The Benefits of Brochure Marketing During Tight Times

Times are tight these days and many small and local businesses are struggling to keep a marketing budget going.  Unfortunately, tight times also result in increased competition between vendors and consumers spend less money.  One often over looked marketing tactic for times like these is brochure and flyer marketing. Distributing these eye-catching and information rich ads to local consumers may very well drive customers to your site for very little money.

To put it simply, there are three reasons to consider brochures marketing right now:

Leveraging Local Search to Market Your Small Business: Part I

An Introduction to Local Search

The use of major search engines to find businesses and services within a geographic area is one of the fastest growing segments of search.
The overall goal of local search is to make it easy for local consumers to find your small business.  Consider the case of a consumer using a search engine to find pizza in Port Jefferson, NY.  If a consumer uses the search query “pizza port jefferson, ny,” Google will provide that individual with a list and map of matching businesses.

Long Tail Search Engine Optimization and Social Media results in Increased Traffic Over Time

As we’ve mentioned in earlier posts, we are leveraging our experience at the smbZen BizJournal to investigate the effect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media marketing on web traffic.  Two months of data derived from consistent execution of this strategy at the BizJournal indicates that Search Engine Optimization of long-tail search engine keywords coupled with Social Media marketing can produce a substantial increase in web traffic (visits and pageviews) over time.  The following week-by-week snapshot of BizJournal website traffic, measured in unique visits, clearly illustrates this conclusion:

What follows is a discussion of the strategy we employed to drive this growth and the conclusions we can draw from this two month data set.

An Overview of Using Surveys for Market Research

Using Surveys for Market Research

Most of us, at one point in our life, have been asked to complete a survey. I know I have certainly been asked to complete surveys - most recently by a PhD student I encountered at the local Starbucks! Having personally never relied upon large scale surveys to guide new product design, I wanted to explore the role surveys could play in launching new ventures. Here’s what I have found.

From a pedagogical level, a survey is a short or long questionnaire designed to solicit feedback on a product or service. They are typically used to assess customer satisfaction, conduct customer segmentation studies, evaluate product usage, and, among other things, understand the perceptions consumers have of a business brand. The data gained through survey information are also descriptive; they are expressed in percentages terms and frequency counts, and sometimes cross-tabulated for the purpose of comparison. And while the aforementioned definition and uses of surveys are simplistic and intuitive, their execution is not. Just like business forecasting, it is part art and part science. And just like business forecasting, garbage in yields garbage out.

Social Media Improves Search Engine Optimization

Social media sites, such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, can be a great way to generate exposure for your content.  We’ve written previously about how these sites can create super-spikes of traffic to your content.  However, a recent analysis by BestRank.com shows an added benefit of the use of social media - improved search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) includes many elements, one of which is back-links, or links on other sites that point to your own.  Search engines place a lot of weight on back-links as they serve as a demonstration of your content’s value: if everyone is linking to it, it must be important information.   The good people at BestRank ran a test to demonstrate how social media can drive back-links.  One of their pieces of content was heavily promoted by the Reddit community, which increased the content’s visibility and resulted in coverage by (and thus links from) Wired.com and Popurls.com, among others.

The increased number of back-links to the author’s content, particularly from high volume sites like Wired.com, catapulted the article to the top of the major search engines for relevant keywords.  Even today, two months after the article was produced, it still retains the top spot at Google.  As illustrated in the following graphic, this has resulted in a high and sustained level of traffic for that one piece of content:

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