Atlanta's Marketing Center

Small Business Marketing Service Worth Looking at

Most business owners realize the need to market and promote their business but can't afford to hire a full-time marketing person.  Other options have included hiring a part-time person that may or may not know a lot about marketing (stuffing envelopes).

Well, I think Duct Tape Marketing has come up with a great solution...and one that fits the times.  I'm referring to their Marketing EXCELerator program.  It's comes along with a marketing coach for feedback and accountability, in addition to access to some of the nation's top marketing minds. And it's very affordable at $599/mo.  If you need an active marketing program, then I would take a strong look at this.

Included below is a recent public webinar on the service-

Great Small Business Stimulus Idea - "Make a Referral Week"

What a great idea to stimulate the economy!  Duct Tape Marketing is sponsoring "Make a Referral Week" that will take place March 9-13.  This is an entrepreneurial approach to stimulating the small business economy one referred business at a time.

The goal for the week is to generate 1000 referred leads to 1000 deserving small businesses in an effort to highlight the impact of a simple action that could blossom into millions of dollars in new business.  Small business is the lifeblood and job-creating engine of the economy and deserves the positive attention so often saved for corporate bailout stories.

But its success depends on everyone's (mine, yours, our colleagues) input.  With everyone pledging to make a referral to a business we want to help, the event will be a success. That's not too difficult, particularly since we all share referrals pretty naturally. 
Here's the website with more information and to make a pledge - http://www.makeareferralweek.com/pledge. The week long event also features a killer list of referral experts providing valuable marketing advice.

Join us and do your part to stimulate the economy by telling your world about making referrals and "Make a Referral Week" - you’ll be in good company.

Marketing Trends for 2009

Smallbiztrends.com (appropriately named, huh?) recently came out with what they thought would be the most important marketing trends for 2009.  There's a long list and I'll provide the link at the bottom, but I wanted to comment on it first. As I mentioned in an earlier post ("Marketing Tactic Mainstays"), I discovered based upon real-world client work that the two workhorses this year and for some time will be online and referral-based marketing.

I'm beginning to see a definite disconnect between what businesses should be doing (eg. the list in this article) and what they're actually doing.  My experience is that, in spite of this list of supposed "trends", most small businesses are not doing these things.  I can see most companies adopting the "bootstrapping" strategy and making things simplistic for their prospects and clients.  But I can't see many companies launching paid membership sites this year.  Information is free and I frankly see a long curve on that changing for the masses.

The other disconnect is that while "do-it-yourself" marketing is on the rise, the truth is that most business owners don't know how to do many online tasks that they suggest in this article (put up a forum section on your website?? what if they can't afford to hire an inhouse marketing person to do that? how would they accomplish that?).

For some reason, they left out a key trend (Search Engine Optimization-SEO) that they held for another related article that I included below.  Here's the article on the 2009 marketing trends-
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/01/top-small-business-marketing-trends-2009.htm

And here's the article on search engine optimization trends for 2009-
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/01/seo-trends-2009.html

What are your thoughts on these trends?

What was the Best Super Bowl ad this year?

If you're an advertising enthusiast, then it's hard to keep away from the television advertising "Super Bowl" that takes place at the end of January every year.  Oh, and there's also a game that happens to take place in between these commercials.

The lineup of tv commercials this year featured a different mix of sponsors...I'd separate them into three groups: junk-food, online and timely.  There were the old staples of Budweiser, Coke, Pepsi, Taco Bell and Doritos; a few online services including eTrade, Godaddy, and Hulu; and ads that hauntedly reminded us of the times that we're in...Cash4Gold, Monster, and Careerbuilder (commercial about getting out of your workplace rut).

Of 62 total commercials, TiVo ranked these as the top ten highest rates-
GoDaddy.com: "Enhanced?"
Bud Light: "Summer to Winter"
Careerbuilder.com: "It May Be Time"
Doritos: "Crystal Ball"
Transformers: "Revenge of the Fallen"
Monster.com: "Moose Head"
Bud Light: "Man Thrown out the Window"
Pepsi: "MacGruber/Pepsuber"
Dennys: "Thugs"
Coke Zero: "Mr Polamalu"

Of these, I'd have to rank the Crystal Ball commercial as the best.  It was humorous and was incidentally written by the two actors in it.  It's been ranked at the top of a few big surveys.  If you missed it, here it is again.