Small Business Owners – Get the Most out of Trade Shows with These Tips

Get the most out of trade shows with these tips
Trade shows are a great place to market your business and get new customer leads. You have many of your potential customers in place, who are there for the purpose of looking at new products and businesses. They have even paid to come there. What could be a better place to showcasing what you have to offer to these customers?

While you can achieve great benefits from these trade shows it takes considerable planning and effort to showcase your business and products. You also need to keep in mind that there are many other businesses, like yours, who are also there for the same purpose. You need to make sure you are ready to spend time and effort required to attend these shows before making a commitment. By following these tips on what to do before, during and after the show you will be able to get your money’s worth, and more from trade shows.

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Do Coupons Still Bring Customers for Small Businesses?

Do Coupons Still Bring Customers for Small Businesses
Coupons are dead! Long live the coupons! Some people have argued for some time that coupons have gone out of fashion with today’s customers. No one has time to clip coupons anymore. With the advent of internet and Smartphone customers can just pop up digital discounts at the time of purchase rather than looking for and clipping coupons before hitting the mall. The arrival of Groupon and LivingSocial, where customers can buy great deals (sometimes as much as 50-60% off the price) has dented  the use of coupons.

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How can Direct Marketing Help you Improve Sales

How can Direct Marketing Help you Improve Sales
In this internet age when all customer interactions are moving online and businesses can always stay in contact with customers some wonder if there is any value left in direct marketing. Direct marketing was popular before the arrival of internet when customers used to get number of mailings every day in the form of postcards, catalogs, and personal letters. However, the volume of such mailings has recently gone down. Even postal service is feeling the impact of this reduction posting huge losses for several years. While there is no denying that internet has made it easier to interact with customers using Smartphone and other electronic devices direct marketing can still provide value to business owners if it is done right. Customers still love to see their name on emails and printed postcards. Before we go into the benefits of direct marketing let’s answer the question –what is direct marketing?

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How to Choose the Most Effective Promotional Gifts for business events

How to Choose the Most Effective Promotional Gifts
Small business owners spend significant time, money and effort in attending the business fairs and events. When done right, these events do provide you with targeted audience who is there for the purpose of learning about new products and services. The challenge for any small business owner is to stand out in the crowd of other businesses who are also there for the same purpose. How do you attract people to come to your booth? And once they do stop by how do you get their attention and ensure they remember your business long after the event is over? This is where promotional swags can help. Promotional items provide an avenue for business owners to remind people about your business after they have gone back home. For promotional items to be effective you need to give careful consideration to the type of items you give away so that people don’t end up forgetting them, or even worse, tossing them in the trash. Here are some tips on what type of items will be remembered by your potential customers.

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How to Create Great Business Brand – The Ultimate Guide

How to create great brand
Let’s do an experiment. Close your eye and think of the first word that comes to mind when I say Apple. How about McDonald’s? Prada? If your answers were something like elegance, Happy Meal and luxury, respectively, you understand the power of brand. A brand can create vivid images in your mind of a business. It can also create powerful emotions in people’s brains. No wonder large businesses spend millions in creating and protecting their brands. The brand doesn’t have to be the purview of large companies only. Small business can, and must, do everything in their capacity to cultivate and manage their brand image.

Just what is a brand?

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The long-term benefits of promotional items

The long-term benefits of promotional items
Small business owners are concerned with many different metrics when it comes to their marketing campaigns. After all, numbers never lie and they can help company leaders determine how successful their branding initiatives are. Return on investment is arguably the most important figure to most entrepreneurs, but there’s another one that they should consider – longevity.

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How to Make Boring Products Exciting and Improve Sales

How to make boring products exciting
There’s nothing exciting about a razor blade, right? How about online budgeting software? Total snoozer. Contact lenses? No way. These are some of the most boring products you will find in the market. Yet, each of these products has been successfully marketed online. Dollar Shave Club has made shaving and razors exciting and cool. Mvelopes has transformed the way people think about something as boring as budgeting. The LensStore is creating a buzz about eye glasses. What did these companies do to generate excitement and how can you do something similar with your mundane commodity?

They took the product beyond itself and utilized online, offline and social channels by promoting stories around the product. This is what differentiates great marketers from mediocre ones. With the advent of internet and social media it has become easier than ever to share your stories to large number of audience. Below we provide tips on how to do it.

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Reputation is Everything in the Online World

Reputation is everything in the online world
It is said that it takes a long time to build trust and reputation for an individual or a business, but it takes only minutes to destroy it. The advent of Internet and social media has only reinforced this. Trust and reputation are the only things customers go by when doing business online with the ones they have never met in person. That is why your online reputation matters more than ever to your business’ success. Learning how to manage and fix your reputation can go a long way in getting and retaining customers.

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Small Business Branding for Beginners

Small business branding for beginners
Small business owners may not have the resources to compete with big brand names such as Nike or Coca Cola, but that doesn’t mean that branding is not important to your business. Building a brand is a vital part of marketing your services. Building commercial awareness of your company is essential to growth.

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Creative Ideas for Small Business Social Marketing

Creative ideas for small business social marketing
If you are a small business owner you’ll inevitably face the challenge of creating and maintaining your presence in social media. Social media presence is a must to promote your business and stay in touch with your customers. However, people will not find you and won’t follow you in social media if you don’t have regularly updated content – you have to communicate with your customers regularly and find the ways to engage them.

Services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus offer you a great chance to promote your business through social media. You can even do this without a dedicated website as social networking sites offer you a surface to carry your content themselves. You just need to fill these channels with engaging content and this may require some time, and of course, resources.

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