With the economy as it is today businesses of all types are looking to maximize their marketing dollar and weed out what may now be ineffective. In order to do that we must look at the cultural trends in America and decide if what worked before is still viable today. Are print ads as effective as they were even ten short years ago? Are television commercials paid the same amount of attention as they were before the advent of TiVo when you can fast forward past them? Are radio spots listened to with any serious cognition by the target audience or listened to at all? (Sirius Radio pun intended). If you haven't yet, it is time for you to get real about your e initiatives.
To Paraphrase Sun Tzu from the book The Art of War: If you know your audience and know yourself, you can win a thousand battles without a single loss. In order to know the audience we are after we must go where they go, see what they see, and do what they do.
Go where they go: Your customers are going to their emails, their Facebook pages and other social networking sites. Are they seeing you there? Opt in emailed incentives to come back to your business is booming and building brand loyalty. People want a bargain and they want to feel as if they are getting rewarded for their business. Facebook Fan Pages are a great way to enhance this idea and using the viral marketing power of Facebook your business can reach far more people than you can via opt in email alone.
See what they see: Your customers are seeing tweets and viral videos. Utilize Twitter and get a one-on-one connection to your customers but be sure to see their tweets too so you can truly get to know them. Have you thrown up any videos about your locations on You Tube? Do you know if any of your customers have? You should check, they could be video blogging about you and you don't even know it. You don't need to put up a skating babies commercial like Evian did, but have you seen how many views they got? The national press did, and that got them even more hits which means millions of more people saw their brand.
Do what they do: You know what is a "must have" for the American tech savvy consumer? WiFi. Their phones have it, their MacBooks have it, their laptops and their iPods have it. Your business should have it to maximize everything discussed in this blog. Managed WiFi is not just for surfing anymore, it is a delivery method for business. It draws in your guests and you deliver key messages to them with it. You use it to deliver them to your Facebook fan page and feed your page new fans directly from your locations. You use it to collect email addresses to deliver opt in email campaigns to get them back in the door sooner rather than later. They use WiFi, they want WiFi, so make your business use WiFi. Do what they do and you can win a thousand battles without a single loss.
