Category: small-business
Bundling Services Preserves Value and Offers Incentive
Posted by ddidier in advertising, small-business Thursday, 5 March 2009 17:05 No Comments
Making the Case for Bundling Services
We recently had a meeting with an Orlando, Florida based social networking company we are considering partnering with. While our services are non-competing, we still serve the same audience and seek the same customer. Both companies want to add value to our current service offerings to help entice sales. In a word, we are looking to bundle our services together.
It is my belief that people like things in a neat package they can understand. When it comes to a sale there are so many questions and concerns a customer has that rambling off a number of features leads to more confusion and lost sales. Using bundling gives the customer a complete package they can easily digest. In my experience the best salespeople are the ones that can accurately take a customers needs and provide a bundle that fulfills their needs. The features, which can be explained, are not the main focus - the problem resolution that the bundle represents is.
Starbucks: Bundling in Practice
Starbucks does not want to dilute the value they have created for their coffee. Considered "premium", if Starbucks was to lower the price and sell more latte's, they would dilute the perceived value of the coffee. It is not so easy to raise a price once it has been lowered. So, to help offset this, they turned to bundling their coffee products with some of their food products and created a value that way. Their new "pairings" enable them to maintain the margin and perceived value of their coffee and take a hit to the price of the breakfast item that is bundled with it. Customers end up spending more per transaction, but do not mind as they see a better combined overall value.
It also gives people an excuse for the guilt they feel for spending money at a Starbucks!
In advertising, and especially bathroom advertising, creating value added benefits for customers is a must. We have chosen to use our Mobile Advertising service as a free add-on to our primary offerings. Also, to display videos on our screens we have chosen to create videos at or near our cost so that the "ticket to entry" to get videos formatted for our screen is small.
Finally
When you have an opportunity, look for what offers you can bundle together for your customers. Take a couple complimentary services and combine them with a new overall price. Partner with other companies that are willing to work with you on your services as well. Sticking together is a key component to weathering out the troughs experienced in economies like today.
Call to Action – A Must in Today’s Economy
Posted by ddidier in advertising, small-business Wednesday, 4 March 2009 18:00 1 Comment
What is a Call to Action?
The online Business Dictionary defines a Call to Action as:
"Words that urge the reader, listener, or viewer of a sales promotion message to take an immediate action, such as "Write Now,” "Call Now,” or (on Internet) "Click Here.” A retail advertisement or commercial without a call-to-action is considered incomplete and ineffective."
Well put. This is a valuable lesson we have learned - a customer is less likely to act on a product or service offering without a perceived constraint encouraging them to act on the promotion.
Call to Action Pointers
Early advertisements we created centered around a display of information and an explanation of the service or product. While this helped for brand awareness, it did little to spur a customer to act. This model is close to that of a typical TV commercial showing the latest wares from a consumer goods company. The key in this day and age is to encourage a sale by pushing the customer to make a decision.
Examples would include:
- Act now while supplies last
- First 50 customers get an additional 10% off
- This offer expires February 1st
- Join our mailing list to receive a free ebook on ...
Tracking Call to Action Effectiveness
Online tracking
While creating a sense of urgency is important, it is also important to gauge effectiveness. Google offers it's analytic tools with the ability to funnel through goals to determine if your online calls to action work. Watching what keywords bring customers to your site and judging the offers by click through is an excellent way to test online call to action effectiveness.
Email marketing
Try sending different marketing emails to customers with different promotions regarding different products. See which one has the greatest effect on your sales. Use this to move distressed inventory or to boost sales of poor selling services. Give away the "dogs" when customers purchase premium offerings. You are interested in "conversion" or the amount of sales you get off the total number of emails sent.
Constant contact (among others) helps you get your email campaign started and keeps track of who opens your email - getting more "funnel" information.
Traditional marketing
For traditional marketing campaigns there are a couple tricks to try. Some of our customers set up special toll-free phone numbers that relate to certain campaigns. You can get local phone numbers through a couple of different sources including Grand Central (though this will take some time).
Steering your customers to a particular website works as well. MediaVision has it's main landing page, however we also have a site at www.mediavisionfl.com/mediabuyers which is only meant for targeting media buyers. This way you can talk directly to the customer without the clutter a generic main page puts forth.
Our Mobile Advertising service is a great way to judge the effectiveness of an ad. Immediately when a customer is interested they text our server, giving us feedback on the time and the quantity of responses. Try it out: text scooter to 407-437-5178.
Finally, the easiest way to track is to ask. Asking every customer how they found out about you is a great way of finding out if your call to action efforts are working. The problem is having a systematic way of tracking such information and being consistent in your asking.
Finally
People today are looking for value. They are fickle when it comes to customer service - today the power of the dollar rules. Give them good reasons to buy from you and track what is working so you can put your efforts towards call to actions that work.
Free is the Cost to Stay Organized with Remember the Milk
Posted by ddidier in small-business Tuesday, 27 January 2009 08:00 1 Comment
In this article I discuss a free software resource that has made my life a great deal easier. Remember the milk (www.rememberthemilk.com) is a smart, intuitive web resource that I recommend everyone try out.
One of the biggest problems being a small business owner I have is staying organized. No one is there looking over my shoulder (which is one of the reasons I ventured out on my own) and it is completely up to me to make sure that things get done on time. I have taken the Franklin Covey time management class twice, owned multiple Palm V's, and even combined the two with a Sony Clie' with the Franklin Covey software. None of those do I use today.
I think technology can solve many of our problems, so when I heard about Remember the Milk (rtm) I figured I should give it a try...hey it's free, so why not? What rtm brings is a very simple and somewhat easy to use interface that enables you to quickly prioritize your daily to-do's and group them by personal, work, or whatever to keep yourself more organized. Although it's called "Remember the Milk" it does a lot more than help you remember your grocery list. It is big on AJAX and web 2.0 technologies so there are easy undo's and hot keys everywhere.
What I find most promising is the fact that rtm is open to development and there are many people working to add bolt-on's, add-ins and other unique ways of interfacing with it. It integrates with Jott, Gmail and other popular web applications. Since it is web based as long as you have an internet connection you have a list of your daily activities.
What I don't like are the ways that you highlight some of the tasks inadvertently and end up changing statuses without meaning to. It's shortcommings are small and with it's continual development, I am sure these nuances will be fixed in the near future.
I suggest you visit their site and give it a try. Use it to augment your current task planning; or create a whole new planning system.
Use Gmail to Pump Up Your Company’s Email
Posted by ddidier in small-business Monday, 26 January 2009 20:00 No Comments
Gmail is not just for your personal email, anymore. Read more to find out how you can use the power of Google to power your small business's email, while using your company's domain name! Oh, did I mention that it's FREE?!
Like many, I use Gmail (Gmail.com) for my personal email. With it's expanding inbox size, easy accessibility, growing number of plugins, constant up time, integration into Outlook and Blackberry...it is hard not to appreciate what Google has done with this free email client.
What many don't know is that you can use the power of Gmail to power your company's email. Far too often I see cars and commercial vehicles with descriptions on the side that state, "email us at: MyBusiness@gmail.com". Right under that line it will say, "visit us at: www.MyBusiness.com". To me that screams small time and it looks like the company hasn't spent the extra $50 bucks to have their "web guy" update their email. That, or their web guy doesn't care! The easy solution is to combine the two and use the tools that Google provides to give you that more professional big-guy look.
The answer is simple:
Go to the Google Apps for Business website.
Here you can select the standard or the premiere versions of their email service. The premiere service is cheap (currently $50/user/year) and offers more space, no ads, archiving, encryption, and most importantly a 99.9% uptime guarantee (which is better than exchange server, read here).
You can see a side-by-side comparison of the two account types by going to this site. I currently use the standard FREE version.
Click "Get Started"
Google makes it easy from here to set up your domain to work with your Gmail account. The only tricky part is changing your CNAME file which requires admin access to your domain host website....no biggie.
Create email accounts that are "aliases" for you that say "info@MyBusiness.com" or "sales@MyBusiness.com". These go a long way to show your web competence and are easy to remember (much better than john.doe@MyBusiness.com). If you are concerned about not getting email from that old account, just forward it!
If you use a client on your work computer (PC or Mac) then going to this website will show you how to integrate it. This is another easy process and you should have no problem getting it to work with Gmail.
That's it! A lot of the "magic" that your web guy does is just this easy. You probably saw a bunch of different things that Google offers small business...and a lot of these tools have a ton of value. One of the features we use is the Google portal site. You can do a lot of cool things with that, too, but I will save that for another post.
In no time you should be set up with an email account that looks every bit as professional as what the big boys have...and you have done it all for free. If you have any questions, post a comment below.
Collaborate Like the Big Guys with Google Calendar
Posted by ddidier in small-business Monday, 26 January 2009 19:24 No Comments
Google gives us one more reason to move away from office and onto the "cloud" with this extremely useful calendar application. In fact, this free application has many advantages to it's stalwart calendar competitors.
As an avid Outlook user I liked the ability to "stay organized" by creating recurrences of important events, quickly jumping to dates and having those pleasant reminders go off every 5 minutes when an event occurred. Well, I do not like the reminder box, but that's a different story. Outlook offered a digital alternative to my written daily planner, and for that I was excited. Unfortunately, as is often the case, my desire to go digital outweighed the true benefits of using Outlook. It ended up becoming another tool I used rather than a tool that replaced many other outmoded tools.
Now, Google in their attempt to take us online and show us more ads created Google Calendar (still in beta after almost 3 years). While there are some downfalls, Google Calendar takes us another step forward in making it easy to be a true mobile professional, collaborate appointments with coworkers and colleagues thus making us more productive business owners.
Become a Mobile Professional
Outlook and other desktop clients like it fail because as we travel and make appointments there is no way to update on the fly. While Blackberry's can do this now (through RIM licenses) and Windows Mobile devices can update remotely as well (through Exchange) the reality is that you are locked to the old desktop paradigm with Outlook. For small business owners Google Calendar offers these solutions:
- Update and retrieve your events through any web enabled browser -http://calendar.google.com
- Use your web enabled phone to retrieve events directly from their mobile site -m.google.com/calendar
- From your mobile phone, use SMS to text information. Text to: 48368 (GVENT)
- Text "next" to get a notification regarding your next scheduled event.
- Text "day" to get a notification containing all of your scheduled events for the present day.
- Text "nday" to get a notification containing all of your events for the following day.
- Text a date (e.g., June 8 or June 8 2009 or 6-8-09...) to get a notification containing all of your events for that day.
- To create an event via SMS, simply send a text message containing your event's details.
Within the Calendar application you can either create an event or use the "Quick Add" feature (my preference) which allows you to very quickly create an event using a sentence like structure.
Finally, when setting a calendar event through the browser, you can configure a number of ways to notify you of the event's occurrence. Choose from a pop-up (like trusty Outlook), email (great for those of us with Blackberry's) or SMS. Nothing is better than forgetting that appointment and having the reminder come up in 3 different ways in synchronization. You will not forget your appointments that way!
Collaborate Appointments with Coworkers and Colleagues
I really liked the "free/busy" service from Microsoft. It allowed you to see if your colleagues or collaborators will available when you scheduled a meeting. This service went away...actually became a pay service. There were limitations to it as well like everyone had to be a subscriber, etc.
Google Calendar changes that. Unfortunately, the invitees need to be Google Calendar users. If they are not, they will be invited to join, free of charge, of course. However, it is easy to invite others using their email account. You can setup the invite to give them the ability to "modify event", "invite others" and/or "see guest list". All of these options make this feature even more dynamic.
Last of all, Google Calendar enables you to search for other calendars. Suppose Tom down the hall wants everyone to know when the weekly meetings are, he can create a recurring event in Google Calendar, publish it publicly and then you can find it by searching through Google's Calendar Search. Options like "What", "Who","Where", and "Date From" allow you to quickly find the one you want. Additionally, you can find out about local events, phases of the moon, when your favorite sports team is playing, etc. through the many publicly offered calenders throughout the service. This is a great tool to use if you run a networking group, schedule parties, or have weekly events that you want others to come to. You can tell an interested person, "Just check out Google Calendar and search for 'Fun Filled Leads Group' in 'Orlando, Florida'" and they will be able to see your events.
On the Downside
The way that calendars are shared is a little bit transparent. I would like the ability to grab events created by others and make them my own, but that is not an option. Each of the public calendars "sits" next to yours so that you can view them all side by side. Furthermore many of the public calendars out there overlap, so you might pick two that have about 2/3 of their events the same...but that final 1/3 might be different...and irresistible. This part kills me since it is not possible to eliminate the redundancy.
More Productive Business Owner
This part is the kicker and the reason why I have adopted Google Calendar. It's called Google Calendar Sync and it enables your Outlook to talk to Google Calendar. Everything that was "trapped" on your Outlook can be freed and sent to the web. Now they are able to talk and communicate in harmony. If you are in a large corporate environment chances are that the IT department has locked down installation of new programs, and if you are an iCal user, you still have to export and import.
I am a Blackberry user, and I have the Google Sync application for it (here's the link for other phones). With the latest upgrade comes batch calendar syncing from the phone to the Google Calendar service. With both of these pieces of software running, a calendar event created on my cell phone updates to my office Outlook in a matter of minutes. Digital Xanadu is realized.
This whole microcosm goes back to Google's open source model and along with this is integration with apps such as Remember the Milk, Jott, GMail and others.
Google Calendar is a worthwhile calendar program that can augment your current organizational needs. Despite the drawbacks I have yet to find an alternative nearly as complete and user friendly.