Blog: Business

Conducting Customer Surveys to Improve Your Business

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

customerservicesurveys 150x150 Conducting Customer Surveys to Improve Your BusinessSurveys are an inexpensive way to improve your business providing you are willing and able to listen to the data collected. They can help you explore your customers buying habits, test new ad campaigns or product roll outs and find out what your customers want to keep them happy.

There are many different ways to conduct surveys. You can have simple cards in your businesses that customers fill out after purchase. You can implement easy to use online survey tools such as Survey Gizmo that integrates with Facebook, your website, email or text marketing lists. Send an invite our to your text message marketing list with the link to your survey. With Moto Message you can also create simple text-2-vote campaigns that can be used for surveys.

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Guerrilla Marketing: Using Cross Promotion to Reach New Customers

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

outside the box marketing strategies 150x150 Guerrilla Marketing: Using Cross Promotion to Reach New CustomersWe think of guerrilla marketing as any way we can promote our business to new customers without having to spend money. It requires a little thinking outside of the box and forming partnerships with like minded businesses in your area that share your particular customer demographic.

When we owned pizza places we would rotate our box toppers a few times a month with other local businesses in the area. This provided they drop one of our fliers in their customer’s bags at check out. We had great success with dry cleaners, car washes and liquor stores. Give the dry cleaner down the street from you a few hundred door hangers to put on the hangers and you place his coupons on your pizza boxes. It’s a win-win as the cost is limited to you printing off extra specials at Staples. The ROI is much higher than most other forms of direct marketing for new customers and customers seem to see this as a recommendation from that business owner that they also like your business and they will too.

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Google Places Update: Respond to Your Business Reviews

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Google PLaces Pin 150x150 Google Places Update: Respond to Your Business ReviewsYour Google Maps listing may be the first place potential customers read a review of your business. Now, like Yelp reviews, you can publicly respond to the good and bad if you have verified your listing. Respond to these reviews and engage your customers. Respond to the good by thanking them for their business and create true loyalty. Use the bad reviews as a chance to examine your business and turn the dissatisfied customer into a loyal follower.

Here is one such example of responding to a negative customer review from Google’s Map Blog:

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Branding Your Business with a Consistent Look

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

business branding 150x150 Branding Your Business with a Consistent LookYour business should have a consistent look across all platforms that customers and potential buyers will see. From menus to signage, interior to your website, all of these areas are a chance to brand your business and show a consistent look that scores an impression.

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How to Create Charity Nights to Drive New Sales

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

fundraising 150x150 How to Create Charity Nights to Drive New SalesHosting charity nights with local community groups, sports teams and charities is an easy way to drive new sales each week. This works great with restaurants as people have to eat every day, but you can also use it if you own a service related businesses and some retail stores. The premise is simple, have a local group host a charity night at your restaurant and you agree to donate back 10% to 20% of the sales from everyone who hands in a flier promoting the event.

We would try to have at least two of these a week in our restaurant. Once you do a few, you will have generated enough press from newspapers and word-of-mouth that the marketing aspect of this method will take care of itself and you will have groups coming to you. Here is the step by step process we would use:

1) Approach local groups: Think charities, youth and high school sport teams, high school bands, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, local youth centers etc…Chances are you get people from these groups visiting you looking for donations on a daily basis. Instead of donations, tell them this is how they can earn money for their group and a lot more then the small donation they were seeking.

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5 Pizza Marketing Strategies to Drive Sales in Any Economy

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

pizzamarketing 150x150 5 Pizza Marketing Strategies to Drive Sales in Any EconomyNo matter how good your pizza is, it will not matter if your pizza marketing strategies are not bringing customers in the door. Once you get them to try your pizza, they may be hooked for life, but just how do you get new customers during this economy and time of increased competition for the average pizza shop?

Lets examine 5 pizza marketing strategies that work to bring in customers no matter the economy:

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The Top 3 Ways to Increase Sales at Any Business

Monday, June 21st, 2010

how to increase sales page earnings 300x299 The Top 3 Ways to Increase Sales at Any BusinessThere are 3 basic methods for any business to increase their sales. Two of these can be done right now, this instant to increase your daily sales over the previous week. The third takes a little time but is something you can do before you open the store or even today for the more aggressive business owner.

1. Increase the average sale

You can increase the average sale by simple up-selling. Just an extra $20 a day will add $7,300 a year to your gross sales. Customers are already in a buying mode, the transaction is already in motion, you just need to close the sell with buying words that aren’t deemed aggressive to the customer.

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Always On

Friday, June 18th, 2010

image800 150x150 Always OnAs a small business owner or salesperson you are always on. You are always presenting, marketing, selling and producing. Failure to acknowledge this will prevent you from being as successful as you could be. I dare say it can actually do harm to your business.

Let’s break it down and take a look at each area.

  1. Presenting

No matter where you go or who you connect with, you are always a representation of your business. How you speak, what you say, and how you conduct yourself telegraphs volumes about your business to others.

Consider how you want others to view your business before you go out into the world. The walls really do have eyes and people really do pay attention. Don’t think for a minute that you can share dirty laundry or gossip with the people you interact with. Well, actually you can do it; it just isn’t a good idea. You’ll leave them wondering what you say about them when they aren’t around.

If you have a difficult client, fire them. Don’t complain about it to others. You are a professional. Handle it!

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Google Tags for Local Businesses Ready to Go

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

GooglePlacesAd 300x252 150x150 Google Tags for Local Businesses Ready to GoGoogle has finally rolled out Tags, nationwide  this past week. We have talked about the importance of local search a lot around here and believe this new advertising method for local businesses to make your listings stick out is going to have an immediate impact on businesses listed in a Google local map search pack.

Google says, “For a flat monthly fee of $25, businesses can enhance their listings that appear on Google.com and Google Maps with a yellow tag that emphasizes specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos, or a custom message. Tags do not affect the ranking of the listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.”

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How To Increase Google Map Listings Rankings

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

1 google logo 300x211 How To Increase Google Map Listings RankingsWe have talked in the past about the new dominance of local search with Google and other search engines. With over 30% of searches and increasing due to higher saturation of web enable mobile phones, it is pretty clear you need to take the time to update your local listings.

GetListed.org has taken all of the sites plus more that we talk about in our member’s area report on local search and placed them in one simple list so you can take care of all major aggregators and business databases that the search engines use to pull their data to determine your initial search engine map rankings.

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