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,

So I’ve been writing an awful lot lately about small businesses and what they can do to be successful.  (I can talk about this stuff for years, folks… and I have been… and I plan to continue.)  I recently recorded a short video for my company, infoGROUP, about what small businesses can do to stretch their marketing dollars.  I thought I’d post the video here… enjoy!

Important tips for small businesses to marketing smarter in this economy:

1) Send an email campaign. It’s cost-effective, efficient, and trackable.  There are TONS of great tools for doing this (like the new online email marketing solution from infoUSA.com).

2) Send a post card. It’s less expensive to mail than a regular mail piece.   The message is instant.  Your customers know it right away when they look at it.  (Yeah, we’ve got a tool for that, too.)

3) Incent your customers to refer you to new customers. It’s an extremely cost-effective way to promote, because your current customers do all the work for you!

Keep your head up! Keep pitching and keep promoting. When the economy turns around, you’re going to be in great shape!

Don’t work too hard.

Stormdawg