I had lunch at my local art museum today — their scallops and black rice are my favorite. As the waiter left our check, he invited us to look at his photography in the museum store. He half apologized, saying that the store manager told him to tell all of his customers that his work is featured in the store. He did not need to apologize. When you are an entrepreneur, you can’t afford to apologize for marketing your work.
Category: Marketing
How Your Small Business Can Benefit From ‘Keep it Simple’ Selling | All Business
Albert Einstein once said, “Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I agree. These words certainly apply to selling. Here’s how to keep it simple.
Simplify your number of offerings.
Some salespeople have to write proposals to make their sales, and others don’t ever write proposals. Whether you write proposals or not, you need to decide how many choices to present to your customers. Some salespeople think that offering a lot of choices is better to make more sales. They’re wrong. Salespeople should offer fewer choices to simplify their selling.
Here’s why. If you offer too many choices, you overload your customers–it makes it harder for them to make buying decisions. This may have happened to you when you were trying to make a purchase. It recently happened to me.
Why Balancing Skippable and Non-Skippable Ads Creates Better Brand Awareness | Adweek
Around-up report from eMarketer, specializing in mobile advertising, recently landed in my inbox. On page three, a table of completion rates for U.S. digital pre-roll caught my eye. It claimed that, on average, completion rates for pre-roll ads on smartphones was 77 percent, rising slightly to 79 percent on tablet.
By themselves these stats seem pretty unremarkable—depending on the creative, 70 percent to 80 percent completion rate is a fairly standard result for a non-skippable pre-roll campaign. But there’s the catch: unremarkable for a non-skippable campaign.
The vast majority of brands and advertisers understand the difference between a non-skippable pre-roll, which obliges a user to watch an ad before viewing video content, or a skippable format, which allows the user to decide whether or not to watch the ad. What is perhaps less well understood is the difference in performance across KPIs that these two buying options will deliver. A non-skippable pre-roll can achieve the highs of 80 percent completion pretty easily (after all, how many people abandon watching a video because of a 15-second ad?) whereas a very successful skippable pre-roll would be looking at a 40 percent completion rate.
Why Don’t People Buy From Me? | Getentrepreneurial.com
Did you ever ask yourself, “Why don’t people buy from me?”
The Biggest Marketing Challenge We All Face
The biggest challenge we’re dealing with today is change. Things are changing so fast. As a result of this rapid pace of change people do not know who to trust!
There are six questions your prospects want answered before they will buy from you. These questions are designed to allow you to think like your buyer and speak with them so they know you are the right and safe choice.
Get Inside Your Customers’ Heads—Here’s How to Conduct a Focus Group | All Business
If you’re putting together a marketing plan for your business and you need market research, consider conducting a focus group. Focus groups can help a company learn valuable information about customer attitudes and their perceptions about the business and its products or services.
Once only utilized by large companies, focus groups are now used by an increasing number of small businesses. They can help you determine how to target specific demographic groups, and their needs and desires.
Save Time and Money With the 80-20 Rule in Marketing |All Business
The 80/20 Rule is a potent little principle that can increase your business revenue and make your life easier.
The gist of the 80/20 Rule is that you get 80 percent of your results out of 20 percent of your efforts. For example, 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your customers, or 80 percent of your sales comes from 20 percent of your salespeople.
It doesn’t always come out as 80/20. It can be more extreme with 95 percent of the traffic coming from 5 percent of the roads on your commute, or 3 percent of your employees creating 67 percent of the errors. The point is that large results come from small efforts.
9 Smart Reasons You Need to Be Using Facebook Ads Now | Inc.com
Social media is a tremendous way to increase exposure and traffic for your business, create loyal customers, and generate leads and sales.
Spoiler alert: Facebook remains King Social Network. It is the social media platform of choice for the majority of marketers–and for good reason.
It’s never been cheaper to build your brand and create new demand for your products and services.
If you aren’t already advertising on Facebook, you’d be crazy not to. Especially if you want to grow like crazy in 2016.
Here are nine reasons Facebook ads will help make your business super successful in 2016, starting right now.
Marketers Don’t Understand Modern Moms, Saatchi Survey Says | Adweek
Memo to marketers: When it comes to moms, get real. Stop focusing on motherhood as a job, and start talking to moms like the multifaceted, multidimensional human beings they are.
That’s the key takeaway from Saatchi & Saatchi’s global study on “Moms and Marketing: IRL (In Real Life),” which queried nearly 8,000 mothers with children ranging from newborns to 17-year-olds in China, Germany, Italy, India, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S. (including U.S. Hispanics).
Year-End Giving: ‘Tis the season for Millennials | BusinessTips
They are young, hip and trendy. They do everything online and many can be spotted walking or biking to work or getting on and off the subway with earbuds in and eyes cast downward on their phones. They are the Millennial generation, adults ages 18 to 34, and they may be casual but they are also generous, kind and purposeful, and every nonprofit needs them. Lauren Sims, CURE Childhood Cancer’s Director of Development, is a Millennial and offers “Do’s and Don’ts” when it comes to reaching this generation.
4 Brands Whose Creative Approaches to Mobile Marketing Are Getting Big Results | Adweek
Did you know that 67 percent of smartphone shoppers will switch to a competitor’s site if the checkout process takes too long? That’s one of a handful of stats Google is releasing today in a new report about how brands like Walmart and Red Roof Inn are moving the sales needle with mobile marketing.
Here are four of the most interesting case studies in the report. It’s no surprise that mobile budgets keep growing, but if nothing else, the below examples should give brand marketers a better idea of which mobile tactics actually work.
1. Red Roof Inn:
An estimated 90,000 travelers are stranded every day from canceled flights. So the hotel chain and 360i ran a mobile search campaign targeting folks scrambling to find a nearby hotel with creative like, “Stranded at the airport?”
