Conferences & Education

The Niche You Need To Target To Promote Your Small Business

October 25, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

You have your products ready, and your services are in place. Your brand image is ready and your marketing collateral is all written, designed and printed out. You now need to target your preferred demographic, your target audience and the niche your small business will occupy.

Nearly every product or service is aimed at a specific demographic group that will be interested buy it. As a small business, you need to do some market research to determine your sales demographics and establish a target audience.

If your product is something that a wide range of customers will use, you will need to create various marketing campaigns to reach different segments of this broad market, maximizing visibility. Then there are products and services which have a fairly specific target audience which need to be zeroed in using a more specific manner. This is called niche marketing and if done properly, can be very beneficial and cost-effective.

How do you determine your market niche? Ask yourself the following questions:

What should be the age of your potential customer?
Who would be more interested in your product, a man or a woman?
If your product is pricey, what income level should your potential customers belong to, preferably?
If your product requires it to be used in a certain way, what is the education level of your potential customers?
Is your product something that will be used by a family or an individual?

What will your customers appreciate the most about your product? Its price, easy availability, or ease of use? What do they like or dislike about the product or service in general?
Where does your audience research for products? Do they use the Internet, newspapers, books, or television?

Based on the results of your marketing research, you should be able to determine the focus of your advertising and marketing efforts. If you happen to find that your potential clients spend are frequent users of the internet, likely that your best marketing lever would be a Web page or an e-newsletter. Again, if you find that your potential customers are interested in listening to talk radio, you would do well to develop promotional strategies that revolve around radios.

Your audience might change too, depending on various factors. It’s always important to keep on top of who your target audience is. Do this, and you will maintain a steady flow and easy returns.

Issues and Concerns from Long Island Non-profits : Social Media Day of Giving

October 22, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

On October 19, 2010 a group of 22 agency representatives from nonprofits on Long Island came to Touro Law Center in search of support to better understand social media and how the digital age has changed the way the nonprofits service their organizations.

A few days later we’ve taken a few minutes to review just a few of the questions, concerns, and issues that the representatives from the nonprofit organizations brought with them to the “Social Media Day of Giving”

Are agencies risking bad comments when they create exposure on facebook and twitter?

The general consensus is that nonprofits just like businesses and individuals lost the ability to control their message without interruption a decade ago. While some have viewed social media platforms like Facebook and twitter as a potential risk, others have capitalized on the opportunity that it represents. While the legal position might caution the nonprofits from engaging in social media, business professionals, community leaders, and social media professionals urge nonprofits to engage in the opportunity that social media provides.

One of the concerns seems to rest with the ability of others to say things or post comments that the organization or nonprofit may not endorse or support. The concern goes as far as, to fear liability from participation or posting by others. While every professional can relate to the concern of what others may say, the new world of social media is about how you capitalize on those opportunities, and is what will make the difference in organizations for years to come. Participation provides the opportunity for viral exposure, which even when led by negative or unsupported posts, comments, ideas or issues, it still represents an opportunity for the nonprofit to display how they support and respond.

Are we liable for what others say?

Unfortunately there is no easy answer to this question. Like anything else, the ultimate interpretation is left in the hands of skilled lawyers and the courts.

Social media professionals would argue that we create an opportunity to open a dialogue and share ideas and emotions and events, what others do with that information we cannot be responsible for, nor can we control. Social media platforms like Facebook, twitter, and even service listings like Merchant Circle and Yelp are platforms that offer us opportunities to engage the general public as well as our members. When someone else takes it upon themselves to provide information they do so candidly without endorsement or support from those that have created the social media platform for which to discuss or topic was engaged.

Now it would just seem good practice that if you create this platform you would be responsible to manage it and monitor it to seize opportunities created by those that would produce information content which your organization does not endorse or support.

How Do we monitor what is said about us?

Ultimately within social media itself and monitoring of your brand and organization is done through everyday participation in social media. This means as you participate in platforms like Facebook and twitter your staff or organizers should be participating in such a rate that monitoring what is said and how it is said is a natural part of the social media interaction.

The hardest part of monitoring your organizational or brand comes from the fact that there is an infinite number of places, platforms and possibilities for others to post a comment or distribute information that may be in support or in contradiction of your organization’s mission or goals. There are lots of resources available to monitor your brand, organization, staff, or keywords throughout the Internet. Two such platforms that offer this opportunity are Google, using Google Alerts (free) you can set up e-mail alerts that will notify you when keywords you have selected have been used anywhere throughout the internet, when Google has crawled it. The second and far more robust option is Giga alerts and Copyscape. Giga Alerts offers a wide variety of monitoring tools for keywords, subject matter and content throughout the entire Internet and while it requires a monthly fee, it provides a priceless service to alert you to any activity taking place on the web in regards to any subject or content you wish to monitor. The other platform copyscape can provide support to organizations in regards to any original press releases blogs or other information in an effort to deter others from reproducing your content.

Online Donations, are they working?

Nonprofits and other organizations often point to their websites as a failure or disappointment in fundraising results. I have found this to be most true during political campaigns and large-scale social movements. While it may be possible that your website is not converting the online donations as you intend it to, it is also possible that your website is raising far more than you give it credit for.

Websites have been a constant evolution from their first introduction and will continue to evolve in purpose, function and monetization as time goes on. The initial purpose of the website was to be a professional extension of an individual that would represent any business organization or another candidate. As such the presence of a website alone may be contributing to fundraising indirectly. An example I often use is a political candidate’s website may offer the opportunity for you to donate to their cause, however the average donor for personal and political reasons would much rather contribute in person than over the Internet. While the website may not have captured the donation through digital means, it is reasonable to assume the existence of the website provided individuals the opportunity to learn an associate with the candidates cause and platform. This extension of the candidate through a website provided the opportunity to capture donations and raise funds that might not have been possible had the website not existed.

While there is no one way to prove that a website or social media campaign has produced fundraising results there are ways to draw plausible conclusions. In the case of a website using Google analytics, a free tool, an organization can monitor the amount of traffic that their website receives daily, weekly, monthly and compare their fund raising success with traffic generated by the website. Google analytics will also provide data that will allow you to track what sources created the traffic for your website. A simple example is direct traffic was likely done via word-of-mouth, whereas references from Facebook would clearly be an indication that something on this social media platform interested people enough to visit the website. While it is hard to prove the success of the website or social media in fundraising, it is a reasonable assumption that if fundraising efforts were more successful during a specific time, when traffic was increased to the website, that there is a correlation between the existence of social media and the website and the fundraising success.

What is the best platform for helping increase fundraising efforts?

There are many social media platforms that offer different opportunities that tailored to different groups of people, as such there is no magic bullet, no one way or platform that will provide fundraising success. Social media platforms are tools that can only be successful when you have chosen a successful message or niche which can be used to capture interest from people that utilize social media.

We cover a lot of information and services how do we cover it all on social media?

The purpose of the website is to be your broad information source. While others will argue that websites should be concise and target your specific mission, others believe the website is meant to be a source of information for everything and anything related to what you do. Social media on the other hand is most successful when you take specific issues and develop a campaign around that specific issue or cause allowing you to create a higher conversion rate from less of an effort.

When do you commit a full time person to Social Media?

It would seem to be the general consensus of social media professionals that successful social media campaigns never come from just one individual. There are many reasons why organizations want to embrace social media on many levels. The earlier concerns regarding monitoring what’s said and how it is said is one of the biggest reasons why no one person should be responsible for social media content. Much like call centers and phone banks, social media requires many individuals to participate and support one another in order to be successful.

What did I take away from this event?

Jeff Namnum explained that Social Media Professionals each bring something different to the table, “one of the great things about Social Media is we can disagree” in a way that is productive.

Special Thanks to my fellow volunteers at this event, as with every interaction I am confident that their input and support at the event helped influence how this blog article was developed.

Dafna Adler, Jaci Clement, Alan Z. Fromm, Farida Harianawala, David Neuman, Ilene Schuss, Sueanne Shirzay, Andrzej Sienko, George Torres, Marilyn Zayfert,Mo Krochmal and Jeff Namnum.
Touro Law Center provided the support, facilities and overall hospitality for the event. Thank You.

Promoting a Small Business Without Breaking The Bank

October 21, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

How do you promote your small business while staying afloat? All you need is a little ingenuity!

The classic promotions options are print, television media and direct campaign. You might think that all these options will cost money, and that you need a large budget to get your message across. Without spending an incredible amount of money, you can attract customers, and have ready to use custom recorded video content for future use, as follows:

Cut costs by using your own employees in place of models for print and television Ads. It’s more believable and you stand a better chance of being noticed and remembered.
Obtain a database of email address and send your company’s information with links to your site via emails for direct campaign.
Put up your promotional videos on your website, with additional content and offers that people can read and watch. Always make sure that your website loads fast, and don’t use too many graphics and heavy content that might slow down the experience for your customers.
Spend a little to ensure more traffic to your website. With more traffic you can usually expect more sales.
Use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to advertise your products and services. Even though too many companies are doing this nowadays, you can still garner eyeballs if you package your company’s identity realistically.

What you need to do is to combine guerrilla marketing with traditional advertising strategies to gain exposure and get paying customers by letting the current technology work for you instead of against you. Create interesting and entertaining under 3 minute videos and post them on your site; while you’re at it, you may as well upload them on video sites such as YouTube. Most video sites are free; by posting your videos online, you can create exposure for your company. Make sure that your video titles contain keywords that are commonly searched by people.

Focus on your demographic; who do you want to target? If you know this already, well and good. If not, consult a good advertising agency to help you define your correct demographic. When you’re on a budget, focusing on your exact target audience will get you more paying customers.

Optimize on television broadcasting by purchasing media time in any locality on any cable network. By doing this, you can run a local cable television advertising campaign in many different cities at the same time. For example, if you know that most of your customers live in large cities, focus only on them. By doing this you can bring down your advertising budget. A national television campaign is way more expensive than a cable TV campaign, and is not as effective either.

Get Published…Want to be a guest blogger?

October 20, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

After a big week and response to my blogs I have decided to open the floor. I received a lot of great feedback and suggestions, so in addition to my blog articles M-F I will feature guest blog writers. If you would like to be a guest blog writer, forward your article to me no later than Sunday 31, 2010 at 12 noon. I will showcase at least 1 a day, perhaps two a day all next week depending on content quality, your name and your contact info will be posted with the article (your website, facebook, twitter or e-mail your choice).

Rules:

The article must fit the following categories:

Social Media
Social Brand
Visibility Marketing
New Tech for Mobile or Social
Small Business Education
Small Business Resources
Advertising & Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Social Brand Reputation Management

Format:

No More than 600 words
Language appropriate (English, Spanish, French or Russian)
No more than two external links for self promotion
No more than 5 links total

Content:

Author is given credit for content
Content must be original
Content cannot be syndicated elsewhere for sixty days.

e-mail: basil@puglisiconsulting.com

How to get Your Small Business on the Virtual Map

October 19, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

The world is divided into two equally powerful entities today; one is the real world that we live in, and the other is the virtual world, or the world of the internet. Getting your business known and noticed in the virtual world can boost your brand identity recognition and your sales to unforeseen heights, depending on your marketing strategies. So how to put your small business on the virtual map?

The first thing to do is to set up your professional corporate website and incorporating e-commerce to increase the value of your business. However, this alone will not result in an implicit increase in the enterprise value of your business.

What you will need to do is leverage the Internet to increase your sales and profitability, thereby increasing the value of your business. With over a 1000 million people online in the world today, and trillions of dollars transacted over the internet, you can sense the presence of a staggering opportunity.

When you put yourself on the virtual map, you are in effect completely eliminating geographic barriers. With one step, you reach a wider, more diverse audience. A properly marketed Web site can be a very effective means of reaching new and existing customers and expanding your geographic presence. Here are a few tips:

Get a smart, professionally designed website designed for your company.
Place your logo prominently on all pages.
Place brief but informative and useful brochure ware of your company so that your potential customers, vendors and partners get an idea of who you are.
Use search engine optimization tools to ensure that your Web site appears at the top of search lists when someone looks for a product or service similar to what you offer.
Make sure your site prompts visitors to input comments and feedback. This way, you can capture the information of existing and potential customers to support the efforts of your sales team.
Ensure that your website allows a safe and secure online purchasing experience. Use the best payment gateways and incorporate every possible security signatures that you can afford. When you allow customers to purchase your products or services online, you can more than quadruple your sales output.

By allowing people to shop online at your Web site, you can reduce your sales staff and other overheads. Imagine what this can do to your business’s bottom-line. Putting up your brochure content on your site can eliminate the need to print expensive brochures and other collateral materials.

Retain your customers and build customer loyalty by offering customer contact and support online. When your customers’ requests are attended to via real time chat, or email follow up, there’s greater satisfaction and trust in your company.

Back to Basics: New Business Owner

October 18, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Are you a small business owner wanting to market your products or services without breaking the bank? If you are, you must read this article.

Customers are attracted to businesses that have a polished, professional image. They often make snap decisions about who to do business with based solely on their image and presentation.

So what does a smart image do to your business? Firstly, it gets you noticed; specific image aspects such as a well designed logo have excellent recall value. So a smart image gets you remembered. That’s two shots in one – a great impression and excellent recall value.

Investing in great corporate brand identity image helps you in two ways; it makes your small business look larger than it is and also sets you apart from the competition. What looks to be fairly simple such as unique logo, an attractive website or appealing business cards will help to establish your business’ brand identity and define its role and services in the marketplace.

So what does a smart image consist of? A well-designed, colorful and yet to-the-point logo that represents your company’s products, services and business ideals is a start. This should be followed by smartly designed business cards with the same logo prominently printed on them.

A smart business card: You can design and print very professional-looking business cards for a low price in order to attract new customers and ensuring that your existing customers know how to get in touch with you.

A smart corporate logo: This is an absolute must if you want to be noticed and remembered. Remember, a picture is better than a thousand words.

A well-designed website: You might wonder exactly why you need this. The world is becoming very web-centric, with more and more shoppers researching products and shopping online. When you have a smart website in place, you will instill confidence in potential customers. Your website must have a consistent look and feel and must contain your contact information, along with your business hours. It would be great to also have the names of the people who can be contacted for specific services. You can use your website to sell your products online; if you do this, ensure a safe secure shopping experience for your customers.

Hand out freebies: Everyone loves it when they get something free. How about gifting your customers small things such as pens, key chains, and mobile phone pouches and so on branded with your corporate logo?

If you don’t have a dedicated art department or marketing team to create your brand identity, here’s some good news. You can easily develop professional-looking logos and business cards using fairly cheap online services.

Pubit! A New Self-Publishing Platform

October 11, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

The writing is on the wall; we are moving from reading books printed on paper to eBooks read electronically. That has become the reality for publishing companies and book sellers. Following the example of the music industry, you either adjust or you become obsolete. What the iPod and iTunes did to music distribution, smart book sellers are doing with the written word. Amazon came out with the Kindle, Sony with its E Reader, Apple with the iPad and Barnes and Noble with their Nook.

On October 4, 2010, Barnes and Noble launched its new service, Pubit! that takes care of the other side of this issue – publishing content electronically.

Pubit! allows authors to upload their work to the site and have access to millions of readers. Authors can self-publish books they have written, short eBooks, articles, short story collections or poems and make them available for sale through Barnes and Noble e-book store.

With a free and simple set up and registration process, books can be uploaded, including the cover and artwork and be available for download for less than $10.

When registering for their service the author enters into a partnership with Barnes and Noble. Every work is prices from $1.99 to $199.99, and every sale proceeding is split between the author and the publisher following a clearly spelled formula: B&N gets 40% -65% of the proceedings, depending on the length of the publication and its popularity. There are no hidden fees, and no upfront costs. The author is able to track sales and payments through their site.

This is a very important partnership since Barnes and Noble has over one million titles in their online e bookstore, and millions of visitors.

Unpublished writers can now get published, E-books have another venue, poets and artists can be discovered by popular demand rather by the tastes of the publisher’s team.

What makes Pubit! even more exiting is the fact that Barnes and Noble went a step further than having it ready to be read on their Nook. They are offering a free e-reading application that enables readers to download and read books on other platforms as well; PCs, iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones. They are making the content readily available, accessed from different platforms, without cost to the authors.

In the same way YouTube provided a platform for people to display their video work and get noticed, Pubit! Is attempting to change the publishing world and allow people from all walks of life, that have been writing ‘to the drawer’, to get published, noticed and become successful by popular demand.

This opportunity also opens the door for hundreds of consultants and coaches allowing them to stretch the hand of social media from helpful advice to expert publications.

Redefining geek and techie?

October 8, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Let’s take the case of a techie and a geek as defined in modern technology. Let’s use the example of Best Buy and their geek squad, a retail division that has been established by Best Buy to service computer and technology failures in products sold by the retailer. This industry change has led me to explore the difference between a geek and a techie.

Technology has divided the world into three general categories, the geek, the techie and everyone else. When we discuss everyone else we are specifically looking at anybody who does not fall into the category of techie or geek. We do this specifically because it is my belief that the technology offered by the world has created two type of IT professionals a techie and a geek.

The geek is the programming and engineering individuals that handle technical design and code. These individuals known as Geeks are strongly fluent in programming language and technical expertise in constructing and deconstructing technology.

I introduced the techie on the other hand as the individual who is capable of understanding the needs analysis of the general public and how that technology applies to that need. The techie is an individual who has remained and continues to remain on top of different technologies while never specializing in one specific type of technology. That techie understands the different strengths, weaknesses and opportunities that technology offers to resolve the needs of everyone else.

Who is everyone else? Everyone else is the public at large, be it business professionals, educators, students, consumers, clients, physicians, lawyers etc. The general idea is that humanity has created needs and these needs have been fulfilled by technology. In addition to the needs being fulfilled by technology, we have also started to fulfill wants. While the geeks have provided us ways to deliver technologies to resolve the needs and wants, it is unfortunate that most geeks fail to be able to see the big picture and purpose of the very technology in which they are creating.

Take the website for example. Websites offer a unique opportunity for individuals to share knowledge, display their expertise, and develop a medium through which they can educate, support or organize outreach. For a business owner, the difference between geeks and techies, have been exemplified in the Web 2.0 era. This is what happens when countless business owners have invested time, energy and money into websites that have been built by programmers and other geeks who understand their trade, language and their code. Unfortunately, business success is not defined by the contribution of programmers and geeks. This is where the need for techies has evolved. Techies are individuals who have enough technology experience and understanding of the technology. They excel in how delivery should be in a streamlined user-friendly manner so that business owners can reach everyone else in the world.

Techies serve the most crucial function of understanding how technology meets the needs, or fails to meet the needs of any function, business or organization.

Business Owner, Entrepreneur, Dishwasher?

October 7, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

While it is often exciting to be an entrepreneur, we sometimes forget to be successful in any business; we must be prepared to wash the dishes. I found myself in the unique position several times of reviewing business opportunities with both young and seasoned entrepreneurs. These are people that have exciting ideas in exciting times and carry with them a great deal of energy that can translate into success.

One of the first things that I offer as advice to any entrepreneur or business owner, is to take the time to think about how it is that they would feel about being a dishwasher.

My father once explained to me that the most successful restaurant owners and successful managers of restaurants have often spent time in the kitchen, on the line themselves preparing food cooking and even washing the dishes.

In considering this advice, I offer you the following thoughts. When you think of creating a successful business, the first thing you’ll need to consider is the actual infrastructure of the business, how will this business operate, what role and how well will that be defined. This is what often leads me to think of the dishwasher. Take the most successful restaurant anywhere in the world and that restaurant will be traditionally be defined by the number of seats, the quality of food and level of service. Although, if the restaurant only has 60 seats and 80 dishes on any given busy night, they would be lost without the dishwasher.

The Smart business owner or entrepreneur quickly realizes that it is important to understand his/her business and every aspect of the business. To have respect for every role and function that that business or service has. This is why I mention the dishwasher. When you think of a business, in this case a restaurant, we often overlook the importance of others or in this case the dishwasher. When a consumer walks through a restaurant door it has always been emphasized how important it is to have the first experience with the restaurant be its finest, it is often overlooked that all of this is made possible by the “dishwasher”. Imagine how a restaurant would function if it had no dishes. If everyone in the business thought that they were better than being the dishwasher. If they thought that the dishwasher was insignificant and unimportant to the success of the business. In such a case, the business would fail. Surely the chef could not cook the steak, prepare the chicken Cordon Bleu or serve his famous French onion soup without dishes. One could even argue that he would not even be able to cook if someone did not clean and prepare the utensils.

So it is my advice to any small business owner or would-be entrepreneur that you consider the importance of the dishwasher not just in the structure of your business but in how it is that you may be called upon to serve that function to develop the success of your business. No business owner or entrepreneur, at least not the successful ones, develops a business based on great ideas and money alone. The true success of every entrepreneur and small business owner is the sweat, tears and hard work that they are willing to put into their own business. At this very moment there is an extremely successful business owner somewhere in the world scrubbing the toilet because there is no one else to scrub the toilet, and while you may believe your above scrubbing toilets, that business owner who provides for his family, sends his child to Harvard, or uses that first business and that first toilet to build the next multimillion dollar business. Their success began with the concept that a great idea and funding will not be enough to be successful.

So a word of caution to all you would-be business owners, entrepreneurs, inventors and silver tongues. When someone talks about America being based on the hard work of its citizens, they are talking about an economy built, sustained and developed by small business owners. This is a experience, endeavor and honor that is not always white sandy beaches, luxurious vacations, or penthouse apartments. It is a rite of passage, a part of the American dream, that if you are willing to work hard, invest yourself, your time, your pride, you may be rewarded with all that you put in. America will always need its “dishwashers”.

If you’re not ready to be the dishwasher, I urge you to reconsider starting or running a business, organization or campaign.