Posts Tagged ‘creative marketing’

Use Foursquare Tips to Promote Your Small Business

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Are you looking for ways to communicate important information about your small business to your customers and prospects? Have you considered using foursquare tips to provide that information directly to those who check-in at your venue on foursquare? Foursquare allows people to leave tips about your business. Tips are limited to 140 characters, but they are a great new form of word-of-mouth marketing. Not only are numerous business owners taking advantage of foursquare tips already, but many owners and marketers are finding creative ways to use foursquare tips. This post is going to explain foursquare tips, and show you how foursquare tips can be used to promote any important information about your business to customers and prospects.

What are foursquare tips?

Foursquare MarketingWhen foursquare users visit your store, and go to check-in on foursquare at your venue, they can leave a tip about your venue. Even those folks who aren’t actually in your store, but are reviewing your venue from foursquare.com, can leave a foursquare tip at your venue. Foursquare tips are limited only to the customer’s imagination.

For some small business owners the openness of foursquare tips scares them, as they don’t want anyone to say anything bad about their business. Here at Catalyst, we always recommend to clients that they not fear negative feedback. It’s better to get access to that information, so that you can work to change that customers opinion, than to not have it, and lose that customer forever. Transparency for businesses is a growing trend, and small business owners must embrace transparency in order to thrive in the coming years.

Why should Small Business Owners Use Foursquare Tips?

For those small business owners who decide to use foursquare tips, they’ll quickly realize that they can use foursquare to promote their own messages about their business. Not only can customers & prospects leave tips about a foursquare venue, but owners can leave tips for their customers as well.

Foursquare TipsUpon checking-in at a location, a foursquare user can click the “Tips” tab on her smart phone to review all of the latest foursquare tips associated with that venue. Others will be checking out your foursquare tips via foursquare.com. Either way, your message will get in front of the right people, at the right time (when they are either at your location, near your location, or checking you out via the website).

Foursquare tips can range from promotional, such as publishing a foursquare tip about a weekend sale at your small business. Other foursquare tips can be educational about your products, services, or business – think FAQs for foursquare. Foursquare tips can also be used to communicate emergency information, such as store closings due to weather, class cancellations, etc. If you have something that you want to communicate about your business, 9 times out of 10, foursquare tips will be one channel that you’ll want to use. Foursquare tips allows you to get specific information about your small business into the hands of customers & prospects at a time when your business is on their mind, either because they are currently at your location, or because they are researching you on foursquare.com.

Hopefully by now you’re starting to see the power of foursquare tips as a marketing channel. Let’s say that you own a business in a resort town, many tourists will be looking to spend their money somewhere. As more and more people get on board with foursquare, foursquare tips will influence their purchasing decisions, as we are seeing with those who are already using foursquare. Even if your business isn’t located near a vacation hot spot, foursquare tips has a ton a utility for your business. Foursquare users are using foursquare tips to help them understand who they want to do business with. Be sure you get one their short list by properly leveraging foursquare tips as a viable marketing channel to promote your small business.

How have you been using foursquare tips to promote your small business?

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Passion & Creativity Go a Long Way for Small Business Owners

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Do you wake up in the middle of the night, scrambling to find your iPhone, in order to get that great idea for your business out of your head? For many small business owners, running their business is a 24/7 affair, and when you do have time to sleep, many times you’re still thinking about your business. In the example above, there are two catalysts at work, they are Passion & Creativity. We often write about Creativity here on this Online Marketing blog, but we’ve never gone too in depth on the subject. For this article, we are going to discuss how both Passion & Creativity go a long way towards driving growth for your small business.

Passion Drives Small Business Success

When reading books on entrepreneurship, it’s almost a lock that you’re going to be told to find something that your passionate about, and then figure out how to create a business out of it. It’s almost like the Golden Rule of Entrepreneurship. The reason why so many authors and entrepreneurs talk about finding a passion first is due to just how strenuous it is to go into business for yourself. These folks understand that there are going to be “dips”, as the leading Marketing thinker of our day, Seth Godin would call them, along your journey to running a successful business. Without passion, it’s extremely easy to let dips in the road turn into the end of the road for your business. Those small business owners who love what they do, who get up early in the morning to get a fresh start on their day, and who never stop thinking about their business, because they love it, are the ones who succeed.

Founder of the Marriott CorporationI recently caught a special on TV about J. Willard Marriott, founder of the Marriott Corporation. This man embodied the term passion. It’s no wonder that he was able to take a small root beer stand and turn it into an international brand for luxury travel. Mr. Marriott thought about every aspect of his businesses, and although he had a lot of help, he never removed himself completely from the day-to-day operations of his businesses. He would frequently visit each of his root beer stands on a daily basis, inspecting every nook & cranny. The man loved what he did for a living. Except for his family, and some even debate that, there was nothing that J. Willard Marriott was more passionate about than his business.

Passion allowed J. Willard Marriott to power through the tough times, like say the Great Depression, and emerge stronger than when it began. Passion provided him with his direction for the business. He knew exactly where he wanted to go. Passion drove him on day after day. Passion acted as a road map for his business, and creativity fueled his growth.

Creativity Fuels Small Business Success

Daniel Pink A Whole New MindHere at Catalyst Marketers, we like to refer to Creativity as the new currency for business owners. When planning to start a business, or when deciding on a big change to an existing business, some folks begin with the question, “how are we going to pay for it?”. Other folks, perhaps those right-brainers as Dan Pink might refer to them as, start in an entirely different direction. Instead of asking how they were going to pay for what they wanted to achieve, these other entrepreneurs began by brainstorming fun & creative ways to help them achieve their goals. So in a sense, some right-brainer entrepreneurs are substituting currency for creativity, when making decisions about their small business.

If you work with us, then you know our motto: Creativity + The Right online tools & strategy = successful online marketing for your business. Today, more than any other time in history, small business owners have the ability to compete on a global level. All it takes is the right approach, plus a little creativity, and your small business could go viral in a matter of hours. If you’re always pushing the envelope, always creating, then at some point you’re going to realize success.

If passion was arguably Marriott’s biggest key to success in the early 20th century, creativity came in a close second. J. Willard Marriott opened his first nine-stool root beer stand in May of 1927. With business booming in the summer months, Marriott quickly realized that demand for root beer was going “dry up” come winter. To some, this dip would be insurmountable. Not to Marriott, as we discussed his passion led him, and he knew exactly where he wanted to take his business. It was in this dip that Marriott decided that he was going to add hot food to his small root beer stand and rebrand it The Hot Shoppe, now a family restaurant. Marriott didn’t stop there, just one year later he spotted a coming trend, the drive-in. His creativity allowed him to understand how he could capitalize on this trend for his business. He quickly evolved his business to incorporate drive-in service, and business shot through the roof.

J. Willard Marriott is a prime example of a business owner who combined passion and drive to create a successful business. Even in our current economy, the tools are out there, all it takes is a little passion, combined with some creativity, and you too can grow a successful business.

If you’d like to capitalize on OUR passion & creativity, we’d love to have you as a client. Contact us about any of your online marketing needs.

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Hotels Rent Conference Rooms to Entrepreneurs for Extra Revenue

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Are you responsible, in one form or another, for driving sales for a small hotel or hotel chain? If so, these past few months have probably been a little tough for your business. Business travelers aren’t traveling as much. Many folks are leveraging online tools like Google Docs and Skype to get business done while in different geographic locations. Summer is usually a big travel season here in the U.S., and I’m thinking even that’s going to be down this year, as more and more families are staying local during their family vacation. So, with this being the situation, it’s up to us to get creative and find new ways to generate revenue for hotels.

Hotel MarketingEvery time I travel, and stay in a hotel, one of the most underused areas of the hotels that I stay in are the conference rooms. Most hotels have at least one to two conference rooms, and most of the time, they are not being used. So, if I’m working at a hotel, especially if I’m a decision-maker, I’m trying to find creative ways to use the conference rooms. One use of the conference rooms is to rent them out to local entrepreneurs and small business owners. There are quite a few small businesses, as well as startups, who need workspace. Workspace with internet and cable connections. Workspace that’s affordable, comfortable, and can accommodate at least 5 – 7 people. Hotel conference rooms can fill this need in the marketplace. It just takes some planning, a little creativity, and the use of the right online tools to market the new service.

When it comes to renting out your hotel conference rooms, you want to make sure you do not upset any hotel guests that need to use the space. Figure out a way to ensure that you do not schedule the conference room at times when hotel guests need to use it. One way to do this is to ask each guest when the book their room (which is usually at some point prior to their stay) if they plan to use the conference room. If they do, find out the date/time that they’ll need it and add that to a calendar that keeps track of the conference room schedule. Once you have a plan in place for scheduling the conference rooms, you can come up with your fee schedule. This could be hourly, it could be by the day or half day, it’s really about what you think the market will pay. Perhaps you can do a little research to see what other “similar” spaces charge. Find a price, start marketing it, and the market will tell you if it’s too high, too low, or just right.

Once you have your plan in place, now you can start marketing your new service both through materials inside the hotel, and through your online social tools, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp, YouTube, your Blog, and foursquare. Your target should be entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses without a physical location. Create content about the need for physical workspace that’s affordable for entrepreneurs. Get testimonials from past customers. Shoot a video showing the space and explaining what’s offered (ie. high speed internet, cable, phone, etc). Create a foursquare special geared towards saving money on a conference room rental. There are countless creative ways that you can promote your message to your target audience through online tools.

Give your plan some time to get up and running. Check-in on a quarterly basis to see how you’re tracking against your performance measures. If you aren’t seeing many rentals, then tweak some things. If people are starting to rent the conference rooms, find out how they found out about your service, ask them what they thought about the service after they use it, etc. Constantly learn about what’s working and what’s not. Don’t be afraid to try new things. With ideas like this, there are hardly any real costs needed to try to rent out your hotel conference rooms. What’s there to lose? If it doesn’t work, then come up with a new creative way to leverage the conference rooms, or other underused areas of your hotel. In times like these, the businesses who get creative, and leverage the proper tools, will be the ones who thrive.

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Create Your Own Connect with Us Cards

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Are you still looking for effective ways to promote your online presence? It’s a good idea to always be looking for new, and creative, ways to drive traffic to your online assets. It’s hard for people to connect with you online when they have no idea that you’re using the Internet to promote your business. Almost every interaction with a customer, or prospect, provides an opportunity to promote your online presence. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare YouTube, a Blog, or any other online social tool, be sure to take the opportunity to drive traffic to your online tools as often as possible. In today’s post, we are going to explain the art of the “Connect with Us” Card – a simple tool that packs a big punch when it comes to driving traffic to your online tools.

The Connect with Us Card is a simple idea that was sparked through an email conversation with a Catalyst client, the local Central Bucks Family YMCA of Doylestown. The Marketing Director at the Y was explaining that a Senior Membership Director was heading out into the local Doylestown community to hand out 2-week membership passes to employees of local Doylestown businesses. During the conversation, we realized that we had missed an opportunity to promote our online presence. We wanted to print our Twitter & Facebook URLs on the 2-week membership passes. From there, the idea of the Connect with Us Card was born. Instead of printing the URLs on the 2-week membership passes, and any other subsequent print materials that we wanted to promote on, the YMCA created the Connect with Us Card.

The concept for the Connect with Us Card is simple. It’s like a business card for the organization’s online presence. On the front of the card is the Central Bucks Family YMCA logo, the logos of each of the online tools that they use to connect, and build relationships with, their members and the surrounding community, as well as, their physical street address. On the back of the card are simply the links to each of their online tools. The card is clean, and to the point, connect with Central Bucks Family YMCA online.

FRONT

Promote my social media sites

BACK

Promote my social media sites

As you can see from the images above, it’s critical that you create custom URLs for each online tool that you use. Having a custom URL that isn’t very long provides you with much flexibility when creating promotional tools like Connect with Us cards. A few months back we wrote about the importance of having a custom Facebook URL for your Facebook business page, and this is a perfect example of why it’s important to have that custom URL. Can you imagine if you wanted to create a Connect with Us Card with that ugly URL string that all Facebook Business pages have before you customize your URL? The card would have to be 6 inches long just to contain the URL.

If you need to shorten your URL for Facebook and don’t have 25 Likes yet, then you can use URL shortening tools like bit.ly, and even customize your URLs. Using URL shorteners may even be the best bet for your Connect with Us Cards, as you can create customize short URLs for each online tool, which you can then track via the Analytics section of bit.ly – Just be sure not to use those same URLs in other tactics, as that will taint your data. If you create customized URLs for only the Connect with Us Card, you’ll be able to tell how much traffic the cards are driving to each of your online tools, simply by checking the Clicks for each link.

Connect with Us cards can be given out at events, during trade shows, with receipts at your store, with deliveries, etc. If you have been trying to answer the question, how do I promote my online tools, then Connect with Us Cards are a great answer to your question. Have you been using something similar? How has it been working for you?

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4 More Inbound Marketing Ideas for Hotels

Monday, May 10th, 2010

We recently published a blog article entitled, 5 Inbound Marketing Ideas for Hotels. Being that there are so many creative ways that hotels can leverage the power of Inbound Marketing, we wanted to add a few more ideas to the list. Below are four more Inbound Marketing ideas for hotels.

BlogTalkRadio Show – Local Events Program

BlogTalkRadio is a free online tool that allows anyone to host their own radio show. You can have guest callers or just broadcast the show yourself. Each radio show is archived, so that those who cannot listen live, can listen to the archived version. It’s really a great tool for small businesses. Hosting your own radio show is a great way to produce audio-based content for your business. Hotels can certainly take advantage of a free radio show.

Content Marketing for HotelsHotels can start out with with a weekly Blog Talk Radio show, whereby you can discuss upcoming events in and around your local hotel. Each week there are a ton of local events in every community. Many times, local residents don’t even know about these events, which means there are even fewer travelers who know about local events. With that said, when people are traveling to a destination, either on business or for fun, they are always looking to find out what’s going on in the local area. Your radio show can help your guests understand just what’s happening in the area while they’re in town. Even if they can’t catch the live show, you can point them to a recent archive that discusses events that are happening during their stay. Guests will find this information extremely valuable, which will entice them to spread the word about your hotel AND continue to use your services each time they are in town. Hosting a Blog Talk Radio show for your hotel is a great way to produce relevant and valuable content for your guests. Be sure to promote your radio shows in your hotel and through all of your online social tools.

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5 Inbound Marketing Ideas for Hotels

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

The travel industry has been hit particularly hard over the past few years. With less discretionary income, families are traveling less or simply staying local. Businesses are starting to use tools like Skype, for video chats, instead of flying to clients for in-person meetings. These two factors have forced hotels to evolve or die. Many forward-thinking hotels are looking to the Internet as a way to better market their their offerings to customers and prospects. Inbound Marketing, a new-age marketing activity that allows customers to find you online, can be hugely beneficial for hotels.

Inbound Marketing for HotelsIn this post, we will explore 5 separate Inbound Marketing ideas for Hotels. Each idea revolves around the use of a specific online tool, such as YouTube, Twitter, foursquare, etc. With that said, many of the ideas below can be implemented using numerous tools. I simply chose the tools that I thought made the most sense for each idea. Before implementing any of these ideas, it’s best to create a Strategic Marketing Plan that lists your goals, strategies, and tactics. This way you’ll have a guide for implementing these ideas, and you’ll also have something to look back at in 3, 6, 9 months to see how you’re tracking against your goals. Without a plan, it’s easy to get lost in all of these Inbound Marketing tactics, and it’s hard to determine your level of success (or failure) if you don’t have a plan, with goals and performance measures, to look back at.

YouTube Customer Testimonial Series

Customer testimonials are one of the biggest drivers of trust between prospective customer and a business. Video is the most powerful medium for communicating with customers and prospects besides face-to-face meetings. By combining customer testimonials with video, you can create a powerful YouTube Video Series full of great customer testimonials.

Hotels have the ability to produce high quality customer testimonial videos. Upon check-in let each customer know that if they are willing to take 10 minutes, at some point during their stay, to answer a few questions about their stay, you will provide them with some sort of incentive (free drink at the bar, free breakfast, 5% off of room service, etc). Hotels have ample space to record customer testimonial videos. Ask customers to schedule their interview and then take 30 minutes prior to shoot time to setup an empty hotel room or banquet room with your video equipment. Then have your hotel guest come in and talk about his or her stay so far at your hotel. Take that video, edit it, and publish it to your YouTube Channel. Hotels have so many guests on any given day that you should be able to produce a few quality videos each month.

These videos have the potential to entice a prospective customer to stay at your hotel, instead of the hotel down the street that he was considering. The reason, he now has another person’s perspective on the accommodations at your hotel. Reading a print ad or watching a TV commercial gives the customer an idea that you’re out there, but it doesn’t give him an unbiased opinion of the accommodations. These videos do that. Be sure to capture the opinions of different guest types (ie. family travelers, echo boomers who are traveling with friends, business travelers, etc). This will allow each prospective guest-type to see videos from individuals who they can relate with.

Foursquare Swarm Badge Party

A few weeks ago, we wrote about running a foursquare Swarm Badge Promotion for businesses. The Swarm Badge is unlocked when 50 or more people check-in at the same location, all within a short time of one another. Hotels can absolutely take advantage of this foursquare badge. Hotels can throw a foursquare Swarm Badge party at their bar. You can invite people from the local area AND guests. This promotion doesn’t just have to be geared towards guests, which is one of the biggest reasons why you should run it at your hotel. Hotel managers usually only think about their guests when it comes to revenue sources, but the local community can also be a revenue source when it comes to coming in to have dinner or drinks at your hotel.

UPDATE: Download our new FREE eBook: How to Use Foursquare to Grow Your Business

Host an event, whereby you invite anyone who wants to come, to have a free drink at your bar. Explain that you’re hoping to unlock the foursquare Swarm Badge for all participants. Let participants know that in order to get their free drink, they must check-in at your hotel or hotel bar on foursquare. Once 50 people check-in, the foursquare Swarm Badge is released to all participants. Participants then get a free drink and the highly coveted Swarm Badge. Hotels running this promotion build awareness for your hotel and hotel bar and you will generate revenue from participants (people are going to have more than one drink and some will buy food). You may be thinking that foursquare isn’t all that big yet, but they already have over 1 million users and they are growing at a fast rate. By the time you plan out this event, those numbers might be very different. Foursquare is here to stay, so it’s time to start incorporating it as a go-to platform in your hotel marketing activities.

Free Food for Facebook Fans

Hotels can reward Facebook fans with free food or drinks at their hotel restaurants and bars. This promotion is geared towards enticing guests to be active Facebook fans. Upon check-in, ask guests if they “Like” the Hotel Facebook fan page. If they say they do, ask them to pull up their Facebook account, show the front desk staff that they ‘Like’ the hotel’s fan page, and finally show that they’ve recently engaged in some fan page activity (ie. wrote a wall post, posted a comment, posted an image, participated in a discussion, etc).

In exchange for being an active Facebook fan, hotel management can provide guests with a free appetizer from the bar or room service. The offer could be a discount on your entire meal or even a free drink. There are many ways that hotel management can offer value here, it simply comes down to putting the right offer in front of the right people. Nobody should know your customers better than you, so I’m sure there are a few offers popping into your head now that might make sense for your clientele. Whatever offer you decide to go with, be sure to establish your goals for this program before you go live, and then start promoting it through your social tools (not just Facebook) and inside your hotel. This way, customers know about the program and how they can participate.

Start a Travel Group on LinkedIn

Start a LinkedIn Group around your geo-location and the hotel industry. You can connect with business travelers and engage them in conversations around travel and staying in hotels. You can learn a TON about common interests, needs, and desires, straight from your target audience. You can also use your LinkedIn Group to start discussions around your blog articles or promote new specials. When it comes to using LinkedIn, it’s best to be a lot more educational than promotional. People don’t want to read discussions solely about your promotions. Figure out an educational tie-in and lead with that. Somewhere, where it makes sense, fit in your promotional copy and a link to wherever you’re looking to drive traffic (your blog, your YouTube Channel, etc). In an earlier post on the Catalyst Marketers Blog, we wrote about how LinkedIn Discussions Can Generate Sales for Your Small Business – check it out if you’re unfamiliar with LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Discussions.

Blog, Blog, Blog

Blog about all of it. Use your blog as your main content platform. New blog posts can be written about all of the marketing ideas above. Blog posts can be written to generate buzz for upcoming programs, but posts can also be written at the conclusion of programs. For example, you can create blog posts leading up to your Foursquare Swarm Badge party, which should help drive traffic to your hotel on the night of the event. You can then write a blog post, and even create a Flickr Slide Show (which should then be linked to the blog post), post-event. This blog article will share information about how the event went down, how fun it was, include any sound bites from participants, etc. Sometimes Management wonders what they will write about on their blog, but once they create one, they realize that there’s never a shortage of content. There are a ton of relevant content stories just knocking up against the walls of your hotel, it’s just a matter of creating a plan for how you will share those stories with the world. A hotel blog can do that for you.

We hope these 5 Inbound Marketing ideas help you market your hotel accommodations to both customers and prospects. Be on the lookout for a future post with a few more Inbound Marketing ideas for hotels. Feel free to subscribe to the Catalyst Marketers Blog if you want to receive an email each time we publish a new article.

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Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Post-Event Promotion

Monday, April 26th, 2010

During the last installment of the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show Blog Series, we discussed Fashion Show Event Hosting. One thing to keep in mind during the event, which also should be included in your Fashion Show Plan, is post-event marketing opportunities. As you may know from reading this blog, many events and/or promotions give business owners the ability to create marketing campaigns pre-event, during the live event, and post-event. Hosting a local fashion show at your retail clothing boutique definitely gives you the opportunity to market your business before, during, and after the event. In order to successfully promote the event after it’s already occurred, there are a few things that you have to do during the event to ensure you are creating that post-event content.

Some of the things that you can do during the event to ensure that you have great content to promote after the event is finished, are:

Video Record the Fashion Show

Small clothing retailer hosts a fashion showAs we discussed in the last post, you want to be sure to video record the fashion show. This is the ultimate content piece for post-event promotion. This truly let’s those who were unable to attend the live show, see what they missed. It’s the centerpiece of post-event content. This video will be the video that local media outlets use when they write stories on how great the Fashion Show was. Be sure to capture the event from multiple angles if you can. Run secondary cameras to capture B-Roll footage. This way when it comes time to put the final video together, there is plenty of core footage and even more filler footage for use in the video.

Video Record the Pre- & Post-Fashion Show Sales Events

Remember your goal of selling $2,000 worth of clothes during the event? In the last post, we talked about having a Pre-Event Sale and Post-Event Sale on the day of the Fashion Show. These sales are only open to Fashion Show ticket holders, which keeps it intimate and special for attendees. Be sure that you have someone setup with a video camera to capture these Sales Events. The footage can be used as a stand-alone video to show the Pre & Post Event Sale, but footage can also be used as filler in between other videos that you produce from the Fashion Show. This footage will be used as video content that’s pushed out to your customers and followers Post-Fashion Show.

Video Record Interviews from Fashion Show Attendees

Candid footage of fashion show attendees makes for great content. It gives folks who were unable to attend the event a glimpse into what the event was all about. It also lets them hear from real people, many of whom they can relate with. While attendees are enjoying the event, preferably during the Pre-Event and Post-Event Sale, pull a few aside to capture some video. Ask them what they are hoping to see during the Fashion Show, what new styles they really like, how they liked the Fashion Show, what they think of the post-event sale, etc. All of this candid footage will provide you with a ton of excellent content to promote post-event.

Remember to let interviewees know how you plan on using the content – ensure they are OK with it. Even consider having them sign a waiver if you want to truly protect yourself. With that said, the more barriers you create, the less your chances are of getting everyone to participate. It’s really your call based on your comfort level. We usually go the route of, “it’s easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission”. Usually nobody complains about anything, but if something were to come up, worst case scenario is that you’re asked to take the video down.

Video Record Interviews from Contest Winners

Prospects love hearing from current customers when they are doing their consumer research. Knowing this, it would be great to grab some interviews from your contest winners and other folks who are loyal customers of your clothing store. As we discussed in the Fashion Show Event Hosting post, prior to the fashion show you can send new clothing to a few lucky local consumers, along with free tickets to attend the fashion show. For many, this would be a really cool thing to have happen to them. Be sure to capitalize on your generosity and creativity by getting as many of the winners on camera as possible, either before or after the event. Remember, these folks will be wearing the clothes they received from you, so that’s great advertising right there. Capturing a video of the winners, who are wearing clothes from you store, is great post-event promotion material. Each winner can talk about his or her experience during the evening, which will hopefully be full of positive reviews of your clothes and your business.

Content Distribution and Promotion

After you capture all of the footage during the event, edit it and make it ready to go live, it’s time to start publishing that video footage to your small business YouTube Channel and to your blog. You can then use the same online social tools that you’ve been using throughout this process, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc. to promote your new content. Use the content to drive folks to your website or online retail store. You can even get creative with the footage and create new promotions out of it.

Perhaps during one of the video interviews, you hand a customer a $100 gift certificate and instruct that person to hide it in one of the hundreds of pieces of clothing in your store. Then, during post-event promotion, you mention the promotion, show the video clip, and let viewers of the video know that next time they come into the store, they could find a $100 gift certificate in a random piece of clothing. This will certainly help drive traffic to your clothing store post-event – which is the goal! :)

The next installment of the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show Blog Series, which will also be the final installment, focuses on Fashion Show Return-On-Investment. Remember to check back to our blog every few days to get access to the new post once it’s up OR simply subscribe to Catalyst Marketers blog to receive email updates when new posts are published.

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Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Event Hosting

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

So, the big day is finally upon you. It’s time to actually pull off this fashion show that you’ve been planning for your small retail clothing store for months now. Remember, if you’ve spent ample time planning your fashion show and you’ve hired a great team to support you, then the event itself will be the easy part. Let’s review some of the things that you have done up to this point that will impact how your event will go.

In the Fashion Show Event Planning post, within this Blog Series, we set a goal of selling $2,000 worth of clothes during the fashion show. This means that during the Planning phase, you have put together a plan on how you’re going to sell the clothes that are being modeled during your show. There are several ways to sell clothes before and after the show:

  • You can have a private store opening for all Fashion Show ticket holders. You can serve hors d’oeuvres in your clothing store while ticket holders shop with other Fashion Show attendees.
  • After the show, you can sell limited items from the show to attendees. You can promote it as an exclusive purchase that other customers won’t be able to make for at least a month. You could even model certain items that aren’t even going to be for sale, a limited edition of sorts, and make them available only to Fashion Show Attendees. You could even give select clothing pieces away days or weeks later as part of a post-event promotion.

Have a Fashion Show at my clothing storeDuring your Pre-Event Promotion for you local Fashion Show, you were connecting on Twitter with Local Media, as well as, sending local residents free clothes and tickets to the event. Between your promotion and the tickets that you’ve given away to loyal customers, friends, family, and local residents, your Fashion Show should be heavily attended.

One thing you should do in the days leading up to the event is reach out to all of the ticket winners, whether it was local media through your Twitter contest OR local recipients who received your free clothes. Give media members the plan for the evening and ask what they are hoping to get out of the experience. Without asking, try to find out how they plan on covering the event. Hopefully you can get them to write some great reviews about the Fashion Show and your business.

When reaching out to local residents who received the new clothes that you sent out as part of your pre-event promotion, ask them to wear those clothes to the show. They would feel like insiders in a room full of insiders at the Fashion Show by wearing clothes that are actually debuting during the event. Others would see how normal folks look in the clothes and hopefully that leads to sales.

Setup Your Store for the Fashion Show

Have a Fashion Show at my clothing storeKnowing that you’re all setup to accomplish your goals of having a full crowd of loyal customers, local residents, and local media attend the Fashion Show, as well as, a plan in place for selling $2,000 worth of clothes to those folks during the Fashion Show, you can now move your efforts to setting up your store for the Fashion Show. A few things to consider when staging your clothing store for a Fashion Show:

  • You must allow room for Fashion Show attendees to browse your clothing selection during the Pre-Show Private Sale we discussed earlier
  • Put people in charge of shooting video of the show, as well as, taking digital pictures of the models, the clothes, and the attendees. These will be used in Post-Show Promotion on your blog and other social sites.
  • Be sure the food and drinks are good to go
  • Prepare someone to live Tweet the event on your Twitter account. This way your Twitter followers can feel like they are part of the Fashion Show
  • Run through the Auction of the new clothing line that will take place post-event, as part of your goal to sell $2,000 worth of clothes during the Fashion Show.
  • Rehearse the show a few times as if it were the live event. This will allow you to check out the best camera angles, position people where you want them to be during certain times of Fashion Show, and simply work out all of the bugs before going live

After everything has been setup at your clothing store, people have been invited, and rehearsals have taken place, you are ready to host your own local Fashion Show! Take a deep breath and go start greeting your guests.

The next installment of the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show blog series focuses on Fashion Show Post-Event Promotion. Remember to check back to our blog every few days to get access to the new post once it’s up OR simply subscribe to Catalyst Marketers blog to receive email updates when new posts are published.

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Check-In at Amazon.com on Foursquare

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could check-in at online retailers, both large and small, on FourSquare? Currently, to my knowledge, both FourSquare and Yelp only work for brick-and-mortar businesses. I love both Yelp & FourSquare, and think they are both really beneficial online tools for small businesses. The other day we wrote about FourSquare Mayor Promotions for Small Businesses. As a way to promote certain Catalyst Marketers blog posts, we start discussions in LinkedIn Groups around the topic of the blog post. During a recent LinkedIn discussion about FourSquare, the idea of FourSquare for online businesses was born.

UPDATE: Download our new FREE eBook: How to Use Foursquare to Grow Your Business

Think about it for a minute. You probably purchase online products and services all the time, right? Just as you purchase products & services from brick-and-mortar businesses. As you shop for products and services online, you probably stop in at a few different online retailers while you’re researching the product. You’re running your ONLINE errands. When you run your real world errands, you can check-in on FourSquare at all of the brick-and-mortar retail locations that you visit throughout the day. Those businesses benefit greatly from you spreading the word to your followers that you’re visiting their business. Well, why can’t e-commerce businesses receive the same benefits?

FourSquare for BusinessWhat if FourSquare offered code for online businesses to serve up on their e-commerce website. The code would display a “Check-In on FourSquare” button on every page of the e-commerce site – think ReTweet button for Twitter. Now, whenever a consumer lands on a page within a website that she wants to share with her network, she can simply Check-In at the Website by clicking the FourSquare Check-In button. The code, like the ReTweet code for Twitter, would be open to large e-tailers like Amazon all the way to small blogs and e-commerce sites.

The idea benefits everyone. Consumers and fans of FourSquare now get to use FourSquare in a whole new way. Who knows, this may open up even more cool special savings opportunities to consumers through those online businesses who integrate with FourSquare. Just as brick-and-mortar businesses are offering specials to the FourSquare Mayor of their small business, online retailers can do the same OR come up with different ways to entice consumers to check-in on their website.

FourSquare would benefit as now user’s can use FourSquare both online and in the real world. Time spent on FourSquare by current users will increase, and new user’s may take notice. Some people don’t like pulling out their phones and checking-in at local businesses while they are out, but if they can simply click a button on the website that they are on, they may be more inclined to participate.

Online retailers are now able to capitalize on the same FourSquare benefits as brick-and-mortar businesses. By placing the FourSquare Check-In button on their site, they allow consumers to market their product and services for them. If those products and services are remarkable, then consumers are happy to spread the word to their friends.

This doesn’t have to apply solely to e-commerce sites. I’d love to have a “Check-In on FourSquare” button on the Catalyst Marketers blog. Whenever a reader lands on a post, he/she can Check-In on FourSquare at the Catalyst Marketers blog. FourSquare’s code should capture the URL that the user is currently on when he Checks-In and then FourSquare should display that URL in the alert that’s sent out to the user’s followers. This function has the ability to drive a ton of traffic to the Catalyst Marketers blog as our site is now getting in front of the user’s FourSquare networks, as well as, possibly his Facebook & Twitter networks. That’s pretty powerful, right?

What problems do you see with this idea? How can those problems be overcome to make this happen?

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Retail Clothing Boutiques Host Their Own Local Fashion Shows: Pre-Event Promotion

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The next part in the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show blog series focuses on Pre-Event Promotion. Building buzz for your boutique fashion show is a HUGE key to your success. Your promotion should start about 6 – 8 weeks out from the actual live date. This will give you ample opportunity to build buzz. When executing on your Pre-Event Promotion, be sure to constantly reference your Local Fashion Show Plan. The plan helps you stay on course, as sometimes social tools can eat up more of your time than you’d like. Using online social tools requires a bit of discipline, which is a topic for another day.

Montgomery County, PA Fashion ShowBeing able to pull off an event like hosting your own local boutique fashion show is a big feat for all business owners, both large and small. With that said, a few years ago, it was almost impossible to host your own successful Fashion Show as a small business. The main reason being costs. Tools for pulling off a fashion show have been around for a while, but those tools were just so much more expensive than tools today. Free online social tools like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google Local, and many others can help clothing boutique owners create a ton of buzz around their local Fashion Show. You can host a contest to give away free tickets to the community. You can offer discounts to live attendees on anything they purchase that night. Really, the opportunities are limitless if you get creative.

Here are a few other ideas that might help you get started promoting your boutique fashion show:

  • Setup a Twitter target list of local media outlets and start building relationships with those folks. Then when it comes time to promote your Fashion Show, be sure to let them in on this creative endeavor. Hopefully you get some pub on their local news websites
  • Package up a few new clothing pieces that you plan to unveil at the show and start sending them to random local residents with an invitation to attend the live event
  • Shoot a video of someone describing the event and the new fashion line. Post it to YouTube to help explain what attendees can expect
  • Create a Flickr Slide Show with pictures of some of the new fashion items that will be revealed – giving people a sneak peak at only some items
  • Write a blog post or 3 about the event and promote it through your social networks

Again, all it takes to pull off pre-event promotion is a little creativity, a plan, and an understanding of how to best use the free online social tools to your advantage. Now, more than any other time in history, small business owners can take control of their marketing efforts and really drive sales for their small business. Running a Local Fashion Show is a really creative way to promote your small clothing boutique. Now, through free online social tools, you have the ability to market your business like a Fortune 500 company.

The next installment of the Hosting Your Own Local Fashion Show blog series focuses on a href=”hhttp://www.catalystmarketers.com/fashion-show-event-hosting/” title=”Host a fashion show”>Fashion Show Event Hosting. Remember to check back to our blog every few days to get access to the new post once it’s up OR simply subscribe to Catalyst Marketers blog to receive email updates when new posts are published.

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