Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Mobile Apps and Advertising for Small Businesses

Monday, April 1st, 2013

At MasterPlans, we’re focused on the needs of small business owners. In today’s technologically saturated world, most small business owners use the internet on a daily basis. Many depend on smartphones to help them run their businesses while staying connected to friends, family members, and colleagues.

Yet new research conducted by The Boston Consulting Group suggests that small businesses are much less likely than larger businesses to promote their products and services online. On March 19, Adweek reported that businesses with fewer than 100 employees spend only 3% of their total advertising dollars online. Bigger companies, in contrast, spend as much as 16%. While most of these small businesses have websites, experts think that small businesses are too focused on getting products off the shelves to put much energy and time into long-term advertising strategies. (If you’re a small business owner, this might sound familiar.) Since online advertising can have a big impact on a business’s chances of success, this represents a huge opportunity: both for businesses and for advertisers.

Increasingly, however, mobile app developers are focusing on the needs of small businesses, just as we do at MasterPlans. Foursquare, the social networking app that allows users to “check in” at local businesses, is courting small businesses with a brand-new mobile app. Designed specifically for small business owners, this app will allow businesses to “push” specials and updates to customers on the go. Over a million businesses already use Foursquare to connect with their customers, but this app allows small business owners to alert customers to a new menu item or a great spring sale through the palms of their own hands.

Interested in other apps that can help you manage and promote your small business? Check out Forbes’s list of 10 Brilliant Apps Small Businesses Should Use. And remember to keep in mind the needs of today’s increasingly mobile-minded consumers when you put together your products and services.

Tags: advertising, entrepreneur, internet, marketing, media, mobile, small business, social networking
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The SBA Learning Center Gives Great Advice

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

It’s popular to try to “bootstrap” when opening up a business: to make your way by yourself without the aid of external help or capital. Indeed, a little bootstrapping is necessary at the very beginning of just about any enterprise, even if the company seeks to find capital quickly. But an entrepreneur dedicated to finding their own way would still be wise to investigate the many resources that are available to help them refine their idea, and figure out how to successfully transform it into a product or a service.

The Small Business Administration’s Small Business Training Network has created a lot of great online courses made specifically for small business owners and entrepreneurs to help them figure out how they can make their business a success. Actually, the SBA often gives the same advice to entrepreneurs that we give to our clients. One course they have online now is a great example of their work: How to Win Customers in Today’s Economy.

What we like most about the info the SBA provides is that, like us, they start with the basics. When they start the course with a lesson on how to explore new markets, they begin with a definition of what marketing is: “Marketing is the process of planning and executing the development, pricing, promotion, and distribution of products and services to satisfy customer needs.” The key word, they say, is satisfy. A business must fill a need experienced by consumers or other producers.

And that means research: Who will be the clients? Where are they located? What are their needs? What products or services might they buy to meet those needs? These are the types of questions that we run through with our clients every day. The most important part of our process is helping the client consider the answers to these same questions in a systematic fashion, and help them find the answers.

Look around the SBA Learning Center. There are courses, videos, and interviews with leading business experts and entrepreneurs. It’s a great resource for anyone looking to start or expand a business or even a nonprofit organization. Even if you’re going without financing for now, take advantage of other entrepreneurs’ experience and the resources put out by businesses and the government. You’ll find you don’t have to go it alone.

Tags: business plan, business plan tips, marketing, sba
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Twitter’s Fancy, But Stand-By Marketing Tricks Work Too.

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Sure, when it comes to small business marketing these days it seems like all you hear about is Twitter this and Facebook that. While those Web 2.0 gizmos have their place in your business plan (if you know what you’re doing), so to do the old tried-and-true marketing methods that often get overlooked. Take this example, from the Pittsburgh Business Journal: “Who’s on first? Softball leagues prove to be big marketing hit.”

“Softball teams can help a company market itself to the outside world in a couple ways. Wearing the company name and logo on shirts and caps turns every player into a walking – or in the case of catchers, crouching – billboard. Anyone watching from the stands or passing the ballpark gets an eyeful. If the opposition is another company, it creates the potential for connections that could lead to new business.”

Stop laughing. We’ll admit that sponsoring a local sports team or emblazoning your logo on a kid’s soccer jersey might seem a little silly as far as being a worthwhile marketing outlet. But it’s a tactic that’s stuck around for as long as it has because, well, it works. And not only does slapping your business name on some else’s hat serve a good marketing tool, but so too does getting out there and hitting around the ball yourself:

“Service firms get 80 percent to 90 percent of new clients through referrals. If a law firm’s team competed against, say, banks or accounting firms, those are gold mines in terms of referrals,” says Rick winter, former dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business, who’s currently a marketing prof with a focus on sports.

The best part about strategies like these is that no specialized knowledge is required like it is, say, with Twitter or even search engine optimization. For regular Joe entrepreneurs who just want to start a local burger joint or car wash, it’s a simple and cheap form of marketing that gets the job done. And when you think about it, you really can’t ask for more when it comes to advertising your small business.

playball

Tags: marketing, small business
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Getting Back To The Basics.

Friday, May 1st, 2009

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’ve probably spent hours devising an effective marketing strategy in your business plan. These days when consumers are hanging on to their every dime like it’s their last, it only makes sense. But for all the complex Internet strategies like search engine optimization, and all the new, fancy marketing tactics like guerilla marketing and viral advertising, sometimes the basics work best. No, we’re not talking about taking out an advertisement in your local Yellow Pages. We’re talking about real, live DIY marketing. From consumer blog The Consumerist:

“An Ohio barbeque restaurant owner was having trouble getting drive-by customers to stop, so he decided to prop a mannequin in a bikini top outside. He says that over the past three weeks she’s been standing in front of his store, he’s had over 70 new customers come in and buy food – a 30% increase in business. So far, he says, no complaints; apparently his ‘mail girl’ even donated a different top and some Daisy Dukes that he’s going to use on the dummy next week.”

So maybe “real” and “live” were the wrong choice of words. But clearly this unique, homespun marketing strategy works. Who says every business plan needs an expensive marketing strategy?

mannequin

Tags: marketing
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Tools You Can Use: Naming Tips.

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Naming a start-up business isn’t easy. Unless you’re co-opting your own last name, or something realllly clever came to you in a dream one night, chances are you’ve struggled with that task. It stands to reason. There’s been all sorts of ill-fated names in the start-up business, and for every Google that flourishes and becomes part of the common vernacular, there’s an I’minlikewithyou that ends up changing their name because the original one sucked. Given that, there’s a lot of pressure on entrepreneurs these days to come up with a catchy name for their business. And even if you’re not starting a global tech business, or a clean tech company, you still want a memorable name for your business that’s easy to brand and that will resonate with customers.

One of the first places to start with the task is to determine whether you want to make up a name (a road fraught with all sorts of challenges—see I’minlikewithyou) or whether you want to use an existing words or phrase (which has its own challenges). Here’s where this useful tip sheet from HP’s Small Business Marketing Guide comes in: it lists the pros and cons of each side, and helps you narrow down which direction you should go. We’ve swiped some of the most useful points from the article and listed them below.

Descriptive Name

Pros:

1) Inexpensive to convey what business you are in. “With a name like Smith’s Towing, for instance, people will know exactly what your company does based on the name alone.”

2) Easier to get found in the search engines. It’s common sense: “If your business name is Toledo Plumbing, you already have a natural advantage for getting found when someone searches for Toledo plumbing companies.”

Cons:

1) Descriptive names may seem unexciting. It goes without saying—Susan’s Car Wash isn’t that most titillating name.

Unique (aka made-up) Name

Pros:

1) “Made-up words set your brand apart – Think of some of the Web 2.0 business names: YouTube, TechCrunch, Squidoo, Gizmodo.”

2) Easier to trademark and get a matching domain name. “Many descriptive dot-com domain names are long gone…”

3) “Flexible enough for strategic business changes – If your business is named Mary’s Bakery, but later on you decide to open a deli or develop a line of mail order gift baskets, you may find your name is too limiting. Whereas, something like Toodleberry’s does not limit you to a single line of business.” (ed note: This example also inadvertently illustrates why made-up names can be…bad. Toodleberry’s? Ouch.)

Cons:

1) See all of the advantages of a descriptive name above. A made-up name doesn’t necessarily convey what your business does, and you also run the risk of sounding, well, ridiculous.

For the entire list of tips, as well as some other useful information about business naming, click here.

sillynames

Tags: marketing, start-up
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Make A Referral This Week.

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Referrals are one of the best ways to snare new business. It’s why most entrepreneurs include “word of mouth” as one of their primary marketing strategies in their business plan. But getting from business plan to reality is where things can get tricky. That’s because snagging referrals, good ones at least, is no easy task as most small business owners will tell you. In this market it’s even trickier. So we think it’s cool that a group of small business and marketing experts launched an event called “Make A Referral Week” this week. The concept is simple:

“Make a Referral Week is an entrepreneurial approach to stimulating the small business economy one referred business at a time. The goal for the week is to generate 1000 referred leads to 1000 deserving small businesses in an effort to highlight the impact of a simple action that could blossom into millions of dollars in new business. Small business is the lifeblood and job-creating engine of the economy and merits the positive attention so often saved for corporate bailout stories.”

Here’s how it works: you fill out a form on the site pledging to make a referral to a deserving small business. Once you’ve done it, you can post on MARW site which business you referred someone to and why—which may in turn generate more business for them. So far 709 referrals have been made—although you have until tomorrow to get yours in. Sure, the idea might seem a little quaint. Don’t worry, it struck us as such too. But the idea is actually a good one when you consider that they way word of mouth works is by one person telling another about a great business. Make a Referral Week just gets technology involved.

referralweek

Tags: marketing, small business, word-of-mouth
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Tools You Can Use: Marketing Webinars.

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Not exactly well-versed in Internet marketing? Here’s a tool you can use: check out this series of four free marketing webinars from Infusionsoft, a web-based marketing software company. If you can get beyond the webinar’s name—”March Madness” (so named because it’s starting in, um, March)—or its horrifying tagline (MAD Traffic. MAD Copy. MAD Website. MAD MONEY!), it appears like the seminars might be worth looking into. The first webinar already happened this week, but every Tuesday starting next week they’ll feature different marketing topics that are relevant to small business owners. We snagged the line-up from the Small Business Trends blog:

Mad Copy: 3/17/09 1PM PST, Topics will include: 1) Email subject lines that get opened 2) 3 common copy mistakes your prospects hate 3) The power of subconscious persuasion 4) Effective strategies for building strong relationships with your customers 5) And more mad copy skills that close sales and increase revenue

Mad Website: 3/24/09 1PM PST, Topics will include: 1) Why your website is critical to your success 2) Small changes to your site that lead to large piles of cash 3) 10 second marketing and how it affects your profits 4) Simple ways to capture qualified leads off your site

Mad Money: 3/31/09 1PM PST, Topics will include: 1) How to instantly attract new customers 2) Techniques for increasing the profit margin of each sale 3) Super successful marketing campaigns that are worth their weight in gold 4) How we helped one business double their sales in just 72 days

You can register for the webinars here, although remember that free isn’t really free, so you can probably expect plenty of subsequent sales emails from Infusionsoft. Still, if you’re new to the Internet marketing game, a few pesky emails might be worth it.

marchmadness

Tags: internet, marketing
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Social Media’s Not All That.

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

We’ve long questioned whether it’s really worth a start-up’s time and money to invest heavily in social media. That’s because unless you’re involved in an Internet business, or really know what you’re doing, it strikes us that spending time on social media campaigns is nothing more than a giant time suck. Sure, that flies in the face of most of what you read on the Internet these days, but if you’re a start-up with limited time and resources, does frittering it away on Facebook really make much sense? We were pleased to find that someone who actually knows what they’re talking about—SEO expert and owner of NY-based Atlas Web Service, Michael Gray—agrees. He posted a terrific topic on his blog yesterday that doesn’t mince words:

“If you’re the kind of person who wants to have 50,000 twitter friends, be a power Digg user, make the front page of Techmeme, get mentioned on Techcrunch, avoid getting mentioned in Valleywag, and it isn’t filling your wallet, then you are a Web 2.0 Weenie Living on Bullshit Social Media Economics.”

Er, ouch. And he doesn’t stop there:

“Social media should make you more productive, more efficient, and more profitable, by allowing you to extend your reach and message to the people who are in your target market and are interested in what you have to say. Social media should not be used to waste time and money on awareness and branding exercises broadcasting messages that are unremarkable to the uninterested masses.”

And therein lays the problem: for most entrepreneurs who don’t have a background in marketing or social media, there’s a good chance that Twittering, Digging, and Facebooking will just end up a massive waste of time. That energy could be better spent on creating an excellent, user-friendly website and optimizing it, or even on an old-fashioned print campaign.

Who disagrees?