Wednesday, June 27, 2007

John's Quick 18 Tips for Local Marketing

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):

  1. Offer free trials for services/applications.
  2. Make it easier to switch to you, or sign up with you.
  3. Offer service bundles that tie in trials on more expensive services
  4. Try BNI (http://www.bni.com/) or other marketing lunch groups
  5. Create a NO-RISK, time limited offer (ie “no setup until August 1st”)
  6. Attend chamber of commerce mixers
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Create a blog and have your staff post helpful articles to it .
  10. Market to your own customer databases with email newsletters
  11. Use analytics to find golden pages in your sites.
  12. Cross-market services from within your applications and pages.
  13. Embrace HTML email instead of fighting it - make nice email signatures for your staff that have links and graphics in them.
  14. Put an article on your web site explaining how to move a site to you (like this)
  15. 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.]
  16. Use press release web site and local newspaper forums for press releases
  17. 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.)
  18. Write articles for local newspapers.

Thanks John!

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