Storm Dawg Marketing

Consumers are taking penny-pinching to the max this holiday shopping season.  What are you doing to compensate?  Are you thinking of creative ways to get your name out there?  You should be.  Keeping less in stock so you don’t have to discount it later?  Maybe…

I mean…I’ll say it…how are you competing with Walmart and Target?  Marketing is going to play a bigger role this year than any other.  How are you getting your offers, deals and steals in front of people?  Do not cut back on your marketing – trust me, they (Walmart & Target) aren’t.

I received no fewer than 7 catalogs in the mail this week, and I looked at all 7…. of course I did…Christmas is coming!  If you are short on marketing $, consider joining forces with other small businesses in your area to put out a “combo catalog.”  Help one another out, for Pete’s sake!  Find a nearby store that sells something complementary to yours and share a marketing campaign.  Or join forces with everyone in your strip mall and coordinate your marketing efforts on mailers, emails and the like.  Why not?  And for heaven’s sake, get a Facebook ad.  Everyone and their mom is on Facebook.  Well….actually not my mom. I just showed her how to get an email address…no kidding.  She shops QVC; however, she’s not your demographic anyway…no worries.

Consumers plan to spend an average of $683 on holiday-related shopping this year. That is down 3.2% from last year’s $705.  How much do you think they plan on spending with you?

For some interesting holiday shopping stats,  take a look at the attached research from ORC Guideline.  If I didn’t motivate you to market, these stats might do the trick.

Do you have some marketing tips for this holiday season? Share!

Talk to you next Thursday,
Christina Kudym

Hey all,

The past couple of weeks have been pretty different around my house. On July 5th my wife, Kim, left on a mission trip to Galveston, Texas. She went with the pastor and two other adults from our church and 10 teenagers to help with the ongoing clean up from last summer’s Hurricane Ike. Like she said, “I guess somebody forgot tell them how hot it is in Texas in July.” After that long week, I was going to take her on a long weekend in Colorado.

Then just before she was about to get home, I talked to her sister Karen from Austin, and she told me she was coming to see us on Wednesday. She planned on staying with us for few days but her real purpose was to plan and work a party for her friend’s mother’s 90th birthday. My first reaction was, “when are you leaving,” because I was trying to figure out how all this would work out with the trip I planned. In the end, I postponed the trip, and we spent that weekend with Kim’s sister. It was actually pretty enjoyable.

Kim, Karen and I had an interesting conversation about her employment situation. She was recently laid off from her job and is trying to renew her teaching certificate so she can go back to teaching. In the meantime Karen was thinking about what else she could do to augment her income. She thought about becoming an event planner and was wondering how she could get her name out there.

We talked about putting small advertisements in the local newspapers and maybe contacting the golf club near her house in Lakeway. But it seemed to me that the real way to promote this endeavor would be to get in contact with some of the people she had worked with when she was an event planner at the Driskill Hotel in Austin a few years back. In this day and age, social networking seems like a perfect solution. If she contacts even a handful of folks and they recommend her to their friends on their Facebook page or on their Linkedin account, she would be all set. She would probably have to turn business away.

It occurs to me that this is an opportunity to make lemons out of lemonade. During tough times, people have to be creative, and as they say necessity is the mother of invention. People can focus on what they love to do and figure out how to make some money at it. Karen loves to do event planning, so she should give it a try. What does she have to lose? I’m going to keep an eye out for Karen and help where I can.

Tell me your story about starting up a business on a shoestring budget, and a little passion in your heart.  Maybe I’ll decide to sponsor a marketing plan for you… you never know!

Don’t work too hard!

StormDawg.