Mashable recently had EyeTrackShop perform a study on the impact of the new timeline brand pages. They found many interesting changes in the way users interact, and what they are interacting with. “The new Facebook Timeline limits the effective branding space, and the top portion of the page must be effectively utilized,” suggest the study’s authors.

For more information on this study, click here.

Read the full article.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

What if I handed you a megaphone in front of a crowd of 50,000 local people and let you tell them why they want to spend money with you.  What if you could do this every day?

This is what radio is, a megaphone with a large group of people listening. When you use radio advertising it automatically establishes quality and credibility to your business.  Example: if you a business owner walked up to a stranger on the street and started talking about your business this stranger would feel uncomfortable and awkward.  When they hear a message about your business from there “friend” the radio station they are more likely to listen and react to the message.  The radio station is where they hear about local news, weather, events and advertisers.  They are comfortable and receptive to receiving this information and reacting to it.

If you want to know more about why radio works and how to use it, contact us and we can help deliver more traffic through your door.

1. Promotion: Promote what you do: ad specials, on location exclusives, copy
writing deals etc – this is your 15 minutes of shameless promotion – use it well!
2. Pass Along: Be the person to share cool videos, links to interesting blogs,
quotes, jokes, etc.
3. Personality: Let “you” shine through: be funny, talk about likes and dislikes
– engage people and make friends!
4. Participation: Ask & Answer Questions – target people outside of your
current friends and followers as well as loyal followers – engage, engage, ENGAGE

For example……. Lets pretend my business is a Bakery……

Promotion: Every Tuesday buy a muffin and get a coffee for free!!!

Pass Along: Go on YouTube and find a food fight or a cake fight and share it with your friends.  People always share things that are funny

Personality: Witch icing should I use for the Cinnamon buns. My daughter say cream cheese and my son said vanilla.

Participation: Does anyone have a good recipe for brand muffins.

These are all very simple statements, questions and videos.  Everyone of them are related to the bakery and they are interesting, engaging and promoting.  Most important, it gives people a reason to follow you.  Social media is not and end to all over advertising it is an important part of the puzzle.  The number one mistake you can make when marketing your social media sites in other advertising, is not giving any reason to follow.  Every ad these day ends with like us or follow us with no reason why.

If you want to use your radio advertising to gain social media followers say something like.. share your favorite recipes on facebook at Jamela`s Bakery, every Friday we bake a batch of our favorite recipe posted.  One line to the point and gives people a reason to find you.

Start with these tips and I will post more soon.

If facebook was a country it would be the third largest country in the World. 55-65 year old female is the fastest growing demo on facebook.

A new member joins Linked In every minute.

These are all pretty bold statements and they all come from this video…..

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I work with business everyday that have just started personal facebook pages with no idea what a fan page is, have never been on Twiter or have started a fan page and just don`t know what to say and really does not have time.  Time is usually what it comes down to.  So there are two different options, make time or get someone else to do it for you.  Chances are you have someone on staff who is on facebook at work anyway or a kid that could earn some allowance.  But the bottom line is there is millions of people waiting to read something clever, funny or useful in social media everyday and when they do they share it.

• Step 1: Take 10 percent and 12 percent of your projected annual, gross sales and multiply each by the markup made on your average transaction. In this first step, it’s important to remember that we’re talking about gross markup here, not margin. Markup is gross profit above cost, expressed as a percentage of cost. Margin is gross profit expressed as a percentage of the selling price. Sell an item for $150 when it only costs you $100, and your markup is 50 percent. Your margin, however, is only 33.3 percent. This is because the same $50 gross profit represents 50 percent of your cost (markup,) but only 33.3 percent of the selling price (margin.) Most retail stores in America (carpet, jewelry and so on) operate on an average markup of approximately 100 percent, some operate on as little as 50 percent markup and others add as much as 200. More expensive items, such as cars, recreational vehicles and houses, typically carry a markup of only 10 to 15 percent.

• Step 2: Deduct your annual cost of occupancy (rent) from the adjusted 10 percent of sales number and the adjusted 12 percent number.

• Step 3: The remaining balances represent your minimum and maximum allowable ad budgets for the year. At this point in the calculation, you may learn that you’ve already spent your ad budget on expensive rent, or you might also learn that you should be doing a lot more advertising than you had previously suspected.

Now let’s calculate an ad budget. Assume that my business is projected to do $1 million in sales this year, I have a profit margin of 48 percent, and my rent is $36,000 per year. The first thing to do is calculate 10 percent of sales and 12 percent of sales ($100,000 and $120,000, respectively).
Second, we must convert my 48 percent profit margin into markup, because markup is what we’ve got to have to make this formula work. Most business owners know their margin by heart, but never their markup. To make the conversion from margin to markup, simply divide gross profits by cost. Dividing $480,000 (gross profits) by $520,000 (hard cost) shows us that a 48 percent margin represents a markup of 92.3 percent. Bingo.

Now we multiply $100,000 times 92.3 percent to see that our adjusted low budget for total cost of exposure is $92,300. Likewise, we multiply $120,000 times 92.3 percent to get an adjusted high budget for total cost of exposure of $110,760. From each of these two budgets, we must now deduct our $36,000 rent. This leaves us with a correctly calculated ad budget that ranges from $56,300 on the low side to a maximum of $74,760 on the high side.

Most advertising salespeople will tell you that “5 to 7 percent of gross sales” is the correct amount to budget for advertising, but don’t you believe it. It simply isn’t possible to designate a percentage of gross sales for advertising without taking into consideration the markup on your average sale and your rent. Yes, expensive rent for a high-visibility location is often the best advertising your money can buy, since a business with a good sign in a high-visibility location will need to advertise significantly less than a similar business in an affordable location. To prove this, just look at the example above and change the rent to $75,000 per year. In this case, the ad budget would range from $17,300 to $35,760, representing just 1.7 to 3.5 percent of sales.

The formula I’ve given you is the only one that reconciles your ad budget with your rent as well as the profitability of your average sale. Good luck!

The first step to building your brand is establishing your advertising budget.  How much are you going to invest every month towards building your brand.  If you are unsure on what or how to establish an advertising budget read Calculating and ad budget under marketing.

Step two decided who your dream customer is.  You might be thinking that is everybody.  Yes, we want to sell to everybody but there is that dream customer that spends money, loves your product or service, comes back and bring friends.  Is it a Man or Women.  Are they young or old.  Do they have kids or divorced, business owners or happily married.  Once you know who your dream customer is, you can focus your investment in bringing in more people just like them.

Next find out how to reach the most of these dream customers at one time, and find a representative of that company that you trust and wants the same thing for your business as you do, success!!!!!

Creating or updating your brand is not cheep and easy, but nothing worth doing ever is.

This video is entertainging and has great tips on new treands in Marketing.  Check it out.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

http://www.wensmedia.com/assets/Advertisers%20Free%20Stuff/TenCourageousStepsToAdvertising.pdf

The campaign ran the entire summer and originally included only 2 videos. By adding content throughout the summer it encouraged listeners to check back often. There were also different contests
held throughout the campaign and a click through advertisement to make reservations online.

The Mission Hill Winery is perhaps the most well known and regarded winery in the Okanagan. This
campaign allowed Mission Hill to re-establish their online branding and interact with consumers that
are both new to Wine’s and experienced tasters. Over the course of the campaign Mission Hill Winery
received an influx in online traffic and reservations.