marketing

Annual Reports for Small Business

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Just the words alone, Annual Report, sound impressive and big league.

Most corporations are required by law to publish an annual report. But what about a small business that doesn’t have any investors or shareholders and isn’t required to do a yearly summary?

Annual reports are not just for the big corporations anymore.

It makes perfect marketing sense for a smaller business to get into the game.

It’s a great way to be different, to stay in contact with your best customers, and to draw in new customers. Serious customers want information about what they’re buying and with whom they’re doing business. An educated customer is the best kind.
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Pyramid Power

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Many things can affect the performance of a business, such as: the quality of its products or services, the abilities of its employees, its marketing, its public and media relations, how it reacts to change and, sure, a bit of luck doesn’t hurt either.

The late Peter Drucker, author, political economist and management consultant, is credited with pioneering the most important social and management theories of the 20th century. A quick web search will turn up many of his famous quotes, including:

There are only two things in a business that make money: innovation and marketing. Everything else is cost.

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Help your photography customers buy

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Some companies have reacted to the current recession by circling the wagons, laying-off staff and raising prices. It’s about protecting themselves and putting the company’s self-interests first.

If customers aren’t buying, then raising prices to compensate for low sales volume only closes the door even more. Raising the price of a product or service can often boost sales, but not during a recession.

Close doors or open new paths?

Let’s say you own a restaurant and people aren’t coming into your place as often as before. Folks are either going to a lower-priced fast food outlet or they’re eating at home more often. What can you do?
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Connect The Dots

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Why doesn’t a newspaper do this:

For each online crossword, sudoku, or other daily quiz, that is correctly completed by a reader, (within a certain time period), the paper donates, say, $1 to a local charity. The chosen charity can change daily or weekly.

The daily quiz would be sponsored by an advertiser which will make the charitable donation. The advertiser’s logo and message would sit right next to the quiz. Fifteen minutes to do the quiz means 15 minutes of exposure to the ad.

How many readers will take the time to complete the daily quiz knowing that it will do some social good? Word-of-mouth will help this spread as readers get their friends to join in and help fund raise for a charity.
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Eyes Buy

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Our brain depends on still pictures. Even when reading text, our brain processes the text as pictures of the words our eyes see. Our eyes really are cameras, taking many, many pictures every second.

We shop with our eyes and, more importantly, we buy with our eyes. Sadly, we still pay with our wallets. This is why product appearance, the design of the store or office, the employees’ style of dress, the company web site and all other marketing efforts should work together to give customers the necessary visual information they need to make a purchasing decision.

This also means that many consumer decisions are emotion-based. Customers buy based on what they’re feeling and not necessarily on logic.
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Three wise men or three blind mice?

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There are currently four new cell phone companies about to start up in Canada. Three of them, DAVE, WIND and Public Mobile will be operating in the Toronto area. Let’s compare their marketing strategies to date.

Web sites:

DAVE is plain and boring and has no useful information. There’s no attempt at excitement and nothing whatsoever to engage the customer. The business image is “we’re cheap and boring.”

WIND is better. This company obviously knows the value of relationship building and is doing everything right in this regard. Unfortunately this site has but a couple of lousy photographs, there’s almost no useful information, and it seems to be trying too hard to be trendy. But at least these folks are thinking about customer engagement.

Public Mobile has some useful information for its customers. The site uses no photography but has some video with its executives. They do try to engage the customer through a blog where potential customers can get answers to their questions.
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Risky Business

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It’s often said that it’s easier for a business to keep existing customers than to gain new ones. But it also works the other way around. It’s often easier for customers to buy from the same business than to look for a new supplier.

A photography customer that already has a go-to photographer will continue to use that photographer, (unless the photographer really messes up), because it’s easier than trying find a new photographer. A search for the phrase “toronto photographer” can result in 50 pages of search results. No one has time for that.

It’s always easier to continue doing things the usual way because there’s little or no risk. The usual way produces the usual results.

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