To make friends.
It's really that simple (and complicated). But if we're not continually making friends with our Kansas City neighbors, then we're not going to be in business much longer.
Manage your social media in 18 minutes a day.
Most small business owners loves the idea of social media, “it’s free!” Then reality hits, “this takes too much time.” And so those small biz social media accounts go fallow.
Can you invest 18 minutes a day? If so, Hootsuite put out a pretty smart social media plan for small businesses:
Media changes. The art of good creative doesn’t.
Video killed the radio station. Cable TV was primed to be the death of the networks. The internet, eReaders, iPads and dinosaur era publishers burned print to the ground. Now social media, digital gurus, YouTube and the app de jour is fixed to kill every media platform that has come before it.
Location alone isn’t enough to move your small business
“Location. Location. Location.”
Before online checkouts, easy highway access and a Quiktrip on every corner, the location you chose for your business mattered. Convenience mattered. The right rent in the right neighborhood was like printing money. And while you can still run a business driven by your location, commerce moves faster now. 135th Street isn’t a pasture any more. Neighborhoods decay. Every year the suburbs stretch further north and south. New shopping centers pop up to greet the new housing developments. If you can’t pick up and move with them, your geographically-based business is in for lean times.
“Your customers are reasonable” and other small biz mistakes.
Mistake 1: “Your customers are reasonable.”
People are more likely to be emotional, insecure, stubborn, fearful, distant and ridiculous, than rational. “Being reasonable” really depends on you, your view of how things should work and how you think your customers should act. To get these irrational customers to act on your advertising, tailor your advertising to align with their reasoning, not yours.
Big Data is sexy & seductive but ultimately a fantasy for small businesses like yours.
Big data. Macro trends. All those fancy info graphics. If you’re General Motors or Samsung or Pepsico, these long term trends matter because you need the masses. But if you’re like most of us — smaller, local Kansas City businesses — you don’t need tens of millions of customers. You need a thousand, or a hundred or maybe just ten new customers to move the needle for your company.
“TRUSTED BRANDS” Are there any other kinds?
Sure you can build your business on faster (think QuikTrip and how quickly they check you out), or cheaper (like Cargo Largo). That works right up until someone comes along who’s even faster or cheaper. Everyone else has to build trust.
Why is most advertising so much gruel?
It’s simple really. Most advertising talks about the client, the product or to the cleverness of the ad agency. As a customer who only really cares about my own needs, that (like most advertising) is easy to ignore. There is a really simple fix:
Want to sell online? It only takes five web pages.
Want to generate sales from your small business website? Keep It Simple Sister. Don’t sweat the geek-speak. Don’t get caught up in all the bells and whistles and shopping carts (and expense). Forget about programming. All you need are these five pages:
Work small.
Small space ads. :15 second tv spots. Outdoor billboards. Twitter posts. The secret to impactful advertising is to work small. Working small distills your thinking down to one single most important, relevant and actionable idea. So that’s where all of our creative starts – with one striking visual, one powerful headline, one repeatable action. Because if you can solve your marketing problem in :15 seconds or on a billboard, you can solve it in a :30, a :60 or with a multi-media campaign.