Video marketing: you’ve got the idea, you’ve got the content but how do you create great videos? It’s actually pretty easy. Depending. I try to be very platform agnostic when it comes to making recommendations but this week that’s not going to be the case at all as everything I’m about to recommend comes from one company: Apple. I realize I just lost a lot of you here but the fact is, Apple makes fantastic video editing tools. This guy was a master of giving out business cards. At a recent chamber of commerce mixer that I attended he approached me twice with an offer for a free business card. Maybe he read my article about working a Chamber of Commerce mixer? Either way he might have been sent by his company with a goal of giving out as many business cards as he could and he was certainly effective at his job. Perhaps he had a special deal with a print shop. But I noticed that, after the room had cleared following a fantastic presentation, most of the cards he had given out were still sitting on the table where people had been seated and now were just being thrown away by those who were tidying up the room. There’s an old saying “you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.” In marketing this can be true or disastrously not. While your marketing may have stayed what was a successful course, the world might be looking elsewhere. Consider how poorly an ad in a telephone book might perform nowadays for most business types. So with this young year just showing promise of exciting opportunities ahead, it’s time to revisit your marketing. Is where your message is showing up truly the best place for that message? Are you spending in all the right places or is some of that spend just going down the drain? There’s nothing cheesy about social media. As a component of business communication it is becoming ever more important. Mastering your “voice” in the social realm can differentiate one business from another even more today than ever before. Case in point. People love to go to social media the second there is even the least little thing wrong with their experience somewhere. If the pattern on a team member’s shirt is just a bit off, the customer is out there using all capital letter to exclaim how they’ve been permanently and irreversibly harmed and how nobody should every patronize that business again. I try to “shop small” whenever I can - preferring smaller, locally-owned businesses to the large chain stores. But large chain stores seem to have the advantage of longer hours, and sometimes seem to have the additional advantage of actually sticking to those hours. In recent social media chatter there were a number of local businesses that were being berated for being closed during the hours they purported to be open - at least according to the signs in their windows. Being a small town, the owners of those businesses chimed in after complaints were lodged with reasons they had been closed which ranged from being tired to having a medical emergency. If you have any doubt that people are doing a good percentage of their shopping on the interwebs, all you have to do is visit the local ghost town that was a shopping mall to reinforce this thought. Unless there’s some compelling reason to go to a physical location, web-based shopping is the wave of today. But I just had the most remarkable web-based shopping experience of my life. So far. I love what I call strange musical instruments. From Stumpf fiddles to washboards to Cajons, the stranger the better. In fact my favorite music video is of a guy who has a truly strange instrument and plays it with great skill. Enjoy. Regional tourism and destination marketing is a really important aspect of the long-term quality of life in a community. While some may disagree, marketing a region is an important component of an area. But it has so much more reach than just having people come and stay in the hotels for a few days. When a destination effectively markets itself it tells the world about the highlights of the area. Everywhere you go in these United States there are highlights whether that be mountains or lakes or man-made structures. When I lived in LowCal Watts was one of those areas that really suffered from Rodney Dangerfield syndrome, no respect, but people still made the trek to go see the Watts Towers. Every somewhere has some reason to go visit. What if you have zero presence on the Internet - no Facebook Page, no Instagram Account, no Yelp account, nothing on TripAdvisor? Could you still run a business in these modern times with absolutely no Internet account. Yes. I actually work with a business that is thriving without any Internet presence. It’s a retail operation that literally owns no internet presence whatsoever. It’s in a competitive business where the competition is all very tech savvy and everybody is all over their internet presence in just about every place you’d expect to find a business. Everybody but them, that is. There was a line in the first Ghostbusters movie where Harold Ramis’ character urged the team never to ‘cross the streams’ when they were using their ghost-capturing technology. Unfortunately a lot of people are doing the same thing with their social media and it can get ugly. While the world may not end for all of us, this can be a huge nail in the coffin for some businesses. You don't want your business to turn into a ghost, do you? Social media is one of the most interesting things that’s ever come along. You can hit Facebook or Instagram with all sorts of things, from what you had for breakfast to your latest vacation photos to your sense of frustration with work. Ooops, there’s where the stream just got crossed. Facebook Events can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal as a business owner and this list of nine tips for Facebook Events success can help you. While Facebook is ever more complicated when it comes to getting your business message out, the company still has two tools that they’re really pushing hard and thus provide a lot of opportunity for your business with these. Facebook Events are one area they want people to become accustomed to using, the other is video. There are a lot of little “tricks” to making Facebook Events work for you and I’ve compiled this list, which I hope is helpful. Facebook is becoming the place where we all gather to share both information and misinformation. After all, how else will I find out about things like whether the dress is gold or blue or if there is a secret volcano that’s going to blow up? |
Tony BarthelTony Barthel is passionate about great marketing for small businesses Get Free Weekly Marketing TipsCategories
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