You Can Sell to the Government

Have you ever considered selling your product or service to the government? No? Did you know that the U.S. government is the largest buyer in the world? According to WomenBiz.com: “Federal, state, and local government agencies buy everything from toothpicks and cleaning services to spaceships and cancer research.” Purchases they make between $3,000 and $100,000 are reserved for small businesses.

If you’re not ready to sell directly to the government you can also look into subcontracting.

Additionally, the federal government has not met their goal to purchase from women-owned businesses. To help meet their goal, the SBA recently launched a free online course for women business owners on how to win federal contracts as well as providing resources that can help you. The course is about 25 minutes long. Go here to get started: http://www.sba.gov/fedcontractingtraining/index.html

Another great resource is http://www.womenbiz.gov.

Best of luck!

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.

Quote for Today

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.”

–Doris Lessing,
Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

What have you done today to expand your learning of marketing?

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.

Moms Like Me

Momslikeme.com just posted an article about my life as a mom and a business owner. Check it out by clicking here: moms like me.

Marketing to Moms

Moms are an active force on the Internet and believed to be outstanding word-of-mouth spreaders…if you’ve gained their trust and appreciation.

If moms are your target audience for your product or service you can find them on many different sites. Here are just a few examples:

1) Local mom clubs like geocities.com/sfbamc and local web sites like marinmommies.com
2) National sites like momslikeme.com and themmob.org
3) Support groups on Yahoo Groups, Facebook and the like.
4) Blogs that moms follow like suburbanjungle.net and momversation.com
5) Moms that twitter on twitter.com and twittermoms.com

Happy connecting.

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.

PR Advertising Tips

I am signed up to receive Build-A-Buzz’s free daily emails. It has great tips on how to do public relations including valuable contacts to get your product in front of celebrities.

Check it out at: www.build-a-buzz.com.

Build-A-Buzz is a new service that provides valuable tips for companies that are looking to maximize their PR efforts. Build-A-Buzz’s first launch is the Daily Buzz Newsletter with free PR advice that will show you how to build awareness for your brand, one tip at a time. Build-A-Buzz is the brainchild of Marina Echavarria, a 20 year PR veteran and owner of Realm Media Productions, Inc., a PR Consultancy based in the New York area. Her expertise and those of PR Pros around the country will be offered free of charge via Daily Buzz.

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.

DIY Free Web Design

If you had someone design a web site for you, you have come to realize that whenever you need to make changes to the site (and there were more changes than you ever realized) you have to go back to your designer to make them…and that costs more money.

Maybe to fix this you decided to create a blog to inform people about updates about your business. Not a bad thought but now you have to work on getting people to visit both sites. (Please note: A blog can be strategically important to creating a relationship with prospects and customers and driving traffic but it’s focus should be on just that and not a band-aid fix for your main site).

Or there’s the option of hiring a web designer to create your site and allows you to log in to a content management system to make your own changes. A great option but at a high price.

Have you looked into online DIY web site services where you can create your own web site? My current favorite is www.yola.com. They have several templates you can customize with your own images. It’s all online so you can easily access and make changes whenever you want to. It’s amazingly simple to use–almost as easy as using Word. You can incorporate your search engine friendly keywords without having to learn HTML. They also have many fun additions to include like a Google map, videos, an online store, Google Adsense ads, widgets from SpringWidget and Widgetbox and more with just a click and drag.

Oh, and it’s FREE.

Use your existing URL and have it point to the site you create on Yola (they give you instructions) or they can purchase a URL for you for a professional business presence.

Certainly a custom web site created by a design professional and maintained by that designer or through a content management system is the ideal way to go. But if your budget just can’t support this, an online DIY web creation service has become a great way to go.

Other sites worth looking into are hubpages.com, homestead.com, joomla.org, smallbusiness.officelive.com/Home, webs.com and weebly.com.

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.

Create a Marketing Machine to Drive Sales

When people make a decision to make a purchase they go through a series of steps in their minds. For some products, like a can of soda, those steps only take a few seconds to occur. For other products, like a car, that process can develop over months. Regardless of the product or service, the decision-making steps exist.

To state it simply, small business advertising is about offering a solution for a particular target audience’s problem, convincing them that your solution will solve their problem, demonstrating to them you are trustworthy and preferable to other options and getting them to purchase.

As a marketer of your business, your job is to help people through this decision process. This can be done by developing a “marketing machine” of sorts. Here’s a simplified path for creating your marketing machine:

1) Every time you reach out to a new prospect, capture their contact information. When you’re doing low cost advertising, capturing email addresses is an easy and inexpensive way to go about it.

2) Now that you have a list of email addresses of people who are aware of your business product or service, now work on instilling trust, preference and a purchase. Email them on an ongoing basis with news and information about your business.

3) As people make purchases from you, move their email address to another group where you send out a different set of emails that encourage loyalty, repeat purchases and referrals.

In concert this marketing machine of yours will create great efficiencies and effectiveness in your marketing endeavors.

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.

Win $100,000 for Biz Idea or Budding Biz

From Alibaba.com in partnership with Inc. the Newpreneur(TM) of the year contest.

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.

Upgrade Your LinkedIn Profile

If you’re on LinkedIn, how well have you optimized your profile? Check out these articles for great tips:

Six Elements of a Great LinkedIn Profile

What recruiters look for in a LinkedIn profile: 8 tips

How to Improve LinkedIn Profile

There are lots of reasons why people use LinkedIn. Check out this list of resources to find articles on how you might improve your usage of LinkedIn.

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.

Personalization is Powerful

Personalizing a marketing message is a powerful way to connect and increase trust among your prospects. Someone is more apt to take notice when spoken to directly. It says you’ve taken a little effort to address me individually.

When I worked on a project to increase United Way charity donations among employees of a particular company, we took a different approach from the prior year. We gathered the names of all employees and, where applicable their prior year donation amounts. We wrote a marketing letter where we merged their names into the letter and, where applicable provided a reminder of last year’s donation amount and a new suggested donation amount that was 10% higher than the previous year.

The result was significant. We saw a 235% increase in the number of pledges over the prior year and a 23% increase in dollars raised–making this company the area leader in United Way pledges that year.

Think about where and how you can start to personalize your communications with leads, customers and past clients. You can do it in your direct mail efforts and email. Some companies even provide their leads with their own personalized pages on their web site as they take them through the online selling process.

Personalization is a proven method of increasing marketing effectiveness.

Small Business Advertising Ideas © 2009 Glynns Thomas and Advertising Spark. All rights reserved.