Blog: Articles

MerchantCircle released a big survey yesterday detailing the rise of social media among small businesses as a cheap, effective marketing tool. Among the more interesting results is the conclusion that “social media are now the top marketing strategy for local businesses” – we wonder if that trend will continue or if social media-based marketing is simply having its moment in the spotlight right now.

What raised our eyebrows was this statistic: “55 percent of people who have run a daily deal campaign said they would not do so again.” That means that Groupon, LivingSocial and all the other group-buying knockoffs are either doing a terrible job at customer retention or that perhaps the group-buying premise is a flawed one – at least for the businesses themselves – to begin with.

Our experience with group buying in a business-to-business e-commerce environment has been mixed. Everyone seems to want it, yet once it’s implemented, adoption tends to be very low (or, in some cases, nonexistent). At least part of the reason for this is that, despite the appeal of group discounts, many business purchasers don’t really want to wait to see if their colleagues are going to buy something just to get a discount; purchases are driven by need, as opposed to by impulse.

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Categories: Articles, General

If you’ve been in business for a few years, you’re probably good at something. Hopefully, it’s something that your customers recognize – perhaps you’re an expert at embroidery, or a specialist at creating innovative promotional packages. Maybe you excel at quick turnaround, or you really know workwear in a particular industry.

What is it you’re good at? It’s an important question, because as the landscape of selling online becomes more and more competitive, the generic message “we sell promotional products” is less useful by the day. Terms like “promotional products” or “logo apparel” are so heavily marketed that competing for search for these terms against the big players in the industry is nearly impossible.

What’s a small or medium-sized business owner to do? As I’ve suggested in numerous other columns, the first place to start is with a geographical focus. In your online advertising and marketing, as well as in the copy on your website itself, you can adopt a regional strategy and make sure you target shoppers searching and buying in your area. As always, keyword research will help you determine popular search terms and search volume in your geographical area.

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Categories: Articles

If you’ve picked up an iPhone, Android phone, iPad or just about any modern smartphone, you’ve probably used what is currently called an “app”. The popularity of this term is an odd phenomenon, given that apps, more commonly known as “applications”, have been around for dozens of years. We can thank the product marketing geniuses at Apple for taking something we’ve all had on our computers for next to forever and turning it into the next big thing in technology.

To be fair, an app on a tiny phone that fits in your hand is a slightly different monster than the Outlook application that sits on your desktop computer. Ten years ago, the idea of packing so much technology into a device smaller than a deck of cards was just a pipe dream. True, devices like the Palm Pilot had apps for various functions like calendars, email and so on, but modern apps have far surpassed them in quality and functionality. You can now run games on your iPhone that are comparable in quality to modern consoles like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It’s really astonishing.

What sets today’s app world apart from applications of the past—both on desktop PCs and portable devices—is the sheer quantity and breadth of the apps themselves, not to mention the pace at which new apps are developed and released. Since the iPhone launched just a few years ago, hundreds of thousands of apps have been built for its app store, and thousands more are available on the Android platform. It’s an explosion in software like we’ve never seen before.

While none of us will ever download even a tiny fraction of all those apps, the ease of purchasing smartphone (or iPad, iPod Touch or forthcoming tablet) apps and the inexpensive, impulsive nature of the purchase have some pretty interesting implications. We are now accessing information in ways we may not have expected. Data is becoming specialized, something you click an icon to access rather than searching or browsing to find. It’s going to be a wild ride, and it may change the way we interact with web technology in ways we didn’t expect. (more…)

Categories: Articles