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June’s Top Marketing Tips

Top marketing tips:

  1. Conduct a client survey: – Some businesses are reluctant to undertake a client survey in case they don’t like what they find out. For those that are keen to understand their customers better, it might just be the best thing you do for your business. The benefits are plentiful. 1. If clients aren’t happy with some aspect of your service or product, better to find out early and have an opportunity to rectify it. 2. Showing your customers that you care will build loyalty and foster a stronger relationship. 3. Are you struggling for ideas as to how you can improve your service or develop that new wonder product? You customers have the answer. All you need to do is ask the right question.
  1. Data capture tool: – If you are like us, you’ll hate spending time typing in or copying and pasting the contact information of various prospects when building a database. Inspired to find an alternative solution, we stumbled across a piece of free software called Contact Capture. Now all you need to do is highlight all the information you want to gather, press a button and hey presto it is organised into a workable format, ready for exporting into your CRM or database software of choice. It is particularly good when consolidating different excel spreadsheets! You can find a link to this software on tlcbusiness.wpengine.com/cool-stuff.
  2. Consolidate your social media: – for those of you out there that are already hardened tweeters and social networkers you’ll probably know this already. But for those of you that are irritated about having to waste time updating Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn accounts, why not use Ping.FM to update your social media status on these three platforms and more. It is free, easy and saves you time. What more can you want? Enjoy.

 

Hope you find our top 3 marketing tips useful. Do let us know what you think and any areas you’d like more info on.

 

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Marketing Trends 2011

In 2010, TLC Business talked about the impact of social media on your business, how lead generation can help you generate new clients and how an SME can go green. So with 2010 nearly behind us, what marketing trends can we expect for 2011?
We have produced a shortlist of what we think will be making the marketing headlines next year, the news we will be reading, blogging and tweeting about.

The age of Social Media

The past few years have seen people and businesses experiment with Social Media tools. Social Media in 2011 will no longer be considered new. In 2011, we will see businesses include Social Media in their marketing strategies, taking full advantage of the social networking opportunities on offer.

SMEs that use Facebook to market business-to-business campaigns will receive a new set of tools from the social media giant. Facebook Pages has released new analytic tools to assist small businesses in better gauging their traffic by posting impression counts. The change will allow small businesses that receive less than 10,000 “likes” to monitor the success of posted content and give SMEs an edge against competitors. Additionally, small companies will be able to see who viewed their posts and post feedback. In turn, they will be able to create better targeted Facebook advertising campaigns.

Not only will businesses be able to take advantage of the growing capabilities of Facebook, shopaholics will also benefit from the power of the Social Media tool. Facebook are capitalising on the fact that many online shoppers like to review, network and interact as they shop. Online storefronts are adding networking platforms to their virtual operations, while marketers are aiming to include social media sites in their sales strategy. With the help of Facebook, you can now take your shopping experience to the next level.

However, unlike 2010, 2011 may not all be about Facebook and Twitter. Google’s top secret foray into social media, ‘Google Me’, has been delayed until March / April 2011. The top-secret plan is rumoured to be a Google branded social platform. According to Google, it won’t be a social network the way people think of Facebook, but rather social information about who your friends are and the people you interact with.

“We are always experimenting with new ways to improve our products, and we have already confirmed that we are focused on incorporating social elements across Google, but we have nothing new to announce”

So what does Google have up their sleeve? Well, we will just have to wait until Spring 2011 to see whether Google’s latest attempt will be a triumph or failure, like Wave and Buzz. Only time will tell.

What we can say now, is that Social Media is only set to grow even bigger than before. If your business isn’t on Facebook or Twitter, it soon will be.

Keep an eye out for more 2011 marketing trends.

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