before heading to an evening performance of the Jay-Z-backed Broadway musical Fela! and a nightcap at his 40/40 Club,” Greenburg says.

It’s clear from that list of holdings, Jay-Z has diversified to touch as many areas of pop culture as possible and he’s constantly looking for new ways to exploit his image for personal gain, a very strong marketing strategy these days.

Will Targeted Television Advertising Change Your Marketing

In today’s landscape, businesses need to find ways to reach the exact customer base they need. This type of marketing, based on segmenting, has been a boom to direct mail and internet marketing to name two, but has been a challenge for mass media marketing.

In many markets, it’s simply too expensive for small and medium sized businesses to advertise on television. It’s hard to measure the return on these campaigns and with all the channels available to television watchers, commercials are often passed right over or never seen in the first place, limiting any return on investment.

But it seems like all that is about to change.

Beginning with DirecTV toward the end of 2010, the move is being made to target television advertising, making it more effective.

Thanks to those boxes that change the channels on your television, providers and advertisers can now see exactly what you are watching and when you are watching it. And with that information, they can tailor a specific advertising campaign for you.

But what makes this idea even more incredible is that the technology exists for people to get different commercials based on what they are interested in. So in one house, while watching American Idol, one family might see ads for new cars, while another family might see ads for toys at exactly the same time.

Imagine if you could reach just your ideal customer base through televised advertising? Do you think it could make a major impact on your lead generation and your business in general?

For years talented marketers have known the key to successful campaigns was reaching the target market with ideas that called that market to action.

Now it seems the opportunity is there to reach people directly with mass media marketing for specific niches. How will your business take advantage of this new opportunity?

The Real Star of Super Bowl Sunday

The Super Bowl is a phenomenon I’ve come to terms with since I’ve come to America. I’m not a big fan of American football. I prefer the football they play without pads like we have in Australia, but the Super Bowl is always a must watch for me.

It’s not the game on the field it’s the game off it which interests me. I’m one of those people that watch the game for the commercials. I might grab a drink or some chips while they are playing, but once the games goes to commercial break, I’m front and center and this year was no exception.

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel it was a great group of ads this year. Sure, some commercials were interesting. The Volkswagen commercial with the kid in the Darth Vader costume was definitely an attention grabber.

And this Chrysler commercial featuring Eminem and Detroit has been getting a lot of publicity.

Of course some ads were just plain weird and, at least in my mind, missed the mark. One of the strangest was this Doritos ad.

Finally, there was this commercial for Groupon which is really off-putting. It seems to make light of the plight of the nation of Tibet. I’m not really sure why an advertiser would think invoking the name of a country that has been subjugated by a more powerful neighbor and truly is in trouble would help their company sell products, but judge for yourself…

There was nothing that captured my attention the way last year’s Betty White Snicker’s commercial did, but I guess the Big Game can’t be great every year.

What did you think about this year’s Super Bowl commercials? Was it a good crop or were you disappointed? Which did you like best?

Jodie Shaw

What would you do differently if you had to land business … with no money?

Pity the poor corporations who try to incrementally move sales and market share with multi-million dollar ad campaigns that do little for either sales or market share (and even, for that matter the more misplaced desire of better “branding”).

What if you had no money … and still needed to get customers or clients?

Here’s an interesting article on successful ways to do just that … and all it takes is an unconventional mindset and a desire to get the most out of the very least …

Getting clients with no money …

(At ActionCOACH, we also call that value – or better yet – leverage!)

The great lesson here is that there is always a way to get something … or to get something done.

Here’s another way to think about it:  How would a big company (say a Procter & Gamble, Nike or Apple) change its advertising and marketing approach if there were no ad or marketing dollars?

Would that company get a spokesperson or run a lot of ads that weren’t tested beforehand and measured for responsiveness and actual unit sales?

Or would that company be a bit more creative and innovative and direct-response driven?

Something to think about … and some good ideas from others who have “gone before you” and who have done just exactly that.

Who knows?

You just might find the best way to get more business … is to act as if you had nothing to work with – and start your own thinking and planning and strategy straight from there.

Jodie Shaw