Folks of a certain age will remember receiving bills in the mail in the form of a perforated punch card. This was back when computers were at least the size of an old Buick and data was fed into them via electromechanical means (punch cards, perforated paper tape and the like). Somewhere on those mailed bills was the phrase, “DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR MUTILATE.” If you did, it meant the auto-reader device could not translate the data on the card, and they would have to be input by a human.
This was the beginning of the end, though we did not know it at the time. We were being asked to adapt our behavior for the convenience of a computer, a machine. Resistance was futile.
We now live in a world where corporate entities (which some try to convince us are humans) do their level best to keep people from connecting with people. On the phone, on the Internet, a communications technology has sprung up to distance the consumer from the provider. It can be a numbered multiple-choice scheme or a voice-activated multiple-choice scheme, but try to talk to a human being and you are thwarted at every turn.
This, in and of itself, is reason and motivation enough to patronize local small businesses, because they don’t have the deep pockets it takes to set up these technological walls of semi-communication. And why would they want to? Local businesses yearn to make contact with customers, they are preoccupied with making connections on a personal level, they are constantly searching for a way to bring you into their stores and provide you with the best goods and services they can. Local business is in the business of being personal and personable.
Folks of a certain age will also remember what avenues small business had to market their wares in the previous century: There were local newspaper and magazine ads, targeted postcard and brochure mailers, door-to-door handouts and the occasional poster; maybe sponsor a Little League team and, if you had the money for them, radio spots were hot with the kids. Back then, “networking” was something that TV stations did to get their primetime programming, and businesspeople joined local organizations as much to benefit the community as to promote their own enterprises (luckily, to a large extent this is still true).
But the faster things go, the more interconnected we get, the more aggressive and indifferent the competition from huge corporate entities becomes, the more frantically small businesses look for ways to make their marketing work in this brave new cyberworld. In order to keep up with the technology of corporate competition, viral marketing has become the domain of small business. The upside is that it’s really cost-effective; they downside is it requires more attention than mailing postcards.
First, having some kind of presence on the Internet via a website is crucial. Your website is your calling card, your brochure, the first face that most consumers see when they check out your business. Getting potential customers off their keisters and into your store can be a challenge, though, so many businesses look to online retail as an alternative. Unfortunately, that can be costly and time consuming, and why sell online to people who live just around the corner or down the block? While cyberselling may turn a buck, it doesn’t enhance your customer base as effectively as face-to-face encounters.
For direct consumer marketing, social networking is the mode du jour. Everyone, it seems, is tweeting and following and yearning to be followed and poked and pinned: we all have our pages on Facebook and “like” our “friends” so that they'll “like” us back. On Pinterest, you can show off your wares and preoccupations to the globe. But, as with any other marketing strategy, social networking only works if you apply yourself consistently, and if you provide your “followers” and “friends” with content that is not only relevant to your business but of genuine interest to your target audience.
Avoid touting pseudo-sales and spewing empty self-promotion; your tweets and posts are easily blocked. Instead, spend some time trolling the Internet for information your target audience would find as interesting as you do. Share and tweet that, and friends and followers will share and retweet it with their own circles: that's how your name goes viral, and that's how you build your online audience base.
A third, and potentially most effective cyber-marketing tool is e-mail blasts. In most cases, this is a nice way to say “spam.” If you’re like me, you spend more time unsubscribing to these irritants than you do actually reading them. But, if done properly, e-mail blasts can be a real plus to your business.
The e-blast Golden Rule: Only send out e-mails when you have something of value to say: they are communiques, not ads. A good e-mail campaign will show up two or three times a month at the most (let social networking be your daily audience informer). E-mails should have real news, engaging writing, and worthwhile visual content and no manufactured promotional hype. Make sure to add links back to your website and social networking sites so you can further engage an interested reader, and always, always make unsubscribing obvious and one-click easy.
Use Google Analytics (or other data services) to track your online presence and adjust your strategies accordingly. And remember, online marketing takes time to grow. Provide consistent value in the information you provide, and a trusting and loyal audience will be the result.
The biggest advantage you have as a small business is that you can use all this high-tech crap to connect on a personal level. If you see that a valued customer has unsubscribed to your e-mail, you can call them in person and show your concern. If you get negative feedback on Facebook or Twitter, you can send a personal e-mail and start a one-on-one dialogue that might just open your eyes.
Now, as it ever was, local businesses need to focus on their strengths: we’re selling to our neighbors, we’re developing commercial relationships that are genuine and trustworthy and, hopefully, will last for decades, even generations.
Good communications technology is technology that promotes authentic human interaction, and that only happens when we invest ourselves, more than our bandwidth, in the process.
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