John McKown @ Delaware.net particpiates on the ISP-Planet listserv for marketing. He rattled off a quick 18 tips for marketing locally. (Marketing, not branding). Here they are (with his permission):
- Offer free trials for services/applications.
- Make it easier to switch to you, or sign up with you.
- Offer service bundles that tie in trials on more expensive services
- Try BNI (http://www.bni.com/) or other marketing lunch groups
- Create a NO-RISK, time limited offer (ie “no setup until August 1st”)
- Attend chamber of commerce mixers
- Make generic business cards for your company that don’t have a person’s name on them. Put those at car washes and bulletin boards at the Gym and the YMCA.
- Create another business card that has a cash value towards your services. Hand it to a prospect you meet that is sitting on the fence.
- Create a blog and have your staff post helpful articles to it .
- Market to your own customer databases with email newsletters
- Use analytics to find golden pages in your sites.
- Cross-market services from within your applications and pages.
- Embrace HTML email instead of fighting it - make nice email signatures for your staff that have links and graphics in them.
- Put an article on your web site explaining how to move a site to you (like this)
- Integrate asking for referrals [my note: after your client is happy, bring him a referral and he will bring you one OR have a referral payment system in place that you can point to.]
- Use press release web site and local newspaper forums for press releases
- Randomly follow-up with existing customers for feedback (asking for feedback usually exposes other problems that your customer has that you can help them solve.)
- Write articles for local newspapers.
Thanks John!
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