Summer Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Renee

With back-to-back holidays (Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, 4th of July, summer vacation, new school year, etc), small businesses are adjusting their focus to cater to a market of vacationers, shoppers, and those who just love to celebrate a good deal in honor of any special event. Summer marketing schedules are being finalized for Dukky clients making it a great time to shine the light on how to leverage the upcoming holidays to increase sales and customer engagement for those who are still in need of some ideas.

Everyone loves a party. Regardless the reason behind it, people love to be invited and included in on special events and savings from friends and retailers. That makes this upcoming season of celebrations the perfect opportunity to zone in on a few major business goals and run consistent marketing promotions to accomplish them. While other businesses are vacationing, here’s your chance to set yourself up for a great third and fourth quarter.

How to maximize a summer of marketing

1) Identify attainable and clear cut goals

grow your email list
increase social media presence
master the art of multi-channel marketing campaigns
identify the brand influencers in your customer database
track/analyze all marketing channels to see which have highest ROI
add social sharing components to all marketing
centralize customer database to capture customer information/demographics from all marketing channels – email, website, facebook, twitter, online ads, blog, partner sites, tv, radio, etc

Write out your marketing goals for the next fews months and hone in on your top 3. Now, let’s start planning.

2) Create a marketing calendar

Organized people get more accomplished, it’s a fact. Not because they are just innately more awesome, but because they create a clear road map to accomplish and reach their goals. You’ve got a lot going on, we all do, and it can sometimes feel like you don’t even have enough time to make a plan. Truth is you cannot afford to not take the time to create a plan.

Take a few minutes and jot down some ideas for promotions/ideas that work well with your business and can play off the upcoming holidays. Here’s a few examples:

Mother’s/Father’s Day

offer a discount – $15 off of $50 purchase or $10 off a giftcard for mom’s (make it easy for the men while they are shopping for their wives/mom)
buy one get one free off of products/services
Enter to win a gift/vacation/free services/products. Hint: Dad’s love giveaways. Mom’s love coupons and winning things for their family. Put together a man cave giveaway collection or something sports/hunting themed all dad’s would love.

Memorial Day/4th of July

Tax free shopping day (Retail companies LOVE this one)
Discounts/coupons to honor veterans
Giveaway for military family – Win a vacation, free service, products, etc

Back to School/Football

Run a back to school special with discounts/promotions for moms who are busy running around with their little one’s
Tailgating giveaway package
Local sporting event tickets or game day gift
Shopping Spree giveaway

3) Run back to back promotions

We don’t believe in one hit wonders, we believe in creating marketing momentum that your customers can hop on to engage with you consistently. Plan 3 to 4 back to back promotions to keep customers engaged and active. This also provides you content you can consistently be sharing and pushing across your marketing the channels.

Hint: Change up your poll questions in each campaign to expand your market/product research and specifically ask questions that you can follow up with in targeted manners.

4) Celebrate the winners

At the close of each campaign be sure to highlight on your marketing channels the winners. This validates the promotion to those who entered and is the perfect set up to mention your next upcoming promotion.

5) Mix it up

Don’t be afraid to try new promotions/offers with your audience in order to expand your customer database. Just because you’ve never run a coupon deal or giveaway doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever try in order to reach your goals. Gathering new customers and an expanded reach during busy times can help prepare your business to manage and grow during slower seasons. Nurturing new customers can lead to new sales.

6) Track your progress

Dukky’s analytics dashboard makes it easy to monitor and track each promotion’s activity and success. Knowing your numbers from month to month will allow you to see what’s working and which offers and deals your customers are the most responsive to. When you know better, you do better but you have to KNOW better to be able to see change.

This upcoming marketing season is the perfect opportunity for your business to focus and hone in on some important goals to see growth, expansion and increase in sales, your customer database and marketing engagement.

If you feel like you need more hands on help to get started, feel free to give us a call at 1-888-662-9096 to jumpstart your marketing success or email us at sales@dukky.com

How to Surf the Social Media Waves of Change Without Drowning

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Renee

If you are working hard to maximize the power of the web in your marketing outreaches, then I’m positive you’re very familiar with having to navigate the waters of change. New updates, new tools, new options, better content, simplified designs, a creative edge, don’t do that, do this instead, stats say everyone hates that word, stats say everyone jumps up and down when you do this…it’s a little tilt-a-worldish at times. But, if you’re an adrenaline junky like me then marketing and advertising can provide you all the change you need to keep your work days exciting.

Let’s take the recent article, Is Facebook Still Cool and Why Marketers Should Care. It’s packed with some really great (and not too shocking) stats about Facebook usage and user behavior shifts in the last year taken from Pew Internet Research. Did we all really think Facebook would rule the social media world forever? Please don’t say yes. Continue reading →

Why You Cannot Live Without Your Influencers in 2013

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Renee

Influencers. It’s a trending marketing term these days, and rightfully so. A quick search will lead to an abundance of tweets, articles, reports, and books filled with the reasons for and benefits of nurturing the influencers in your customer database. Yet, still we see so many clients struggling to sift through their customer database and segment those who are participators vs social advocates vs true influencers.

In a recent article, The State of Digital Influence 2013, Technorati Media’s recent influencer report is summarized quite nicely. Being that all of Dukky’s campaigns provide detailed influencer ratings and identifies the relationships customers have with the people in their social realm, we were thrilled to see this write up only adding fuel to the already growing influencer fire we’re continuously fanning. Continue reading →

Three Ways To Bulletproof Your Marketing Promotions

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Renee

Have you been searching to find the perfect marketing formula for your next promotion? Maybe you are a relatively new business and you’ve spent your days trying to find what your competitors are doing to drive traffic, grow their customer list and expand their business…and you feel a bit lost and overwhelmed.

Or you might be a very established business with an active marketing budget, logins to multiple online marketing tools that are sure to change your life, and analytics that are all over the place. Do you know if you’re maximizing your efforts?

Every marketing team, new or established, is constantly facing opportunities and challenges. Did you see this new cool tool? What are your analytics saying about your last promotion? Oh look we’ve increased our reach…oh wait there’s a big drop in conversion. It’s a revolving door of trial, error, success, and sifting through new tools and channels to create your next “bulletproof” strategy.

When the overwhelmed or just heavily inundated business makes its way to Dukky’s marketing door, we’re not surprised. We get it. There are more options than time. So how do you bulletproof your marketing campaigns without spending your entire life sifting through all the pieces?

Bulletproofing your marketing may not be a perfect science, but there are a few key factors you can count will ensure your maximum success. Continue reading →

4 Things to Do When Business Gets Slow

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Sherry

Snowflakes and raindrops are beautiful, but all I really want is SUNSHINE this time of the year!

Weather (and notice my pun there) you are in B2C or B2B the long winter days before Spring can be the pits. Winter blues, sun-deprivation, cabin fever, call it what you will…once the holidays are over, it can feel like a long time before spring comes and good weather motivates us and consumers. It’s the time in every business when things slow down and the passion, energy, and go-get-em’ is low. So what do you do to get it back?

Here are some ideas to mix things up:
Continue reading →

Undercover Boss: Marketing Edition | What’s your marketing really saying about you?

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Renee

I’m a big fan of CBS’s show, Undercover Boss. I don’t get much tv time in my life, but it’s always one of my favorites when I do.There’s something captivating seeing the big man climb to the bottom of the ladder and getting to live normal life with his employees. And when the best CEO’s start dishing out big cash prizes at the end of the episode, I’m always moved by the ripple effect of their generosity. What an incredible place to be able to change someone’s world by freely giving them 10K, 25K, or like the episode I recently watched…. almost 200K. Talk about a game changer.

The undercover bosses always walk away learning both valuable life and business lessons by slipping into the trenches and experiencing the ups and downs with their employees. Assuming your company vision and motto is trickling down to the bottom is easy to do, but actually investigating for yourself can expose the area’s that are threatening your ultimate success. This got me thinking about how it relates to marketing. It’s great to plan, launch a campaign and look from a distance in hopes it all goes well, but like the undercover bosses discover…the answers to increasing productivity and profits are really found in the trenches of our execution.

In order to drive increase in any area, you have to know the details. Occasionally, we get questions surrounding the big benefit in knowing your numbers in live time or really what’s the big deal about analytics at all. Sometimes the questions still shock us, but maybe we’re just that big of believers that you have to know the numbers and reasoning behind a campaign’s success or failure to keep a marketing strategy alive. We’re not into one hit wonders, we’re in the game of creating lifelong relationships between businesses and their customers and that takes dialogue. Continue reading →

Mobile Marketing Present & Future Stats – Is Your Marketing Ready?

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Renee

Mobile marketing has quickly moved beyond simply being a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. As the infographic from Microsoft Tag shows below, it’s becoming the primary way customers will be interacting with marketing promotions. The way customers read our emails, enter our promotions, view our social ads, review our website, research help information, and more will soon primarily be coming from their mobile device. Long gone are the days of “I’ll check that out when I get to my computer”. Welcome to a new era of instant engagement and review with consumers. And if the user isn’t captivated by us in that mobile minute, we’ll miss our chance to engage.

It’s time to adjust the marketing checklist.

When our team is prepping to launch a marketing campaign, we have a standard checklist we keep handy. It’s serves as our guide to ensuring we don’t miss anything we know that is both important to our campaign’s success and also to our customers. In 2013 one thing we’ve moved to the top of the list is reviewing each outreach method on a mobile device to evaluate the end user’s experience. We’ve also added mobile specific outreaches. According to the infographic below, we are only a short 11 months away from mobile experiences trumping the desktop experience. Is your marketing plan taking this into consideration? Continue reading →

5 Examples of Great Microsites

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Renee

As we wrap up this blog series about landing pages, we wanted to get very practical. It’s great to have a list of ideas and best practices jotted down when you start designing your own landing pages, but seeing others that have proven successful can help speed up the design process. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend you read 5 Reasons Why You Need Landing Pages in 2013 and How to Leverage Landing Pages to Increase Sales before checking out our examples below.

Microsites, a collection of landing pages, are a vital tool in the marketer’s arsenal, providing a funnel that serves as a doorway to trackable data on customers entering your promotion. So Team Dukky has compiled a list of our 5 favorite microsites we’ve had the pleasure of working on and why they work. Enjoy! Continue reading →

How to Leverage Landing Pages to Increase Sales

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Renee

In another post, Why Landing Pages over a Website, we looked at the reasons why you should use landing pages instead of directing your traffic to your company website. In this post, let’s take a look at the ”how,” with some easy, actionable tips that will help you leverage your landing pages to increase sales.

‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple…

Your landing page should have one goal, and one goal only: convince your visitors to convert. So, keep it simple. Anything, whether it’s content or visual elements, that distracts your visitor from that goal needs to be critiqued ruthlessly. Too much of anything is not always a good thing.

To create a tightly focused landing page, get the messaging nailed down first. Remember, more words are not necessarily better. Create a simple, persuasive call to action that makes it crystal clear why your customer should redeem your offer. Everything else on the landing page should support the call to action, not detract from it.

Keep It Consistent

Establishing trust is a crucial first step toward convincing customers to follow through and act on your offer. Consistent design and messaging will reassure them that they are at the at right place and that you aren’t trying to trick them.

That means that the text in the ad that brought your visitors to the landing page needs to be reflected on the landing page itself. The headline, call to action and offer should all match. If it doesn’t, warning bells go off and conversions go down.

The design of the page and the imagery used should also be consistent with the original ad, and it should remain consistent across each page of the microsite.

Design for Conversion

Your landing page design should support your call to action. People are visual creatures- include attractive images that will inspire them to redeem your offer, like that mouthwatering burger in the Wendy’s landing page above.

Also, use visual elements to direct your visitor’s eyes to your call to action. As with text, less is more here. Use blank space to surround and set off the elements you want your visitor to focus on, as Stine does below. Don’t let the page become cluttered or busy.

Make it Shareable

Finally, use social sharing buttons to encourage your customers to share your offer with their friends and families. This exponentially increases the amount of exposure your campaign will receive, so you get more leads, more new customers and ultimately, more sales!

Stayed tuned: Tomorrow we’ll be highlighting our top microsite designs!