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

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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

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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!

Related Posts

• My Ideas for Inspiring My Small Business Senses
• ResultsRevTV Live! May 11th with Elizabeth Sparkman Fowler
• ResultsRevTV on Tuesday, April 13, 2010: Jack Criss, Owner and Publisher of Greater Jackson Business Magazine on the Ups and Downs of Business
• A Case for Social Media in Small Business (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• How Not to Use Social Media

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

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• How to Make Money in Retail
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• What the Future Holds
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• Pulling Up Weeds

One easy way locally owned business can get themselves on the map (literally) is by soliciting customer reviews for your business on geographically based review sites. Review sites are usually very large conglomerates with individual mini-sites for each geographic location. Often they’re divided by state or region, and then subdivided by city or township within that region. The bottom line in this uber-web-based world in which we live is simply this: If your business can’t be found through a quick web search – you’re business is going to die.

Use Geo-Based Review Sites to Grow Your Business

What’s great about these websites is that they allow brand-new customers to find you – and want to try your business out – when they may have known nothing about you before. These new customers are online searching for your type of business in your area; if you’ve set up your profile and garnered some reviews on any of these sites, they’re likely to run across your business. Suddenly they not only know you exist, what you do, and where you’re located, they also get to find out what your customers think about you by reading the reviews.

So how do you get into this action? It’s pretty simple.

Step 1: Focus on the major review sites.

The most important local review site is the home of the “red pin” – Google Places, formerly known as Google Local. Other review sites include the following:

• Yelp.com
• Local.Yahoo.com
• CitySearch.com
• InsiderPages.com
• CitysBest.com

There are more, but if you get set up on at least a few of these major websites, your information will get picked up by the other sites as well.

Step 2: “Claim” your business and/or set up your profile.

Once you’re at the website, search for your business. You may find it already listed; if so, you’ll see an option to claim the business or add updated information. Fill in all the information you can: physical address, phone number, email address, Internet information (email, website, blog, Facebook, Twitter), store hours, specialties, owner’s name, history. Some sites will give you more room than others. Some will also allow you to post pictures; I highly recommend that you post a few photos of the outside of the store, inside of the store and a sampling of available products.

If you don’t find your business, you’ll simply have to start the profile or information from scratch. Follow the same principle as above by including as much information as possible on each site. Remember, the more information you have, the more you will show up in search results and the easier it will be for people to find you.

Step 3: Ask for reviews.

The most important part of a business profile on one of these review sites is, of course, the customer reviews. So start asking for reviews. When your best customers come in to your business, make it a point to personally ask them to go online and submit a brief review to ONE of the review sites. Don’t ask them to submit reviews to more than one; that’s simply too much and too complicated, and most customers (even the ones who love you) won’t respond. All you have to do is say something like, “We’ve just set up our profile at CitySearch.com, and we’re trying to get some reviews up. If you have a moment when you get home, would you mind sharing about your experiences here? You’re one of our best customers, and we’d really appreciate new customers getting a chance to hear from you.”

Then hand each customer a card with the information printed on it, so they won’t forget when they get back home.

That’s it! The whole process is simple and can really make a huge difference in helping new customers find you, so get it started now and see what results you’re getting in a few months.

Image: dbking.

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You’ve heard us talk about the phenomenon for small businesses that is Twitter. We’ve talked about everything from fun Twitter contests to writing tweets that get the picture or link opened.

But what about Twitter basics? Lots of brick and mortar retail stores and local restaurants are catching onto the fact that their customers are on Twitter – and that deals are being done there. Is it time for you to catch on to Twitter and capture some of those deals?

I say an emphatic YES!

First things first:
1. Setup an account on Twitter. Go to www.twitter.com and get started… It’s easy and painless. And unlike many social networking sites – if you choose a username or “handle” as they’re called in Twitter circles – and decide later that you made a bad choice – you can change it! Twitter is cool like that, so don’t sweat it – go sign up!

2. Upload a PICTURE of you or your store logo for your avatar. This is a critical step.

3. Tweet a few times. Just say something about your business, what you like, what you’re doing. You can’t tweet too much – unlike Facebook where you can really overdo it and drive folks nuts.

4. Download Tweetdeck to your computer. It will be your new friend.

5. Visit Twitter’s Advanced Search engine – type in some searches about your community, business district, business niche or even your business name. Watch in amazement at what pops up.

There’s more to a successful run on Twitter – like writing a description that gets you found, creating a Twitter background, who and how to follow, how to grow a following – and most importantly how to start doing some business on and thru Twitter. That’s exactly what we’ll be covering in our webinar on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 called (remarkably) Twitter for Small Business 101. Andy and I will co-teach this webinar – and you will leave FULL of great and valuable information whether you a complete Twitter novice – or have been on Twitter for a while. We’ll talk Twitter strategy perfect for retail stores, small business and local restaurants and the like. Join us by registering here… and stay tuned. We’ll be talking a lot more Twitter in the coming days and weeks.

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