Business Loan Option Blog

T’is the season to be jolly, yet it can also be a stressful time for people who are worried about job losses and the economy. During the Great Depression, Proctor and Gamble managed to gain huge market share by sponsoring theater on the radio, and getting the characters to include small promotions within them for their soap products, and thus the term “soap opera” was born. It gave people during those tough times the ability to switch on the radio, and be entertained and forget their troubles for a while. After the depression, those people still remained loyal to Proctor and Gamble products because the brand became a household name. The same can be accomplished by anyone these days, if they just take advantage of the Internet to entertain and delight their customers this holiday season.

Financing A Fun Holiday Campaign

You may need some additional monies to start a fun holiday campaign, but the costs are far less if you implement it online, than if you put it on television. If you already have merchant funding services to cover small cash flow gaps, odds are you have enough to start right now. It really only takes some ingenuity, a fun idea, and a bit of social networking to entertain people. You don’t need to buy too much special equipment, maybe a web cam and a few copywriters.

Think You Tube

Every day people are entertained on YouTube by other average, ordinary, people. You can create your own YouTube video and market it online on your website and social networking sites to create buzz and interest for your holiday offerings. You can even create your own “soap opera” but use YouTube, instead of the radio, as the medium. YouTube offers a link back to the sponsor of the site, so whether you create your own, or pay someone else to be their sponsor, you are offering up entertainment that is associated with your business name.

Create Contests For Fun!

Why not create a contest that offers a nice price for the best holiday video? One company does this for the Super bowl commercials and it can quickly become a crowd favorite. There is something folksy about having your next door neighbors ads get promoted by a large company. It adds to the general appeal, and people are inspired to try to join the contest the following year in the hopes of winning too.  Set up rules for the contest that prohibit any type of content that could get you in trouble, like pirated copyright content (whether video or copyrighted music playing in the background). Make sure the contest entrants are aware of what they can and can’t use to create their videos. This way, they won’t be surprised if they’re the most popular video, but you can’t award them the prize because they’ve used copyrighted content. Find out what the proper guidelines are and advertise them on your site.

Share The Fun!

It’s not as hard to share your YouTube creations that are meant to entertain as the ones that are meant to sell someone something. There are still links and advertisements that will point people back to your site or advertise your brick-and-mortar store, but that’s not the main message of the videos. This makes it far easier to share with friends, who can instantly cause it to go viral, if the message is funny enough. Humor, especially in a recession, sells itself.

YouTube videos are easily sharable, can be commented on, and are rated too. The more you can get people involved with the video, the more likely it will start to be passed along to other people, gaining steam and exposure on social networks. You can also embed videos into popular sites like Facebook profiles, link updates, and websites. You can tweet about the video on Twitter and let those friends now that it’s online.

When you hold a contest, in general, you want to give out instructions on having people share their videos too. That way, you aren’t just publicizing one, but many videos and the one that becomes the most popular is the one that wins the prize. The popularity can be assessed by the number of subscribers, the visitors, the comments, and the ratings left behind. You should make sure you get the rights to the video that wins, so that if it is a viral video, you will have a powerful marketing tool at your disposal for a long time to come.

When you’ve been in business for a while, you probably understand the value of promoting your business offline. However, have you got the necessary knowledge to know how to do it online? It’s a whole different world, and not understanding what works and what doesn’t can be the difference between attracting customers and scaring them off, especially on social networking sites. You can set aside monies from small business loans to hire help and get things outsourced, but will you know what you need? If you have a website and are hoping that just word of mouth will lead customers to your online presence, it may surprise you to know that there are actual steps you can take to make traffic happen without relying on other people to bring their friends to your doors. It’s just a question of finding the right place to advertise online, with people in your chosen demographic, and then gently nudging them back to your site via a link.

Press Releases

Just like you would do a press release in mainstream media, you can do them online. There are websites that allow you to publish your press release and include all your contact information, not just your website URL. Many search engines place these documents higher in their search engine results period, at least when they are first released, since they are more timely information for people searching the web. You can write one press release and expose it to many different press release sites, so that you gather interest from all corners of the web without too much work.

Social Networks

You can also expose your business more by joining social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. All this may take too much time to learn, so if you just want to start building a presence now, hire a social media expert to help you set up a presence on these sites, while you take care of the offline business marketing. The big thing is just getting started and once you tell your social media expert who you want to attract back to your site, they can customize your profile and get you involved with just the right people and groups to make a steady stream of people link back to you. You can post information about yourself and what you’re doing within your business in the status updates and let people know what’s going on offline through social networking.

Build A Blog

A blog is different than a website in that content is updated more frequently. It has a casual, conversational, tone and you can use it to network with other bloggers within your niche. This will help you tap into existing traffic with some credibility. People typically frequent blogs much more than websites, and they enjoy commenting on them too. This builds a community and online word of mouth, that is difficult to duplicate with just a website. It provides interactivity between visitors online and your business. You can get feedback on promotions and build excitement for your products and services by having contests promoted through the blog. List the blog with Technorati and index all your postings so that they are easily searched and found. A search box is also highly recommended, along with categories, to make it easy for people visiting to find topics of interest to them.

Outsource What You Can

Content creation for blogs, building profiles, and interacting with customers can take much time out of your day. That’s why you should seek to outsource as many of those activities as possible. You can hire ghostwriters to write blog content and press releases. These are different than social media experts who generally will set up marketing campaigns and avoid writing content. You will also need to get social media experts to set up multiple profiles to help you get started on social networking and integrate your offline sales activities with online campaigns. If you haven’t the money to fund these types of contract or freelance hires, you can get a loan to cover these temporary costs until you can move these tasks in-house, once you understand what it takes to pull off promotions online and feel comfortable taking on that role in-house. You can have an employee respond to questions on the blog or social networking sites a few times a week. Just make sure you remain active and available for people and learn how to use these types of activities to grab traffic from these areas and steer it back to your site and offers.

Online businesses are a great place to learn the art of the back end offer. Unlike a regular brick-and-mortar store, there is no friendly sales associate following up on customers to see if they can sell them more. Instead, a visitor to your site is likely to come with an idea of what they want to purchase, and whether they find what they want or not, the moment the order form completes, they’re off to another site – unless you have a planned back end offer in place.

Why Back End Offers Work

Back end offers work due to the state of mind the buyer is in when they’ve already made the decision to buy. If they’re already pushing the button to buy, they are very susceptible, at that moment, to adding more to their cart, or upgrading their offer to something even better. At that point, the money is less important, they’re not even concerned whether they’ll need a business loan later. The resistance to purchase has already been overcome. They are indicating their willingness to trust your company, when they click on that “Buy Now” button, and that also tells you that’s when they want to be presented with more offers. Just like the candy and magazines placed near the front of the cash registers at grocery stores, once a buyer is in a purchasing mood, they will be more likely to spend more without thinking about it too much.

The Up Sell and Cross Sell Online

Since you don’t have a sales associate online watching when someone places an order and is checking out, you have to place automated messages to up sell and cross sell your buyers. That means that you have to plan your lines of inventory, typically with three tiers – one low end, one mid range, and another high income range. If they buyer chooses a low end product to buy, they should be told that other similar products with more features exist, before they finalize the sale. After all, they’re not standing in a store where they can look at multiple items at once on a shelf. They usually type in what they want in a search engine on your site, and it pulls up that item. If you don’t tell them other offers exist, then they won’t know. If they would have liked the upgrade, but just didn’t know it existed, are you’ve lost a valuable opportunity to increase your bottom line because you weren’t prepared properly for the sales event.

Another way to make money is by offering compatible items upon check out, with a promotional or limited time offer. For instance, if someone buys a pair of shoes off your site, why not offer them three sets of socks for a special deal, just for adding them at that time to their cart? It doesn’t take special insight to figure out people who are buying shoes want socks. However, without an automated message that allows them to click and add socks upon checkout, they would have to go into your site again and specifically pick that item. Instead, have that option available upon your electronic checkout for specific products and their compatible partners.

The Limited Time Offer

This back end offer works well on a thank you page, after a person has bought something, checked out, and is receiving confirmation on their order. To thank them for patronizing your online store, you can offer them an exceptional limited time offer that is only valid until they move off the thank you page. Let them know that once they navigate away from the thank you page, the offer will no longer be available the price will go back to whatever it was regularly. If it’s matched to the items that have been purchased and can help the visitor in some way, you’ll make more money this way, just by programming a limited time back end offer on your thank you page.

It’s Not What You Sell, But How Much

Back end offers don’t require special merchandise to work. They don’t require special knowledge to implement. They do require attention to your demographics buying habits and a bit of awareness to ask for the sale at the right time. The key here is not about inventory, it’s about increasing your sales from that one person who is already buying. Let’s face it, it’s much easier to get someone who has previously made the decision to buy from you, to buy again. New customers are far more resistant to making purchases, as they don’t have any reason to trust you. That’s why back end offers work to market people who are already more likely to buy and increase your sales from purchases at the point of check out.

Small businesses can’t compete with the big guys by buying promotional spots on television. It’s simply not an affordable strategy for a small business. That doesn’t mean that a small business should forgo advertising all together, instead they should focus on creative advertising funded with spare cash or business loans. First, a business will need to assess their market. Is it regional or multinational? This will affect how they advertise and the strategies they invoke. Next, they will want to understand their demographic customer profile. Finally, they will want to set aside monies for creative advertising, based on their assessment of market and demographics.

Where Is Your Target Market?

Small businesses may not actually have to compete on a world stage, if they are a local business with local customers. Examples of these types of businesses are Mom and Pop stores that cater to a local clientèle found on Main Street. Other types of businesses that seek a local market can be home remodeling industries and local real estate companies. These establishments all have one thing in common: They are tied into the customer base that resides geographically close to them. It’s not important for these types of business to advertise world-wide, as their customer base isn’t there anyways. Instead, they want to focus on advertising that reaches their geographic area, whether it’s one state or a set of states in which they do business.

Who Is Your Customer?

Along with this information, small businesses should also consider who is buying their products, their demographic. If the typical buyer is a female householder within a certain region, ads should be created to appeal to demographic and advertised to reach the target markets. Both of these elements are very important when considering advertising formats. If your market does happen to be world-wide, or at least several different countries, but your demographic is teenagers, then you want to use strategies that reach this market, but narrow it down to traffic from teenagers.

Creative Advertising Techniques

Finally, here are some advertising techniques that can be used to help generate sales, taking into account target market and demographics.

Sign Spinning – This works great for a local business on a major thoroughfare where many people in their sales demographic pass by each day. It is relatively inexpensive when compared to television, radio, or print advertising and can generate a lot of attention from many different types of demographic audiences.

Local Coupon Packets – You can advertise locally with advertising packets that include a number of local merchants with discount offers. In general, these work for a residential homeowner demographic as they need a residential address to mail them out.

Affiliate Marketing – This has a global reach and the audience demographic is targeted by the publisher, not the creator of the ad. Therefore, it is much less highly targeted, and instead relies on a mass exposure to work it’s magic.

Social Network Ads – These are global, also, but you can limit them to specific demographics that are finely tuned to age and other social characteristics that are obtained upon registration. SocialAds on Facebook is one such program that creative business owners can use to get online ads that are highly targeted to their chosen demographic.

Print Ads – These can be limited to the audience of the subscriber base, and so you should choose the publication for its demographic and market reach, not for it’s popularity. A church bulletin, for instance, may work well in cases where you’re selling religious items, and cost far less than advertising in a local newspaper.

Blogs – You can sponsor a blog with a big targeted audience, but their reach may be limited. You will reach a world-wide base, in some cases, but the number of people is limited to how many people read the blog. The rates are also dependent on how popular the blog is with readers. You pay for a link back to your website or ads posted on the blog on a monthly basis.

YouTube Videos – You can also pay to be featured on a YouTube video in the URL as a sponsor, if the video is relevant to your market niche. Videos are very popular with tech-savvy audiences and can be a great way to reach many people, if the video goes viral.

Referrals – Some of the best advertising, both locally and on the Internet, comes from word of mouth. Give out incentives for people to share your services with others by offering a referral bonus. You only pay if you get a new customer and you can build a large number of independent representatives who are promoting your service, both online and offline.

Advertising offline is generally less complicated than learning the lingo and skills needed to implement online affiliate campaigns. You’ve probably heard that it can get rather expensive to use pay-per-click advertising, if you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t want to get merchant cash and capital set aside for advertising, only to waste it by incurring costs from click fraud or marketing that isn’t targeted to your niche audience. That’s why it pays to do a little market research, read up on the different types of affiliate programs, and investigated targeted markets to hold down costs of advertising and make it more efficient.

Where Are Your Customers Located?

You can limit the number of markets to expose your affiliate advertisings. The default in many affiliate networks is global marketing, because it’s assumed that if you’re online you want everyone to know about your services. While it’s true that world-wide publicity is good, it’s not so good if you’re paying to expose your products and services to a market that has few or no potential customers. Thus, if your customers are mostly internal to a specific country, limit the campaign to that country’s market. You do have the option to do that within PPC affiliate campaigns and it will help to keep your advertising dollars going to the right audience. However, there’s also another reason you want to refine the markets that you will target: To reduce the potential for click fraud.

Reducing Exposure To Click Fraud

Simply by alienating countries where the most click fraud originates, like Nigeria, you will be able to manage your online advertising dollars much better. Should you see a click that comes from a country that is not on your approved list, you can get reimbursed for that click by notifying the affiliate network administrators. This way, you know that the ads that are being published are being seen by the right people and not by people just trying to take your money for nothing.

Use Multiple Affiliate Networks

PPC advertising is just one way to get your name out there. You can build affiliate programs in cost-per-action (CPA) networks too. Instead of paying for a click to your ad, you would instead pay for a specific action to take place. That action could be generating a sales lead through a subscriber registration, adding an email to your marketing list, and/or a completed sale on your site. CPA networks offer you the chance of paying for more than just clicks, which don’t provide much return on their investment if no sale is completed. Instead, you can set up a CPA program that at least provides you with an email that you can market later, as a valuable sales lead, even if a sale isn’t completed. You only pay if the action is taken by the visitor, whether they click the link or not. CPA programs are easier to track ROI and many Internet marketers find them easier to publish and market too.

Keep Track of Your Metrics

As with any advertising campaign, you want to have metrics in place to give you an idea whether a campaign is working or not. Split testing is one way to test different versions of a sales page that may be linked to an affiliate campaign. You can have a redirect page send half the traffic to one version of the offer and the other half to the other. Whichever performs better, is the better ad. Usually, only small changes are implemented, like headings are changed to see what creates a better impact in a measurable way. Keep track of your sales across different sites and programs. Research keywords and see whether you can cut campaign costs by targeting different keywords than those that are highly competitive and costly. See how that impacts the sales on your sites. Use the tools available to do the necessary research from Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to the Google Traffic Estimator. Once you have a good idea of what keywords can generate what amount of traffic, estimating the costs and potential return on your affiliate networking campaign gets a little easier to manage. The more you learn about affiliate advertising, the easier it will be to manage costs so that you don’t go over budget. Investigate different tools, services, and a variety of networks, and try to get a good plan in place before you actually plunk down hard earned cash to roll out your own affiliate programs.