@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Business Consulting

Can You Get Free PR?

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How to make the most of your internet presence and increase your visibility is a subject many small business owners are grappling with. With the enormous speed in which social media is evolving, you probably have this question reverberate in your brain: am I doing all that I can do to advertise my business?

Even if you don’t have a big advertising budget, there are some things you can do to get free – or almost free – PR. But you have to know how to do it.

–          Do your homework – know what is happening in your niche, what makes you different and better. Identify local publications and trade magazines. See which writer writes about your area of business and what is he writing about (personal story, facts, sales?)

–          Build your story. It has to be compelling, short and to the point. It has to entice the writer to look into your new venture.

–          Choose the date carefully. Does your business have something to do with dates? Holidays? Writers are looking for things to write about which are relevant to the date of publication. They are more likely to look into your business if it has something to do with the date of the next issue.

–          There are few site you can go to which will cost relatively very little but will start you up on the road to a PR campaign:

PRWeb is one of them. Their site helps you create a press release and they will send to search engines, news sites, geographic location sites and 5 industry sites. Press releases start at $80 and go up to $360 if you want your release to appear in big newspapers like New York Times or USA today.

1888 Press Release – a similar service to PRWeb but more variety in pricing and more control over the message. They also have editors going over your press release to check for grammar mistakes and appropriate content.

MediaSync. A site that aggregates material according to subject or market and allows you to see who writes about your kind of business. It also lets you contact the writers or bloggers to offer them new information to write about. Their service is free. In the future they will introduce a paid subscription for going deeper in measuring the influence the writer has had.

Handle Your Own PR. A service designed for medium and small businesses, it offers PR tips, media lists and press release writing assistance.

These are but a few initial steps to increase the visibility of your small business, but these steps cost you – in time, not money. It has been said that the most expensive element a small business owner has is his time. If time is an issue, contracting a consulting firm that knows all the ins and outs of online advertising world and social media websites. There is much more that can be done to increase your business visibility.

Social Brand Visibility: Are You LinkedIn?

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LinkedIn is a business based social networking site which connects you to your business contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities. It helps you expend the network of professionals in your field.

The site allows users to maintain a list of contacts with people related to their business. It connects users to friends of professional friends and increases their professional circle.

Through LinkedIn you can develop a professional profile which is posted on the web so you can establish an authoritative resource that allows people to find you.

Employers searching for workers can use their LinkedIn network to get first hand recommendation. It also allows job seekers to see if anyone needs their expertise.

Being free, open and friendly, it encourages people to approach you. When your contacts change jobs or change their e mail address you are still connected to them through LinkedIn.

This familiarity and wider circle of business ‘friends’ enables you to reach out to members of your group for direct introductions and recommendations.

You can upload your address book, develop relationships and maintain them. You can join a group and see experts talk about a common issue and solve problems.

You can share tweets and use their mobile application to stay connected on the road. It keeps you in touch with people that might matter to your career.

LinkedIn offers users the ability to research companies with which they are interested in working. When searching a specific company what is shown as a result are different statistics about the company; the ratio of female to male employees, what are the most common titles given by the company to their workers, the location of the company’s headquarters and a list of present and former employees.

LinkedIn has more than 80 million registered users in over 200 countries worldwide. It operates in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million visitors globally.

Since 2008 LinkedIn launched DirectAds as a form of sponsored advertising.

In November, 2010, LinkedIn started allowing businesses to list products and services on company profile pages. It allows members recommend certain products they liked and write reviews about their finds.

If you are interested in expending your circle of business connections, talk to like-minded people, help and be helped in solving professional problems, LinkedIn is a site which will allow you do all that for free.

Startups that could affect your Marketing Strategy

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How to use social media to advertise your business has always been a game of catch-up. Inventors, investors and programmers are constantly busy with building new sites, creating new applications that will change or improve the way we connect with each other and our viewing habits.
TechCrunch, a company that started as a blog in 2005 and has evolved to be one of the biggest and more innovative companies, holds a yearly conference where they choose 25 new startups from over 1000 applications to present their ideas to the conference and through it to the world.
At the last conference in San Francisco, in September 2010, TechCrunch chose to show a few companies that might have an impact on how you advertise your small business through the web. Here are some to watch for:
Badgeville – Aims to help increase audience engagement and loyalty by providing an easy way for web publishers, media sites and brands to increase engagement with their customers. It also enables measuring and optimization of users engagement.
Gifi – Combines Venmo and FourSquare into a location based game involving real money. Recommending a restaurant or a dish becomes a social game. Users can hide money for their friends to be unlocked when they order the dish they recommended for example. It provides business owners with a simple way to deliver rewards for valued or frequent customers. Every time a customer is rewarded, the business gets exposure through the social media sites of their customer’s friends. The company received $1.2 million in seed money this year.
Gripe – A location based free mobile app.  It allows the users to send complaints or cheers about a business they frequented. The remarks are sent to the business as well and they can react, while spreading the words through friends and followers. By resolving complaints, businesses can turn detractors into promoters spreading positive word-of-mouth to everyone on their social media network.
Sumazi – was awarded by TechCrunch as the startup “most likely to change the world”. By intelligently connecting people to other people they don’t know but should, they leverage the personal and extended networks to discover, recommend and introduce customers to other people and opportunities at the right time.
Tello – another startup which aims to help companies improve customer service by providing real time reactions to their customer’s experience. It is a mobile and social application. Businesses of all sizes can improve service and engage customers in conversation, resolving issue and monitor employee ratings.
Which of these will flourish remains to be seen. Watch for them and subscribe when they become operational.

So You Want to Start a Business Blog….

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A paradigm shift (shift in habits) has been happening in the last year as far as blogging is concerned. It was not surprising to find that according to a research done by Hubspot, blogs are the most critical platform for businesses, more than social media.

75% of the respondents said they consider blogs ‘useful’ and 31% said it is ‘critical’ to their business.

According to the survey businesses with corporate blog generate more leads than businesses which don’t have one. And it is true not only for business to customer relations but also for business to business.

As long as you post quality content which addresses your specific target audience, business leads are almost guaranteed.

The quality of the content, posting frequency and having an interesting and easy to read design, have to be consistent to ensure effectiveness.

Before you embark on a blogging adventure you have to ask yourself several questions:

–          What are your strategies? Experts have found 4 different kinds of blogs that are used for businesses advantage:

 Building brand awareness through leadership. It requires businesses to share their thoughts and opinions regarding their industry. The aim is to be a trusted source, to be considered an expert in the field and come up with blogs about new developments, opinions about old ones and guidelines. (For example: http://edelmandigital.com/page/1/)

Another kind of blog deals with the corporate culture – helping others understand the company and what motivates it. (http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos)

Connecting with leaders – is another kind of blog written by the CEO or another head of company. It helps connect the leaders of the company with its employees and the customers. It creates familiarity that has disappeared from the corporate culture as companies grow bigger. (http://www.blogs.marriott.com/)

Branding – a blog that establishes a brand image. (http://www.openforum.com/)

The content must reflect the reason for the blog.

–          Set Goals – Think what you want to achieve with the blog and how are you going to be able to see if you accomplished that goal.

–          Management – Someone in the company has to be responsible for the blog. If you don’t have an IT to build the blog for you, you can go to hosted blogging services such as WordPress. That is for the look of the blog and the ability to upload it quickly, but managing the content is another issue. Have an “editor” designated to working on the blog and generating and evaluating the information that comes in. Have more than one person post blogs especially if you want to publish on a daily basis.

–          Post interesting blogs. Make them easy to read and informative. You’d want people to spread the word through Tweets and the readers own social networks.

Small Businesses and their Banks

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How many keyboard strokes have been used to write about small business and the banks? Too many to count.

Promises were given, rules are being written and debated in Congress and  the Senate, ideas become laws –  and still the economy is not moving forward in the desired pace.

Small business owners blame the banks for making it difficult to get a loan and expend the business. Banks are saying they have been burnt enough with bad loans and there are less and less applications for loans. In the last quarter the numbers of loans given by the banks went down 12%.

It seems like a ‘Catch 22’.

Are we doomed to continue this cycle forever? As with everything else that triggers the American ingenuity, there are solutions, even when it comes to banks and lending.

A recent poll by J.D Power and Associates wanted to check the current relationships between small business owners and their banks. They conducted a survey in July and August 2010 among over 6,600 financial decision makers in companies with revenues between $100,000 and $10 million, about their relationships with their banks.

The loyalty factor of small business to their bank has been declining drastically. If in 2008, 34% of small business owners said they will definitely go back to their bank, in 2010 the number dropped to 19%. Less than a quarter of people who do business with banks will not go back. In any other business it will be a cause for a major alarm.

The biggest complaints small business owners have is that they are not getting the support they need from the bank.

The poll shows that small business owners want a few simple things;

They want a point man, someone they can talk to. Someone that understands a bit about their business and someone that is available, either physically at the branch or through E mail.

They want to know in advance what the fees will be. Small business owner don’t expect to get something for nothing, but many complain about being blindsided by additional fees and charges they were not aware of when they signed the contract.

It looks like the big national banks are the ones who fail their customers in those two areas.

The list of the “Least Satisfied With” banks starts with Bank of America, Chase and Citibank. It continues with Wells Fargo and the rest of the big banks.

According to the poll, the ones who did get a good loyalty rating were the small regional banks like SunTrust in Atlanta, KeyCorp in Cleveland and Huntington National Bank because they are headquartered in Columbus Ohio as local banks.

I for one have used Suffolk County National Bank and Suffolk Federal Credit Union. These two are located in Suffolk County New York and still have a great personal feel to them.

Big banks have lost the human relationships with their clients. It may be high time to leave those big ones and go with the smaller local banks, with bankers like George Baily in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, a movie we will soon be seeing again on TV, come Christmas.

Networking and Schmoozing Do’s and Don’ts

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One of the most important aspects of making your small business grow is networking. With all the technology and innovation, human relationships are still the most important aspect of growing your business. After all, humans are those who order your products and services. Technology enables us to communicate faster and better, account for stock and orders and advertise, but you still need people to make the orders from you and no one else.

A big part of networking is schmoozing – making new connections and keeping the ones you have. Unfortunately, not all of us are born natural schmoozers. For some the idea of schmoozing in a convention or a gathering is enough to send chills down their spines. What can we do to be better communicators?

Here are some key points for the dos and don’ts of human relationships and schmoozing;

–          Be open and real. People can smell a fake miles away (unless you are a gifted con man). Don’t pretend to be something you are not, or promise things you can not deliver.

–          Don’t assume you are smarter than the other guy. You don’t know him yet. Treat him with respect and don’t BS – it destroys credibility and makes you look like an idiot.

–          When schmoozing, it’s not about you as much as it is about the other guy. Find things you have in common that you can talk about. Even if you disagree about a point – but you are both passionate about your position – this is also a way to open discussion and connect.

–          People like attention. A good schmoozer will give them what they want. Listen to what your new acquaintance has to say. Ask questions about him and really listen to the answer.

–          Be attentive. When you really listen you might find things in common to build a conversation upon.

–          Don’t go into a pitch speech right away. Get to know them first. Don’t talk at people but to them.

–          You have to be brave enough to make the first step. People find it difficult to get out of their comfort zone and engage others. Someone has to start a conversation. Let it be you.

–          Be appropriate and don’t overdo it. Mind their personal space and their time (especially true for small business owners. Time is their most important commodity).

–          Let yourself be schmoozed. Sometimes helping others first can be an opening for a successful relationship.

Be friendly, frank and listen. People love to talk about themselves. A big part of being a good schmoozer is to make the other feel as if he is the most important thing in the world, at the moment. The worst thing you can do is ask a question and then ‘check the room’ while the answer is given. Behaving like that will alienate all those who you are trying to be in connect with.

Why Free is so profitable!

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In the case of digital media and social media, giving it away is turning out to be quite a profitable business.

Every business owner has their niche or talent that makes their business a success, in many cases it requires long hours and a massive commitment to be success, or keep the business alive. If you’re an advertising or marketing professional, you should consider giving away some of your services for free. In doing so, your acting in faith that if you can show value to the business owner they will do business with you.

In some cases many people worry about giving up the trade secrets, and in case you’re curious the trade secret is google and YouTube. If you want to know about it, it’s likely a website, or blog and they give it away for free. Want to know how to do it, use the second largest search engine, YouTube and your likely to find a how to video that will walk you through it step by step.

The truth is teaching someone or telling someone, doesn’t mean they will have the time or talent to do it for themselves. Take Google Places, clearly google places is changing the way people find relevant local sources for service and goods, and in some cases places like automotive centers and florists just don’t have the time to take on simple tasks as listing their business with Google Places.

In the end it’s all about time and resource management, if you can show a business owner value in your service for free, then they know they will find value in the paid product and services you can offer as well.

How to Market Your Business like the Big Boys

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  Sometimes looking at a big company and their marketing strategy can teach us a lot about marketing our small business.

Apple Co. is no doubt a big company. They are known for their innovation and ‘cool’ gadgets. Every launch of a new product involves a presentation by Steve Jobs. Their products are sold in the millions in the first few days (iPhone 4 sold 1.7 million in 3 days) because they create such an anticipation and smart marketing campaign. What do they do that makes them so successful?

Looking at their last few launches a pattern emerges. Not only does Steve Jobs do all the presentations, not only he wears the same clothes no matter what weight he’s in, there are some things we can all learn from the big boys, with their cool innovations, the advertising budget and the PR firm. We can do it too, on a smaller scale.

When Steve Jobs does his presentation he is concise, to the point and entertaining. He does not concentrate on the technical aspect of the new product. He doesn’t talk shop – how fast it is, how the components became smaller. What he does talks about is what their new product will do for you, the customer. How will it improve the way you communicate or do business. If a customer wants to know the specifications of their new gadget he can go to their web site and get that information. Steve jobs is talking to the average customer to show him how cool is the new product and how fun it is to use.

When thinking about marketing and advertising, think about your customers first – how will they benefit from it, what needs your product comes to satisfy.

  • Create a buzz. That is what Apple does best. Months before the product launch they drop a few words here and there. Obviously not every company is as highly regarded as Apple, and not every launch is a topic of conversation on the big news networks. Creating a buzz before the launch is very important. Every company that is serious about their marketing can do it through websites, social media and bookmarking sites. Don’t wait until the product is completely finished. When you create a buzz you can get feedback about what people want and think your product will be. Monitor those conversations, see what customers really want.
  • Create a product customers will be happy to show off. When you look at Apple’s products, not only the components are important the packaging is important as well. It is always slick and new (think iPhone, iPad, iPod.) Apple always innovates, jumps ahead in leaps and bounds, not only evolves from model to model. What can you do to your product to make it as sleek as possible, something others will be proud to share? How do you show it on your website?
  • Get expert advice and recommendations ahead of time. Show your product to the titans of your niche and have them write a few words about it. Put it on your website and tweet about it.
  • Take pre-orders. This is a must and a base to build on. Even if you are not sure yet about the final price, you can create a following you can e mail to and update on pricing and new features. A business woman I know created a buzz by tweeting about her product when it was still in the building stage. She got 150 preorders just in the first few days. The product is not finished yet.
  • Make a big deal out of your launch – as big as your budget allows. If not a presentation in a big ball room, you can create a launch on the web. Make sure your speech is short and entertaining. Leave the technology to the experts.

The bottom line – when you are about to launch a new product, plan the launch months before the actual date. Think what information you want to release and when, think how you can maximize your exposure and don’t hesitate to turn to experts in the field to help you plan it correctly.

The Niche You Need To Target To Promote Your Small Business

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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.

How to get Your Small Business on the Virtual Map

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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.