4 marketing promotion ideas that will help you plan for 2012

Posted on 01/03/2012 by Pubfish

Most small businesses would love to create well thought out, integrated marketing plans that can be executed methodically over the course of the year; the kind of marketing plans they teach you at business school. Many academics believe that a strategic marketing approach is the only way to grow a business. Unfortunately, most of us have too little time and experience to create sophisticated strategic marketing plans, and even if we could, we don’t have the resources to implement them, track them, assess, modify and try again. We all need more skills, more people, more time and more money.

So, the big question for 2012 is whether or not it’s possible to cut corners and still be able to grow your business. Although it’s best to think strategically about your marketing, you can still make big things happen by stringing together a range of tactical marketing programs such as promotions, events, special offers etc.

Here’s a few ideas to get you going.
1. Past customer loyalty programs
(One word though before we get started. If you sell to businesses make sure your loyalty program rewards the business, not the employee.
You don’t want to be seen to be bribing people).
You’d be surprised how often small businesses take their repeat customers for granted. Create a loyalty program that your past and existing customers can sign-up for. The simplest of these is a Frequent Buyer Card that gives customers one free item for every 10 they buy. You’ve probably seen this sort of promotion used by your local coffee shop or dry cleaner, but the principle can be transferred to larger products and services by not offering the same level of reward; if you sell TVs you can’t really give one free when someone buys 10. So, offer a warranty, offer a lower priced item that is really attractive to the customer, offer free support, etc.

If you have the time and the information on hand, take a look at your past customer history and identify synergistic items that you know they might want to buy, and give them a deal. Amazon does a good job analysing the preferences and wants of their customers, so why can’t you? Granted it will take time, but it will be worth the effort.

2. Referral programs
Word-of-mouth is probably the most important new business source for you, so it makes sense to add more horsepower there. It’s tempting to offer existing customers a reward for referring new customers, but it may not be necessary. People like to refer great resources to their friends, relatives and colleagues…in many cases, all you have to do is ask. The trick (if there is a trick to this) is to make sure that you relay the fact that you value their business and also value their help in assisting you to grow your company.

If you do decide to offer a reward, you can offer some of what you sell either for free or at a special price, but be careful not to cannibalize your existing business. It’s better to try to parley the reward into more sales. For example, provide small samples of new products and get their feedback, give something that enhances their experience of your products such as an extension to a warranty.

3. Events
Use standard events such as Holidays to trigger a promotion. Better still, create your own event and you’ll avoid the competitive noise that happens at Holiday times. Don’t always jump to price cutting at these times, try to add value to the sale and tighten-up the time window in which your customers can take advantage of your offer.

4. Special pricing
There are situations that demand price offers, but they shouldn’t be the first thing you think of. Special pricing works when you want to keep customers. They don’t work well in getting new customers because customers who buy on price are usually short term and don’t tend to repeat purchases at the higher price. They buy once and when it’s time to buy again they look somewhere else for the lowest price. Special pricing should be reserved for specific situations, such as when a competitor decides to try to undermine your customer base, when you need an emergency cash boost, when you have a product that is not moving and you need to free-up up cash that’s locked in inventory, or when you accompany special pricing with a larger promotional program.

So, right now is the best time to get started and plan for at least the first six months of the year. Decide on at least one promotion per quarter, and ideally two per quarter. Look at your past sales in that quarter, and if you have time, try to figure out where your business traditionally comes from at that time. If you know that a lot of your past customers re-up purchases at a certain time each year, don’t plan on a pricing offer…just stimulate their memories; a full promotion may not be necessary. If you know that sales traditionally slow at a certain time, try to figure out if your new customer flow also diminishes, and if so initiate a promotion that aggressively reaches out to new customers using one of the approaches above.

When it comes to your marketing plans, focus on bite-sized promotions and don’t try to do too much planning. Keep it simple, keep the cost down, and keep the promotions coming.

Instant promotions – just add water and stand back.

Posted on 12/12/2011 by Pubfish

The quickest way to generate sales is usually pay-per-click advertising, but it’s often expensive to implement and many small businesses find that it isn’t cost effective. Social networking and blogging are by far the least expensive ways to get the word out, but the hours required to implement and maintain them can be really extensive. A lot of businesses resort to offering discounts to attract quick sales from new customers. But with Groupon and the like you have to give away the farm and most of the new customers you get are only interested in low prices and are notoriously fickle. You give them a big discount, pay Groupon the same and you’re left with less than your cost. A competitor offers a similar deal and all those new customers go and buy there.

So, how do you get quick results without big costs? How do you do it without having to invest a lot of time and energy? How do leverage this short term activity to generate sales for the long term?
Here’s a quick guideline that you may want to follow. It’s short, sweet and effective:

>>>Start with a quick goal setting exercise that takes two minutes. You can set goals many ways and it often depends on what you’re selling. Here’s a few examples:
-Pure revenue-you want to generate. (e.g. $_______ sales in the next ______ months).
-Number of customers. (e.g. You want to find _____ new customers and sell them ________in the next _____ months).
-Number of sales of a particular product or service. (e.g. Sell ______ of this item ________ in the next _____ months).

>>>Then decide on your offer. This can be a little more difficult. There’s some suggestions below to get you started. Take a little extra time to make this decision because if you plan poorly, you may trap yourself and lose money on the offer:
-Which products or services that you offer have the highest margins? These offer some excellent ways to help bundle products and sell slower moving items.
-Which products or services are in most demand? Can you use them to help sell other products that are not moving fast?
-Do you need to launch and announce a new product? New things are always interesting to customers and prospects and can help drive the sale of older products.
-Do you have products in inventory that are tying up cash that you need to free up? You may want to reduce your profit margin on them but move a larger number in a short period, thereby releasing cash and generating some income.

>>>Pick a plan, write just a little copy…not too much because people don’t want to read much. Then make sure you have photos of products, or images that entertain. There are a lot of web sites where you can rent images and cartoons, so spend a few dollars and you’ll see your results go up.

>>>Now it’s time to broadcast your messaging. There are several tools to do this; some are easy to use, some more difficult. You may have to use more than one as there are very few that do it all. Here’s a short list that you may want to review:
-If you have a web site, you could start by adding a new page or updating an existing page. If you can do this yourself you’ll save money, but most microbusiness owners don’t have the time it takes to learn web page coding and go outside to have it done.
-You can do an email blast using Constant Contact and other services. These require some experimentation, and all they do is blast out to a list of customers and/or prospects.
-Post announcements to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc. This can be done on a one-by-one basis and that takes time. Or you can sign up for a social networking dashboard service that allows you to post to many networks with one click. The service is not free, but not too expensive. Take a look at Threadsy, Myweboo and Hootsuite. They take some time to set up correctly, but they can save you a lot of time if you just want to use social marketing.
-Use a multi-marketing platform. We think that pubfish.com has a great solution and it’s free. You can create a marketing document right there on the site, post it to social networks email it with images, even add it to your wesite with one click. Pubfish.com automatically makes your online document search engine friendly. This tool saves a lot of time, and you just have one tool to set up.

Do you have to have a business plan to grow your small business?

Posted on 12/09/2011 by Pubfish

If you own a micro or small business and decide to go to the bank for a financing loan, the first thing out of the banker’s mouth will probably be “Do you have a business plan?”.

Now, a business plan is a great thing to have. Granted, it can be a ton of work to create, and at the end of the day, may not have much in common with the way the business actually plays out, but it is a great comfort to the banker. That’s mostly because the fact that you had the discipline and dedication to actually go through the arduous process, suggests that you’ll have the tenacity to make a success of your business and therefore protect the banker’s investment.

A business plan is rarely used to actually “run” a business, especially micro and small businesses. First because it’s much like the old paper telephone directories; out of date by the time it’s printed. Second, a micro-business owner who is essentially responsible for every task required to keep the business running, rarely has the time to operate to a plan, however well thought out.

Micro businesses don’t grow at a constant pace; they grow in spurts, usually because there’s no constant marketing effort generating a flow of leads or sales. When a business is busy, that’s the time to get out and sell because it really is the only way to avoid the peaks and troughs that can really cripple cash flow and potentially put you out of business.

The trick is to set up promotions way ahead of time, repeat successful promotions (with some modifications and twists to make them fresh), and use a marketing automation system to make it quick and easy. Obviously, a big part of the solution is to get the word out quickly. Facebook, Twitter and email tend to be the most used and for the time being, the most successful. However, as more and more small businesses use these tools, the clutter will get in the way and reduce results for everyone. The only way to counteract this is to increase the number of tools you use, but this in turn increases the amount of time it takes to implement a program.

That’s why a marketing automation system is so important, but until now there have been no systems that very small businesses had access to; they were either too expensive, or too complex (or both). Pubfish is the first to tackle this problem but more systems are sure to come to market soon.

Why do people want to be heard?

Posted on 10/20/2011 by David Andrews

Facebook is the proof; people want to be heard. Unfortunately, what they have to say often ends up on my Facebook wall. I have a less than average number of Facebook friends but even my 130 or so includes a range of relationships from people I love, to people I once met in a bar.

I check my Facebook page daily but frankly, I often skim over most of my postings. Even if a performing cat or a man who creates epic buildings from toothpicks interests me, it hardly ever engages me. Even if that topic of a posting really engages me the most I can do is add a simple comment that gets sandwiched between all the others. So I seldom comment on someones posting. Even if I do, it’s not a memorable event and it hardly ever drives me to take a position on an issue or make a meaningful comment. After all, I want to be heard like everyone else.

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t really provide you with the tools to focus postings to specific friends, but pubfish allows you to focus your postings and allow your friends to add more than just comments.

If you want to be heard, make sure you have something to say that engages people and then direct it to the people you think will be interested….not everyone in the world. Frankly, the rest of us don’t care a whole lot.

Building the Art of Conversation

Posted on 09/13/2011 by Philip Andrews

“A customer is someone who buys twice; the first time you just got lucky,“ a wisecracker once said.

Relationships are the foundation that every small business must build with their customers. The cost of a repeat customer is a fraction of what it costs to find and convert a prospect into a new customer, so, starting and building conversations is vital. But how do you do that without having to put aside huge chunks of time? Starting a conversation can be as simple a planting a seed and taking a step back. If you’ve done it correctly the members of the conversation will take it over and you’ll be the hero who started it.

Typical web interactions have up until now, been “push” based, meaning that you say something and push it out to the world – reactions can be pushed back of course [blogs for example], but typically those interactions are shallow [trolls, ASCII, emoticons, etc.] – Real conversations are by their nature involving, and involving conversations have the potential to build relationships.

But for relationships to work, the parties have to be able to “relate”- makes sense right?

If you can offer topics and content that customers can relate to, conversations will naturally follow. Think cash-flow, funny customer stories, customer successes, the economy, etc. Try starting a conversation with one of those topics and watch your customers join in.

24 New pubfish enhancements

Posted on 08/04/2011 by David Andrews

We just released the latest version of pubfish. We enhanced the look and feel of the site, and added a whole slew of new functions. Here’s a list of the 24 new pubfish enhancements:

You can now add a photo to your profile
You can scroll through the pages in any pub
You can add multiple new pages anywhere in a pub
Change your personal info and password
New posting process
Links to free image resources
A time stamp on postings
New index/home page format
The ability to rotate images
View the name of pub creator (pubfisher) on reader page and other stats
Enable keywords to use for search functions: title, author, keyword, friends’ pubs, and your pubs
A new look and feel on all pages
Ability to post to Twitter
Conversation maps
Social network links on pages
The pubs are now search-able by title, topic, and author
We started a new WordPress pubfish blog at http://blog.pubfish.com
New WYSWIG text editor
View/edit toggle for your pub
Forced save button
New logged in page format
Keywords, description, and title added to each pub automatically so every pub is SEO-friendly
SEO updated on pubfish.com
Recent Twitter handle change to @pubfish

Have you tried any of these? Which ones do you like the most? Do you have any other enhancements that you’d like to see?

Google+1. A hidden tool that could change copyright management

Posted on 07/26/2011 by David Andrews

I’m up on Google+ and the other day I saw the +1 button and started to dig into what it does. Frankly, it was a bit of a shock.

Seems that if you create something and post it on Google+, then hit the +1 button, Google records it and timestamps it. To quote B.L. Ochman at AdAge Digital, “Google says that claiming authorship of your content ‘gives Google what we need to better identify you as the author of web content.’ When Google detects content you’ve marked as yours, they’ll list that content on the +1 tab of your Google Profile (they’ll do this automatically as soon as you’ve +1′d at least one webpage).”

This is a great tool for authors and publishers, but it’s also a wonderful tool for anyone who posts to the web. It also helps with search rankings because Google catalogs the content and ranks it by popularity.

New Twitter Account

Posted on 07/21/2011 by Pubfish

Be sure to update your bookmarks and keep on following us on our NEW Twitter account! http://twitter.com/#!/pubfish

#pubfish

LOL, no really!!

Posted on 07/20/2011 by David Andrews

I get them every day…those emailed jokes that I don’t have time for but open anyway. Several of my friends and relatives find it necessary to add me to the broadcast list, and to be honest, they offer me a light moment in what is often a stressful day.

Problem is, I delete the emails and sometimes want to remember (and tell) the jokes later.

But now I’m using pubfish to help me keep them safe and to also have my Facebook friends add their favorite jokes to mine. My friends and I are creating a sizable joke book that we share only amongst ourselves.

Here’s how I’m doing it:
1. I opened a ‘pub’ on pubfish. (A pub is a living, breathing online document that you can create and your friends can add to.)
2. I insert the jokes in a template that pubfish provides.
3. I post it to my Facebook page.

My friends then add pages with their favorite jokes, and (I suspect) steal my favorites and pawn them off as their own. The whole process is simple and quick, and the pubfish service is free.

pubfish doesn’t stop at templates for jokes. They have also created templates for recipe books, schools projects, ancestry tracking, wedding albums, and even for marketing over Facebook for small companies and more.

pubfish is also fun to use. I can create a pub in a minute or two and by adding text, headlines, images, videos, and colored backgrounds, and I don’t need to be sophisticated software user to use it.

Now I’m exploring other ways to use the templates. There’s a template for pub’ing and sharing trips and that will be the next I try. After all, what’s the point of spending a ton on a trip abroad if you can’t share it (and brag about it) with your friends?

Random vs. Topical – what’s your choice?

Posted on 07/15/2011 by David Andrews

I just looked at my Facebook wall and here’s what I found:

A posting by a photographer friend about portraits
A posting about a health club
A posting about jokes
A birthday greeting from one friend to another
A video about rabbits
A video about romance

It’s nice to see all these different things, but frankly, only one interested me enough to look more deeply and click on a link.

That’s my issue with social networks; they tend to be random. It makes perfect sense though; after all my friends, relatives, colleagues and people I have met and “friended” all post stuff that interests them, and it ends up on my wall.

What I’d prefer is to have more things that interest me, and less random stuff. That’s why pubfish makes sense to me. I can start a “pub” on a particulate topic (a multi-page online document that can include text, images, videos and more), and then when I post it to Facebook or Tweet it, my friends with the same interest can add to it, follow other pubs on the same topic, and create their own. The service is free and it’s fun and easy to use.

I’m not saying that I only want to see postings that are inside my scope of interests, but I’d be really pleased to see more of what I like from my friends, and be able to collaborate with them to benefit us all.

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