Juicy Business Card Marketing Ideas Every Business Should Steal from Me

Juicy Business Card Marketing Ideas Every Business Should Steal from Me

When you think about business card marketing, it’s easy to picture someone just giving out cards to whomever they come across.  To some people or business owners, this is what they do to implement some form of local marketing. But that’s not the way that it’s done, and frankly, I have a better and more dynamic way of doing it.

I even included business card marketing into my 31 local marketing tips to dominate your local market. Here today, I’m going to dive into exactly how to put this process together, and use it to your advantage. What I’m about to show you is what I do for business owners who hire me to come in and build that promotion throughout the community.

Business Card Marketing Ideas

Business card marketing allows you to target your local market to know the following:

  • Where you should spend money in your city
  • Where your customers live
  • Where your message is not be reached

Just by having a business titanic in place, you can now measure some things from engagement to promotional ideas. So, my goal here is to inform you of what you can do, starting today, to get your brand on the top of the mountain without even breaking a sweat.

The excellent old fishbowl method has been used thousands of times throughout the years. People will place a bowl at the front without having any reason for a customer to drop their business card in it. I have something for you today that will ultimately help you get your fishbowl method talked about all around the city.

First, you need to think about what you want to give away that will be of value to everyone who has a business card. You want to make your prize so tempting that they’re almost handcuffed to leave a card. So, think long and hard about that promotional item and follow my lead.

Map it Out

After several weeks or months, you should have a fishbowl filled with tons of business cards. These cards will have the names, place of business, and several customers who are visiting your site of the company. From here, you can use color pins on a map of your city.

I will take every card and use a color pin to locate every customer on the map. Now, I can take a step back and see where my customers live, and where I need to market more, maybe to attract those whom I’m not reaching.

You must think about the plan of attack because if you want to dominate your local market, you must reach all areas. That side of town that you’re trying to get may have a lot of competition.

One way to build up your marketing effort is to have those business cards that you have put into a mailing list. Now, there are many ways you can do this, from calling them up and asking if they would be interested in getting more promotions.

From here, the options are endless, because you can email them or send direct mail to get in front of your customers. Just respectfully do this, so that you don’t over-promote your business. You don’t want to come off as being pushy and run your customers off to the local competition.

Don’t forget to make that drawing from your fishbowl marketing titanic. Make sure that you announce to all entries of who won and what they won so that they know that there was an actual drawing. But, at the same time, you do have their information, so use it wisely, and they will continue to visit your place of business and spread the word.

Think About This

Go and team up with other businesses around town, and introduce this to them. Let them know how you did it and the results that you received, which will encourage them to participate in the program.

If ten businesses decided to enter this program with you, and all of them receive 50 cards in their fishbowl, that would be 500 business cards at your guys’ fingertips to do as you please. How Powerful is that?

Comment Time: Will you think about using the fishbowl method in this manner?

What!!! Who Needs to Build an Online Presence? Not Me | Our Business is Doing Good

What!!! Who Needs to Build an Online Presence? Not Me | Our Business is Doing Good

Some people feel as though they’re doing well offline, so why have an online presence? We are doing good offline by having tons of clients/customers, so why do we need to build an online presence?

Small businesses conduct business in a manner of what’s working today. They don’t seem to think outside of the box about who’s looking for their business online. Just because you’re a beauty shop doesn’t mean that people are only riding down the street looking for beauty shops to choose from.

Maybe there are a number of people who are on Google searching for “beauty shops in Shreveport, La.” There is a big possibility that people are going online to find great places versus word of mouth. Have you ever thought about the thousands of people who move into a new city every year, and they don’t know anything about the local businesses.

If they’re looking for“Restaurant in Shreveport, La,” and they do a Google search for that, guess who comes up and gets those thousands of potential customers just because they took the time to create what I call an online presence.

I want to go deeper just to ensure that you understand that having an online presence just doesn’t need to be about Google. Here is a list of places to build your online presence..

  • Google “#1 in my book”
  • Social Media
  • YouTube or video sites
  • Web 2.0 sites, create off site content
  • Blog Comments, yes it still works

Just the other day, I wrote a blog post on crushing my local market while eating a Bologna sandwich. What I was mainly talking about were the different avenues that I’m looking to take to dominate my local market. If you have a business, you must be willing to tackle your market from all sides versus having the offline world work for you.

Think about this…What!!! Who Needs to Build an Online Presence? Not Me | Our Business is Doing Good 1

I did some research on my local market here in Louisiana some time ago. What I wanted to see was how many people were looking to buy or sell real estate here in my local market of Shreveport, La.

I looked this information up by using Google Keyword Tool, and the numbers that came back almost knocked me out of my chair. I found that over 1,600 people search for the keyword “Shreveport Real Estate.” That is a lot of individuals looking to do some form of real estate business.

If you do a Google search, you will see that there is only one local real estate website that is on the front page. The rest of the sites are national sites, which no matter what, will rank for any terms you use that has the keyword “real estate” in it.

As I said before,  there is one local real estate website, but it has been there for years.  The only reason that  it’s ranked that high is because no one else has the common sense to do the same thing. The reason for this is because all of the other real estate businesses around the town are only focusing on the “offline world,” which is crazy. Research shows that over 1,600 people are looking for real estate in Shreveport, so why not get your brand in front of those people.

This is just another example of businesses not caring too much about their online presence. There is no way in the world that I would have a real estate company, and not have my website optimized to be ranked for “Shreveport Real Estate.” It’s not smart at all, so I’m going to run through a list of things that you can be doing today to get that competitive edge over the local competition.

Google “#1 in my case”

Google continues to be the #1 source of building an online presence. For one, if you have a website then that website can get ranked locally for your given keyword. Now your site has to be optimized, right? Actually, what you need to do more than anything else is build content on your site so that Google can index it.

Social Media

There are tons of social media websites, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, just to name a few. These sites are supposed to be used for networking, but some businesses still think that it’s a place to advertise to people. Yes, you can advertise, but it needs to be done in a different manner if you’re seeking results. Besides that, social media allows you to build an online presence by engaging in local conversations. This runs even deeper on this subject, so I think that it’s best to stay tuned for a well in-depth guide on this subject.

YouTube “or video sites

Most businesses over look video marketing just because they feel as though it’s not important. You’re crazy for doing that due to the fact that video is the second highest searched content online. Again, if someone is searching for “Shreveport Plumbers,” and they have created a video of being a plumber in Shreveport, La, guess what will show up in the search results and on that video website. Videos are powerful, and they allow you to gain an instant online presence without much effort.

Web 2.0 sites “create off site content

One thing that you will learn about me is that I have a solution for anything that you’re going through. If you are a small business and just can’t afford a website as of today, then don’t worry because you can still build an online presence. Here is a list of 128 web 2.0 websites where you can use them to create content that ranks locally. It gives you the opportunity to build an online presence without starting with your own website.

Blog Comments “yes its still works”

Last but not least, is that you can still Google local content and leave a comment on there. This is not my favorite way to go but, if you just need to get recognized on some level just start commenting. Just search local websites and have it.

I’m not going to leave you hanging without giving you something that will help boost your business growth. I created a 31 tip marketing guide just for you if you want to dominate locally. So, all you have to do is that action and the customers and clients will come running.

Comment Time: Do you have an online presence?

Antonio’s 5 Local Store Marketing Tactics Implemented for Pennies

Antonio’s 5 Local Store Marketing Tactics Implemented for Pennies

Local Store Marketing Tactics

Saving money is what all stores are looking to do in 2014 going into the new year. The local store marketing tactics I will be discussing today are some of the cheapest, cost-effective ways to grow your business without all the headaches of getting into debt. When I talk to local store business owners in my surrounding area of Shreveport, Bossier City and Minden, one thing that I stress to them is how in this market you must think creatively not with the dollars you can spend, but with the tools and resources available to you.

So, the question comes down to how can I market my business locally without going into debt?

I will bet that most of the business owners run promotions of some sort to get more foot traffic through their stores. No matter if you have a restaurant, clothing store or a beauty salon your overall goal is to get people coming through those doors every single day without spending a lot of money.

Those promotions that you’re running may or may not be as profitable, or if it is then unfortunately you may be losing money. Don’t worry because I’ve decided to produce my 5 local store marketing tactics that works, and most importantly saves you tons of money and time.

Piggyback off other Businesses

With my 31 tips of dominating your local market I go into this subject a lot more deeply. But, what you can do here is exchange business cards, coupons, products or anything that will be of value for someone to have for free. You can approach any of the local stores in your community to exchange promotion items.

Example: Your hair salon shop may want to exchange promotional items with the local beauty store. That beauty store sells all of the items your hair salon uses, and plus your potential clients shop there. Not only that, to reverse it, the beauty shop would love to give you their promotion also because your clients will benefit from shopping in their store. So at the end of the day, you’re not competing with each other, the money is just flowing hand to hand without you going into debt.

Your Cost: Price of promotion items

Benefits Who: Local businesses with brick and mortar

Put on an Event

Putting on events is something a lot of local businesses just don’t do enough of. Those who do try, are all catering to a small group of local businesses. Putting on an event in your local city that invites everyone together, will be effective in networking. You can make a simple event where everyone just introduces themselves, and explains what type of business they run.

Light Bulb Moment: One of the main reasons that I would do this is to implement step one of these local store marketing tactics. I will be on the grind to create some cross promotions with them while I have all of them in one place. That’s called killing two birds with one stone.

Your Cost: $50 to $200

Benefits: Who: All Local Businesses.

Be Everywhere

My good friend, Pat Flynn, talks a lot about being everywhere so that people can find your business. Take out some time to view your local market, but first look at your local competitors to see what they’re doing. Just go to their website and see if they’re on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest and so on. If they’re not on all of those platforms, then please believe that I’m signing up and building my business up through those profiles.

Remember: You still need to have a website even though you’re on these social sites. Reason for this, is because there is nothing like owning your own home, if you get what I mean. So, don’t build your house on someone else’s land and expect them to let you stay there forever.

Your Cost: Totally Free

Benefits Who: All businesses in a competitive market

Give, Give, Give

Education is something that I preach all of the time on CMG. This is to teach people what you want them to know, and they will come back for more. If you own a gardening store, I’ll create a website for my store.  In front of the page, I will set up a big opt-in box for gathering customers and future customers that I will be getting.

From here, I would write a simple guide on how to keep a beautiful garden. How many people do you think will enter their name and email address just to get that valuable information? From here, you can email them updates on items for sale and countless  other things.

Your Cost: $20 for auto responder..get a free trial here

Benefits Who: Any business who wants insane business and growth

Support Fundraisers

One of the best ways to get your brand, product or services in front of your targeted audience is through fundraising. I’m not saying to do a fundraiser yourself, I’m saying it would be wise to give to certain groups who would present your business to their given audience. You can support the fundraiser by giving money, products or offering some form of your services.

All you’re trying to achieve here, is to get your name out there by supporting a cause to build even more creditability for your brand.

Comment Time: What type of things are you doing to get your brand out there locally?

153,000 Words in 153 Days Challenge

153k words in 153 days Challenge

153,000 Words in 153 Days Challenge

Goals are achieved or broken every single day. Us as people are looking for ways to motivate each other on making the right moves in life to set us up for success. So, one of the ways we can all achieve our goals is by writing them down, and sharing them with world. “Like me.”

Today’s blog post is not about dominating your local market,which is what I talk about 90% of the time on my website. What I’m looking to do today is to bring you on a ride in my goals for the next 6 months.

These goals are achievable only if I take action, and leave no stones unturned. My actions will be performed every single day to get to where I need to be for my website www.Colemanmg.com, and most importantly, Coleman Marketing Group LLC.

This year I’m looking to bring my online presence of this website, and my brand into the mainstream. The only way to achieve this is by sticking to the plan. So, this is the reason for the title of this blog post,which is,“153,000 Words in 153 Days Challenge”

Basically, I’m looking to write 153,000 words in a matter of 153 days which begins August 1 – December 31 2014. So, if you break down the number, this comes out to a matter of 1,000 words per day.

This may seem like a lot of words but it actually is not because I can type1,000 words in an hour or so just depending on the topic. It’s all about sitting down, putting my fingers to the keyboard, and getting to work on the journey of completing my goals.

Now..Let’s Talk Goals

My First Book

Believe it or not, I’m writing my first book on a certain subject which is…you guessed, it local marketing domination. Plus, it’s not going to be that general targeting all industries. I figure my book will be more profitable if I targeted a certain niche such as,

  • Sporting
  • Clothes
  • Pets
  • RealEstate
  • Restaurants
  • Furniture Stores
  • Dentist office
  • and many more…

I could have written a book on these subjects in general, but I felt that it would be best to do this by category. So, I picked one, did some in-depth research, and found that I could write a book on it in the form of dominating the market.

So, from the day I start this challenge to the day that it ends at the last days of December, I will be working on this book which should come out to be at about 200 pages.

At nearly 300 words a page, no matter if it’s a kindlee-book, amazone-book, or just the plain old paper back book. It’s going to take about 60,000 of those words to complete 200 pages. The book may go over this number, so the plan is to stay substantially underneath it.

153,000 – 60,000 = 93,000 words left

Just with the book I’m losing about half of my word count, but at the end of the day a book surrounding your brand is priceless, and you set yourself as an authority in that industry.

CMG Blog Posts

While writing my book, I don’t want to neglect the CMG community without posting great content. Even though the book will take up a lot of content, I still have to keep building the content here on my website.

I will still be writing about local marketing, case studies, new local research and doing my favorite..list posts. These are my best pieces of content because they include top notch content from people whom I network with across the world.

So, I’m looking to keep a fresh two blog post on the website each and every week. This comes out to,

  • 2 blog posts a week
  • 8 per month
  • 40 over the next 5 months

I’m looking to use approximately1,000 words per blog post, so that puts about 40,000 words being used.

93,000 – 40,000 = 53,000 words left

This will allow me to work on my book and never miss a beat of posting content to the website. How about them apples?

Targeted Keyword Post

With about 53,000 words left,you maybe asking yourself what will he do with that. I thought about using them for guest posts, but I said no way because when I create great content I’d rather it be for my website.

This goes for posting on article sites, which is good for in-house exposure, but not good for the over all success of your website. Guest posting and article sites are only good these days to post content and get a so called quality link.

So, what I said that was best for those 53k words is to just add them to my website. My goal is to write content centered around the book that I will be writing. This content will talk about this industry and the ways of marketing it to thousands.

Now, these won’t be the 1,000 word posts, these will be what I call “Targeted Keyword Posts.”These are only 300 to 350 words a blog centered around a certain keyword that gets some traffic in the search engine, but its really low like 50 searches per month.

Doing this will allow me build up a list of people who will be interested in the book that I’m writing. So, when the launch day comes I will have a large list of people who are ready to buy my book.

So the numbers break down like this…

300/1,000 words is rounded to 3 post every 1,000 words.

This gives me at around 150 or so posts centered around my book targeted market. Plus, hopefully I’m getting at lest 1 visitor a day from each post with an opt-in rate of half of that.

Closing Words

These are my goals all from writing a measly 1,000 words a day. This on top of the networking that I’m doing, which I will be talking about in the next blog post, will just make this even more powerful.

So, if you just want to get more exposure for your website, business or social networks, then I would say just start writing. It doesn’t have to be 1,000 words a day, but it does have to be at least 1 word.

“Shocker” First Local Marketing Event at Minden Chamber of Commerce Was a Disappointment

Dominating Your Local Market Workshop at Minden South Webster Chamber of Commerce

I took my local marketing techniques to the road this past week to help the local businesses in my community. I sat down with the president of our Minden Chamber of Commerce “Jeri” to talk to her about doing the free local marketing event for small businesses here in Minden, La.

 I told her that Minden is stuck between 1995 and back when it comes to keeping up with the times of marketing. When our newspaper is still the number one way to get your message out to the consumer, then you’re in trouble as a city.

We talk long and hard about doing this, and like I stressed to her that the turn out might not be that good because for one, most businesses in any city know little to none about marketing. On top of that, we are a small city who is more like a monkey see monkey do city, so businesses usually do what the business down the road is doing.

So, I got the ok to have this first local marketingdomination event on April 16 at 11:30 – 1pmwhich is lunch time for most business owners. Doing this was convenient because it was done on their lunch, so it didn’t take away time from running their businesses.

Heck I was even given the list of Minden Chamber members which was around 240 small businesses. So I put together a simple but very effective call to action post card that I felt would convert like hot cakes. I stressed on my event page, and my website that this event is 100% FREE, and all you had to do is show up and reap the benefits.

Event DayFree local marketing workshop at Minden Chamber of Commerce by Antonio Coleman of Coleman Marketing Group LLC

Out of 240 post cards that went right to every business owner, only one person showed up. Yep, out of hundreds of businesses only one person felt as though they needed help growing their business in Minden, La.

Now, I wasn’t shocked or even mad because if you know me then you will know that I have been doing online marketing for over 13 years now so I have seen and heard it all.

My goal was to take what I have learned from trial and error over the years to share it with my community. Unfortunately, the community said that they’re doing fine, and they’re not too interested in this local marketing thing.

Maybe some of them just didn’t really understand who was going to be the presenter of this event. I understand that they didn’t know that I’m one of the top marketers in the world lived right here in Minden.

Whatever the case was, they didn’t show up for some reason or another. So, I sat there with the one person who did show up and revealed to her how to dominate your local market without a dime on advertising.

So What Now?

Basically, this is not the last local event I will be doing because like any, and everything in life it takes time for people to see the vision. Just one post card is not going to do it when trying to reach people who are stuck in their own ways.

I know for a fact that 99% of the businesses in Minden, Shreveport, Bossier City and all the surrounding areas need help on growing their business. Most of them are doing it all wrong, and if someone will do any sort of upgrade marketing that’s in their industry that it will almost butt them out of business.

So, my plan is to not give up on my community but take a different approach in getting in front of them. What I have learned over the years is that sometimes you just have to do things to get their attention.

What I’m planning on doing are reviews on every business here in Minden, La. I will make short videos about their website, Facebook page or whether or not they have an online presence or not. Then, I will contact them through email, Facebook and mail to get their attention.

Now, after I do this then some people will entertain what I have to say, but others will still look the other way. No matter what, I will keep pushing until I reach everyone here no matter how long it takes.

Plus, when it comes to doing another local event I will have to sit down, and come up with a better plan to really get people to show up. It will be something creative, and so out of the box that it will force them to show up because of the incentives I will be giving away.

Overall, I’m a happy guy knowing that our Minden Chamber of Commerce is willing to work with me more on doing another local marketing event sometime later down the road. So stay tuned, I have some more events coming up soon but this time I hope to get at least 2 people to show up. LOL

If you’re a small business owner and need to grow your business locally, then check out my local marketing domination guide that will help you put your business in-front of thousands of customers per month.

Local Marketing Domination Guy “signing out”

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