The Growth Wire

Does Social Media Work For Retail?

Just because we’re in the traditional advertising business doesn’t mean that we have a chip on our shoulder regarding social media. In fact, anything that helps local businesses grow is a good idea in our view. But a study published this week raises serious questions about how Social Media is being used in retail: the [...]

Buddy Up To Stretch Your Marketing Budget And Have Stronger Impact

When budgets are tight, some businesses stop marketing and advertising. In fact, according to American Express Open, about 40% of SMB owners reported eliminating their ad budgets in 2009 due to economic uncertainty. Yet we know that this approach costs businesses much more over the long run (if they ever live that long). Still, if [...]

How’s YOUR Economy Doing?

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 [...]

The Truth & Lies About Why Consumers Buy

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 [...]

Toilet Paper, Laundry Soap, and a $25K SBA Loan?

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 [...]

Your Brand Is In The Intangibles

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 perceive you're better. Focus on the intangibles...

How Not To Be A Bore

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 [...]

How Free Lead Management Software Can Help Your Business Grow

Many small businesses will find that FreeView, a no-cost lead management solution, will provide an instant boost to their electronic

Consumers Don’t Avoid Ads. They Avoid Bad Ads.

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 [...]

Can You Find New Customers With Twitter?

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 [...]

How Good Are You At Mass-Salesmanship?

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 [...]

Marketing Domination On A Shoestring

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. 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 principal 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.

Technology: Mobile Credit Processing For Just About Anybody

Small businesses that don’t have storefronts or hard-wired point-of-sale systems often have a tough time handling today’s most common methods of payment – debit, credit, and gift cards. If you’re reducing your customer pool to people who can pay with cash or check, or those with good enough credit to merit an invoice, you’re likely [...]

Is Your Brand Image Too Professional?

Ever heard the expression “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”? How about “People buy from people that they like”? These two ideas represent polar opposites of marketing strategies used today by many small and mid-sized businesses. The IBM quote reflects the idea that a ‘big business image’ will make prospects more comfortable buying [...]

Connect With Local Bloggers To Get The Word Out

Big companies use PR firms to keep the press up to speed on their latest product announcements, event sponsorships, management changes, and other important information. All of these announcements inundate the press (i.e. spam) and have actually created a backlash – many journalists now look to blogs in their area of interest for the really [...]

Does Your Business Need CHANGE To Thrive?

Do you think that your staff needs to care more about the quality of their work? Do you need people to show up on time and respond to customers in a more timely, positive manner? Do you need your sales team to pay more attention to their most important accounts, or do more prospecting? [...]

Emotion: The Key To Success This Spring

What will you do to win more than your fair share of the Spring ’10 spending season: The 2nd busiest shopping season of the year? When it comes to gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Graduation events, there’s no right choice. The firms that market the best win the largest share. Even though there [...]

Advertising Do’s & Don’ts: Part 2

Here’s the second in a series of simple tips to improve the quality of your advertising. This month, we focus on the power of emotion and the appropriate use of facts and logic. As much as you’d like to communicate all of the things that make your business special, your best message is one that [...]

Look Twice Before You Cut Price: 720° Value

In tough economic times, consumers go where they still get the best value. You either have to increase the value side of the equation or reduce the cost equation. Reducing cost can have significant long-term effects on your business, since prices are typically difficult to raise until demand increases to the extent that consumers are [...]

Tough Times Aren’t An Easy Time To Hire

Anyone who’s had an opening or two recently has probably seen hundreds of resumes. More than a few from folks who have enough experience to run the place. And we certainly can’t complain about salary needs: recruits are demanding much less than they were several years ago. So what’s the problem? There’s a funny thing [...]

Feb 2010: EXCEPTIONAL MARKETING

Dr. Carmen Kavali, Kavali Plastic Surgery When we think about the types of businesses that benefit most from strong consumer marketing effort, categories like retail, entertainment, and automotive usually come to mind. This month’s exceptional marketer, Dr. Carmen Kavali, illustrates how professional services – even medical practices – benefit significantly by building market-wide brand awareness. [...]

Google Turns To Broadcast When Things Get Tough

Google is putting their money where their mouth isn’t: brand marketing via broadcast media. The internet advertising behemoth has been running broadcast ads since mid-January and invested an estimated $5 million for a single 53-second Super Bowl TV ad. The spot, an emotion-laden story about life, love and adventure, driven by Google searching, was one [...]

Who Decides Which Local Business Is The Best?

If Google has its way, its new local search technology will soon be the arbiter of ‘hot’ or ‘not.’ The latest (local) product, Google “Favorites,” is designed to label one business per specific locale the ‘favorite’ for its business category. This nod will be driven by consumers in a variety of ways involving social and [...]

“No Cost” Mass-Market Advertising?

Each month, Access Points highlights a way for businesses to creatively and cost-effectively reach the large communities of radio listeners in their markets. This post pertains to several specific types of businesses: primarily the restaurant, golf, ski, and spa categories. When someone hears the term “no cost” advertising, his or her first reaction is usually [...]

Switch To Digital Advertising Leads To Poor Q4 And Firing of Zales Corp CEO

As reported by the Wall Street Journal this week, the board of Zales Corp fired it’s CEO and two other top executives over poor performance, particularly during the 2009 holiday season. One of the major issues, according to The Journal, was CEO Neal Goldberg’s decision to shift most of it’s broadcast advertising budget to internet [...]

A Merrier Christmas For Retailers? (Updated)

Five days after my original post (below), the Commerce Department released its estimate of December retail and the report was much less rosy (down .3% or basically flat). This data counted ALL RETAIL, as opposed to the earlier report which was based on reports from larger mall stores and retail chains (i.e. well-known consumer brands). [...]

A Great Way To Make A Memorable First Impression

All too often, our business cards are designed for utilitarian purposes: affordability and utilizing the artistic expertise that most small business owners have on-hand at the time. At the least, they help us distribute our contact information and at best, many show that we care enough about our work to invest in color printing and [...]

Are Reputation-Killers Threatening Your Brand?

With recent advances in search technology, your customers’ experiences can now be instantly in the public domain and, in many cases, magnified by the size and nature of social networks. This adds to the existing risks posed by sites that offer un-moderated ‘ratings’ of local businesses – many of which you may not even know exist. [...]

2009′s Scariest Innovation For Local Business?

I love technology, and you have to give the geeks credit: if there’s an inefficiency in the world, it won’t be long before one of them figures out a low-cost way to eliminate it with a web service or, most recently, a smart-phone app. Take local retailing, for instance. Used to be that when a [...]

Why Few Small Business Owners Benefit From Social Media?

According to several recent studies, 75-90% of small businesses get no return on investments in web marketing via social networks. This, despite the fact that about 50% of small business owners spent over 100 hours last year engaged in social media marketing. In one recent survey conducted by BizLaunch, owners were asked a very general [...]