Customer Generation Tool Kit
This topic came up in an online business networking thread and also with other local business owners that I’ve spoken with, and it’s no surprise. Not only is generating leads and business an enduring concern for all businesses everywhere, but this time of year — with school back in session and money drying up — is when a lot of businesses start to feel the pinch of slowing activity. (more…)
On Memorial Day Muddled Messaging
Yes these American holidays can be real confusing, especially between now and Labor Day Weekend (a topic of a similar post here). The common thread of course is some kind of patriotic feeling, flags, barbeques and yes, mattress sales.
So if you’re communicating as a business, does it really matter if you thank the troops for their service on Memorial Day as if it were Veteran’s Day or theme your promotions as if the last Monday in May was the Fourth of July? I think it does.
Clarity in your messaging says a lot about your business and the thought you put into what you do and how you serve your customers. So if Memorial Day is about remembering service men and women that made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, then when if you want to reference the holiday, then that’s what you talk about. Thanking current men and women in the military for their service is muddled messaging. As is Happy Memorial Day; that’s like saying happy memorial service.
Unless of course you’re in the mattress business. Then you know what to talk about.
Make it a Real New Year for your Business
I tried to avoid slipping into a New Year’s resolution theme with this because a) it’s been done to death and b) we all know what happens to New Year’s resolutions by February. Still the start of the calendar year is always a great time to refocus on what you need to do to be successful and grow your business in 2023. So here are a few tips:
1. Turbocharge local search
You’ll notice that I don’t use passive words like position, setup or even optimize. If you’re a local public-facing business with a physical location and you don’t do this, you might as well skip the rest of this post and save yourself some time. (more…)
Local search is search
I’ve had many clients come to be for search engine optimization recently and what strikes me is how so many of them still view SEO through the lens of 2009. What I mean by that is that they’re trying to rank high for certain keywords in general search to get some traffic, without any local geographic overlay while competing against thousands for businesses. And for many of us long-suffering Jacksonville Jaguar fans should know, that’s the recent equivalent of the Jags beating Tom Brady in the Super Bowl — four years in a row.
A lot has changed since Google came on the scene, heck my iPhone now has more computing power than my 2003 Mac. And search has gotten more sophisticated too, in the more intelligent answers it gives to people’s queries and most importantly, where they’re looking for answers. So these days search is driven primarily by local search, and performance in local search means ranking high on the map. The tag line for this site — putting your business on the map — was not put there by accident. (more…)
Direct Mail Primer
The USPS will probably be heartened to learn that I’m getting more and more inquiries regarding physical direct mail — you heard right, the old fashioned stuff made of paper that arrives in your mailbox and delivered by an actual mail carrier. Just like late great folk singer John Prine, the singing mailman!
So I thought now would be a good time to publish here information I posted in a business forum: (more…)
It’s Small Business Week Again
Yes it’s small business week again, brought to you by the SBA. Like many other designated days, weeks or awareness months, Small Business Week is designed to bring awareness to the need to support small local businesses. Small Business Week has grown over the last 50 years out of a Presidential Proclamation and like many of those proclamations, it’s the kind of sentiment that we call can agree and feel good about. The problem, of course, is that there’s a big difference between a feel-good concept and getting people to change their buying behavior, which is really what the week is supposed to be about. (more…)
Shop Local in the Age of…
Nowadays to don’t even have to finish that phrase, but I’ll say it anyway, shop local in the age of COVID-19. Or more specifically, getting customers to shop local in the age of COVID-19.
With the holidays just a few weeks over the horizon, this is the time when blogs and business networking sites light up with the topic of getting people to buy local. The trend toward online shopping has been flummoxing small businesses for years, and the challenge has grown exponentially with the advent of the novel coronavirus that has people looking for ways not to shop physically. (more…)
Hollowed Holidays and Labor Day
This is an update of a post I wrote on my corporate blog last year and it dovetails perfectly with my last post on back-to-school.
No, the title is not a typo. I did mean “hollowed” rather than “hallowed”. It seems that as more years go by, these three-day summer holiday weekends (Memorial Day, the Fourth when it falls right and Labor Day) are further and further removed from the origins and intent of the events that spawned them, so they have been sort of hollowed out. Now they seem to be uniformly about beer (nothing wrong with that) barbecues and much-needed time off for the beleaguered American worker, who works longer and harder than anyone in the industrialized world (if they get any time off at all in this service economy). And mattress sales. I don’t know what it is about three-day weekends and mattress sales, but you could realistically change Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day to Mattress Sale Day One, Two and Three to avoid confusion. (more…)
Remaining COVID-19 Life Rafts for Small Businesses
The Payment Protection Program — part of the US Government’s economic rescue efforts — was sort of like a massive truck looking to leap a deep ravine in a stunt. You hope the truck makes it, but you close your eyes because you can’t bear to look. The SBA loan program is similar in that you hoped it would turn out OK and we would all make it to the other side, but you could just imagine the breathtaking falls along the way.
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The Ebb and Flow of Storm, Seasons & Time
This article first appeared in my Everyday Marketing Advice blog:
This post was initially inspired in part by the passing by of #HurricaneDorian (passing by Florida; our thoughts and concerns are now focused on the Carolinas and other states up the coast, I hope they pull through fine).
When a major disruption like a hurricane arrives, or even seasonal interruptions like vacations and back-to-school, many of my clients lament the ebb in their business flow, as if they were helpless observers of the business cycle. That perspective is indeed the problem.
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