3 Fall Marketing Tips for Your Business

Fall is the season of change. It’s a great time to update your strategy and promote your business with some fall marketing tactics.

Read on to find our 3 favorite methods for marketing your business in the fall.

1. Photo Fun

A fun idea for fall marketing is to invite your customers and followers to engage in a photo contest.

You could have them post pictures of their favorite fall activities, like jumping in piles of leaves, picking apples, going to a football game, or anything else!

It’s even better if you could have the activities align with the products or services you offer.

2. Go, Team!

Fall is also the time of big team sports. Basing promotions, deals, and sales around games and events are a great way to market your business in the fall.

You can base promotions on local, college, or big team games. Examples of ideas you can try are having a discount or sale if the local or college team wins their game. Or you could offer a percent discount based on a star player’s number every game day or every home game.

3. Happy Holidays!

Fall is a marketing season filled with Holidays. Halloween and Thanksgiving are 2 of the major Holidays, but you don’t just have to focus on them.

You can make your business stand out with fun, social media friendly holidays unique to your business, like a “National Taco Day” sale or an “International Coffee Day” sale.

Are you looking for assistance in your marketing strategies or ventures? Contact us here!

4 Simple Marketing Tips for The Local Business Owner

local business

It’s easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest marketing tips, but it’s important to take a step back and make sure that you find advice that works for you and your local business.

In local marketing, businesses put a lot of effort at the start and then let it fall by the wayside as the year moves on.

Check out these marketing tips for your local business:

Facebook Advertising

Social media networks aren’t always the first thing companies think while building local marketing strategies, but Facebook advertising is an exception.

It’s an inexpensive way to advertise your business to the target audience. Like Google, Facebook also knows buying and click patterns of all their one billion plus users. They are experts in putting the ads in front of a relevant local audience.

Ask for Reviews

Reviews are a must-have for all companies who focus on local search marketing.

You should get your business listed on all of the major reviews sites and then make sure that you’re managing those websites. Sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Consumer Reports, and even Amazon are great places to start.

Keep your information up to date and complete, and be ready to tackle any negative reviews in a healthy way. By putting a “Review Us” link on your homepage, talking with your loyal customers, and urging your social community to get involved.

By putting a “Review Us” link on your homepage, you can talk with your loyal customers whose opinions matter most.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Local SEO means you’re optimizing your website for the local web search so that your business shows up in a location-specific query. For example, “Laundromats near me” or “best coffee in New York City” would both be considered local searches.

How do you get started with local SEO?

It’s a big topic, but it mainly has to do with making sure you have local accounts on all of the major search engines (Bing, Yahoo!, and Google) and use of right local keywords for the target audience and area.

Attend, Speak, and Host Local Events

You should try to get involved in the community as much as possible. You could Join your local Chamber of Commerce,  advertise in the local papers, and or host a local event.

Need help with your marketing ventures? Don’t hesitate to contact us here!

3 Insights to Improve Your Social Media Marketing

social media

In today’s market, you can’t go to any marketing blog without them telling you the importance of having social media, and using it for marketing. How do you get the most from your social media? Sure, it’s great to have it, but you’ll lose money if you’re not using it correctly.

Today we’re talking about 3 main insights on how to use social correctly.

Visual Content is Key

One major point of your social focus should be in visual content.

As humans, we are much better at remembering pictures than words. When you post a text-heavy post, your customers will only remember 10% after a couple days. But if you add in a picture, they’ll remember 65%. Your posts will have much more impact if you included a relevant image or graphic with it.

Keep it Consistent

As with most things, consistency is key with social media marketing. Having a consistent and quality strategy will keep your current customers more engaged, and help you attain new followers, leads and customers through your social media pages. People will be less likely to follow your page if you go weeks without updates, and then bombard your audience with updates. If you infrequently post on your page, it’s shown that people will likely lose enthusiasm for your page, and could even unlike it. This is the same effect that posting too frequently could have.

Strategy and Analysis

One of the most important tasks to do on your social media is to always have a strategy, set goals and analyze your pages to see if you’ve hit those goals. One the best things about developing a strategy are that it gives you direction. It’ll help you define your goals and objectives you want to achieve using your social presence.

You should set SMART goals in your strategy. These are goals that are:  Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based. Setting goals will help you intelligently use your social media to its full potential.

If you’d like more insights or need help developing a strategy for your social media, don’t hesitate to contact us.

3 Reasons Why Radio Commercials Boost Sales and Leads

Radio Success

Think video killed the radio star? And YouTube killed the video star? Think again. Radio is still a compelling marketing medium and has the power to target consumers who don’t use the Internet. Here’s why you need to incorporate radio commercials into your digital marketing strategy. You’d be a fool not to.

1. Radio Commercials Target Lucrative Markets

 

You hear a lot about millennial, the so-called lucrative consumer segment that most brands spend all their money on. However, the over 50’s are one of the fastest-growing and richest demographics in the United States, according to research [1]. And with a great radio commercial, you can target this group effectively and generate more leads to your business. It’s not just the over the 50’s, however.

All age groups listen to the radio at some point, providing you with ample marketing opportunities.

2. Online Radio is Big Business

 

Online radio might play second fiddle to more dominant digital marketing platforms like video streaming, but it still provides a hefty return on your investment. In fact, studies show that the number of Americans over the age of 12 who listen to online radio has skyrocketed in recent years, and was the highest it’s ever been in 2016 [2]. Online radio offers customers more choice and lets you get your message across in mere seconds. The result? More customers, higher sales, and greater revenue. Use radio as the basis of your lead generation strategy.

3. People Listen to Radio For Longer

 

Radio resonates for longer than other mediums. In fact, studies show that average radio listening times have more than doubled in the past five years [3]. While a YouTube ad or banner ad might be momentary, radio commercials continue to produce results. Consumers hear the radio on their commute to work, for example, making this a profitable marketing opportunity.

Radio advertising is known as the “theater of the mind.” This is because the images created by radio are ones that come from inside your mind. With only 60 seconds to convey a message compelling your otherwise distracted audience to act, you can see why radio commercial production is such an exciting challenge.

There are three main parts of creating a radio ad you must always consider. These include:

    • Casting is vital.

      • Without the right voice talent, you’ll waste a lot of time and money. For this, you’ll need to really understand the ad’s tone. Not only do you want the voice to grab attention, but it must also be believable and resonate with your audience.

    • Directing the voice talent towards creating an effective ad occurs in several steps.

        • It’s important that your pre-session consists of just one person talking to the voice talent so they’re not overwhelmed. You must also be ready to produce any sounds you’re envisioning. Make sure you can articulate this to your voice talent. In this regard, you’re acting as a coach.

      • Producing crisp, clear sound is important.

        • Loud music either distracts your audience or drowns out your voice talent. In either case, you don’t want this to occur. So, if it isn’t necessary, don’t include music in your ad. Once you have your ad created, make sure you save it as a .wav file so quality isn’t lost when you’re working on different drafts, which happens with MP3 files.

Killerspots Agency, specializes in radio marketing, creative creation and strategic media buying that is not only engaging but trackable.  ROI that turns listeners into traffic through your doors.

Hearing is believing. Click to hear some of the custom Radio commercials produced for businesses all over the United States in many different industries.  It may just inspire your creative juices for some effective radio to drive sales!

Facebook Canvas Is Changing How We Do Advertising

Facebook Canvas advertising is no joke. I sincerely and somewhat aggressively recommend to all of my clients. That they use some form of their service as part of their marketing strategy because it’s game is THAT strong. And how could it not be? With approximately 1.5 billion monthly active users that spend 20+ minutes a day using the platform (DMR); it’s definitely an open audience that cannot be ignored.

But how best to reach that audience if everyone else is using the same ad service? Well first of all, it’s ALWAYS important to utilize Facebook’s very comprehensive audience targeting options. Pinpoint your exact customer, as specifically as possible. And then not only are sales more likely, but you’ll be presenting yourself right to them. Without competition from other less specific ads.

It’s obviously still also very important to make sure that your ad graphic (whether it be a static image or a short video) is engaging and interesting. This just means whatever form of image plus copy you use; should be well branded but also something you yourself would want to know more about.

Once you are running consistent engaging Facebook ads, you’re already going to see awesome results in your page engagement and also your product sales. But what’s next?

Facebook Canvas

Canvas 2
Image Credit: https://canvas.facebook.com/

Enter Canvas.

Facebook’s all new mobile ad unit that now takes your ad from a sponsored post pushing to an external site to a totally Facebook-hosted full page experience where you can scroll and explore all original content. Facebook Canvas is designed to be a way to break through all other ads, telling a fuller story of your brand, through an interactive fresh environment.

When using Canvas, customers will click on the ad, and then see a “fast-loading, full-screen experience where they can browse through a variety of products, before going to the retailer’s website to purchase”. The pro to this type of ad is that the customer doesn’t have to worry about waiting for a website to load. Having a mobile experience that isn’t optimized and having everything they want in a shopping experience using only one app on their phone.

Canvas 1

So how do you start using Facebook Canvas NOW?

Well, you join the waitlist. That’s right. Anything worth wanting always involves a waitlist right? But something tells this Marketing Director, this one is worth waiting for.

Contact Killerspots Creative Team for any media/marketing needs you may have. http://killerspots.com

Facebook has done it again. What the heck is a Beacon?

Recently I was looking over notifications for one of the Facebook pages I manage when I stumbled into this message alert atop the page about a beacon:

special invitation
Figure 1 Screenshot of beacon invitation

Facebook is certainly one for new innovations that usually aren’t introduced. But rather implemented. Therefore, I was less than shocked to see yet another “Facebook update” that I hadn’t heard of. Even working day-to-day in the Marketing and Social Media world doesn’t necessarily grant you awareness of current trends. But being that I like to have know-how of such events. I thought I’d investigate these new Facebook “beacons” and find out if indeed this was a special invitation.

Basically what I’ve found is such:

facebook beacon
Figure 2 Photo c/o Facebook Help Pages

A Beacon is a Bluetooth device.

Facebook plans to send these devices to businesses with great activity on Facebook within their local area for early access trial runs.

The beacon will interact with your customers’ Facebook apps while visiting your business. To let them know inside “tips” about your business. These tips are based off of comments your friends have made on Facebook, reviews of the business, photos that have been posted and more of that liking.

Beacon
Figure 3 Screenshot explaining the beacon further

According to an article posted in Facebook’s Help Center: “Your location is determined using cellular networks, Wi-Fi, GPS and Facebook Bluetooth® beacons. Viewing place tips doesn’t post on Facebook or show people where you are.”

When I clicked “Get Free Beacon” I was taken to a form to fill out name, address and business name. There’s also an option to send the device to a different address. Than that of the business page you were on. If you are like me and managing a page for another company.

Is this the future?

So far as I see it, this new addition to Facebook technology could either be a fantastic advantage for businesses and their customers. Or it could be taken as yet another creepy invasion of technology that we now need to block in our privacy settings. As a Social Media Maven and voice for many businesses soon to receive these beacons. I’m obviously pushing for the former to be true.

At this time we have not yet received the device or put it into action so only time will tell how people react. We will update once we have more information for you and try these little Bluetooth gems for ourselves.

Have you heard about Beacons? Were you invited to use one? What are your thoughts on this technology and Facebook introducing it to their platform?