While it’s clear now that the country is gradually emerging from the economic crisis, the strength of individual regions and business sectors is still decidedly mixed. As small and mid-sized businesses look out into this environment, it can be tough to make critical and/or prudent decisions. No one wants to be the last business returning to market, and few are willing to be the first.
The Growthwire would like to help. We’re inviting the Growthwire community to take a 6-7 minute online survey to help other subscribers make more sense of what economic life is like on Main Street today, including strategies for growth in specific regions and business sectors. When compiled, the survey will help you, and businesses like yours, understand how local businesses are working through our current economic conditions and even finding growth opportunities.
All we need to make this happen is YOUR HELP. Please take a few minutes to contribute your views (all 100% anonymously) – we will post all data online and analyze specific trends in future Growthwire newsletters. We will mail you an invitation later this week, but if you’d like to take the survey now, you can find it at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BSZCN9J
Thanks in advance! We look forward to hearing from you and sharing your insights.
The book Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom should be on the short list of anyone who’s involved in brand-building. It reads like a good mystery novel, it’s based on very strong science, and it paints a very clear portrait of how physiological and psychological mechanisms in our brains drive brand preference. In fact, the science is so revealing that it’s ignited an online debate about the ethics of neuro-marketing: Is the stuff is so powerful that it’s not fair to consumers?
Chapter 8 is particularly fascinating. Here, we learn why our visual senses – what most of us probably think are the drivers of brand impact – are highly over-rated when it comes to remembering and choosing particular brands. What works better? Audio (as well as smell). Audio has the ability to mentally generate the visual images and, more importantly, powerful emotions associated with it.
While visual marketing tells consumers what something can, or should represent, this type of association is very abstract and doesn’t process well in the consumer brain. Sound, on the other hand, allows the individual to conjure an association that is already in the brain (i.e., personalizing the idea) which has much more impact. The research even shows how sound is engineered by companies and institutions to direct people’s behavior using our biological wiring and triggers. It makes you wonder why marketers spend so much energy trying to reach us through our eyes, instead of our ears… (more…)
While you may have some experience buying paper products, computer equipment, or even insurance for your small business at Sam’s Club, odds are you haven’t tried their newest service: small business lending.
With a lot of the government stimulus programs coming to an end, often without helping the liquidity crisis facing many small and medium sized businesses, retailers like Sam’s (A division of Walmart) are taking it upon themselves to help businesses finance growth. Call it over-the-counter stimulus plans. Sam’s lending service is built upon a standard SBA loan program, though the service streamlines the paperwork and approval process considerably (a significant deterrent for many businesses) and even discounts the loan application.
The program lends from $5,000 to $25,000, unsecured, at a low rate (7.5% at time of publication). Pre-approval is available online in minutes… To date, about 45% of its applicants have been approved. (more…)
We spend a lot of time thinking about ways to ‘make’ our product or business better. Don’t forget to think about how you can make people ‘think’ you’ve done the same. Here’s a wry presentation by IPA’s Rory Sutherland on the importance of brand’s intangibles…
Don’t worry, this is not a recommendation to wear a lampshade at your next social event. This post is about effective advertising. But since the social metaphor is on the table, let’s follow it for a minute to illustrate how you can save a lot in wasted marketing dollars and, instead, turn those dollars into a powerful investment.
Have you ever gone to a party or networking event and found yourself locked in a one-way conversation with someone that spent 20-30 minutes going on and on about themselves? It’s a pretty miserable experience, particularly if politeness, politics, or family relation prevented you from bolting. It certainly didn’t leave you wanting to learn more about or interact more with that person. We’ll use this as our definition of ‘boring.’
Now, if you hold your marketing up to the same standard, would this fit our definition of boring? It’s a fair question because 70-80% of the advertising you notice on local TV, print, online, or radio (and ALL that you don’t notice) fit this description. These ads are boring because they focus mainly on the advertiser, and not the end-user. Just more blah, blah, blah about things consumers don’t care about. No one except the lonely people watching informercials want to hear about what a business is selling. For the most part, these boring messages are a waste of marketing dollars. If you want to communicate with a consumer, make your communication about that consumer. Her problem. Her felt need. (more…)
There’s a free software tool available to small and medium sized businesses (SMB) today that can quickly transform your business into a savvy, high ROI digital marketing operation. This tool was originally created to help some of the world’s most sophisticated web marketers and ecommerce sites understand who was using their websites, opening targeted communication, and interacting with different parts of the operation. It allows these firms to actually track individuals, their interests, and their response to differing marketing exposure – a web marketer’s dream.
Until recently, this type of solution has only been available to larger companies that had enough electronic marketing and web-based activity to merit the monthly investment. The good news is that this is no longer the case.
One of the leading providers of lead management software, Loopfuse, is now offering a free version of their solution (it’s called FreeView) to businesses that focus on lead and customer groups of fewer than 2500 people – in other words, the average local business like yours. Should you give it a try? Answer these 3 questions to find out: (more…)
Ad avoidance is a major problem for anyone in the marketing field. We buy, schedule, and target our media under the assumption that it’s going to get noticed. But often it does not. 60-70% of television ads can now be bypassed by DVR. Only 1/2% to 2% of direct mail is opened. According to scientific studies, over 80% of internet ad units are purposefully avoided.
Radio, on the other hand, is only ignored about 8% of the time*, but that’s not what this is about. This post is about making simple changes to your advertising or marketing approach to vastly increase the likelihood that your audience actually pays attention to your message.
Yes, consumers will pay attention to ads. Many do today, even with the tools that they have to easily avoid them. But only the ads that speak to them, and that’s the key – the ad actually has to make the consumer think that it’s about them, not just the company that’s advertising. Here are four basic things (and one advanced technique) that you can use immediately to improve your connection with, and therefore your engagement to, your target audience. (more…)
As most of you know, Twitter is a free social media platform. Its users micro-blog everything from what they ate for lunch to news articles that they’d like others to see and share. Users express themselves in short 140 character broadcasts to designated groups of “followers” (Tweets), which can be read and passed virally through the Twitter site, mobile devices, and a number of 3rd party applications. In the last months, The Growthwire has received a lot of questions about the use of Twitter for local businesses. Most of these questions come from people who clearly see Twitter’s value as a social and a customer-service/relationship tool, but are uncertain about Twitter’s usefulness for customer acquisition.
Our honest answer is that we don’t know the answer yet.
The platform obviously has many evangelists, some of whom say it’s a great acquisition tool. We’re not entirely convinced that these anecdotes are objective or applicable to the average local business. Most of the more thoughtful discussions note that even if it does ‘work,’ it’s probably not for everyone. The most common challenges appear to be: 1) It requires a lot of work and a broader social media strategy to use effectively, 2) Its potential decreases significantly as the geography of its use narrows (i.e. global, virtual companies like Dell will get more ROI than the small brick and mortar/local market computer shop), 3) Despite all the talk and awareness, only about 11% of the US is using the service (compared to 40% for Facebook), and 4) A lot of Twitter activity is now the cultivation of mass-follower lists to facilitate spam advertising.
Maybe we’re jaded – we’ve been through several major cycles of internet hype to date… So instead of trying to tell you what’s going on, we’ll simply ask. Read on to take our one-question poll and see links where you can learn more about Twitter. (more…)
Odds are that you or one of your key staff excels at sales; Few businesses survive long, no matter how great their product, pricing, or service, without at least one strong rainmaker on the roster. If you could clone your Rainmaker several times — effectively doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your Rainmaking expertise — you’d probably be able to grow significantly. The problem, however, is this can be costly and sometimes it’s just impractical. Due to the specialization/experience required, training, the inevitable ramp-up phase, and the fact that many new hires don’t work out, sales is very difficult for most small businesses to expand and profitably grow to a meaningful scale.
Enter advertising, the tool that many businesses turn to increase revenue at a meaningful and profitable level. Advertising, when done right, is simply Mass-Selling. When it does the exact same things that a good Rainmaker does, advertising can actually ‘sell’ to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of prospective customers at once.
Many businesses that advertise (or used to) might argue that this is idealistic at best and wrong-headed at worst. They’ve tried advertising and it doesn’t deliver (at least to the scale that they’d expected). Having seen hundreds of small businesses experience significant growth through advertising, I’d argue that many of these unimpressed businesses simply don’t advertise the right way. If they’d thought of their advertising as mass-salesmanship, and actually applied the principles of strong one-on-one selling, they could have experienced much different results… (more…)
Most small and mid-sized local businesses have had to make all kinds of tough decisions since the Recession began. According to American Express, only 20% of these firms have been able operate profitably without major cut-backs in staff and operating capital.
Marketing is an obvious target for most budget cutting. The only problem with chopping the marketing budget is its damaging impact on sales. According to numerous studies over the last 80 years, firms that eliminate their marketing decline rapidly during tough times. Those that even cut back modestly lose significant market share to the few firms that don’t cut. They also tend to miss significant gains in the first 2-3 years of recovery.
So how do you make a tough budget decision that preserves your near-term viability without causing an even greater long-term problem? Simple: cut your marketing budget to the bone, but spend your remaining dollars to dominate an audience – no matter how small that audience may have to be. It’s a principle that smart advertisers have been using for decades, through good times and bad, but one that proves essential for every firm when funds run tight. (more…)
While it’s clear now that the country is gradually emerging from the economic crisis, the strength of individual regions and business sectors is still decidedly mixed. As small and mid-sized businesses look out into this environment, it can be tough to make critical and/or prudent decisions. No one wants to be the last business returning to market, and few are willing to be the first.
