New Year’s Resolutions For Small Businesses

Get a smart phone, socialize your Website and form partnerships in 20111. Get a smart phone. This great tip appeared on the New York Times‘ list of “10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Technology“. Your clients are no longer using phones for conversation only, they are using them to find products and services, get directions,  keep track of appointments and goals. Mobile marketing is the next frontier for engaging your clients. In order to understand how your customers are using mobile phones, you need to become a user.

2. Socialize your Website. If referrals are important to your business, you’ll need to make it easy for your current clients to tell their friends about your great products and services. Subscribe to services (such as ‘Add This‘ and ‘Share This’) that allow visitors and clients to share your content with friends in their social networks. After all, your clients (and potential clients) are visiting your Website, but they are spending most of their time in social networks.

3. Form partnerships to promote your business. Although new media marketing delivers clear, track-able results, it can be costly and time consuming for small businesses. Partnering with a business that is not a competitor is one way to over come the cost and time. For example, if you are running a bakery, partner with the shop next door to retweet messages, Facebook statuses and share a marketing budget. Soon you’ll find that you are building and sharing a community of supporters for half the effort.

Top 10 Interactive Marketing Articles for 2010

2010 was a great year for us – we thoroughly enjoyed sharing the many interactive marketing ideas we published on this Website and elsewhere. Many of our articles were based on questions that came from projects and friends, and we certainly hope you keep them coming. Here’s a rundown of our top social media and interactive marketing articles for 2010 (based on visits and pageviews).

  1. Social Networks: Free R&D for Small Business
  2. Email vs. Social Media – Should you follow Ben and Jerry’s?
  3. How Much Time Should Visitors Spend on Your Website?
  4. Three Steps to Better Open Rates
  5. When your Company Name is Your Top Keyword
  6. Best Billboard? Yahoo! Mail Homepage
  7. Is mobile phone jailbreaking good for business?
  8. Yahoo! tosses HotJobs to Monster – Search Fail?
  9. How to become a “trending topic” on Twitter
  10. Facebook closing Gift Shop – but not for entrepreneurs

We hope you’ll keep coming back for more – follow us on Twitter @suzettegardner, @smmarketingtips, join us on Facebook or get fresh updates via email, the good (almost) ole fashioned way.

What’s next? More great interactive marketing tips and insights – plus an in-depth look at advertising today. Stay tuned!

Google – Teaching Parents Tech (for Product Awareness)

Google Teach Parents Tech Google has joined Yahoo! in converting its email login page into a billboard – but what Yahoo! is using as premium ad space, Google is using to promote its products through a new project called “Teach Parents Tech”. The project is a Web-based video resource that allows users to select any number of simple “how to” tech support videos and send the videos to mom, dad or just about anyone. It takes about a minute to watch any of the videos and they cover a range of topics including, how to find information, upgrade your browser or manage electronic media files.

So, how can businesses and nonprofits benefit from this great idea? Continue reading “Google – Teaching Parents Tech (for Product Awareness)”

Location-Based Mobile Ads – Advertising’s Next Cash Cow

iphone, location based advertising - what's nextIf you haven’t considered a mobile based advertising campaign for your business, perhaps these numbers will get you started. The latest BIA/Kelsey U.S. Mobile Ad Revenue Forecast (2009-2014) is predicting that mobile ad revenues will grow from $491 million in 2009 to a whopping $2.9 billion in 2014 – that’s right!

So what are businesses spending this money on? Here are some products that were included in the forecast that your business should Continue reading “Location-Based Mobile Ads – Advertising’s Next Cash Cow”

Event Ticket Sales Made Easier with Mobile App

Social commerce company Eventbrite recently rolled out a key improvement to their iPhone application “Easy Entry” that should put the company leagues ahead of the competition – event organizers using their service to sell tickets can now scan and verify ticket sales using the Eventbrite mobile phone application Easy Entry 2.0. According to Eventbrite, the bar-code scanning feature is “a game-changing feature that makes ‘Easy Entry’ even easier.”

Event organizers that prefer not to use the iPhone (or Droid) application can check in their attendants using a laptop. An improved “Day of Event” toolset makes it easy for organizers to provide a seamless check-in experience for their event. Continue reading “Event Ticket Sales Made Easier with Mobile App”

Is mobile phone jailbreaking good for business?

Is jailbreaking good news for businesses and non-profits? Big news in the mobile phone industry this week! According to the latest findings of the U.S. Library of Congress, if you’ve bought a mobile phone it’s yours to do with as you please – and that includes jailbreaking and adding applications to your phone not approved by the phone’s maker.

So what is jailbreaking? It’s simply the altering or unlocking of your cell phone’s code so that you can use it with any carrier Continue reading “Is mobile phone jailbreaking good for business?”

Social Networks: Free R&D for Small Business

How do you keep your products and services fresh? Three words – “Research and Development”. True, R&D can be expensive and time consuming, but without it you could be wasting money trying to convince your target market to buy your products when you should be providing the products and services that they actually want.

Most small businesses think that they have to get to ‘big’ before they can afford R&D – not true. Here’s our quick guide to using social networks for research and development (R&D) on a shoe string budget: Continue reading “Social Networks: Free R&D for Small Business”

Stop Your Email List from Shrinking

Businesses that depend on email marketing to engage customers will notice two things about their email list every year; 1. Your email list will shrink by at least 15% before the end of the year, 2. Your bounce (email return) rate will be greater than it was the previous year – but does this mean you are losing your subscribers? That depends on your Website.

Customers no longer depend on emails to keep up with the latest news from their favorite marketers – thanks to SPAM (the worst kind), your recipients have grown tired of wading thru emails to decipher which ones they really want to read. Continue reading “Stop Your Email List from Shrinking”

Coupons 3.0 – Getting it Right

How do you keep customers coming through the door on a major holiday when everyone seem gone fishing or at the beach? Coupons! Mr. Wash is one company that’s getting this almost right. Every holiday weekend their subscribers get an email with coupons for up to 50% off their services. The coupons are “one per customer” and all you need to do is print it and present it for a nearly free car wash. Sounds easy enough? Well, not if you read your emails on a mobile phone.

Old coupons, new challenges. People who must show up in person to get deals from companies like Mr. Wash face two challenges with the ‘print and present’ coupon model Continue reading “Coupons 3.0 – Getting it Right”