Foursquare, life is a game

Created in 2007 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai who shared communal office space in New York City, foursquare is an app for your phone that keeps its users connected to their surroundings. It presents a great way to acquire new customers as well as accelerating their number of purchases from a fantastic loyalty program presented as a social media game that rewards its users with special offers.

Here’s just a few examples of how foursquare can be used:

• You just finished a job interview downtown and you’re starving. Use foursquare to find out what restaurants are nearby. It will even be specific for those times when all you’re craving for is sushi.
• You have just finished your errands and not are ready to head back home. Using foursquare, you just found out that your favorite store is having a sale. As you head in that direction, you use foursquare again to find out if any of your friends are nearby who might want to meet you there.

The more places you check into, the better foursquare gets to know your likes, your friends and your favorite parts of the city. Foursquare was designed to get to know you better, which is why you can use this app whenever you’re stuck on what to do next, where to eat or who to hang out with.

Making the consumer life a fun game where friends compete against each other.

From a business perspective, the stats are in your favor. The foursquare community boasts over 20-million users, with nearly 1-million businesses using the Merchant Platform. That works out to millions of check-ins every day.

The Merchant Platform of foursquare offers a variety of free tools to help you increase awareness (and therefore revenues) to your business. Basically, you can use foursquare as the tool for launching and managing your loyalty programs.

If you manage a business, you start by claiming your location. Then, you stay in touch with your customers by keeping them up-to-date with what’s going on at your business. To keep customers coming back and referring their friends, you create specials of some sort to entice people to check into your business.

Creating your own page is the first step to enticing customers to check your brand out.

So it does make a lot of sense to integrate foursquare into your business marketing plan. Are you ready to check in?

Watch foursquare CEO & co-founder Dennis Crowley’s passionate foursquare presentation and his vision of the future through foursquare.

So what is your business about?

Do you think that you can integrate foursquare into your local business marketing strategy?

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        Listed as the 15^th most valuable brand in the world by Business Week, the American Express name has been around for over 150-years. Founded in 1850, they started out as an express mail business in Buffalo, New York. In 1882, and to compete with the US post office, they started offering money orders.

In 1891, Traveler’s Cheques were introduced, which established American Express as an international company.

The first American Express Credit Cards, launched in 1958 to compete with Diner’s Club, were printed on paper and cost just $6 per year. The following year, American Express issued their credit cards on embossed plastic cards, which was an industry first. Today, they offer many variations of their credit cards, including gold and platinum. The average annual fee is $450 per year.

Today, 24% of all credit card transactions originate from American Express card holders. This is, in part, because of a unique marketing approach launched in 1983; with each purchase made with an American Express credit card, one penny would be donated towards the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. This ad campaign not only increased transactions and credit card membership, it generated $1.7 million for the Statue of Liberty Restoration project.

American Express quickly became the customer loyalty experts. Their customers are 4 times more loyal than those of Mastercard and 3.5 times more loyal than Visa clients. Rather than using revolving credit balances and lending fees that other credit card companies rely on to make money, American Express earns most of their revenues from card member spending.

According to a 2011 Colloquy Customer Loyalty Census, $48 billion of perceived value comes from loyalty, incentive, points and rewards programs. A staggering 1/3 of that amount goes unclaimed.

American Express continues to lead the way in loyalty programs. Just this past March, they launched their Twitter Sync campaign for which cardholders have redeemed over $2 million in rewards.

How about you? What do you do that keep your customers coming back to you for more?

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How many loyalty programs are you currently involved in?

Do you even remember? Probably not, until they remind you how close you are to its reward.

The other day I realised that out of the 11 loyalty cards I have, I only use 4 of them on a regular basis.

And it got to my attention to cover an article on this very powerful internal marketing strategy designed to significantly boost your sales in highly cost effective ways.

So my approach to loyalty programs is not far off the average of each household having only 8 of 18 loyalty programs actively being used. But what’s the reasoning behind this? Did you sign up for the loyalty program perks or because you shop at that store anyway or both? Do you even know what you get or how the program works?

Knowing what a loyalty program is supposed to do might help you answer these questions. And Adam Torporek describes it best:

“A loyalty program is a system of structured rewards given to customers, usually in exchange for desired behaviors, with the goals of increasing customer loyalty and collecting customer data. Loyalty programs use the psychological principles of reciprocity, commitment and loss aversion to increase the likelihood of customer loyalty.”

An actively-involved company offers a loyalty program to increase their customer service efforts. Whether your small local business offers its customers points per purchase, discounts on pre-ordering or incentive prizes for collecting points, you’re doing it for two reasons:

1. Collecting relevant data on your customers to better your marketing efforts, and
2. Encouraging new and existing customers to do more business with you, either from buying or from referring a new client.

And either way, you’re trying to increase your customer base and make more profits.

“Loyalty programs are intended to motivate consumers to buy more products or engage them into creating a relationship with the company…” - Ran Kivetz, expert on Customer Loyalty Programs

But is launching a loyalty program the right move for your business? 

The only way to find out is by conducting your own market research and keeping these points in mind:

• What is the life time value of a customer?
• How much can you invest to increase that value?
• What do your customers value most in order to motivate them?
• Can your irresistible offer incorporate a loyalty program?
• What might your return on investment be?
• How can you make this marketing option cost-effective for your business?

There are also 5 key factors to consider while creating your loyalty program.

If you believe that offering a loyalty program would be beneficial to your customers and your bottom line, make sure you educate your customers about the benefits of using the program and continue to keep them informed on how they can take advantage of your program. After all, do you want to be one of the 8 loyalty programs they use or one of the 10 they don’t use?

Keep in mind that just like every marketing campaign, you must test it and optimise it.

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Years ago, there were not many ways of tracking progress within a business to see whether the amount of time spend doing a specific task would yield the right amount of results. Sometimes you would be spending a lot more time on, for example a project, just to move an inch into further progression with the project.  This is where the Pareto principle comes in. With the Pareto principle, you are able to model whatever it is that you are doing, to be working more efficiently meaning you will get more for the time you spend on doing that specific task. This is what you want for “getting the bang for your buck.”

Origin of the Pareto Principle

The pareto principle was named after an Italian, Vilfredo Pareto. He was the one who made the observation where he says that 80 % of whatever result he observed was caused by 20 % of the efforts put in. By discovering that 20% of his tomato plants produced 80% of all the tomatoes of his garden he then found this ratio everywhere from in his garden to economics. He discovered that not all things in nature are a ratio of 1 to 1. He made the observation that in Italy, 80 % of the land was owned by 20 % of its population. The pareto principle is just an 80/20 split.

 Efficiency

Later on, this observation can be seen in many things today. This principle can be seen also in the business world where 20 % of the effort gives 80 % of all the results. Just by looking at those numbers will tell you that it is way more efficient to apply the Pareto Principle to have better results in the least amount of time. Pareto also did develop the Pareto Principle efficiency which talks more about the non-linearity of the principle.

Final Thought on the Principle

As you have read in this post, efficiency is very important. The Pareto principle helps in getting things done that are of real importance. It’s all about doing the work that will give you the most results. So next time when you wake up and have a lot of work to do make sure you do the stuff that will give the most affect as opposed to something that will be not that affective. The built in time management in this principle is also what makes it so great.

So in terms of business, it doesn’t matter if you are a small local business or a big multinational, 20% of your clients generate 80% of your profits. And 20% of your efforts generate 80% of your production.

It’s a time management technique, do the top 20% now and delegate the rest of the 80% later. Sometimes you can spend a lifetime trying to finish 100% of a project, because even in the last 80% you will find the 80/20 ratio and it’s infinite.

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            In 1946, Warren Avis started his car rental company with just 3 cars. Today, the Avis Budget Group is the second largest vehicle rental company in the world and comprises of Avis, Budget Rent a Car and Budget Truck Rental. They have 10,000 locations spanning 175 countries,

            “We’re only No.2. We try harder.”

“We presented a company that was willing to work for you. It was sort of like tacking up the manifesto on the door.”

— Paula Green, the copywriter from DDB who came up with the famous slogan.  

After 13-years of not making any money, Avis lured businessman Robert Townsend to step in as the CEO. Schooled at Princeton and fought in WWI, he spent 14-years rising through the ranks of American Express. When he made the move to Avis as their CEO in 1962, he was the Senior Vice President for Investments and International Banking.

The first thing Robert Townsend did was to hire a marketing firm. He chose the prestigious DDB (Dolby, Dane and Bernbach) marketing company to come up with a profit-winning advertising campaign. Besides the extremely successful Avis ad campaign, DDB also became well-known for Volkswagen’s ad campaign “Think Small”.

           - Robert Townsend – CEO of Avis in 1962

For 3-months, the team at DDB took a crash course about everything regarding rental cars. In order to learn as much about the business as possible, they asked Avis employees the simple question of “Why does anyone ever rent a car from you?”

The answers led to the slogan which became the business philosophy, their core message, their identity, their irresistible offer and enabled the ad campaign to turn Avis’ annual $3.2 million loss into a $1.2 million profit in just only one year. 

Besides a brilliant ad campaign, how did this particular campaign become one of the best known ad campaigns in history?

Avis made sure each and every employee was on board with the campaign by visiting each and every location in the United States and explaining the campaign to each Avis employee. Additionally, with each pay cheque, employees received updates on soon-to-be-launched campaigns. After all, it was the employees who had helped inspire the money making slogan, so keeping them informed made smart business sense.

Today, Avis continues to use the “We try harder” slogan for their advertising means. They’ve gone one step further to include the experiences of their customers into each ad campaign. 

At Local Tech Marketing we came up with “Your success is Our success”, in just 5 words we state the core foundation of our business, offering business success, implying that our business cannot succeed if we cannot make yours succeed first, we’re not here to take advantage of you, if you jump, we jump, you are not alone, we are here, taking the ride with you until we succeed, together. 

How about you, what’s your slogan, you’re irresistible offer?

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 If you’re a business owner, chances are you’re always looking for inexpensive ways to market your business. Email marketing is one of the most effective, low-cost methods to market your product or service. Its primary purpose is to build a relationship with your customers and give them a chance to buy from you again and again.

 Most prospects don’t buy things instantly, but if you give yourself the chance to remind them later that you are still there and educate them about your product or services, you will increase your sales and thus with very low effort on your part. And once your prospect becomes a client, you can up-sell, cross-sell, down-sell… make significant increases in your revenues.

 Think of it this way – email marketing is like having your best and most consistent sales rep working for you 24/7 on autopilot.

Contrary to popular belief, e-mail marketing is not spam and it’s not complicated. There are many online programs which offer support on how to set up your subscriber list, offer templates for your emails and provide step-by-step instructions on how to send and manage your own email marketing campaign.

 The only catch is that creating and maintaining an e-mail marketing campaign takes patience and creativity. Yes, it can easily double your local business’s income, however a successful email marketing campaign requires four key factors;

1. Subscribers – I’m here to dispel the myth that more is not merrier. Actually having a small list of loyal readers is much more valuable than the number of people are on that list. Email lists can be obtained a number of ways; the best way is by creating a sign up form on your website. That way, you know that your reader is already interested in what you have to offer. To lower your spam rates, you can set up your campaign for double opt-in, which basically gives you their permission to send them emails

2. Your Message – Once you’ve built your subscriber list, you need to think about what you want your email marketing campaign to accomplish.  Are you sending out a regular newsletter? Offering seasonal promotions? Running a contest? Getting people to sign up for your blog or “Like” your Facebook page? The clearer you are about what your message is, the easier your customers will be able to buy from you.

            If you get stuck on this step, think of the who, what, where, why, when and how of your business.

3. The packaging – The next step is to choose a template to send your message in. Try to keep the template as simple as possible and align it with the look of your website. Make sure you write your message in the same way you write the content on your website. Remember to personalize the email (Dear John), clearly include your contact    information and call-to-action and make it easy for them to unsubscribe.

4. Tweaking – The key to doubling your income is tweaking your email marketing campaign. A huge advantage that email marketing has over other types of marketing is that the results are instant. Your email marketing program will tell you how many people have opened the message, who clicked on which links, who forwarded the message to a friend, etc.

Use this information to your advantage. If the same 50 people are opening one type of email you send, create a new campaign to cater specifically to their needs. Continue to finesse your message, your subject lines, your calls-to-action. Be honest about who you are and what you offer. Be consistent.

 So are you ready to give it a try? Let us know how your first email marketing campaign went. How long did it take for you to double your income?

Marketing is something most business owners dread, yet it’s the very thing that increases sales.

Marketing has been around for as long as human kind has been in existence. In the age when it was a privilege to know how to read and write, symbols were used to market different goods and services; bread for bakeries, horseshoes for blacksmiths and mugs for pubs.

Over the centuries, marketing efforts evolved. In 1836, the first paid advertisement in a newspaper and in 1941, the first ad on TV appeared. However, it wasn’t until 1967 that Lester Wunderman defined the term “direct marketing”. He’s responsible for creating, among other things, the magazine subscription card and the American Express Customer Rewards Program. Wunderman is best known for the introduction of the toll free 1-800 number. Where would marketing be today without 1-800 numbers?

Direct marketing is basically a sales pitch composed of an irresistible offer and a call to action.

             By far the most profitable and measurable form of marketing.

A 2010 study from the Direct Marketing Association stated that $153.3 billion was spent on direct marketing, accounting for 54.2% of all ad expenditures in the United States. The industry itself employs 9.8 million U.S. jobs.

Businesses use direct marketing to communicate with their customers using a variety of different methods such as, but not limited to, emails, fliers, telemarketing, websites, coupons, mobile messaging, TV shopping channels and catalog distribution. By tailoring messages (a call-to-action) to entice a specific audience, businesses can substantially increase their bottom line. Additionally, direct marketing efforts can easily be measured and analyzed to assist with future marketing endeavors. How? Well, you know who or where you sent your message and can track responses accordingly.

Customers enjoy direct marketing as much as you enjoy the return on investment. Technology such as the TV, Internet and mobile phones make it easy for customers to shop on their own terms. They can compare products, look for the best price, customize a purchase and avoid being accosted by a sales person. Best of all, they can cross off their to-do list from the comfort of their own home.

From a business perspective, direct marketing not only helps build a relationship between the customer and your brand, it also provides you with valuable information on your customers. You can request a specific call-to-action and then get results instantly. The more you know about your customers, the more you can anticipate their needs. It’s also a great way to test a new product. The data you collect from running a direct marketing campaign can be valuable for all aspects of your business; from allotting a budget to marketing for the following year to discontinuing a low-selling product to further tweaking existing marketing efforts to make them even more lucrative. Direct marketing is a fast, easy, measurable way to stay in business.

            So what’s the down side?

Electronically, your message may not always reach its intended destination due to ISP, spam and junk filters. If your clients respond better to coupons, fliers and catalogs, considering the environment may increase the overall cost of your message. Also, many people consider direct mail as a form of junk mail or as coming from a less than reputable company. 

However it is that you’re marketing your business, you’re doing it to make money. No matter how much we sugar coat it, your interaction with your customers is about brand recognition, building trust, closing the sale, retaining him for future business and increasing your reputation through word of mouth.

So which direct marketing tool has worked best for your small business?

Why Many Professionals Are Now In LinkedIn

 LinkedIn’s membership continues to increase as more people discover how to use it to further their career or business. It has been a popular source for Human Resources personnel who are searching for top talents to join their companies.  About 80% of the Fortune 100 companies use LinkedIn’s corporate hiring solutions to find the most capable professionals.

 Almost all Fortune 500 companies’ top executives are in LinkedIn. New members can easily participate in group discussions related to their fields, where they can share insights with other professionals and at the same time expand their networks. To date, there are now over 100 million LinkedIn groups that are flowing with live discussions on various industries.

Benefits To Your Business

 If you have your own business, you can easily find out what’s happening in the industry where you belong by viewing the trending news stories. Using the LinkedIn signal application, you can keep track of conversations and trending news from professionals and experts around the world.

 Up to the end of the first quarter this year, at least two new professionals are signing up with LinkedIn per second. Most members belong to the mid-40s age range and many are earning in the range of US$100,000 annually. This presents a very huge opportunity for businesses to broadcast their products to this target market, using both paid and unpaid advertising tools that LinkedIn provides.

Using LinkedIn Ads For Your Business

 LinkedIn is now globally accepted as the social network for business because of its built-in tools that businesses could use to engage their target markets easily. One good example is the LinkedIn Ads, which is an advertising platform where you can place your ads on prominent positions on LinkedIn.com. Depending on your budget, you could define your ad exposure and identify the demographics of the population that you want to reach.

 You can allocate a budget from as low as $10 and you have full control on when you would want to pause and start your campaign. LinkedIn features a “suggested bid range” which presents the competing bids placed by other advertisers. As you place a higher bid, you gain more exposure for your ads, which means your conversion rate from ads to sales could also increase.

Don’t Be Left Behind – Join LinkedIn Now!

There are 1.3 small business owners and 12M small business professionals who are now active members of LinkedIn. Do not be left behind.

Create your individual or company profile now in LinkedIn and be part of this burgeoning network of professionals.  Find ways to maximize exposure for your LinkedIn profile. 

Better yet, hire a social media marketing consultant who could help create more traffic to your LinkedIn account that could open up more opportunities for you.

That old adage, “No man is an island” has never been as true as it is today. People are now connecting with each other so much easier through the Internet, and even more so through social networking sites. Within the last five years, these sites have exploded in number and people who use the major websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are currently now in the billions. 

Social networking is here to stay. 

Smart businessmen should recognize the impact of doing social media and should understand how social media management could benefit their business.

Why Should You Pay Attention To Social Media?

Since the world has virtually shrunk due to technology, news travel faster and people from opposite sides of the world could interact with each other easier. Through technology, the means for conducting business transactions have also been revolutionized. Today, million dollar deals could happen through online chats, emails and video conferencing. On the other hand, if you are a business owner, you could potentially lose customers also merely because someone used the Internet to launch a smear campaign against your brand.

Anything that goes viral is consumed immediately by online audiences. Smart business owners leverage this fact to their advantage.

In fact, many companies are now utilizing free social media sites to talk more about their products, interact with their clients, watch their competition and in the process, build their brands.

Once you recognize the good and bad things that social media could do to your company, you would also realise the need for social media management. Making your company visible on social sites does not happen overnight.

It takes patience, creativity and most of all, time to get your brand across through your target market using these sites.

Some of the tasks that are basic to social media management include content creation on your own website, microblogging, creating your profiles on the top 3 social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and finding opportunities to market your brand online. All these three sites offer countless opportunities for interaction within online communities that could potentially be your target market.

Finding The Right Social Channel For Your Business

Facebook has almost 1 billion subscribers, Twitter has about 200 million active users while LinkedIn now has 150 million users. Among these three, LinkedIn provides the highest lead conversion rate and has the biggest impact on B2B (business to business) interactions.  LinkedIn users generally post information regarding their professional lives, and more business talks happen inside this social network, which makes it easier for companies to find more of their target market in LinkedIn.

Leveraging Social Media Management

To get the best advantage for your business from these social media sites, you need to invest time and effort to engage and grow your audience. Avoid doing hard sells, as most social media users frown on this. Instead, post relevant content that provides benefits to your readers. 

Monitor activity on your accounts, pay attention to comments, both positive and negative ones. Do damage control if necessary, keeping in mind that whatever publicity that your brand gets online could benefit or hurt your brand offline.

Never take social media management for granted, because this is the trend of the future. If you find the tasks too overwhelming, you could always outsource your requirements to social media experts who are skilled on online techniques to promote and protect your brand.

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Consumer shopping has been greatly revolutionized with innovations in technology. Today, a great number of shoppers spend their time using the Internet to compare shops and suppliers for the products that they need. They compare prices, quality of service and feedback from other shoppers.

Whatever is published or said about a company is now a factor that can affect its marketability. This is why companies should really consider reputation management as an important aspect of their marketing strategies.

What Is Reputation Management

If your business belongs to a very competitive industry, you could spend a fortune trying to build up and market your brand using traditional advertising. However, just one negative post, feedback or blog about your company that goes viral on the Internet can render your advertising efforts futile.

Online reputation management should be an integral part ofany local business marketing strategy. Most companies make the mistake of taking their reputation online for granted and end up losing a considerable chunk of their target market to their competitors.

Reputation management is putting into action certain Internet practices that can increase your positive online visibility. By blending these practices with smart local business marketing schemes, you could promote and protect your brand. Monitoring what is being said about your brand by consumers, competitors and even employees is important if you want to prevent negative publicity about your company.

Online Visibility Matters

Most consumers would like to find companies that offer the products and services that they need within their vicinities. Research shows that more than 30% of online searches are targeted locally. If your company can not be found on the first page of a search engine result for keywords relevant to your business, then chances are, your clients will not find you either.

However, it is not enough to just get a high page rank on major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You have to make sure also that no negative publicity figures in search results for your company. All these tasks could become overwhelming, which is why companies hire social media marketing experts to do reputation management for them.

Today, consumers depend mostly on search results on their desktops and smart phones for the products and services that they need. Although many consumers still prefer to buy from brick and mortar stores rather than from online shops, whatever information they gather about a company from the Internet can easily affect their choices.

Customer reviews greatly influence how potential clients view your company, especially those that use the Internet to get information about your business. Investing on improving your company’s online visibility and reputation is a smart business decision, and one that can drive your business to success.

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