Power To The Small Business | Branding / Marketing Plans & Ideas / Social Media / Customer Experience Design / Digital Market

Small business owners often play a dual role of both marketer and manager. That can rip your marketing mind in half. Left-brain management thinking is at odds with right-brain marketing thinking. Best-selling author Laura Ries says to be a good entrepreneur you need to be a right-brainer. In their new book: War in the Boardroom, Laura and her father Al Ries tell you how to win this war and revive your marketing program. In this episode, Laura Ries says that "The key to success for any entrepreneur is going to be marketing." You have to understand these forces that bog down your marketing program. She offers advice on how listen to your gut and encourages you to embrace your right-brain marketing mind. See show notes and links on The Marketing Spot blog: http://themarketingspot.blogspot.com/2009/03/laura-ries-war-in-boardroom.html

The neat thing about delivering a remarkable customer experience is that it can be the foundation of a strong brand. Or a community of brands. Unless you live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one of the best experiences you've never had is from a community of businesses you've never heard of: Zingerman's Zingerman's Deli is a featured company in Bo Burlingham's Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. Co-founders Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw have grown a community of businesses in Ann Arbor founded on the mission of delivering a great experience. That community is now nine businesses strong and will probably swell to 13-14 by the year 2020. Ari Weinzweig is Co-founding partner and CEO of the Zingerman's Community of Businesses. In this episode of Power to the Small Business, Ari shares how Zingerman's explored their mission to discover a brand based on experience. Ari says real mission statement contain the answers to four questions. For links and show notes: http://themarketingspot.blogspo

The social media evangelists are preaching: "Social media is the way, the truth, the light!" But is it right for your business? And if it is, how do you get started? Guest expert David Berkowitz is Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy for 360i, a social media marketing company based in New York. In this episode of Power to the Small Business, David explains how get a social media program started and how to analyze whether or not a particular channel is for you. David says that while most of these tools are free, the time commitment can be enormous. You can find complete show notes and links on the blog: http://themarketingspot.blogspot.com/2009/01/starting-social-media-program.html

Your website traffic should not be a mystery. There are tools to help you track and analyze website traffic. Those tools are called web analytics. Tina Bean is Sales & Marketing for VisiStat, a real time website visitor tracking service. In this episode of Power to the Small Business, Tina Bean explains what web analytics are and what they can do for your small business website. Tina says that, "everyone with a website needs web analytics." Get complete show notes on The Marketing Spot blog: http://themarketingspot.blogspot.com/2009/01/marketing-basics-web-analytics.html

How do you solve the branding puzzle, especially if you're an existing business? Your brand is your company's most important asset, so you need to do it right. Alina Wheeler is the author of Designing Brand Identity, now in it's second edition. In this episode of Power to the Small Business, Alina Wheeler gives us four simple questions to answer. Answering those four questions is the start to designing your brand identity. Show notes and links are posted on The Marketing Spot Blog: TheMarketingSpot.blogspot.com

Mobile marketing was supposed to be hot in 2008. What happened? We're not really much closer to using mobile tools on a local level than we were when the year began. Part of the reason is that it's somewhat of an unknown for small businesses. Some of the big questions are "What is it? How can I use it? How do I get started." In this episode of Power to the Small Business, Kim Dushinski answers those questions and simplifies mobile in to something more understandable. Kim is the author of The Mobile Marketing Handbook. and her company is Mobile Marketing Profits in Denver, Colorado. Kim says there are certain mobile tools that are better for small businesses than others. Also, mobile marketing is not right for everyone.

Can social media be used as a marketing tool for your business? Many social media evangelists say yes. That may not be necessarily so for the small business. The first challenge is to navigate the confusing social media landscape. The second challenge is to figure out how to use social media. In this episode of Power to the Small Business, Dave Evans helps fit all the pieces together of this marketing puzzle. Dave is a social media consultant with Digital Voodoo in Austin, Texas and the author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day. Dave says that social media can be a very potent marketing tool if you know how to use it. Listen to the episode to learn: What is social media? How to use social media to market a business? How to develop a plan to use it social media.

Viral marketing gets too much credit. Slap together a hilarious video, slap it on YouTube and then people all over the world will rush to see it. Problem is, that very rarely leads to quantifiable business. And that type of viral marketing is practically useless to a local small business. JD Hinton writes songs, is a performer, and he lives in Central Texas. Last month he hosted an amazing event that he simply refers to as a wine concert. But it was much more. It was actually a jazzy, bluesy, eclectic event. The event sold out in four days and was was marketed almost exclusively by a form of viral email. There were no jokes, no funny videos, no amazing claims. Listen to how JD did it.

Word of mouth is often called the most powerful form of advertising. But the concept perplexes many small businesses. What is it? How does it work? Can it be controlled? In this episode of Power to the Small Business, word-of-mouth expert Jackie Huba provides some answers to those questions. Jackie is the author (with Ben McConnell) of Creating Customer Evangelists and Citizen Marketers. She believes that customer evangelism should be a primary concern of your business. Huba advises that you build word of mouth in to the DNA of everything you do in business. See complete show notes on the blog: http://themarketingspot.blogspot.com/2008/09/word-of-mouth-tips-from-jackie-huba.html

Guest: Michael Dowd - Outrider.com Is the search engine world already changing? Just as Google establishes itself as the monster of search, will it now have to conquer a new frontier? There are two different worlds of search: the PC and the mobile search space. While they may have similarities, they are not exactly the same. Listen to the podcast as Michael educates us on what you need to know about search in the coming mobile revolution. Different ads and different organic search results show up in your mobile browser when you search. Meaning you can search a term in mobile and the same term from a PC and get different results and different ads. Usually, mobile optimized websites show up first in organic results. Non-mobile optimized sites are not given as much weight in mobile search. PPC or search marketing works much the same way on mobile search as it does on traditional search. Now is a golden time to get into mobile search marketing. You can get in early and establish a high quality score because cl

On this episode of Power to the Small Business, we welcome Holly Kolman. Holly is passionate about the coming mobile revolution. She tracks it, writes about it, and advises on it on her blog: Mobienthusiast. Are you prepared for the coming mobile revolution? You should prepare because it gets closer with each passing month and each new iPhone sold. The good news is you can prepare rather easily and Holly's going to tell us how. What you are getting in this episode is short, concise, and yet so important to reaching your customers in the future. There are very few opportunities to be the first in the game, this is one of those opportunities. The opportunity is called the mobile web. The Mobile Web vs. The Desktop Web: More than 270 million smart phones will be sold worldwide next year. Smart phones are those web-enabled mobile phones like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Moto Q. As the use of smart phones rise, so will the use of the mobile web. That's a great opportunity for the small business, but it's also a c

On this episode of Power to the Small Business, we welcome Jim Morris. Jim creates compelling, evocative advertising. He also writes a weekly column for the Advertising for Peanuts blog. His specialty is creating taglines. His most famous tagline is for Flintstones Children's Vitamins: We Are Flintstones Kids, Ten Million Strong . . . And Growing. Jim has created taglines for both large and small companies. I asked Jim about the importance of having a tagline. He believes that a good tagline is the single-most powerful, condensed, compact expression of your brand that you can have. Taglines are show their value when you need to get your brand in front of people and connect with them in little space and time. The tagline is the first articulation of your brand. However, taglines are not explanations and they shouldn't tell a long story. It needs to encapsulate the feeling you want

One of the most pervasive, misused marketing techniques is building artificial communities. That's because many online businesses fancy themselves the next Facebook, Twitter, or the early years of AOL. What results is a steady stream of friend requests to a constant deluge of new web communities. It's really impossible to keep up. And it's not very effective. The new wave of community builders doesn't really understand what building a community is all about. Marketers don't help by presenting community as the magic marketing tool. But good news; we found two local business owners that have built successful communities. These communities are not about friend requests, they're about enhancing the customer experience. On Episode 13 of Power to the Small Business, we talk to two entrepreneurs who have built successful communities. Eric Brown is Founder of Urbane Apartments in Royal Oak, Michigan and he uses both online and offline elements to build

Howard Schultz rode in on his white horse in January to reclaim his throne as CEO of Starbucks. It wasn't just the media anointing Schultz, Howard put himself front and center and promised to return Starbucks to its glory. In his first Transformation Agenda Communication, Schultz listed as one of his priorities: "Re-igniting our emotional attachment with our customers by restoring the connection our customers have with you, our coffee, our brand, and our stores." The fact that Schultz called his communication a "Transformation Agenda" hinted of big things to come. Naturally, most people expected a transformation, including me. We are now four months into the transformation and it is difficult to see the re-ignition of emotional attachment that Schultz promised. Granted, Schultz didn't promise immediate results. Instead, he said it was a 12-18 month timetable. But exactly where

Dan Roam, Author of The Back of the Napkin How much would you pay to become creative and innovative? You may only need to pay $16.47. That's the Amazon price of Dan Roam's new book: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Roam contends that any problem can be solved with what he calls "visual thinking," a simple system of drawing. Don't like your drawing ability? That's ok, because Roam says it's not artistic ability that matters. It's time to open your mind to new possibilities and opportunities with visual thinking.