You’re sliding into Fall of 2014. Sales aren’t quite what you want them to be. You’re terrified that Black Friday may be a bust. You don’t even want to think about your upcoming Christmas campaign. What can you do right now to make a difference? There are a few simple steps the savvy female executive can use to become a marketing media maven fairly quickly.
Target Mobile Users
Americans are leaving their laptops at home and spending more time on their mobile gadgets. Almost every American consumer has a piece of technology within reaching distance at all times. Take advantage of that!
If you have a website, start user-testing it on mobile phones immediately. You can use a low-cost site such as this one to get real-life users to test your site on their mobile devices and give you feedback. If your website has very simple graphics, only one or two columns, and a small amount of text, then it should be mobile friendly. If your website is more complicated, it is easy to have a simple mobile app created for your business.
Fast “Disposable” Marketing Is Key
Consumers have learned how to block many of the banner ads today. A lot of people are moving toward simple social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. In order to engage consumers in this group, you need to use one-shot “disposable” advertisements. There are a couple of ways to do this:
- Single advertising photos with very little verbage
- Humorous looping videos of the type created on Vine
- Short advertising “micro-videos” of 10 or 15 seconds
Click Here for an example of a cute advertising micro-video.
Get Personal With Your Customer Base
Starting a blog is an excellent method of engaging your clients. A blog about a relatively generic subject loosely related to your product (such as this one from Urban Clotheslines) can be used to make your current customers feel like valued insiders. A good blog will also draw in new customers. Remember that a blog needs to have new content posted regularly in order to maintain engagement. However, if you use a good text-brokering service, maintaining a low-cost stream stream of high quality content shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Use Your Customers To Market Your Product
One of the newest rages on the internet is customer reviews. Everybody wants to know the “star rating” before they purchase. If you want to see a quick example of this, click through any category on Amazon. Customers have learned to research products on the internet before they buy. They give their opinions on the products they use, and they like to read the opinions of other users before purchasing. You can ask readers to comment on products in your generic blog. This is an excellent method of soliciting customer feedback. You can also have your webmaster include a star rating or comment section on your website. Optimally, you might try both methods to bring in the maximum number of new customers.
Black Friday isn’t looking nearly as scary now, is it? You have a solid framework and can start your own customized media marketing plan right away. Good Luck!
Share small business news, blogs and social media tips with Project Eve’s community of small business owners and entrepreneurs today. Our contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds; so whether you are a small business owner, social media strategist, financial adviser, serial entrepreneur, or write an amateur blog we urge you to contribute a blog to our 500,000+ community today. For more information, please refer to our Content Submissions Guidelines.
