What does social networking mean for your company? It changes how people can and will talk about your brand. It changes how you can and hopefully will create community and value around your brand.
Is this important? Review the report below and decide for yourself…
Why do you do what you do? Somewhere in your business is a story that connects to that reason. And somewhere within your story, perhaps dormant, is your emotion.
The emotion behind your business is powerful. It cuts through advertising hype. It bypasses people’s natural skepticism that you are trying to sell them something. It’s a story so pure that when people hear it - they get it and they want to experience it for themselves.
Your website let’s you tell your story. It’s a medium that can convey emotion, move people, connect them to the energy and benefit of your business. Each day, the web is evolving in ways that allow you to share the emotion behind your business, faster, better, cheaper. You just need to start using it. Here’s an example. It’s a very worthwhile 6 minutes:
Marketing Potential
RSS is emerging to be one of the most cost effective and powerful marketing channels available for small business. Imagine being able to automatically and easily build automated in-house marketing lists, measure the actions of your subscriber base, increase your search engine visibility, help your customers refer your business to multiple people with the click of a button… This is only scratching the surface of the strategic applications of RSS for small business.
Are You Missing Out?
If your website does not use RSS feeds as part of an integrated marketing strategy you are missing out on a significant opportunity. First, try subscribing to an RSS feed yourself. (Refer back to the video for exact instructions) You can download Google Reader Here (Which in my opinion is the best RSS reader for business owners)
Start Getting Up To Speed
Start exploring RSS options for your business. A simple way to start putting RSS to work for your company today is by publishing a blog.
Service companies like health clubs (who provide ongoing memberships) and interior plantscapers (who sell weekly maintenance) are faced with a sales situation that can make or break their businesses. How to structure contract
Long term contracts provide predictable cash flow, insulate clients from competition and reduce client churn. However, they can be harder to sell and renew because the client faces more risk from the transaction. The secret weapon for selling long term contracts - a strong money-back guarantee to reduce client risk.
Month-to-month contracts (or no contract) provides less initial sales resistance and better conversion rates. But, attrition has a greater impact on cash flow and clients can be lured away by cost cutting competitors.
Selling Less To Sell More
More and more businesses have been migrating their contract service models to month-to-month. Why? Because consumers are demanding that service companies share the dis-satisfaction risk. It provides the customer with extra value in the transaction without a written or formal guarantee. Companies are understanding that value and turning it to their advantage. Here’s an example from the health club industry via The Houston Chronicle:
“Why are Life Time and Town Sports succeeding when Bally has stumbled? One key difference is in membership structure.
In an interview, Simkins said Bally was highly leveraged to member financing under its original structure, which required that customers commit to long-term memberships at lower rates.
Analysts prefer the Town Sports and Life Time models, which are primarily month-to-month and target a higher income clientele with more expensive fees.
A Bally spokesman said the company began offering month-to-month memberships in 2004, to provide customers with more choice.
One downside to a month-to-month structure, however, is it gives customers an easy out if the fee becomes too burdensome. Analysts said the industry has been generally resistant to recession, but acknowledge that an economic downturn could cause customers to turn in their gym memberships for jogs in the park.
CIBC World Markets analyst Vivian Ma, who gave Life Time a “Sector Outperformer” rating noted, however, that the industry has experienced steady growth since 1987 and showed no significant slowing during two recessions. Life Time outperformed the industry during the most recent downturn in 2001 and 2002, she adds.
As for Town Sports, Simkins said the company is tied to New York City’s economic health, and noted that unemployment in the city is relatively low. About 70 percent of Town Sports’ store base is located in the New York City metro region.”
How is your business selling it’s services? How could your business be selling it’s services? That may be the most important question of all.
This video provides a glimpse into how social networking, search engines, tagging, widgets, blogs, wikis, video, audio and other forms of new media will revolutionize how we communicate and do business.
At BrightCite, we’re always on the lookout for products and services that exemplify our guiding principles. Here is one such example: MILK.
It’s an elegant, solution rich work desk . It features customizable boxes that hold everything from fish tanks to your garbage can in discrete, space saving and productive ways. It’s a great example of design simplicity without sacrificing function or usability. Just like a great website.
Here’s an innovative marketing idea a personal fitness trainer uses to get noticed.
His business card is actually a piece of fitness equipment.
Not only does the texture of the card incite you to pull it apart to read it - when you do, you get a taste of the actual experience behind using the fitness trainer’s services. Brilliant!
A website could transition the reader’s attention from the novelty of the card to the action of becoming a client quickly.
Interest Diminished
Instead, the reader of the card is forced to use the phone.
This more than likely leads to a "We’ll get back to you message" that diminishes the reader’s motivation for the services.
Untapped Potential
What if the reader of the card is directed to a strong website with solid copy and design?
Chances are it will turn the spark of interest the card stimulated into a flame of purchase motivation.
By: Curt Conrad
President, BrightCite Inc.
Warning. Slight rant below…
Is your small business prepared for the arrival of the virtual marketplace? For years I’ve been telling all who would listen how strategic use of the web is a critical small business asset. I’ve been met with many glazed eyes and blank stares from small business people who just don’t get it.
Too bad - because the clock is ticking for the small business person who is web-illiterate and who still thinks about and uses a website as only an online brochure.
It’s going to be a rough road ahead for small businesses not actively seeking to build online assets and who lack a basic understanding of how business works on the web.
On the flip side, proactive small business owners who see the Internet as an opportunity for a business building investment will be rewarded with an exceptional rate of return on time, money and resources.
Are you actively educating, positioning and preparing yourself and business to profit from the power of the Internet? Where do you stand?
Quick Audit
Answering yes to the questions below indicates you are positioning yourself to build online assets that will serve you and your business well in the years ahead:
The more questions you answered "no" to, the less prepared you are for the rapidly approaching future. On the other hand - there has never been a better time to start increasing your online business knowledge and skills.
By: Curt Conrad
President, BrightCite Inc.
Ideas, Vendors, Opportunities, Hiring… Small business is filled with decisions large and small. We make most of those decisions by comparing pro’s and cons, risks and rewards, plus numerous other variables to determine the best.
It’s really about competition - survival of the fittest. Our options compete and what we feel is the best solution wins the decision and survives.
A Powerful Business Tool For Making Decisions
There is a simple, powerful tool that distills logic, weeds out the weak options and narrows a field of contenders to a best choice.
It allows you to harness the collective intelligence of others on your behalf. And you are probably familiar with this powerful tool and it’s elegant, simple solution - The Bracket.
Sure you’ve seen them used to measure the results and winners of sporting events and college basketball. But have you applied their power to your business?
Slate - offers an interesting application of brackets based on what authors Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir call Braketology the title of their book. According to the Slate essay:
Bracketology—the practice of parsing people, places, and things into discrete one-on-one matchups to determine which of the two is superior or preferable—works because it is simple. It is a system that helps us make clearer and cleaner decisions about what is good, better, best in our world. What could be simpler than breaking down a choice into either/or, black or white, this one or that one?
Apply The Power For Yourself
Let’s say you are looking for a new Unique Selling Proposition (USP) for your business. You write down numerous tag-line ideas, looking for the ultimate slogan. You arrange your list in brackets and have potential slogans compete with each other. Round after round you narrow the group, harnessing the collective brainpower of your company and customers, who choose their favorites. Ultimately, one tag-line is left standing - the best decision has been made.
See It In Action
Slate has set up Ad Slogans bracket competition to determine the best slogans of all time. Check it out and you’ll not only get some great marketing inspiration for your company - you might just discover a way to solve that business problem that’s been holding you back.
May the best solution win!
By: Curt Conrad
President, BrightCite Inc.
In my last post I discussed how adoption of feed readers are turning RSS into an up and coming online advertising channel. The channel is relatively new and inexpensive, not to mention uncrowded. This is a great time to get in on the ground floor and get ahead of the pack.
Here’s some info on how RSS is being integrated into online ads:
From the post: Turn Ads Into Content & They Work Better:
"In late September, several marketers — including Symantec — rolled out ad units that pulled content into ad banners straight from RSS feeds of those advertisers’ corporate blogs. I just reviewed click-through data for Symantec’s first twenty days, and the early data suggest that RSS-powered deliver better performance, both in terms of click-through rates and engagement.
Normal ads (whether they’re video ads on TV, banner ads on the web or billboards along the freeway) experience “creative fatigue” over time. Creative fatigue means, in essence, our eyes get bored with the same creative after we’ve seen it too often, and we stop noticing it altogether. If you plot the performance of a single creative execution over time, with time passing left to right along the x-axis, it’s a sad, downward slope almost every time. This is why advertisers “refresh” their creative frequently."
Blog.memeorandum.com expalins the RSS sponsorship model being used by Techmeme (A news and blog aggregator website).
"The way it works is simple. A sponsor’s blog feed is polled every few minutes, the latest post of which appears in its assigned slot (first, second, or third).
Advantages of this approach over banner advertising are numerous. "Click-throughs" can lead to the visitor browsing, commenting on, and even subscribing to the sponsor’s blog. And a sponsor has direct control over what appears on Techmeme simply by posting."
Here’s how they’re doing it. (Notice the sponsored posts on the right coming from the advertisers Blog Via RSS feed)
This is an exceptional ad model because it hits the intersection of Consumer and Advertiser value. The consumer can self-select meaningful content that stays relevant because it’s constantly updated. The advertiser’s product and services then become next in line for the consumers attention. Even if no transaction takes place, a consumer clicking through to the advertisers blog can set off a chain reaction of back end marketing value through list building,consumer comment feedback, community development, analytic analysis, inbound links, social networking and SEO impact.
We’ll keep our eyes on this as it evolves. But there is no doubt RSS has and will continue to develop into a powerful online marketing and advertising tool for small businesses. We’re working on integrating a similar model in our upcoming Xtenda™ release. Stay tuned…
