Marketing

Small Business Saturday has received national attention in recent years, particularly last year when President Obama promoted it and did his own small business shopping with cameras at hand to get the word out. This day of celebrating small businesses around the country falls during the pre-Christmas shopping season along with Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

While you should still take advantage of the hype that Small Business Saturday provides, there are a lesser-known, but longer-standing celebration of entrepreneurship that falls in the middle of Summer which can help small business owners promote local buying in perhaps an even better way.

You’re one of the brave ones. You started your own business, and if you’re like 88% of small businesses owners,  you do your own marketing too.

One of your biggest challenges is to get yourself on the watch lists of your target audience, whether you are opening a new store, trying to stay afloat or reach higher goals.

Sure, social media is a common answer to the question of “cheap marketing” and it obviously does have answers to that conundrum, but with so many networking options out there on the web, how do you zero in on the best solution without having to maintain an account in everything?

What likes are to Facebook, retweets (RTs) are to Twitter – a strong validation that the content you are putting out there is having an impact on someone, somewhere. A reply to a tweet is good, but a retweet is what makes the medium viral.

A study by Internet marketing firm Sysomos throws up some interesting data about retweets. Only 29% of the 400 million daily tweets get a reply or a retweet. Of this 29% only 19.3% are retweets, a paltry 24 million.

I threw a Tweetup once.

It was December of 2009, at the former BlackStone in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. We dubbed it #JollyTweetup because it was holiday themed and we even included a Yankee Swap.

At the time, there were a few popular tech-based Tweetups in Providence, but no general-interest get togethers that I knew of.

About a week before the event, fear set in: What if nobody shows up? What if I didn’t order enough food? What if people don’t like me in person?  

At Swipely, we speak with hundreds of restaurant owners and marketers every week, and explore the thousands of social media sites they manage. It’s clear that everyone’s spending time on online marketing. But most don’t have a system in place to connect those marketing efforts back to offline sales.

There’s a better way!

Learn how to unlock the big data already running through your restaurant.

After all, who doesn’t love an infographic?

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Twitter is still a bit of a hidden gem when it comes to social media marketing. It’s not exactly hidden, but lots of small businesses shy away from it in favor of Facebook because they think that’s where the action is.

But for those who use it and love Twitter, it’s one of their favorite, most effective marketing tools. The ability to really connect one-to-one with customers is its main benefit over Facebook which is really a one-to-many platform most of the time.

In her book 6 Steps to Free Publicity, Marcia Yudkin tells a story of the grand opening for a local hardware store in Grand Junction, Texas, population 2,500. The owner calls all of the newspapers in Texas, sends a press release to ABC, NBC and CBS affiliate stations from El Paso to Texarkana, and National Public Radio Austin.

Nobody seems to care, and they don’t get a single bite on their news story. Why? Because the news doesn’t match the need.

If you haven’t brushed up on your Spanish lately, here is the first thing you would want to know about Cinco de Mayo – its a literal translation. ‘Cinco’ and ‘Mayo’ mean ‘five’ and ‘May’ (the month) respectively in the Spanish language and Cinco de Mayo hence translates into ‘the fifth of May’.

A little history lesson here – in 1862, a group of outnumbered Mexicans fought in a battle against the French in Puebla and snatched a very unlikely but hard fought victory.

According to a new Manta survey, 61% of small business owners say the return on their investment for using social media is zilch, nada, nothing.

The survey sample itself was small, only 1,235 small business members, however the numbers tell a story.

But what is that story? Screenwerk took the words out of my mouth, speculating that perhaps “SMBs are unsophisticated about tracking ROI on social media or because their efforts are weak or limited.”

Here are some numbers that may support that argument:

- 55% say their main purpose of using social media is to acquire and engage new customers and referrals.