January.

For retailers, it’s cold not just outside, but indoors when it comes to moving the stock off the shelves. After the Christmas-buying sprees, most shoppers are back at home cooling their heels while retailers try to entice them back out to buy. The one stand-by many local store owners turn to is holding big sales, and they’re finding that in a tough economy it’s necessary to offer deeper and deeper discounts to get folks back and willing to buy. It’s great to have warm bodies in your store again, but it’s not great if your sale ends up making you no profit due to all that deep discounting.

So what’s the method of success that allows you to get the customers back and still make a profit? Is there a way to get both?

There are several methods you can employ to attract business and still maintain a profit margin. See which one of these (or more than one) will work best in your restaurant, retail store, or service-based business and give it a go.

Know Your Bottom Line, and Sell Just Above

This is the method to use with that inventory that needs to move out the door, not with that great new batch of products that just came in for Spring. Calculate your bottom dollar on these items: how low can you go and still make something, even if it’s a small something? Then make your strategy to sell many of these items, each bringing in that small amount of profit, and you’ll end up with a good amount of profit when all is said and done. Plus you’ll have cleared your store of excess, aging inventory.

Create a Loss-Leader

Grocery stores use the loss-leader method just about every week; their circulars advertise a deal that’s “too good to pass up” for their shoppers. In many cases, the grocery stores are taking a loss on this item, but they know that just getting the customers in the store is worth that small loss. How many times have you gone to the grocery store and bought just one item? Most of us don’t shop for groceries that way, and why not? Because in the process of locating and purchasing the loss-leader item, we’re unable to ignore the displays of other great merchandise – some also discounted, some not – that we have to walk past and around to find our goal. Use the same strategy in your store; advertise a huge discount on a popular item, set up a great display for it, and put it smack in the middle of many other great displays with enticing offers of their own.

Offer Package Deals

Another angle on the loss-leader strategy is to offer package deals and discounts; this method allows you to package your items of choice together, being sure that one of them is a cheaper item for you to purchase, which gives you greater wiggle room for a discount. You can offer a greater discount on a combined package, knowing that your combined investment in all the package items is still well below the discounted package price. You might even use a “buy one of these, get one of these other things” free method to sell a costlier item without a discount while taking the “loss” on your cheaper, freebie item. It’s the same method beauty product companies’ use when they offer a “special gift” with a purchase.

Add Value that Doesn’t Cost You Cash

What can you offer your customers that doesn’t come with any cash cost to you? Look beyond the basic inventory, and think about subscriptions, memberships, special discount or dining clubs, consultations, or other perks that offer a huge incentive for customers thinking about a purchase. The value is still there for the customer, who would otherwise have to pay to get the subscription or membership or consultation; but the value-added item isn’t costing you cash that you can’t afford to lose. Use these value-added items to upsell; offer them as freebies or part of a package, which allows you to give your customers an increased value for the same cost without decreasing your profit margin.

What method sounds best for your business?

Image by Alan Cleaver2000.

Below you will find some great resources on New Media Marketing from my recent speaking engagement in Heritage, Ohio.

The Case for a New Approach to Marketing

View Video

Your Marketing Toolbox

This PDF download lists the various tools that you’ll want to put in your marketing toolbox to have the ready for upcoming promotions and marketing efforts.

Twenty Blog Post Ideas that you can use & use again

Download PDF

Headline Ideas & Where to Use Them

PDF coming soon…

E-mail Marketing Explained and other ideas

Following are links to blog posts on this web site that will help you in your quest to successfully convert your email list into economic benefit to your community.

Improve Conversions from E-mail Marketing with this Simple Tip

How to Collect Customer Information This Holiday Season

How to Collect More E-mail Addresses from Customers

E-mail Marketing: Mix It Up with the “Letter” Format

Five Tips to Improve Twitter E-mail Open Rates

Seven Reasons to Keep Using E-mail Marketing

When to Send E-mail Marketing

Recommended Tools, Blogs & Books

This PDF download lists the various recommended resources that have been especially helpful or inspirational to me and my team over the last six months.

Case Studies Worth Watching

The following are links to the various businesses and events mentioned in my presentation. These are live events, and they may cease to exist or change and develop over time. Hopefully you can learn from them and the other promotions that these businesses conduct – and use those ideas in your own community!

It’s time to consider using video to market your business. It doesn’t matter what size business you have, video is now an affordable and most importantly, effective, tool that can improve sales significantly. The following statistics about marketing with online video using video sharing sites should make you think twice about ignoring this powerful marketing tool:

“Video in email marketing increases click-through rates by 96%.” – Implix 2010 Email Marketing Trends Survey

“Press releases that include video components receive 500% increase in views.” – Eloqua, April 2010

I found these stats over on Pixability’s web site that say that sites with video receive…

• 30% more clicks
• 18% more calls
• 30% more store visits
• 24% more purchases than those without video

In July 2011, a Pew Research Center study said that 71% of adults watch online video like YouTube or Vimeo videos. According to this study, rural and minority Internet users are no less likely to watch online video than suburban or city dwellers. Men and women are also equally likely to use video-sharing sites. Also of interest, parents use video-sharing sites more than non-parents. Some 81% of parents in the Pew study reported using video-sharing sites compared to 61% of the non-parents.

Mobile use is on the rise, too… It seems that 34% of cell phone users in the United States have shot video with their phone, 26% have watched video on their phone and 22% have posted videos or photos online… all from their mobile phone.

YouTube viewership has grown from 8 million views a day at the end of 2005 to 3 billion views a day in 2011, according to YouTube.

All of this on the heels of Forrester Research’s stunning announcement in 2009 stating “You are 53x more likely to appear on Page 1 of Google’s search results if you have video on your web site.”

Now. That is shocking.

Why aren’t you using video in your marketing? What is holding you back? Ask your questions or share your roadblocks, and I’ll try to answer your questions in future posts on this blog.

Photo Credit: Mike Jennings

In his book “Free,” Chris Anderson (Twitter link) talks about the power of the digital economy to minimize the cost of producing and distributing a product to the public. We’ve all seen and participated in examples of this, whether it’s from using a free e-mail service like Google to downloading free e-books or getting free apps for our phones. Free is nice.

For retailers dealing in tangible items, though, how does the low cost, and ensuing “freeness” of many digital products matter? You’ve still working in terms of concrete stuff: food, clothes, gift items, raw materials to be transformed or tangible lines to be distributed. The good news is that you can still take advantage of free, using it in terms of your own business to attract new customers, retain loyal customers, build sales, and build your business – all with digital content that costs you next to nothing to create and distribute.

A blog is one of the easiest ways to create and give free digital content. It doesn’t have to cost you anything to set up a blog; you can invest in a professional design and hosting service, and at some point you might need to, but getting started can be as simple as setting up a free blog on one of the many web services. After the initial set-up, the cost for you is in terms of time. You need to put the time in to create 1 – 3 posts every week, on a regular basis. These posts are your freebie; they’re informative, valuable, helpful, and, of course, somehow related to your business.

One step up from blog posts are digital products such as e-books and e-newsletters. Both, again, can be produced for only the cost of your time. You can easily create an e-newsletter weekly or monthly and mail it out to your email list of customers who want to hear from you. Make sure the articles you include in your e-newsletter are informative, valuable, helpful, and somehow related to your business. Even though you’re giving this content away free, if it becomes irrelevant, then it moves into the “spam” category.

An e-book can be a collection of the blog posts and e-newsletters you’ve produced, or it can be new content entirely. You can format an e-book in an office program, convert it to a .pdf file, and offer it as a free download on your website, blog, and Facebook page. Here are a few examples:

A restaurant owner could offer an e-book that contained any or all of the following:

• A recipe collection
• Ideas for entertaining
• Cooking tips
• A “day in the life of a restaurant” story
• Ideas for creating restaurant-worthy menus
• Ideas for cooking at home
• Tips on using fresh, seasonal food
• Essays about cooking/eating green
• Essays about food/eating in general
• Tips on any food-related specialty topic (spices, herbs, growing your own veggies, ethnic cooking, desserts, etc.)

A retail storeowner could offer an e-book that related to its products in some way, as the following:

• A style manual for spring/summer/fall/winter
• An up-to-the-minute clothing & fashion trend tip list
• Advice on putting a great wardrobe together
• Help on dressing for your body/personal style
• Tips for wearing accessories
• Profiles of fashionable people
• Great gift ideas for men
• Great gift ideas for women
• Tips on hosting a great party
• Ideas for fun dinner parties
• Ideas for family activities

The list is endless, and limited only in how much time you can give to producing the content. Of course, if you’re thinking “I am not a writer,” then look to your staff for someone who is. You can often find a willing volunteer, someone who can dedicate some portion of their working hours to helping create and promote these digital products.

As you create the digital freebies, of course, you want to let your customers know about them. Facebook and Twitter, flyers in your store, e-mail sign-up sheets at the counter, and some simple training so that all of your employees promote your digital freebies by word-of-mouth. Every customer who walks into your store should know about the great e-book they can get (free!) or e-newsletter they can sign up to receive (free!) or regularly updated blog they can follow (free!).

Every digital freebie you distribute builds your reputation and strengthens your connection with your customers; and, since digital is so easy to share, it gets passed along from one network to another, extending your reach well past where you can go with a print mailing or newspaper ad. It’s cheap for you and free for them, so everybody wins.
Image by Ken Hawkins

In last week’s Promo Ideas e-letter, I made a garden analogy when talking about bad habits that sneak into our business… I correlated those bad habits with weeds in our garden. Spring is wonderful in a lot of ways, but one of it’s shortcomings is the emergence of a fresh crop of weeds in the garden and flowerbeds. In order for our gardens to produce at peak, those weeds must go. And the same holds true in business.

I challenged my readers to identify those weeds in their own business, and here I’d like to walk through some of the ways that I’ve found work for me when I need to banish bad habits from my business life. You’ll have others I imagine, and I hope you’ll share them in the comments section.

1. Focus on cultivating healthy habits.

I’m a farmer’s daughter, so I’ve learned a few life lessons that way growing up. One is that bad weeds have a hard time flourishing in the midst of a lot of other healthy plants. Now, some will, and they will need to purposefully be eliminated. However, at the same time that you are removing weeds, you must replace them with healthy plants. Or the weeds just grow back.

The same is true in business. At the same time that you purpose to quit doing things wrong; you have to start doing things right. You need to determine what the correct and healthy habit is—then start doing that—and stop doing the bad one. Focus on how consistent you are with doing the right thing—and celebrate your wins—rather than focusing on not doing a bad thing and beating yourself up over missteps.

2. Write down your plan, goals or resolve.

Decide what needs to change – then write it down. Maybe you write it on a napkin or a post-it note. Maybe you e-mail it to yourself or set an alarm on your phone to remind you every day. It doesn’t matter how low-tech or high-tech… stats show that when you write something down, it has an exponentially greater chance of actually happening. That chance gets better and better as you refer to your plan daily and challenge yourself daily as you develop those new habits.

3. Attack the process in bite-sized pieces.

You didn’t develop those bad habits overnight, and they won’t quit happening overnight. When I gain a little weight, it takes time and a lot of bad eating habits to put on the pounds. And as such, I can’t lose that weight overnight, no matter how much I wish I could. Instead, divide up your goals into smaller, even daily, incremental steps. Then attack those bite-sized pieces one bite at a time.

4. Each day is a new day.

Without a doubt, none of us are perfect. As such, our path to better habits and achieving our goals will be riddled with backsliding or missteps or just not getting things done. Free yourself from the slavery of perfection and clean the slate everyday when you end your day. Wake up refreshed and re-energized to pick up on the right track wherever you left off. Every day is a new day, and there is no sense in beating yourself up over what you did or did not accomplish the day before. If you’re always looking backwards, you’ll never go forward. Purpose each day to start fresh no matter what successes or failures happened yesterday. The success of yesterday doesn’t guarantee success today, and just as much, the failures of yesterday don’t mean you’ll fail today. Chin up. Feel free to succeed. Review your written goals. Go do something good. Even revolutionary!

Photo Credit: kusine

Lately, we’ve pinpointed that our search traffic to this blog is heavily weighted towards posts like this holiday-focused one that hands out retail promotion ideas with retail window display ideas coming in a close second. A quick Google search – followed by disbelief and more digging – showed that there simply isn’t a wealth of retail promotion and window display ideas floating around on the web. So, while we’ve got lots of resources in store for you in this new year, I am boldly stealing both inspiration and format from Chris Brogan’s newly launched weekly blog topics program. You’ve got a small business – and you’d like to keep the customers buying. Want some new ideas?

What’s the plan?

I’ll send weekly e-mails with FIVE OR MORE PROMOTION IDEAS for you to implement in your small business or store. In addition, I’ll be including quite a few visual and window display ideas each month as well as some general marketing strategy and sales advice.

Click to learn more about how to get an endless supply of promotional ideas for your small business!

What Types of Ideas?

The ideas will be widely flexible to work in a variety of scenarios – flower shops, coffee shops, clothes boutiques, grocery, restaurants and gift stores. And everything in between. We’ll be doing seasonal ideas a few weeks ahead of the season or date to allow for advanced planning. The ideas will go far beyond discounting and include many ideas to sell at full price, to inspire repeat purchases and to catch new customers. Your creative juices will get a weekly fix – and your store will never look more inspiring to customers!

It’s not free. It’s $27 a month. Think of it as a magazine subscription. Is it for everyone? Definitely not. Is it for someone who wants to keep their business booming and looking fresh and interesting year-round? Is it for someone who could use the creative encouragement and steady dose of fresh ideas? Yep, that’s who this will serve best.

Each mail comes with a lot more than FIVE OR MORE RETAIL PROMOTION IDEAS. It comes with ideas about how to improve your business, ideas on sales, marketing and customer service in general, retail window display and merchandise display ideas as well as lots and lots of modification ideas as well. The first message was just over 900 words long. The second message is nearly 1000. They’ll stay pretty meaty, because that’s what I’m known for – and I always want you to feel like you got far more than value than you paid and always leave with something you feel you can accomplish immediately.

Want to learn more? Check out the weekly Revolutionary Promotion Ideas email.

As we explained in a previous article , the key to locally owned businesses surviving and thriving in a competitive, online marketplace and tight economy is to find and dominate a niche of their own.

Small businesses can’t compete with the advertising dollars and inventory numbers of huge national chains; they can establish themselves by finding a specialty and being the best in it.

You Can’t Please All the People

The toughest part of becoming a successful niche business is realizing that you simply won’t be able to make everybody happy. If you choose to specialize your small business in science fiction, for example, then you won’t gain a following of classic literature lovers. But you will gain science fiction fans. If you choose to specialize your locally owned restaurant in a specific type of cuisine, perhaps Italian, then you’ll lose the people who don’t like pasta. But you’ll have fervent and loyal customers in the pasta lovers.

The Trade Off

For a business to succeed in a specialty or niche, it has to make a trade-off. You trade the complacent, so-so, average customers for the fervent, dedicated, enthusiastic ones. Sounds like a good trade, right? It is, because a few enthusiastic customers will give you more in lifetime value and passionate referrals to their peers than many average customers.

Finding Your Enthusiastic Fans

The first step to identifying those customers you want to find and keep for the life of your business is to clearly define your specialty. What are you offering that’s different, better, or more unique than your competitors? Once you’ve identified your own niche – your special offering – you’re in the right position to find the people who will be interested in what you have to offer.

The second step is just a bit of simple brainstorming: who is going to be the most interested and the most enthusiastic about your specialty, your niche? Don’t focus on the people who might be interested. Focus on the people who will love what you offer. If you’re selling science fiction books, you need to be at the sci-fi gatherings, clubs, and conferences, and partnering up with the local theater when the next sci-fi movie opens. Market yourself to the most passionate people in the particular niche; they, in turn, will market you to the people they know. When you find and convert enthusiastic customers, they do the advertising for you.

Places to Look for your Niche Customers

• Specialized online communities and groups
• Local clubs and meetings
• Conferences
• Meet-up groups
• Fan clubs
• Organizations and associations
• Trade shows

Note: If your “niche” is too big to define and go find in groups like these… then your “niche” isn’t a niche at all – and you need to work harder to find your small business’ niche – a truly narrow scope or specialty that will create a winning formula for your business in a difficult economic time.

Where would your ideal customers hang out? Where do they gather? That’s where you need to be.

Image by Rachel Voorhees.