Location Based Mobile Marketing for Small Businesses

Location based mobile apps such as Foursquare and SCVGR are another way for small businesses to reach customers that are actively using their mobile devices to update friends and followers about what they are doing including being your customer. Whether you want your business to be included in location based mobile applications or not, it is highly likely that your business is already listed as these mobile web apps pull information from popular business listing sites including Google places.

There are several marketing strategies that a small business owner can implement to make the most out of these types of mobile marketing opportunities. Creating formal and informal specials to customers using these apps can help increase your company’s exposure through their viral nature by getting more customers to check-in and share comments, reviews or basic information about your brand or company with their friends through social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Sponsored Deals

Businesses can work closely with a location based app company such as Foursquare to promote a special deal to customers directly through the app. This can be a very effective way of marketing to potential customers that are near your business. People in close proximity will receive information about your promotion. This type of paid advertising promotes the deal to all users in the region and requires a person to click the check-in button in order to receive the coupon which will in turn provide your business with demographic details about the people visiting your location for the advertised special.

Special Location Based Promotions

Another strategy that can be less cost intensive is to provide discounts or special deals for customers that choose to check-in through any number of different mobile apps. Simply create a nice marketing flyer and place it near the cash register or online check out cart that proclaims “Check-in on Foursquare” or “Check-in on Facebook” and receive “XYZ” discount or special offer. This can help a business quickly begin to trend in the local area making other users of these apps more likely to see your business.

This type of marketing is relatively inexpensive and customers generally have no problem saying something nice about a business they frequent that is also giving them a deal on one of their favorite products or services. One of the keys to being successful at marketing as a small business owner is to keep looking for trends such as location based apps and thinking how to tap into those communities of users without having to shell out the big bucks that a formally sponsored marketing campaign would cost.

Give location tagging apps a try for marketing your business to local customers and get them engaged with the brand online by actively supporting the company simply by checking-in or making a nice comment about your products or services.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

Discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

Online Marketing Focus: SEO and Social Media

Small business owners have a wide array of marketing choices when selecting the right online marketing strategy to pursue with the goal of finding new leads that actually turn into sales. The most popular being paid advertising, SEO campaigns, and Social Media Marketing. Making a site that is streamlined to be attractive to the search engines through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most talked about tactics that drives traffic to websites generally through Google. It is always important to build a website based on proven SEO principals, but in today’s online world failing to engage with the community through social media sites is a big mistake.

Google now puts value on the number of shares, likes, +1’s, etc. that a site receives when producing its search results. Therefore social media campaigns also have an impact on a company’s search rankings for their desired keywords. A great SEO strategy with lots of backlinks is no longer enough to gain high visibility and traction online. The best marketing campaigns for a small business include a combination of both solid SEO principles and promotion of social media channels. Paid search advertising and banner ad space can get a new site the exposure it needs to reach customers; but it is usually way too expensive for most small business marketing budgets.

Basic SEO Principals

In order to get the most out of your social media campaigns it is wise to have a site built based on best practices concerning search engine optimization. The following are a few guidelines that are important for your web development team to follow when designing your site. But doing these alone will not drive the traffic you desire until you begin sharing your website’s content on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere providing readers the opportunity to share, like or +1 the content you are distributing.

• Create a site map.
• Develop unique page titles, keywords, and page descriptions.
• Use keywords in headers and body of text, but don’t overdo it.
• Create backlinks, but use a family of similar keywords not just one or two.
• Include blog titles in the URL for the company blog

Of course there are dozens of other aspects for building a website with SEO in mind and so it is important that you have a web developer that is adept at SEO techniques when building the website. Many small business owners fall into the trap of trying to implement what they read about SEO strategies that pertain to affiliate marketing companies that are only seeking traffic through Google search and are not actively selling a product themselves or building a brand that customers will return to.

Social Media to Drive Traffic

Using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, and other sites to promote content about the business, products, and services provided should be the majority of your focus. Building a community of people interested in the industry the business is in, is much more effective than building thousands of links on irrelevant websites. Individuals that actively follow a business on Facebook or engage with the company on Twitter are actually helping to promote the brand to their followers and friends simply by engaging and having a discussion. This can be the best kind of exposure as the business is able to reach additional people that may have similar interests. By focusing on creating an effective social media marketing strategy the business has a much greater chance of being noticed by others that will take the time to write or comment either on the social sites, but also on their own blogs and other websites which can result in very high quality links. Building links is a huge part of any effective SEO plan and one of the best ways to get others to link to your content and discuss your brand is through unique and original content that is shared through social sites.

Make sure your site has the basic requirements that the search engines are looking for. Be sure to have a well-designed website and leverage social media to generate the high quality links and discussions that will really send traffic to your site. If you have the ability to create original content then you don’t need to worry about creating an intricate link building scheme as it will more than likely end up getting sniffed out by Google anyways. Small business owners are much better off spending their online marketing budgets building value for their community and actively participating in industry focused discussions throughout the web.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

Discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

Rebranding a Product or Company to Attract New Clients

It is always a serious decision rebranding a company even when new clients have been few and far between. It’s also a major decision for just a single product or service to be changed due to the resources required to make the necessary changes, but if sales have been slow and there is limited positive engagement with the target market a rebranding might be what the business needs to get new clients walking in the doors. The obvious reason for a company to drop its name, logo, etc. is to cover up some really bad PR or other blunder that has done irreparable damage to the company’s image with the market, but sometimes a new look can be done deliberately to realign with the market and set a new course for the company that results in new clients.

A Name Change

A rebranding can be as simple as a name change and new image in the form of a logo. This is common among software companies that are able to quickly adjust the skin of their product and who will carry several brands at the same time of the same product depending on the market being sold to. A name can be the perfect fit when incorporating, however as businesses grow and take advantage of new opportunities that present themselves a name can start to limit the company. When a business has a very specific name like “Joe’s Baseball Supplies” it can reduce opportunities in selling other sports equipment which the company may have grown into and a simple switch to “Joe’s Sports Supplies” fixes the messaging problem with the company name. If the name of a product is not very easily searchable on Google it’s a good idea to consider rebranding a product or company under a new name that is more search engine friendly.

Research and more research

The goal behind creating a fresh look is to make a pivot in the market that attracts new clients to the company and should be based on heavy market research data and focus groups to ensure the new messaging has the best chance for connecting with the audience. When evaluating a rebrand look at every aspect of the company from the marketing collateral, company logo and name to the way customers interact with the company and how they receive the products / services and are provided customer service. Analyze the competition and talk with key business partners about how changing the image of the company will impact their abilities to support your business in the partnerships you have established.

It’s critical that you understand how each business in your ecosystem will respond to the new look and feel of the company and educate them about the improvements you are making ahead of public release. Continue to conduct research as elements of your rebranding are put together by conducting focus groups with existing customers and the target markets the business is considering expanding into when the transformation of the business is complete.

Plan a kickoff party for the new company brand and invite business partners and important clients to the event. This is a great opportunity to promote a new product or company image to a larger group. Inviting press and releasing information about the new image on the company website and social media platforms should coincide with this kickoff event.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

Discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

Use Visually Appealing Marketing to Attract New Business

All marketing campaigns should have a visual component to them and many marketing activities might be entirely a visual experience for the end user, so focus on the graphics and design team to increase the likely hood that a new marketing effort will attract new business. When marketing to a new customer it’s critical to catch their attention and create a desire within them to want to learn more about your product or service. Depending on the marketing message and the desired demographics the visuals will be different but they need to achieve the overall goal of capturing the person’s attention long enough that there is an opportunity to acquire the new business. Small business owners have many resources available to them through the web to have the capabilities to hire designers and execute new campaigns.

Crowdsource Ideas

One of the best methods for finding the right marketing images for a specific joint venture marketing campaign is to crowdsource the project out to many different design teams that are competing for your business. This allows you to put your concept and marketing campaign focus into words and allow several designers to put their inspiration into your ideas and create an excellent visual marketing tool. Companies like 99Design.com provide graphic design services for many core business marketing tools that are likely to be part of any joint venture marketing with your business partners.

Crowdsource Examples

An example of the types of graphic design work available for crowdsourcing:

• Logo Design
• Web Design
• Business Cards
• Icon Design
• WordPress Theme Design
• Stationery Design
• Brochure Design
• Print & Packaging
• T-Shirt Design
• Banner Ads

Crowdsource Benefits

Using a crowdsourcing solution like 99Designs.com for creating all the graphics and marketing collateral for your next marketing campaign allows you to cull the best from several smart and creative designers. Each project you load into the system is like a mini-contest, the designers will create their work and when you select the one you like they are awarded the job. This allows you to avoid the process of finding and hiring the perfect candidate. If none of the designs will work for the marketing campaign you can get all your money back.

Ready to Attract New Business

By creating very appealing marketing collateral for all marketing campaigns, the businesses capability to attract new business will improve. Creating a banner or special T-shirt for a specific event that your business is attending and marketing can be that unique touch that separates your business from the rest. Engage with your target demographic by connecting your brand with visual images that appeal to them. Include as much detail about your target market to the designers in the crowdsourced pool as possible. This will ensure the best designers will align their work to match the market.

Leverage the online community of graphic designers to easily improve the visual appeal of marketing campaigns to attract new business.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

Discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

10 Low-Cost Ways to Market Your Joint Venture

Once you decide to embark on a joint venture, it may seem as though the hardest part of the process will be to find a prospective partner that will prove to be profitable and effective. However, once that partnership is in place, the art of marketing your new union will make all the difference between a joint venture that is successful and one that fizzles all too quickly.

To help you prepare for the marketing aspect of your joint venture, we have 10 low-cost marketing ideas to get you started.

1.  Search Engines - Using search engines to boost your rankings on places like Google will bring a lot more traffic to your website with little up-front costs by guiding prospective customers to your website before they see the business down the list.

2.  Autoresponders – This technique ensures you don’t let a single prospective customer slip through your fingers by automatically making contact with every individual who contacts you and maintaining that contact to maintain interest in your company.

3.  Link Exchanges – So easy to do and so effective when used in the context of a joint venture, link exchanges allow you to exponentially increase traffic to your site through your joint venture partner.

4.  Blogs - Establishing a blog for your joint venture is an excellent way to set yourself up as an expert in your field and increase your credibility within your industry.

5.  Articles – Also a means of building expertise and credibility, articles can be published at a variety of online publications and e-zines.

6.  Email Blitzes – This is a great strategy for reaching a multitude of customers and prospective customers in a single swoop, particularly when the message entails a free sample or special promotion to draw customers to your website.

7.  Press Releases – Press releases announcing your new joint venture are a good way to make the general public aware of your new partnership and stir up interest in your goods and services.

8.  Social Marketing – Cheap and widely used, there is almost no better vehicle for making your joint venture known than on social networking websites like FaceBook and LinkedIn.

9.  Gift Events - You can do these online or from a brick and mortar location, but combining resources to provide prospective customers with free gifts and other incentives is a great way to alert people to your business.

10.  Traditional Ads – While many of these methods tend to be a little pricier than online marketing strategies, newspaper and television ads, as well as mass mailings, are still an effective way to reach prospective customers in your immediate area.

There are plenty of inexpensive ways to market your new joint venture to increase the effectiveness and profitability of your partnership. If you are planning to contact a prospective JV partner, it is a good idea to have a few of these strategies ready to present in your initial pitch for your joint venture. Once the partnership is signed and sealed, begin using these strategies right away to promote your joint venture, increase your customer traffic and explode your sales.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

4 Ways Joint Ventures Power Up Your Marketing Campaigns

If you are looking for a way to amp up your marketing efforts, a joint venture may be just what you are looking for. These strategic alliances provide an additional boost from another company that brings its own wealth of resources, talent and customer lists to the table.

Joint ventures offer exponential returns on your advertising dollar because you’re multiplying all of your efforts times two, or the number of JV partners you end up with in your entity.

We have four ways joint ventures can add the oomph you need to your marketing campaigns.

Two-for-One

Let’s say you are planning to use backlinks as part of your online marketing strategy. These carefully placed links provide prospective customers with a direct connection to your company’s website, as well as SEO benefits. Of course, backlinks are not free; you usually need to provide cash and possibly text to post your backlink on other websites.

When you have a JV partner, you can double your backlink potential by utilizing all of your partner’s resources, as well as your own. In addition to backlinking on each other’s websites, you can work together to produce content for e-zines and other resources to drive as much traffic to your online business as possible.

Endorsements

Larger companies will often agree to endorse smaller businesses for a portion of their profits. While this might seem costly up front, the value of an endorsement can rarely be beat. When you get another company to recommend your business, you immediately establish customer confidence that is challenging to produce with online businesses today. Every customer that is satisfied with the products and service they receive from your JV partner will be much more likely to try out your business as well.

The Art of Sharing

Even small businesses have small customer lists early in their operation. Just imagine what can happen if you exchange your customer list with another business that offers a related product or service to your company. You immediately explode your customer list with a long line of potential customers who are already interested in the goods or services you are selling. Joint ventures are target marketing at its finest, costing little up front, but providing a wealth of returns in the long run.

Pooling Resources

There are many great methods for online marketing today, but all of them are guaranteed to take a major bite out of your relatively small advertising budget. When you partner up with another business, you combine your advertising dollars and your talent to get maximum impact with a minimal upfront investment. You instantly gain the ability to diversify your marketing strategy, with enough money and resources to enable a variety of advertising techniques.

Joint ventures are the perfect solution for small businesses to maximize their marketing potential without much time or cost up front. For those that have little advertising money to grow their customer base when business is just getting started, joint ventures offer the opportunity to make the most of the small advertising budget available. By pooling talent, resources and customers with another company, you instantly power up your marketing returns for better business and a healthier bottom line.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

Using Joint Ventures to Boost Consumer Confidence in Your Online Business

Online businesses have become the most popular way for customers to shop for goods and services today. Now customers can find what they need any time of the day or night from the comfort of home.

However, despite the growing trend to shop online, it can be difficult to build your online business effectively. Websites all tend to look alike, and it is hard to promote customer confidence through a few photos and a creative flair with fonts. This is an area of business where joint ventures can be particularly effective in boosting customer confidence.

The Importance of Consumer Confidence

There have been plenty of studies conducted on the effects consumer confidence has on businesses today. Consumer confidence influences the types of purchases customers make and the companies from whom they choose to buy.  When your customers are confident in your business, they are more likely to return for repeat purchases, and they may recommend your business to their friends and neighbors. Word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing tool that doesn’t cost you a cent in your hard-earned advertising dollars. It is easy to see why consumer confidence plays such a key role in the success or failure of a business today.

The Trouble with Online Business

It is much easier to build customer confidence when they walk into your brick and mortar store. They can gauge the quality of your business by the appearance of your store, the friendliness of your staff and the availability of the products they need. However, none of these features are quite as obvious when you do business online. It is much more challenging to exude that same aura of customer service and quality with photos on a screen. This is where joint ventures can go far in improving the reputation of your online business.

It’s Who You Know

Once customers have a positive experience with your business, they will be more likely to shop with you again. They will also be more likely to shop with other businesses linked to your own through advertising and other methods. This is the core of joint ventures: to promote another’s business to customers who have already built up their confidence with yours. Joint ventures jump-start the consumer confidence process, so you can quickly and effectively build your customer base online.

There are plenty of effective advertising tools to use in online marketing, but the best value will almost always come from a combination of these tools and a JV partnership that will direct new customers to your business. When these customers trust the company that recommends you, they trust you much more easily as well. That type of consumer confidence can’t be purchased; it must be built up slowly over time. Joint ventures allow you to capitalize on the time and energy your partner has already put into building consumer confidence by taking those customers as your own as well.

Online business is booming today, but the competition is fierce indeed. Build consumer confidence for your own company through effective joint ventures, and watch your customer base and your bottom line grow.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

How to Use Joint Venture Marketing to Increase Website Traffic

Joint venture marketing is a beneficial way to get your business noticed when you are just starting out in your sector. The ability to link with a more established business is an excellent way to build credibility and a customer base quickly and effectively.

One of the biggest advantages to JV marketing is that you can increase traffic to your website much more efficiently than by simply using search engine optimization techniques. We will show you a few ways to use your JV partnership to your fullest advantage when it comes to building website traffic for your business.

Backlinks

Backlinks are used to link traffic from one website (your endorser) to yours. Backlinks provide two purposes; they raise your search engine ranking and they help customers find you on the Internet.

To ensure you get the most from your backlink, you should not simply purchase it from another website (which is not only a black-hat strategy, but costly as well). Instead, you need to get your link by mutual agreement, such as a JV partnership. The way to build this type of business relationship is to find a website for a related industry, so the traffic at the original website will be more likely to be interested in what you are selling as well.

It is also important to analyze the website you will put your link on, since sites that get little traffic themselves, or link to illegal websites, may not build your traffic and may even lower your standings in the search engines.

Blogs

Blogging is the way to inform and interact in the 21st century. Many business owners develop their own blogs because people are often more likely to read content than pay attention to an advertisement. If your JV partner also has a blog, you can direct customers to each other through your blogs. This is mutually beneficial, since traffic increases to both websites, which means higher revenues on all sides.

Recommendations

If you find a JV partner who is larger and more established, you can rely on that business for recommendations for your goods and services. Your JV partner may put a link on his website, recommending your business for a related or highly specialized type of product or service. Your traffic immediately increases exponentially because your JV partner already sees a significant amount of traffic each day. More traffic means more sales, especially if the customers directed to you are already interested in what you have to offer.

Content is King

Once your customers find your website, the key is to keep them coming back for more. To encourage customers to sign up for your regular email correspondence, provide content on your website that is informative and entertaining. Your articles will draw your customers to your business and make them want to find out what you have to say next. When you have a good customer list for your opt-in marketing program, you build sales by maintaining regular contact that allows you to alert them to new products and special promotions you are offering.

JV marketing is an excellent method for building high-quality traffic to your website. When your customers come to you, your sales will effectively increase.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report.

Getting Started In Internet Marketing

When you hear the term “internet marketing“, what do you think of?

For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.

At its core, internet marketing is about these things:

* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads

Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.

My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.

My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.

However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.

Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.

Even though there are more sides to internet marketing than just email marketing (permission based), email has been the foundation that our business sits on.

You Aren’t Marketing Your Business on YouTube? Your Competition IS!

If you write a blog and want to expand your audience, or a business that needs more customers (who doesn’t want that?) you really need to be creating videos and uploading them for people to view!

Your competition is taking customers from you that have no idea you exist if they are uploading video and you are not. If they aren’t producing video for YouTube or their own sites then you need to make sure you get those customers they are missing.

Compete.com lists YouTube with 85 million unique visits in July of 2009! Just imagine what it could do for your site if you happened to create a viral video that got 100,000 views… 200,000 views…. 1 million views! A certain percentage of those people would visit your site and a percentage of those would sign up for your newsletter or buy something from you.

Now if my math is right, and you get 1 million views for a video and only 3% of those viewers visit your site that is 30 thousand visitors! If 3% of those signed up or bought something, that is 900 signups or sales! Sound good to you?

I know it’s very difficult to get a video with 1 million views, but take a look at YouTube and see what videos are that popular. Why do they become popular? What is great about them? It’s not the production value, it’s not because they have celebrities or cost a large amount of money to create.

These videos are crazy popular because they are extremely funny, or cool, or amazing for some reason. The videos can be planned out, but wildly popular vidoes are not outwardly selling anything, there is no pitch. If you want to create a viral video you cannot be selling in the video, let the video sell for you!

There’s an old saying from my door-to-door sales days “Sell the sizzle not the steak”. Well what does this mean to you? If I’m selling plant food for gardeners, do I tell them how wonderful the fertilizer is and how many nutrients are in it? NO! I am not selling them fertilizer, I am selling them BIG TOMATOES, that’s the sizzle!

Give for free something of value in your video. We are a camera repair shop and can’t make videos about how to repair every camera, but your customers are looking for something regarding your business, so find out what it is and give it to them!

Teach them something, give them information they are looking for, entertain them. [If you become an authority on your subject your customers will happily tell others about you].

No need to spend thousands on professional video production, but they must be easy to watch and understand.

• Make sure your camcorder or digital camera records good quality video, and no it doesn’t have to be HD quality for YouTube!
• Use a quality microphone. Poor audio will drive away most viewers, guaranteed.
• Use a solid backdrop, don’t show your cluttered basement or office or bedroom unless this is part of your presentation
• Write a script or at least notes regarding what you want to say
• Practice and view your results before publishing it. Ask others for opinions and feedback!
• Yes, you will hate the sound of your own voice, but that is how you sound to the rest of us so don’t worry about it.

Just go for it, things will get better as you go!

Now I’m off to try and figure out what my customers are looking for regarding digital camera repair for their Sony, Canon and Nikon cameras and then just give it to them.