by Christoph Puetz
Marketing is a difficult beast to tame. It is easy to spend a lot of money on marketing, but the results are not always there. Also, many businesses are just following the old path of using Yellow Pages and Newspaper ads to market their services – leaving a lot of other and cheaper marketing options on the table. Here are a few marketing tricks your competitors don’t know about.
Local Chamber of Commerce
No, this is not the advice to just join the local Chamber of Commerce. Here is the part you might not know. Many companies join the local Chamber of Commerce and that’s about it. They are not active members. They send a check once a year and that is it. They do not participate in any of the networking events, they do not use the leads groups.
I own 2 companies and they both are members in the local Chamber of Commerce. With the membership I am also participating in leads groups and it is amazing how many members are not taking advantage of these leads groups. There is actually a high demand for getting certain professions represented and there is a great chance they would get immediate business out of this effort, but they do not do it.
As an example, plumbers, roofers, and other related business could get a lot of business pretty much instantly and they could build so-called Power Partnerships to get even more business. So, great opportunity here for business owners who can spare an hour or two per week to drum up more business.
Mobile Marketing Optimization
More and more people have smartphones and take advantage of the mobile Internet. Over 30% of searches for local services are already done from mobile phones according to market research. Even if this would be only 10% it is still a large number of customers.
Not many businesses optimize their website for these searches and not many business optimize their search engine rankings for mobile search either. The ones that do are bringing home the bacon.
A mobile optimized website is just a simple version of your real website. It loads fast and instead of having all the gimmicks and stuff that your main website offers, it comes down to the point immediately. Fast and straight down to the point sells on the mobile Internet.
Conclusion
These 2 items are simple to master and the rewards actually can be huge, but even if people know about them, not many are taking the appropriate action. The ones that do take action discover that these 2 marketing tricks drive a lot of volume and financial rewards.
For one of my own businesses it took 3 weeks to have the first customer from the Chamber of Commerce and the order placed covered and exceeded the membership for one year. However, the connections I am building up and the increased reputation are showing dramatic results, too. For me this is a no-brainer marketing method.
This article describes simple marketing tricks many small businesses do not know about. Christoph Puetz, the author of this article, has been writing a lot about mobile optimized websites and web hosting reviews and most of his articles are based on his own personal experience.
