Columbus Online Small Business Marketing

Text messaging, or SMS, has experienced huge growth in the number of people who use it regularly. And it’s not only younger people who are using it – it’s becoming more and more common with older users as well.

Local businesses can use text messaging to engage their customers on a much more personal basis than even email marketing can provide.

There are two huge advantages to text messaging that really can’t be matched by any other method of communication.

1. Most people have their phones with them virtually all the time, so those messages will reach them no matter where they are.

2.    The vast majority of text messages get read almost instantly when they’re received. Compare that to email that may go unopened for several days.

How can this work in your favor? Going back to our pub example, text messaging could work much the same as Facebook promotions, except it would be even more immediate.

If the pub was slow on a particular day, they could send a text message at 5:00pm and reasonably expect a response that same evening. There’s just no other advertising medium that can reach your customers as immediately that is virtually guaranteed to be seen.

So does that mean you need to be feverishly tapping out text messages to all your customers every time you want to send something?

Not at all. There are services that will broadcast a text message to everyone who has requested to receive them from you. These services let you choose a number, called a Short Code, to use as your point of contact. Your customers just have to send a text to that number to sign up to receive text messages from you whenever you broadcast something out.

You can even set up an automatic response from these short codes, giving you the ability to offer an incentive to get people to opt into receiving those messages.

For example, a restaurant might offer a coupon for a free appetizer on their next visit by texting the word “appie” to their short code number. When the customer sends the text, they get a response virtually instantly with the details of how to get the free appetizer. This can be as simple as “Show this message to your server on your next visit to claim your free appetizer.” But now whenever you broadcast a text message, they will receive it virtually instantly.

Another place that it’s important to maintain an active presence is review sites. Examples of review sites are:

• Yelp
• Where
• Citysearch
• Insiderpages
• Yahoo Local
• Google Maps

These sites are local business directories of a sort, which let people post ratings about reviews about them. Much like any other website we’ve discussed, you need to maintain a presence here if you want to be able to manage your brand and what people are saying about it.

One of the reasons these sites are so important is many of them have apps for the iPhone and other smartphones, so a lot of people use them to look up local businesses when they’re on the go. If they find a listing with low ratings or bad reviews, they can just choose another one – the business owner will never know they lost a potential customer.

Just like Facebook and Twitter, you want to have an opportunity to either correct the problem or explain your side of it when these low ratings and review happen.

These sites aren’t only about reviews, however. Many of them let you make special offers to your customers, in the way of discounts, giveaways and more. These special offers can be another great way to draw in both new and existing customers through their smartphones and other mobile devices.

If they are searching for a local business using one of these services, seeing an offer from your company will make them a lot more likely to visit. And if it’s combined with good reviews and interaction on your part, it’s going to cement their decision even more firmly.

One of the biggest hurdles for a lot of business owners to leap when it comes to the internet is realizing that people will be talking about your company whether you like it or not.  And that includes good AND bad. Mistakes are bound to happen in any business, but when they do it’s quite possible that the story will wind up on the internet where anyone searching for your business can find it.  If you’re not maintaining an effective presence on the web, you’re going to have two problems if this happens.

1. The negative review could wind up ranking high in the search results, so whenever somebody searches for your business, this could be one of the first things they see. The review might be accurate if a mistake really was made, or it might be completely inaccurate, but that potential customer has no way of knowing for sure (and is more than likely going to accept it as fact).
2. You won’t have a chance to explain the situation and fix it.

The solution here is to be a part of the conversation. In other words, engage your customers where these kinds of things might appear so you can try to correct any mistakes that were actually made, or explain your side if it’s completely inaccurate.

Two of the places that these kinds of discussions can happen – Facebook and Twitter. It’s important that you have a presence on both, if only as a point of contact for your customers who are already in those places.

Imagine this scenario…
One of your employees has been dealing with a customer, and the customer is unhappy with the service they received. But instead of coming to you and giving you the opportunity to fix the problem, they go to these websites and post about the problem and how unhappy they were with your company.

If you don’t have a presence on Twitter or Facebook, you might never know about it. But people who are looking for information about your company online could quite likely find that information whenever they search for you.

Now think about this…
If you are active on those sites, on the other hand, you can jump in and try to correct the situation. This is not only going to give you a chance to turn an unhappy customer into a happy one (who might also become one of your biggest supporters at that point) it’s also going to add your side of things to the “record” of the situation on the internet.

Now when someone searching for you finds that review/complaint, they’re also going to see your response, and the fact that you tried to correct the situation for that unhappy customer.

Which scenario would you prefer?

Anyone can stake a claim to your name or company name on any number of social media sites.  They are given out on a first-come-first-serve basis, so your best defense is to claim them NOW if you haven’t already done so!

One great tool I discovered to check the availability across dozens of sites is a site called www.namechk.com.  Enter your desired name and in seconds you’ll have a full report of any sites where someone has claimed it already and on which sites it is still available.

I found this free website awhile back and it has become very useful to add an extra zing to my posts and to my email signatures.  …Continue Reading

Are you kidding me?
A friend of mine showed me this story and I gotta tell you, its pretty alarming!
With all the good uses of technology in our lives, theres a few that take it to another level.
The latest is Electronic Pickpocketing.  The bad guys can work a crowd, stealing numbers and then e-mail them anywhere in the world.

…Continue Reading

So you open up your Facebook account, look to your left and see you have some Events showing. A few birthdays this week-great!  Here’s a great idea to implement into your relationship building process. …Continue Reading

Your future is not a matter of chance.  It’s a matter of your choice.  It’s not something you wait for.  It’s something you must actively pursue. Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities.  Seize common occasions and make them great.  Opportunity can come disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat. Distant fields will always appear greener.  Yet, golden opportunities are all around you.

The will to succeed springs from the knowledge that you can succeed. You must make every thought, every fact, that comes into your mind pay you a profit. Make those mental images work and produce for you. Visualize all the things that you want in life. Your imagination can show you how to turn your possibilities into reality. Think of things not as they are but as you want them to be.  Don’t just dream, be creative.

The only thing that stands between you and what you want from life, is simply the will to pursue it and the faith to believe that it is possible. If you want success, begin thinking of yourself as a success.  The feeling of being successful has to come first. If you have a deep inner conviction that you will always have all that you need, if you actually feel prosperous, it will be so. Only your mind sets your limits.