20 Feb
Posted by Matt as growing profits + revenue, online promotion, small business marketing, small business promotion
http://www.kurb.co.nz/smallbusinessmarketing.htm
Developing New Business Ideas With Online Marketing Services
Are you looking for small business idea and online marketing services
to develop them?
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All under one roof, Kurb, based in Auckland, New Zealand but working
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design and development, online advertising, ppc and google adwords
campaigns, social media promotion and marketing including myspace
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They also have an amazingly cheap range of youtube promotion and video
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I’ve talked about creating a product in place of offering ongoing
consultation services for music marketing because leads for music
marketing services continue to pour in and it’s one area where solid
promotion and marketing through my blog promotion has created a strong
onging audience of customers for this aspect of my business.
That means I need to turn those leads into money with less effort and
not leaving money on the table. For some clients, they can afford more
specialized services, but otherwise, the information product will be
at the vanguard of my small business marketing services online,
because it is also a gateway to upselling.
There are also a number of marketing services I am planning to develop
more in full this year.
Video marketing is one service I plan to develop as we are able to
provide very cheap video marketing through our outsourced team
overseas. The challenge here is presenting high quality examples hat
give customers confidence in the service we can provide, but we have a
number of highly competitive options for clients we just need to
illustrate how effective simple video presentations on yout be can be.
With our che ap colour copying and delivery service based here in Auckland I will be developing this with aggressive and competitive
online advertising and allocating a generous marketing budget for
promoting the value of this service.
Finally I will be marketing and developing the branding for our
children’s entertainment service, with SEO and online advertising,
promoting the services we offer but also expanding the brand and
looking at other opportunities to expand the scope of the business
where we can sell new services and products to the market we are
already establishing in Auckland.
With small business marketing services I will stress the range of
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As part of an effort to contribute to the community that has added to its success, Fire Mountain Beverage Co. recently sponsored this year’s L.A. Watts Summer Games, the largest high school athletic competition in the nation.
“Our goal here is to support elite high school athletes by giving back to the same markets that support our sales,” said Anthony Miller, chief executive officer of Fire Mountain Beverage. “This event helps to accomplish one of our objectives by promoting healthy living through education.”
Since the passage of the Pupil Nutrition, Health and Achievement Act of 2001, California schools have banned the sale of sugared, carbonated beverages and are moving toward juices, certain sports drinks, diet sodas and bottled water. And recently, major beverage distributors have followed suit, agreeing to stop selling sugary drinks to the nation’s public schools.
Fire Mountain’s Five O2 oxygenated bottled water is enriched with vitamins A and C, niacin, potassium and calcium, making it a more nutritious alternative to beverages containing sugar, caffeine, sodium and carbohydrates. Five O2 also comes in fruit flavors that are appealing to consumers of any age. By sponsoring the games, the company hopes to show teen athletes that they have healthier options with which to quench their thirst.
The L.A. Watts Summer Games started in 1968, three years after racially charged riots tore the Watts neighborhood apart. The goal was to foster understanding and camaraderie among the area’s high school students. The games now include competitions for both boys and girls in soccer, track and field, volleyball, tennis, cheerleading, music, art and poetry and more. Nearly 200,000 young people have participated in the games to date.
To promote the achievements of high school students in areas other than athletics, scholastics were added to the mission of the games. In 1992, a scholarship program was established for youth dedicated to serving the community through volunteerism.
08 Aug
Posted by Matt as Uncategorized
You will find ideas and articles on pay per click search engine advertising or pay per click internet advertising as it is also called. Cybertegic, a PPC internet search engine marketing company, specialize in building pay per click advertising campaign for ebusiness. Our pay per click internet advertising follows special practices to achieve the best result for PPC search engine web marketing campaign. So check out Mamma’s Internet marketing solutions, including pay-per-click advertising, graphic ad network, xml search feeds and the branded search box.
Cybertegic, a PPC internet search engine marketing company, specialize in building pay per click advertising campaign for ebusiness. Our pay per click internet advertising follows special practices to achieve the best result for PPC search engine web marketing campaign. Our staff can setup your pay per click Internet advertising campaign. You will find ideas and articles on pay per click search engine advertising or pay per click internet advertising as it is also called. On this site, I will show you how to make money on the internet using affiliate programs and pay per click advertising. I tried almost every internet money making opportunities that exist and my biggest find was pay per click advertising.
This is the reason why pay per click advertising returns are far better than banner advertising - the internet user is looking for you! Internet advertisers can select from a variety of performance-based advertising alternatives, including pay-per-click, banner, e-mail, and pop-up campaigns. With Pay-Per-Click Advertising an advertiser only pays when an Internet user clicks on their keyword-targeted ad and gets transferred to their website. This allows the Internet Marketing company the scope of reducing pay per click advertising spend and of increasing significantly the number of target keywords.
Continue article Advertisement Click fraud has been a problem nearly as long as pay-per-click advertising emerged as a preferred model for Internet advertising. Silicon Valley’s twin titans of the Internet era get almost all their revenues from pay-per-click advertising. So check out Mamma’s Internet marketing solutions, including pay-per-click advertising, graphic ad network, xml search feeds and the branded search box.
http://www.advertising-internet-online.com/advertising-click-internet-pay-per/
Do you have a list of words that you like? I used to have a pretty extensive list. I had lots of words on there, but unfortunately I have forgotten many of them because I wasn’t thinking about them enough. This is depressing because that list was such a simple little pick me up to maintain. I also liked that I liked the words for absolutely no logical reason. For example, the word “fusia” was on there and I’m not even one hundred percent sure what color that is, but I like the sound. Incidentally, I’m thinking fusia is a burgundy-ish color.
I once was out to eat with a girlfriend named Kit (actually her name was Katrina and for some reason it was shortened to Kit rather than Kat). The relationship was clearly coming to a close, but we still had a few dinners and drinks in us before the official end. Anyways, that night she told me that she liked the word “perpendicular” and although I was mentally tainted in my thinking about her, because I knew that we were going to break up, at the moment that she said that, she seemed to me the most beautiful woman in the world. I like words and I like people who like words.
Anyways, I just realized that I also like the word “strategy”. I’m not sure why. I like it and moreover, just thinking about it makes me wish I had a strategy…for anything…except marketing. I don’t want a marketing strategy and I definitely don’t want an internet marketing strategy. Much like my feelings towards Kit in a positive way, I think that I would be negatively influenced by someone who had an internet marketing strategy. I don’t even want to think about what I’d feel towards someone who claimed to have the best internet marketing strategy. So in conclusion, I feel that the word strategy is cool and I also feel that actual strategies are cool, but a marketing strategy to me reeks of exploitative intentions and to me that is just not cool.
The best advertising, whether for a small business or large, is advertising that works. The price a small business owner pays for advertising would not be an issue if the outcome of the ad was known.
If a small business owner had a choice of paying $1000 a month for advertising that brought in a guarantee of at least $2000 a month profit, or paying $500 a month for advertising that brought in $750 worth of profit a month, there would be no hesitation. That savvy small business owner would gladly shell out $1000 each month for the advertising.
Small business advertising has no such guarantees however. It’s not like buying a refrigerator that is guaranteed to keep the milk and eggs cold. $1000 of advertising might bring $8000 of profit, or it might bring in zero. So, what’s a small business owner to do, especially if faced with a limited budget?
The best answer is to use small business advertising that only charges the owner when and if it works. There are several ways of doing this.
The primary method is called pay per click. This Internet option is available with numerous online merchant sites as well as hundreds of newspapers across the country and the globe. Simply put, a small business agrees to pay a specified amount to the publisher, or the merchant site, for each ad that entices a consumer to come to the small business site. The price paid is generally an amount that the small business owner has bid on. More and more newspapers are offering this option as they struggle to maintain competitive online with eBay, Craigslist and other pure play classified and marketplace sites.
Another option for pay per click and inexpensive advertising for a small business that wants to concentrate on local customers is with regional publications or some of the larger metropolitan newspapers and groups that are introducing citizen media sites. These zoned products offer a much less expensive buy because the small business advertiser is buying the local neighborhood instead of the total metropolitan circulation of the metropolitan paper.
Companies such as YourHub, a product of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, are licensing these citizen media sites to other newspapers in other areas and those welcome small business advertising and discount the price. They also encourage citizen journalism. The small business owner can contribute articles, photos and local stories, although the paper will undoubtedly edit something too unabashedly self-serving. This is still a great way for a local entrepreneur to introduce himself or herself to the neighbors in a friendly, casual and soft sell way.
Sometimes being at the right place and time can do wonders for the business. This can happen in the street or in the mall and starts by just approaching a stranger. New contacts occur everyday and with a little initiative, the person may be able to close a sale or be referred to someone who may need it.
There are many ways that a person can attract customers to one’s business. Some do this by launching a marketing campaign in the form of an ad in the paper or on a billboard. Some don’t use marketing at all and just flourish through word of mouth.
On a more personal level if that person travels around, the best thing to carry and give out is a business card.
Business cards are used by people in big and small time business. It reflects who the person is. It gives people an idea of what the person is capable of doing in the event that the service one offers is needed in the future.
Such instruments are easy and light to carry along. It saves a lot of time and trouble for the other person to jot down one’s contact details.
Making a business card is easy. One can do this at home and just print it in the computer. Should the person decide to have it done by a small printing firm, the individual should be sure that the spelling and the design is correct. This will make it easy for people to get hold of the services one can do.
Business cards should always have some important details such as the name and contact number where the person can be reached and the company that one works for. If the person is self-employed, this can also work to get more customers for the business.
Since most people who get business cards simply put it in the drawer with the others, one should be imaginative in letting people recall it.
A few good examples are giving it in the form of a magnet that can be placed in the fridge. Should that person drink coffee in the office, one can have a coaster made that people will surely notice. Since computers are a necessity in the workplace, a mouse pad will also be a good idea to give away.
There is also another way of making oneself noticed by other people. That is carrying the business cards of other people and giving it to those who need it. When this happens and the person asks how the card went to that person, the individual will be remembered and one’s services will surely be called upon in the future by these two potential customers.
Businesses survive due to a regular customers and having new clients. This will bring additional revenue for the company and allows the company to flourish. By using the resources one has such as the use of business cards, this will happen.
These small hard pieces of paper are things that one can give out at anytime. Be it in a convention or some other function related to work or in parties and other social gatherings that will really help increase customer traffic. Small things do come in small packages and bringing this handy thing around can really help the person a lot.
You’ve read about the importance of being courageous, rebellious and imaginative. These are all vital ingredients in an effective advertising campaign. However, they must be tempered with the most important ingredient of all—strategy.
As long as the advertising industry has been in existence there has been debate about whether advertising is art or commerce. Quite frankly, this kind of divisive argument is a waste of time and has only helped to diminish what little respect the industry has earned through the years. Besides, the answer is simple. Advertising is the art of commerce.
It can’t be pure art because pure art won’t engage the consumer on behalf of the brand. Art can certainly get people’s attention, but it rarely causes them to take action. If the consumer is not actively engaged, the brand won’t grow. If the brand doesn’t grow, the company won’t profit. And if the company ceases to make a profit, it dies and takes its brand with it.
On the other hand, advertising can’t be mere commerce because capitalism, in and of itself, is not pretty. It doesn’t make people sit up and take notice. Pure commerce deals with the exchange of money for goods and services. How boring is that. Besides, you don’t want to encourage simple commerce. You want to promote branded commerce. That is what makes strategy so important.
Let’s be clear. We’re talking advertising strategy. Advertising is not marketing. Marketing involves several disciplines including product, pricing, packaging, distribution, customers and promotions (which encompasses public relations, advertising, point-of-sale, direct marketing, e-marketing, etc.).
If your ad agency can’t tell the difference between marketing and advertising strategy, run like hell. You’re liable to waste a lot of money. Now some agencies do understand the balance between the broader marketing picture and the narrow, targeted advertising scope. If they are capable and comfortable operating in both realms, they will be a very valuable partner to you.
The importance of a strong ad strategy can’t be stressed enough. Creating ads without strategy is like throwing a ping pong ball at a speeding car in a wind storm. There is little chance you will hit your target.
With a sound advertising strategy, however, even a company with a limited budget can compete against deep-pocketed competitors. Such is the power of the single idea that remains constant over time. This, my friend, is the essence of long-term branding.
You must start by knowing to whom you are speaking and to whom you should be speaking. What are their hot buttons? What kinds of things are they paying attention to (art)? What would make them want your product or service (commerce)? What kind of life do they lead? What are some of their daily hassles? Can your product or service help with any?
The key, of course, is to begin thinking about your customers and potential customers. Focus on their needs instead of your own. By offering solutions to their needs, you will fulfill your own profit needs. It doesn’t work the other way around. Trust me.
Only after you know your audience, should you start thinking about how to communicate with them. Because only then will you know how and where to reach them.•
This article introduced the fourth of twelve steps. Challenge yourself, your staff and your advertising agency to revolutionize your ad program. If you missed a previous step, contact the author for a complimentary copy. And, remember, every revolution begins with just one step.
Jeff Berney is a freelance idealist, brand evangelist and writer. He can be reached at jeff@jberney.com.
© 2006
In order to get consumers (whether they are retail or service customers or business-to-business audiences) to notice an advertising message, many companies resort to loudness and one-upmanship. Neither of these tactics works in the long run.
If your competition is talking loudly and you decide to yell louder, what do you think they will do? Yep. They’ll start to scream. Nobody wins a shouting match when it comes to advertising. And usually you’ll find you even lose a few customers in the process because they can’t stand the noise.
It’s the same with one-upmanship. If you have to compete on more and better coupons or more and better discounts, giveaways or incentives unrelated to your core product, your revenue per sale decreases as well as your number of sales.
Customers see these types of games as gimmicky, fake and disingenuous; and they leave. The ones who do stay now view you and your competitors as commodities with no difference except your price. That is a dangerous place for a company to find itself.
The answer to clutter is not more clutter; it’s finding who wants to hear you and speaking to them. So how do you compete if you can’t out shout or out discount your competition? You get rebellious and radical with your advertising.
Do those words scare you? That’s okay. Remember, you’re being courageous now. You can handle it. Besides, rebellious and radical aren’t dirty words. They will help you draw attention away from your competition without resorting to screaming and insulting your customers.
It’s not about being outrageous just to get attention; it’s about being remarkable. An advertising campaign with a strong rebellious strategy is, by its very nature, different from anything your audience will find from your competitors’ marketing efforts. It’s unexpected. It’s surprising. It’s effective.
There are two keys to creating a successfully rebellious advertising campaign. The first is the big idea. This idea comes from a strategy that is derived directly from your customers and their relationship with your brand. You arrive at this idea through a discipline called account planning. We’ll get into the details of both the big idea and account planning in later articles.
The second key to a successfully rebellious advertising campaign is attention. You can’t gain attention if you don’t learn to identify and then steer clear of the norm. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is or how large your potential market, if your target audience doesn’t pay attention to your message, your ad budget has been wasted.
Think about these two keys while you flip through the newspaper or a magazine. Ponder them while you watch TV. You should notice something almost immediately. Most ads today don’t seem to be based on any big idea. Many are so boring that you flip right past them without noticing them. Others get your attention but the ads don’t have much to do with the product so you quickly forget the brand the ad was supposed to sell you. What an opportunity for your brand!
Now, there is a caveat to being rebellious. Your ads should never be different just for difference sake. The difference should be derived from your brand’s uniqueness.•
This article introduced the second of twelve steps. Challenge yourself, your staff and your ad agency to revolutionize your advertising program. If you missed the first step, contact the author for a complimentary copy. And, remember, every revolution begins with just one step.
Jeff Berney is a freelance idealist, brand evangelist and writer. He can be reached at jeff@jberney.com.
© 2006
What’s the easiest way to kill a great ad campaign before it even begins? Take it too seriously. Advertising is not rocket science. You shouldn’t need a degree in the physical sciences to create or understand an ad.
And you should never, ever, under any circumstances, kill an ad because it is not literal enough. On the contrary, if you find your ads are too literal, you should destroy them all and start fresh.
Are Volkswagens flawed pieces of junk? No, but an ad with the headline “Lemon” gets your attention, doesn’t it? It makes you want to read the story, which goes on to explain how the particular car shown in the ad would never be driven because VW cares so much it weeds out the lemons so you never get a bad car. Think what an opportunity would have been missed if the folks at Volkswagen had taken that headline too literally.
Think about it from this angle. Why do people read an ad or watch a commercial? The majority do so because they find them entertaining and informative. If your ads are all information and no entertainment, you’ve wasted your budget.
This is not to say that an ad should be created purely for entertainment purposes. Again, a great ad is both entertaining and informative. The entertainment value should be derived from a feature of your product or brand. In other words, what you’re selling should be the star of the show. Sounds simple enough, but it is often hard to strike the right balance. That’s what makes advertising so fun.
How much information does your audience really need? What kind of story will they find entertaining? These are questions that should be asked and answered early on so that when you finally are presented with an ad or a campaign, you can judge the work according to these preordained guidelines.
A good campaign will reach your target audience and talk to them on a personal level. This has a valuable effect on your sales and reputation. A great advertising campaign will do more than that. It will create a buzz outside of your target audience.
Apple Computer’s “1984” commercial ran only once. But it is still one of the most talked about commercials because it was rebroadcast on every major news show and written about in every major newspaper for weeks and months. And none of this cost Apple anything more than a single TV buy.
It’s worth noting that Apple’s Super Bowl commercial helped make the company a household name and created unbelievable demand for the new Macintosh computer-yet the ad never showed the product or explained any details about it.
BMW’s Mini Cooper was one of the first cars to be introduced in the United States with no TV advertising. Blasphemy! Instead, they bolted the Minis to the roofs of SUVs and drove them around major cities. They created tongue-in-cheek billboards, interactive print ads and great guerrilla promotions. Most importantly, they created a waiting list of customers who couldn’t wait to get a Mini.
Companies that think bigger become bigger. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. If you just think like a local operation, you might miss the opportunity to expand regionally, nationally, or even internationally. Your advertising campaign should reflect the direction of your company—even if you’re not yet there.
Challenge yourself and your agency to think bigger.•
This article introduced the third of twelve steps. Challenge yourself, your staff and your advertising agency to revolutionize your ad program. If you missed a previous step, contact the author for a complimentary copy. And, remember, every revolution begins with just one step.
Jeff Berney is a freelance idealist, brand evangelist and writer. He can be reached at jeff@jberney.com
© 2006
For such a simple statement, this is one of the hardest things for people to do. It goes back to that damn survival instinct each of us is born with. If an animal draws attention to itself in the wild, it might soon find itself the main course of a larger animal’s next meal. That fear of being chewed up and spit out has survived all our millions of years of evolution and is alive and well in today’s business environment.
Fight or flight is another instinct many of us haven’t yet learned to manipulate. It’s easier to run away from a new idea than it is to stay and fight for it. With today’s leadership-by-committee mentality and intense public scrutiny, the easiest solution is unfortunately the most popular. Companies today often miss the forest through the trees. They tend to concentrate so much on short-term profit that they fail to make investments or take advantages of opportunities that promise long-term profit simply because they require a short-term loss.
It may also be argued that fighting for a new idea—whether that means pushing for the development of a new product, staving off competitors or supporting a slumping brand rather than letting it die—is usually undesirable because of such costs.
Certainly that might be true in the short term, but in the long run, giving up too soon my actually cost your company far more in lost revenues, public outrage or shrinking market share. It requires a different way of thinking. Advertising and promoting your business is an investment in your business’ future. Investments are not mere costs. They come with a benefit.
Let’s get one thing straight from the very beginning. No company ever dominated its industry by operating with a philosophy of fear. And, ultimately, no company can survive if it doesn’t learn to conquer its fear and take chances, make changes.
It is the ability to see past any short-term problems to the bigger, long-term picture that has fueled the meteoric rise of the world’s most successful companies. Nobody knew what Apple was before its history making 1985 Super Bowl commercial.
Apple paid to run that commercial only once, but it ran again hundreds of times around the country and the world during local and national news broadcasts. Stories about Apple and its commercial were front-page news for weeks.
When it comes to advertising, you might wonder what kinds of changes are needed. After all, it’s just advertising. If your ads look like your competitors’ ads, if your messages are strikingly similar, if you talk to yourself instead of your customers, if you worry more about your logo being large enough than the message being attention-getting enough, you need to change.
Now this is just the first step, so we won’t get into any more detail here. The object of this step is to let you know that you need to screw up your courage and prepare to make some changes in your advertising that will have a profound effect on your bottom line.
Fear is the greatest motivator. However, instead of motivating people to act, it usually causes people to freeze or retreat. It takes courage to make the kinds of changes that are needed to survive in today’s crowded, complicated and competitive business environment.
Conquer your fear. Be courageous.•
This article introduced the first of Jeff Berney’s “Twelve Steps to Creating Breakthrough Advertising Campaigns: A creative philosophy to help companies recover from years of playing it safe.” Challenge yourself, your staff and your advertising agency to make a revolutionary transformation of your advertising program. And, remember, even the largest revolution begins with just one step—the first.
Jeff Berney is a freelance idealist, brand evangelist and writer. He can be reached at 816-507-2124 or jeff@jberney.com.
© 2006