Let’s face it, marketing can be hard! In each marketing blog post, we hope you’ll find the information you need for your business marketing success.
Calculating the ROI for Community Development
Calculating the return on investment (ROI) for some business functions is challenging. The concept is quite simple: determine how much monetary benefit the company realized (return) for each dollar spent on the effort (the investment.) Yet, the ROI for many marketing, human resources, and community development activities is difficult to determine because it may seem…
Extreme Makeover Extremely Social
The 200th episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition is taking place where I call home, ‘The Rogue Valley.’ It didn’t take long for word to spread, and for a social media storm to hit. A lot of businesses are jumping to the aid of the at this time, unknown winning family. It is, after all…
Five Ways to Create Local Loyalty
Creating loyalty with your customers today is a tough job. In a world of social-living offers, half off Groupon coupons where does the consumer’s loyalty lie? Is it with the business owner that has been in and supported the community for years or is it with whoever has the lowest price? It is not easy…
When paying for facebook ‘likes’ is a GREAT thing
What is a Facebook ‘like’ worth, is always a hot topic, so many different perspectives and rarely can you find the same answer with the same dollar figure attached to it. There are so many different variables, like what business you are in. Social Media has proven to be a GREAT medium to get the…
Buy Local Ramblings and Thoughts
There have been numerous amount of ‘buy local’ campaigns over the past couple years. Many of these campaigns have been economic driven as people have seen a lot of long standing local businesses disappear due to the economy. Project 3/50 has used social media well to spread their philosophy of shopping local. Last year over…
What Does Google+ Mean To The Local Business Owner
So you are a business owner, maybe a small brick and mortar store. Over the past year or so, you developed a business page on Facebook. You’ve invested time in posting and replying to posts, worked hard to built ‘Likes’ and done what’s necessary to develop a relationship and engage with your community on your…
Cause Marketing for Brands
How many times has a news story broken that reveals a profound injustice? Too often I’d argue. If you’re not an Auburn fan (or you don’t know one) you may not have heard about the poisoning of the trees at Toomer’s Corner by someone claiming to be an Alabama Fan. These trees were more than a…
3 Must-Not-Miss Components for a Non-Profit Brand
Soliciting donations is hard work for any non-profit and it’s often made all the harder because the non-profit has not laid the appropriate groundwork in creating their brand image. This oversight usually ends up costing them donations in the long run. While non-profits need to create a brand to the same degree every other business…
If Organization Networking Why Not Social Media Networking?
For years local business owners have joined networking organizations and clubs. Local Chamber, 20/30, Rotary, BNI, just to name a few. Some are exactly what they are networking, and some are disguised as charitable although we know that 90% of the reason we are involved is for the networking. Most clubs/organizations then have sub-committees that…
Why Twitter? Maybe for the News
While everyone talks and talks about how you should use social media, and if you follow their 10 steps you’re sure to succeed if you pay attention the one category that is using twitter the right way is our local journalists. That alone is why you the local small business owner should be involved in…
How Good is Your Elevator Speech?
We’ve all heard it, we need to be able to describe our company and what we do in the space of time that it takes to travel from one floor to another in an elevator. And even in knowing it, it’s still difficult to conceptualize and spit out unless you’ve taken time to think about…
Are You a Part of Small Business Saturday?
Have you heard of Small Business Saturday? It takes place on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. And it’s a movement that is growing. The concept is simple: A day to come together in support of the small businesses we love. The businesses that are the heartbeat of our communities and local economies. That day is November 27, 2010—the…
5 Reasons Great Brands Aren’t Selfish
As you consider creating a strong and powerful brand, a significant philosophy to consider is creating an un-selfish brand. This was important before the advent of social media, but now that many brands find themselves online in social media (Facebook and Twitter) the stakes are much higher. Here are some principles to consider: People like…
Tagging Your Business Thanks
This week, as our thoughts turn to a turkey dinner, family, and friends, it’s appropriate to consider who in our businesses we need to give thanks to for making our year successful. If you’re doing well in this economy – it’s no accident. And it’s unlikely that you will be able to pinpoint one single…
Online Guerrilla Tactics
I have to admit, as much as I work in social media and employ guerrilla tactics to spread messages in a community, I hadn’t adequately considered ways to utilize guerrilla tactics online to drive traffic to your website and business until recently. So having given it some thought (at long last) here are my top…
Competing for Attention
As a small business owner, I know, it is HARD to keep the focus on growing your business when the needs of your current business continually take all your time and attention. But here’s the thing we all know, intuitively, if we don’t focus our attention on doing those things that grow our business, we…
Blue Sky Marketing (NOT!)
Remember when our marketing lives were easy? Unlimited budgets, no concerns about the economy, fabulous television ads… those days have been gone now for awhile, and I think that as marketers, we’ve gotten better, smarter, and more responsive. We’ve had to think carefully about every dollar we spend, we’ve had to project and hit ROI…