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Category: My Marketing Advice (Page 15 of 26)

9 Publicity Ideas for Your Small Business

November 12, 2015 /

Right now is a good time to pitch a story to your local business reporter in hopes of getting some press for your company in December and January. Even if you sell online and internationally, never discount the power of your local market. 

Here are some headlines you could pitch or maybe one of these will inspire one of your own:

December PR Ideas
  • How This Local Business is Pulling Out all the Stops for the Holiday Shopping Season
  • Local Company to Host Food and Toy Drive
  • Was Black Friday a Boom or Bust for These Small Businesses
  • Why You Should Shop These Local Businesses This Christmas Season
January PR Ideas
  • How a Bad Winter Could Impact These Local Businesses
  • Challenges and Wins in 2022 for Local Companies
  • Our Favorite Local Small Businesses of 2022
  • What These Local Companies Plan to Do Differently in 2023
  • Advice for Starting a Business in 2023, from 5 Local Small Business Owners

As I have always said, you have to give a reporter a compelling and timely story headline (and then show how your company would fit in the story) as this makes it easier for them to see the value in the pitch.

My Publicity Planner is part of my Marketing Planner Bundle, and it will help you create, plan, and organize your pitches.

Good luck and let me know if you have success!

© 2015-2021 Gail Oliver. All rights reserved. Publicity Ideas for Your Small Business

Today’s Awesome Tip for Writing Product Descriptions, Courtesy of Apple

November 3, 2015 /

by Gail Oliver, Online Marketing Consultant

There are many reasons why Apple© is great at marketing. One thing they do is write very compelling product copy. Recently when I was on their site, I noticed a recurring theme in their descriptions. Because their products are feature-rich, they tend to write their product copy by starting with a hook – basically a few words that highlight the main benefits and then they lead into more detail.

writing product descriptions apple

Sum It Up in 3 Words

This is actually a good approach as we are way to busy these days to really take the time to read a detailed description without some heads up first whether we should care. Therefore, maybe you want to try this tactic of hooking your potential customer first with a few key words. If you are not sure what I mean, see what Apple does below for some of its products:

Mac Retina Display:  Accuracy. Brightness. Clarity.

iPad Pro: Thin. Light. Epic.

iPhone 6 Camera: 12MP pictures. 4K videos. Live Photos. Lasting memories.

Apple Watch: Notifications. Phone calls. Wallet. Right on your wrist.

iPod Touch: A8 chip. 8MP iSight camera. 5 stunning colours.

So try pulling out the three or four main benefits, features and/or competitive advantages that you feel potential customers are looking for and try hooking them with just these words before leading into a big sales pitch.

Now Don’t Forget To…

  • Check out my E-book shop on Gumroad
  • Follow me on Bloglovin
  • Share this post on Facebook and follow me for exclusive tips

Thanks so much for your support!

Gail

© 2015 Gail Oliver, Attention Getting Marketing. All rights reserved.

Your Business Success Checklist for 2016

October 14, 2015 /

by Gail Oliver, Online Marketing Consultant

As we are in the final months of 2015, it is a good time to look at your business and decide how successful your year has been so far and what changes you need to make to have continued success in 2016.

business success checklist 2016

1. Are Your Sales Increasing?

It is critical that you compare your sales from year to year, as well as month over year (for example, are your August 2015 sales stronger than your August 2014 sales). This really helps you see overall annual growth as well as if you have any seasonal highs and lows.

I highly recommend you set up a spreadsheet where you enter your sales for each month of the year (in a column) with sales for the previous year’s months in the column to the left. Then in the column to the right of your current sales determine your sales growth, by month and by year, by entering the calculations:

[sales for Month X 2015 – sales for Month X 2014] / sales for Month X 2014

[sales for 2015 – sales for 2014] / sales for 2014

This will arrive at a percentage. Overall sales should never be down from the previous year. If this is the case, then you need to rethink your business in terms of your offerings, your pricing, your costs and whether you need to invest more in marketing.

2. Are Your Costs Increasing?

It is also important to look at your profit, which is Revenue – Costs. Is your profit up over last year and month over year? Again, if profits are down you need to consider raising your prices and/or lowering your costs, especially if your revenues increased. It doesn’t have to be a huge price increase. If profits are down 10%, then you can easily raise your prices 10% and it should have little negative impact on your business. If your costs have increased, then you need to analyze each cost center (be it supplies, fees, shipping) and see which ones increased in price and find alternatives.

3. What Were Your Revenue Leaders?

Look at which products and/or services performed the best for you in 2015 and consider expanding further in this area, slowly eliminating or reinventing products and services that did not sell as well.

4. What is Working For Your Competitors?

Take a look at your competitors and see what they are selling, what their customers are saying in their reviews and on their social media sites. Try to garner what is working for them in terms of their business offerings and marketing efforts and see which ideas you can steal.

5. Are You Listening to Your Feedback?

Listen to your customers. Read your reviews, comments, feedback, even ask your customers questions. If they feel your prices are too high, consider lowering them if that makes business sense. If they didn’t like the quality of a product, improve upon it. If there is a product or service you don’t have that they want, consider offering it.

6. What Marketing Efforts Are Working?

You need to study your website analytics, even though it will not tell you which traffic sources converted into sales, it is still a way to decide which efforts you should be spending time on and which you should maybe discontinue. For example, if two-thirds of your traffic is coming from Pinterest and very little from Twitter, then stop wasting time on Twitter and dedicate even more time to Pinterest. If your Google ads are not bringing in a lot of traffic, contact a Google Adwords rep and ask how your ads can be improved. If you have been avoiding social media altogether, then maybe now’s the time to give it a chance. Remember, it is futile to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

7. Are You Maximizing Your Customer Base?

How many new customers did you get last year? Guess what, they are still potential customers in 2016! Find ways to tap into your already established customer base – either through special offers on your social media sites or a Mail Chimp email campaign – to get additional business from them (as well as referral business) in 2016.

Just 3 More Things to Do…

Thanks so much for your support!

Gail

© 2015 Gail Oliver, Attention Getting Marketing. All rights reserved.

Blog Ideas for an Online Store

September 1, 2015 /
blog ideas for an online storeDoes your online store have a blog? Need blog ideas for your online store
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Content marketing is a great way to drive traffic through SEO. The key is to focus on content that will attract your ideal customer, particularly if based on how they search.
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For example, let’s say that you are selling dog products. Since you are targeting dog owners,  there is a variety of content you can post that your potential customers will be searching on. Then, as a result, they will hopefully stumble upon your online shop via your blog posts.
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You can find ideas for blog posts based on using Google’s auto-complete feature. You start by typing in “dogs”, “French bulldogs”, “dog lovers” etc., and see what longer search phrases come up. This is a good way to determine potential blog titles and content.
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Some blog ideas based on top Google searches:
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  • 15 Christmas Gift Ideas for Dog Lovers
  • 5 Awesome Monthly Subscription Boxes for Pet Owners
  • 8 Boston Terrier Puppy Training Tips
  • 20 Male Dog Names & Their Meaning
  • 12 Non-Shedding Dog Breeds
  • 10 of the Cutest Puppy Videos on YouTube

You do not always have to write original content, you can curate content for your blog as long as you give credit to the original source.

Now, because you are primarily an e-commerce site and not a blogger by trade, you just have to post once a week. For a pet store, you may want to make it on #WoofWednesday. The point is, the optimized content stays around for years bringing you a constant and steady stream of traffic.

You can also upsell your products within your blog posts, much like I do here 🙂

By the way, you need an SEO optimized blog post written for your ecommerce blog, I do offer this service. 

You might also like to read: 365 SEO Optimized Blog Post Titles.

© 2015 Gail Oliver. All rights reserved. Blog Ideas for an Online Store

Want Big Sales This Holiday Season? Target the Corporate Gift Market

August 27, 2015 /

by Gail Oliver, Online Marketing Consultant

If you really want to guarantee big sales this holiday season, one market you’ll want to consider targeting is the corporate market, and you will want to start preparing for it now.

how to get corporate gift sales

According to a report from the Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI), last year companies were planning to spend $43 per customer (or prospective customer) on Christmas gifts and $50 per employee.

Typical gifts for customers were food baskets, bottles of wine, and desk accessories. Typical gifts for employees were gift cards, food/beverages, apparel and cash. 68% of corporate gifts will bear a company logo (for obvious reasons).

Therefore, do you offer a product and/or service that would be suitable as a corporate and/or employee gift?

How to Make Sure Your Products Work for Corporate Gifts

  1. Personalization – It would really help your chances if you allow for personalization of your product as companies do use corporate gifts as an advertising medium.
  2. Gift Packaging – If your products already come pre-packaged, ready for gift giving, you will be saving the company time and money.
  3. Quantities – Don’t approach a company with 500 employees if you can’t turnaround high quantities of product in a short time.
  4. Delivery – Companies will want to start sending out their corporate gifts in early December (but they will order in September and October), and hand out employee gifts in the first two weeks of December, so you will have to be able to meet these deadlines.
  5. Distribution – The company may want you to actually send the gifts directly to their clients, so make sure this is a service that you can offer.

How to Get Corporate Gift Sales

  1. You are best to approach local companies as they will typically want to support another local company.
  2. Employee gifts are usually sourced by the human resources department, so start there by hand delivering a sample (with gift packaging) and price list (with discounts for quantities ordered) to the Human Resources Manager (find names on LinkedIn).
  3. Mention to the HR Manager that your product/service would also work well as gifts for clients, customers and prospects, and they will likely pass this information along to the Sales Manager.
  4. Printout references and reviews from previous customers to give them some assurance as to the quality of your product/service.
  5. Make sure you understand the company’s business, their customers and their employees. For example, if the majority of their staff is young women, they will not be interested in men’s wallets.
  6. Approach companies in early October. September is too early and November is too late.

By the way, my 2017 Etsy Shop Marketing Plan does indicate that this is the month for sending out corporate gift inquiries, so if you haven’t downloaded my plan yet, you are missing out on other great sales opportunities.

© 2012-2017 Gail Oliver, Attention Getting Marketing. All rights reserved.

The Holiday Gift Guides You Really Want to Get Your Products Into

August 20, 2015 /

by Gail Oliver, Online Marketing Consultant

If you sell products online and want to take advantage of those huge holiday sales, then I highly recommend you re-read my post of two years ago, Why You Should Be Pitching Your Products for Holiday Gift Guides Now. However, today I want to give you a more current suggestion for getting holiday gift guide publicity.

how to get your products into holiday gift guides

Popular Pinners

You want to pitch to the lifestyle bloggers who are excelling at creating beautiful, comprehensive, and highly pinnable gift guides for Pinterest. One of my favorites is The Everygirl blog. Their gift guides are really well done, great at attracting attention on Pinterest and getting thousands of repins, not to mention turning up first in Pinterest search results. Other bloggers whose 2014 holiday gift guides also got huge circulation on Pinterest last year include:

All of these blogs create gift guides for every family member, every type of interest, so don’t be afraid to pitch your own category. Some of these blogs were also part of a mass marketing effort last year by a group of lifestyle bloggers, all promoting each other’s holiday gift guides, creating even wider exposure by tapping into each other’s social media following.

YouTube Vloggers

I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot more holiday gift guides on YouTube this year. Many popular “vloggers” (people with popular YouTube channels) last year did holiday gift guides that were viewed by millions of people. Granted, most of these vloggers and their audience tend to be young, but they are recommending gifts for mom, dad, boyfriend, boss, your pet, etc., so it is a wider market than you think. Vloggers are known to get paid for endorsements, however, you should still pitch to them asking for consideration as an artisan/indie seller, and hopefully they haven’t completely sold out and would still recommend your product because they like it, not just because they got paid to say so. You would likely have to send them product to show. Here are a few vloggers who had popular gift guides last year:

Now, Before You Go….

  • Follow my blog on Bloglovin
  • Pin this post to Pinterest and follow me
  • Check out my E-book shop on Gumroad for more creative ideas!

Thanks so much for your support!

Gail

© 2015 Gail Oliver, Attention Getting Marketing. All rights reserved.

Try This Old Marketing Trick to Sell More Products and Services

August 6, 2015 /

by Gail Oliver, Online Marketing Consultant

I was in the drugstore yesterday and I saw an annual back to school favorite called the Teen Value Pack, which consists of 10 different skin and body care products from various brands packaged together in a box for a value price of $9.99 (retail value $42). Even though my kids may only need half the products in the packs (my son isn’t old enough to shave just yet), I still bought them because I felt like I was really just paying for one product and getting the rest for free.

Screen shot 2015-08-06 at 2.00.45 PM

The lesson here is that consumers love getting value for their money, and love getting many items at one expenditure almost feeling as if some were free. So, have you thought about bundling together your products and/or services?

There are a few advantages to this old marketing trick:

  • The customer might be more likely to go for the bundle because of the overall cost savings, allowing you to sell more product to one customer at one time, and hence make more money overall.
  • It is a good way to introduce new products and create future demand
  • You can take advantage of various selling occasions or events to create bundles or value sets around, such as Back to School, Having a Baby, Going on a Trip, New House, etc.

It can also be a way to quickly expand your customer base. Back when I was working for a computer software company, we wanted our customers to start buying the CD version of our software because it was much cheaper to produce. But a lot of people didn’t have CD-ROM drives in their computers (we’re going way back here). So the company bundled the CD version of the software with a top-notch CD-ROM drive (they worked out a deal with the manufacturer to buy them at a really good price). They packed the software and CD-ROM drive together in a box and called it the Blockbuster Bundle for the same price as buying the software on its own and they sold like hot cakes. Why not, it was a chance to essentially get a free CD-ROM drive. The end result was not only did we successfully get our customers to upgrade to CD-ROM, but we got a ton of new customers in the process.

So come up with a bundle that makes sense, offer it at a value price where you still make a decent profit, make it a limited time offer, and see what it does for your business.

No Sales? Get a Marketing Critique of Your Business for Just $99 and I’ll Tell You Why

© 2015 Gail Oliver, Attention Getting Marketing. All rights reserved.

My Latest Surefire Tip for Getting Publicity for Your Business

July 30, 2015 /

by Gail Oliver, Online Marketing Consultant

Do you ever get frustrated trying to get publicity for your business with the media outlets specific to your industry? For example, fashion magazines are besieged with requests from vendors to use their products in editorial, so how good are your odds? But you do have other choices. Have you ever thought about stepping away from your industry’s mainstay magazines and blogs, and try a different approach?

How to get publicity

Let’s say I owned a restaurant, I would typically be trying to get a review or included in articles from local magazines, lifestyle and travel blogs, and as such would be competing with many others for the same editorial. However, consider a story pitch that would work with a different type of publication and have the same effect.

For example, I was recently planning a trip to Boston and I searched on Google for “Top restaurants in Boston”. One of the articles that came up was from the business blog, Business Insider, entitled “The 10 Best Restaurants For A Business Lunch In Boston“. Do you see where I am going here? Would you normally expect to see restaurant suggestions in a business publication? But this article makes sense for this particular type of publication.

Maybe you have a pet products business. You are likely always targeting the pet-related media. However, earlier this year the men’s fashion magazine GQ ran an article called, “The Ultimate Dog Accessories for a Gentleman’s Best Friend“. Would you have thought to pitch to them?

If you own a resort or tourist-related business, I imagine you are always trying to get featured with the travel media. However, Time Magazine ran an article last summer entitled, “7 Great American Vacation Spots That Won’t Bust Your Budget” as part of their money feature, and it listed and linked to several hotels, restaurants, bars and attractions.

What if you sell beauty products and you have had no luck with the beauty editors at the popular beauty blogs. But did you know that Shape Magazine, which typically focuses on fitness-related editorial for women, also has regular beauty editorial, even an annual beauty awards?

I hope this gets you thinking about how you can increase your chances of getting publicity for your business by targeting non-industry media with a story relevant to their editorial.

Before You Leave….

I hope you will:

Thanks so much for your support!

Gail

© 2015 Gail Oliver, Attention Getting Marketing. All rights reserved.

4 Easy Tips to Help Your Business Succeed on Social Media

July 17, 2015 /

To succeed on social media, it is really all about interaction. So, if you are a business on social media here are four easy ways to make sure you are maximizing your presence there and reaching more customers:

Respond to Comments

On Facebook, Instagram and Twitter you can reply to comments on your posts, photos, tweets, etc., and you should, especially if someone has asked you a question. I know I can forget to do this too, so make a point of setting aside a half hour at the end of the day and go through your notifications and make sure that you respond to every comment as well as if people have even mentioned you on their social media site. If people have retweeted your tweets, say thank you and/or return the favor. You never want to look inactive or that you don’t care, so take the time to respond.

Comment, Like & Share

How good are you are taking the time to comment, like and share on the social media posts that appear in your feed? When you comment, like or share someone’s Facebook post, your name is now seen by their followers. I have actually had people tell me they found me on Facebook based on a comment I made on another site’s Facebook page. Plus, a lot of the time when people see that you liked, shared and/or commented on their content, they will return the favor.

Follow Back

Again, take that half an hour everyday and go through your list of new followers and make sure to follow back. Now, I am not saying you have to follow everyone who follows you because sometimes you will have people follow you that are spammers or maybe not appropriate content, so use your discretion, but if they look like a potential customer, a potential business alliance or someone in the media, follow back.

Analyze What You Are Posting & When

Take some time at the end of the week to go through your social media posts and see which content was the most popular. What was liked the most, commented on the most, shared the most? Now try to analyze if it is the actual content and/or was it a particular day that was popular, or a particular time of day? Both Pinterest and Twitter have pretty good analytics at the ready for you. For Twitter, click on your avatar in the upper right hand corner (for Pinterest, it is the gear icon) and then go to “Analytics” on the menu. You want to stick with the content that is working for you, and then schedule it for the days and times that seem to offer the best chance of sharing.

More Social Media Posts
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About Me

A 20+ year marketing professional, small business consultant, ebook author & blogger, my advice has been featured in the NY Times, Success Magazine, American Express, Big Commerce, Business2Community to name a few – so this is professional advice you can trust!

I have consulted for thousands of small businesses since 2012. It really does help to talk to someone who is objective to get a new, but professional, perspective. I have also written publicity pitches for clients that resulted in them being featured in Real Simple Magazine, Apartment Therapy, House Beautiful, Vanity Fair, Houzz, Martha Stewart, Glamour Magazine, LONNY, DesignMilk, Emmaline Bride,– just to name a few.

©2020 Gail Oliver. All rights reserved. Succeed on Social Media

Where to Sell Your Products Online

June 16, 2015 /

by Gail Oliver, Online Small Business Consultant

I have added a permanent page to my blog for your reference. It is called 50 Online Marketplaces where you can sell your products online, and, as the title says, it includes links to 50 online selling sites.

50 Online Marketplaces to Sell Your Products at from Attention Getting Marketing

50 Online Marketplaces to Sell Your Products at from Attention Getting Marketing

Some of these sites sell all types of products (Etsy, Amazon), whereas others specialize in art (Society6), clothing (Not Just a Label), vintage clothing (As0s), food (Artizone), kids (Buy Baby Buy) and home decor (Houzz).

Some are regular marketplaces (11 Main), some are auction sites (eBay) and some are flash sale sites (One Kings Lane). Hopefully you can find the one(s) that are right for what you sell.

Now, things are always changing in the online e-commerce world, so you may see some of these sites merge in the future. There have been rumours that Wayfair might take an interest in CustomMade and Alibaba (that owns 11 Main) has invested in Zulily, so who knows.

Please note that I did not include businesses like Shopify and BigCommerce as these are considered e-commerce solutions.

Be sure to share this list with your fellow sellers on social media!

Till next time, Gail

© 2015 Gail Oliver, Attention Getting Marketing. All rights reserved.

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