The last year has really been fun to be in marketing hasn’t it?  Think of all the “shiny new toys” that have come of age in the last year.  Facebook, Twitter, and of course the iPhone, Droid, Blackberry and numerous other smart phones.  All these new and exciting ways to reach out to your customers.

Of course all this new technology has come with a learning curve the size and shape of the Matterhorn.  Maybe “fun” isn’t the right way to describe this new landscape.

So on the topic of Smart Phones, what’s a local business to do?  Your winning strategy comes with four steps.

1.  Make a Commitment

The number of people here in the valley with smart phones is only going to grow.  So will their reliance on them as their primary communication / information gathering device.  And the more affluent your potential customer is, generally speaking anyway, the more likely they will be to rely on one of these little gems.  Whether you are ready of not, this is the new reality.  Whether your vehicle of choice becomes an ap, an ad, or a simple text message, you need to have a vehicle in this race as you can be certain that your competitors will.

2.  Don’t Overcommit

Caught you off guard with this one, didn’t I?  The major mistake I see local businesses making (more…)

Email can be a great way to stay in contact with your customers and prospects.  In 2010, many people will try and tell you that email is dying – soon to be replaced by Twitter.  Tell them that you talked to me and you don’t believe them.  It is darn difficult to build customer loyalty 140 characters at a time.  Not that you can’t do it, but sometimes, theres a benefit to a longer form to your communication with your customers.

But not all email strategies are created equally.  Doing it right takes some work.  And when I undertake most any online marketing project I like to start by learning what not to do.  If I can learn this lesson while laughing at the mistakes and follies of others, all the better.

So let’s take a field trip together today, and look in on some research into the “worst practices” of email marketers.  Many of you will see yourself in these lessons.  They are all too common for many small businesses.  That’s OK, because you can fix the problems if you want to – and its easier than you think.

Want to learn more about the inexpensive, yet powerful, tools you can implement in short order that will help you move towards the current best practices?  I’d be glad to help you out.  Give me a call today.

I read through my regular sources of news today, but in addition to reading the news (Hey did you know there’s a golfer named Tiger, a baskeball player from Medford who is good, and it will quit raining today?) I spent time looking at the advertisements, really looking at them.  These are ads that cost the companies hundreds or even thousands of dollars to run, but throughout my viewing I kept thinking, “where are the benefits?”

When I reached the end, I realized that less than 10% of the ads were benefit oriented. And yet, if you were to ask the copywriters who wrote these ads, each of them could give you a lengthy lecture on how important strong benefit statements are to writing good copy.  Benefits are those statements that turn your products into what the customer is actually buying.  Features are those aspects of your product that are compelling advantages – and what most ads contain.  Features are important, but only to you.  Benefits are the need, problem, or desire that your customer is looking to address.  And to be effective, this is where you need to meet them.

The problem is that many of us think we are writing about benefits, but we are writing only near misses. We use words that take the place of benefits and mistake them for the benefits themselves, leaving you with only well-intentioned features isntead.  Here are some ways (more…)