When considering print media, one must consider who the reader is, and whether or not that reader fits the target demographic. Also consider the source.
Local newspapers may also be an ideal advertising medium when reaching your desired audience. Contact your local advertising staff to find out what their rates are and how you can get your ad in a prime location.

It’s also imperative to know your budget and limitations. It helps when you have a budget figure in mind before you considering any form of advertising. Your budget may limit you to only the most targeted of marketing. However, if you do have resources available, and you can spend advertising dollars on the internet, radio, TV, and print, then do consider print options as a possible way to reach your targeted customer.

Christina Gurtowsky
Media Consultant
Market Insights, LLC

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In an effort to boost the recent decline of tourism in Ft. Lauderdale; the airlines hoped making satire out of this devastating situation may bring light and positivity to the natural disaster. But after receiving less than positive feedback from consumers, Spirit decided to pull the marketing campaign.

The ads are promoting a $50 discount on travel to the carrier’s coastal destinations. The slide show, found on the Spirit’s website, features destinations in Cancun, Mexico; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Atlantic City, New Jersey, culminates in a closeup of two green-and-yellow bottles of “Best Protection” 50 SPF sunscreen, with B and P highlighted to stand out.

After reviewing the ad and sympathizing with the oil spill crisis, I was left with the lingering question: Was this a classic example of insensitive marketing, or was I just looking too deep into something that was intended to be lighthearted and comical.

A few news organizations posted articles about the ad, calling it “ill-conceived” and saying the spot “mocked” the spill. Spirit claims their advertisement was “misunderstood.”

Needless to say; within 24 hours, the ad was pulled from Spirit’s site and the airline responded to criticism with a semi-apologetic press release.

The ad campaign prompted outcry from news media to Twitter, with people calling it “offensive,” “tasteless,” and “a remarkable poor … choice.”

What are your thoughts? Did Spirit Airlines go too far, or are they just making the best of a bad situation?

My Best,
Christina Gurtowsky
Market Insights, LLC

Morgan explains: “I am scientist at heart, so when I received an e-mail from LinkedIn offering me a $50 credit towards creating a direct ad, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I have had precious little luck using Google AdWords and I wondered whether a LinkedIn ad would give me better results.” “To determine which ad performed better, I ran identical text-based ads at the same time, for a total of three days, explained Morgan,” I had initially planned on running the ads for an entire week, but when I noticed that the LinkedIn ad had exceeded my $50 allowance after only three days and resulted in no sales, I decided to end the experiment a little earlier than expected.”

The visual differences Morgan observed between the ads was that the LinkedIn Ad allowed her to include a company logo image, and target a specific audience. After reading the FAQ on the LinkedIn page, she went with the $3.00 minimum and a $10.00 daily budget. The LinkedIn FAQ was as follows: “Your daily budget is the amount of money you are willing to spend on a specific advertisement each day. DirectAds will attempt to show your advertisement until your daily budget is reached in a given day. Once your daily budget has been reached, your advertisement will stop showing for that day.” Starting off a hopeful consumer, Morgan’s feelings quickly changed after checking her stats on the third day. “At that point, neither ad had resulted in a sale on my website. The thing that disturbed me the most was that my bill for the LinkedIn ad had already hit $59.57,” she said. According to a three day budget, the math did not equal out correctly. “Ten times for three days does not equal $59.57,” stated Morgan. According to the LinkedIn Ad stats, her ad produced 4 clicks and 19856 impressions. This averaged a cost per $14.89 per click—which proved to be far over Morgan’s original budget.

Morgan’s Conclusion: “As I stated earlier, neither ad produced a sale, so I consider them both to be failures.” “I have decided not to use either Google AdWords or LinkedIn Direct ads. Instead, I am just going to continue my efforts towards social marketing and creating quality content.”

At Market Insights we have tried similar experiments with facebook ads, linkedin and google ad words. We have found our best results also come from creating quality content that people want to read. We love to hear what works for you.

Our Best,
Christina Gurtowsky
Media Consultant
Market Insights. LLC

Whether you’re interested in sending out promotional emails with special offers or informational newsletters, the program offers a wide selection of ready-to-use templates to choose from.

You can also build code into your web site and it allows visitors to sign up for any lists you may have. For example I manage multiple lists and guests can choose to sign up for my e newsletter, Trenton events and coupons, Festival information, Rotary information and much more. When they sign up, it automatically is added to your account, no need to retype or collect in any other manner.

Constant Contact offers a free 60 day trial to give new users a chance to explore the benefits of their service, while working on building a list from their website or email campaign. We can refer a link and you get an additional $30 credit to your account! Let me know if you’d like one kane@marketinsights.us.

They even have a Facebook page if you want to check what others are saying. http://www.facebook.com/constantcontact

My Best,
Kathy Kane
Market Insights, LLC

-What are competitors saying about your product and company?
-What do customers and prospects have to say about your product and company?
-What your competitor’s customers are saying about their own product?

If you want to rise above your competition and receive rad reviews from your customers, it’s essential you place customer satisfaction at the top of your list of priorities! No one wants to buy from a company with unhappy customers. The best way to build brand awareness is through excellent reviews and happy current customers; it’s critical to study and be able to identify what exactly your customers are saying.
When building brand awareness, it’s imperative one NEVER ignore a customer complaints. If there are issues, it’s critical they be recognized and addressed head on, immediately.

Moving forward, here are some positive ways of handling a negative situation:

Establish an immediate way of communication channel with the customer where the comment originated. Social media is not the forum to work through specific customer issues. Use this as an opportunity to express your concerns and encourage the customer to communicate off line. Customers want to be heard; so make sure you making it clear that as a company you are indeed listening.

Many top notch, successful companies have appointed individuals or an entire department to specifically monitor Twitter for the faintest mention of customer dissatisfaction, so that these concerns are addressed immediately. Many companies would rather take extreme measures to ensure customer satisfaction, than run the risk of degradation of our brand and hesitation in purchase intent.

My Best,
Christina Gurtowsky, Sales Coordinator
Market Insights, LLC

By narrowing down your market, you will get way more referrals because people will know exactly what your specialty is and who to send to you. Research has shown it is much more profitable to market to a narrower group. It is all about fully understanding the needs and wants of this group and then providing a variety of products and services to offer value to them.

In addition, your clients will be able to tell their friends about your company, and perhaps even refer more people to your way. Niche marketing makes it possible for people to better view you as an expert in your field. By being the best, and most knowledgeable, it is more likely you will get asked to compose articles on your subject, and speak to groups at conferences or seminars.

When you know who are you are marketing to it’s easy to determine where your marketing energy and dollars should be spent.

It’s essential for your business’s success to master and focus on your niche market. Are you still experiencing trouble with identifying who your niche market is? If you answer “yes,” consider taking some time to ask yourself these following questions:

-How do I set myself apart from the competition?
-What is it that my current clients have in common?
-What is different about the services or products that I offer?
-What are the “extras” that I bring to the market?

Still experiencing trouble finding the answer? Contact us! Market Insights is specialized is helping local businesses uncover and reveal their most sought after talents. We will help you narrow it down, and then market it from there. Take advantage of our services that you may share a particular interest or expertise in, and see where that can lead you! By the way our “niche” happens to be the Downriver area, in Southeast Michigan, getting to know the Downriver market is unique so let us show you how they like to be marketed to!

My Best,
Christina Gurtowsky, Sales Coordinator
Market Insights, LLC

Another place to put your story is in articles. Ezine Articles as it also has a very high page rank and The search engines love it and will rank you very high for the related keywords you use. PRlog is another quick and easy place to send out articles about your business, but you are limited in number of words. It also has a great search rating. Lastly, I love making videos. Create yourself a Youtube channel. I know, most people are not comfortable in front of a camera, but get over yourself. Create a video of your story or have others tell your story and put it up. Some people use that same video to introduce themselves on to new friends on Facebook. You Tube is currently the easiest way to get high search ranking if you follow a few tips to be revealed next time.

Branding and positioning yourself takes time. Your content doesn’t just appear overnight. It takes strategy and it takes work, so just keep posting!

My Best,
Kathy Kane
Market Insights, LLC

The similarities
• You have a profile
• You can upload a photo and some information about yourself
• You post “updates” answering the question “what are you doing right now?” or “what’s on your mind?”

Your Facebook profile serves as an online poster that tells your friends “all about you”. It’s a hub where you can summarize what’s going on in your world, and other people can look at your page and see a snapshot of your life. You could conceivably complete your profile, and then do little or nothing with it, and it still serves its purpose – to stay in touch with friends. You can log in only once a week and still get a lot out of Facebook.

Twitter is not like this at all. Your profile is much simpler – it shows (at most) your photo, your location, a website link, a brief bio, and your most recent tweets. If you set up your Twitter account and do little or nothing to it, it doesn’t work at all. The heart and soul of Twitter is interacting with other people. If you only log in once a week, you may get something out of it, but you’ll be missing the true wealth of Twitter, which is constantly streaming information and connectivity, and real-time interaction.

Twitter doesn’t make much sense unless you’re actively using it. The foundation of your Facebook experience is your profile – you post updates, photos, etc. – and other people’s profiles, and the interaction that takes place between friends. On Twitter, your profile is not the foundation. Most probably, the only time anyone will ever look at your Twitter profile is when they are deciding whether to follow you or not. They’ll spend about ten seconds on your profile and then move on.

The point of Twitter is to listen, talk, and engage in conversation with other people who are also using Twitter. This all starts to make a lot more sense as you follow more people who tweet on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are setting up Twitter profiles with the idea that it’s something like Facebook – you create a profile that other people will look at, and then something will happen. But Twitter doesn’t work that way! It requires you to be more proactive and more involved than many other social networking sites.

Picture Twitter as a river. All the people using Twitter all over the world are contributing to this giant river of tweets. When you join in, you’re adding your tiny stream of tweets into the river, and when you follow people, you’re taking in another tiny part of the river. No one could possibly consume the whole river, so don’t even try! And if you just set up a profile, follow a couple people, and tweet once, it’s like sitting by the river in a lawn chair, sticking your toe in the water, and complaining that “this river is no good for swimming!” You have to dive in!

Once you’re following some people, and other people are following you, the conversation can begin. It takes time and effort to establish your own little “Twitter stream” and to get comfortable swimming in it. As you follow people, they will follow you back, and as you reply to people, they’ll reply back, or comment on your tweets.
If this still seems confusing, let’s compare Twitter to something we’re all familiar with: email.

Interaction on Twitter is a lot like email:

@reply

Email wouldn’t be very useful if we couldn’t reply. On Twitter, replying is really important too. You can reply to anyone publicly, or reference them, by typing @ followed by their username (no space). If you’re talking about someone else, refer to them by their @username.

Example:

@corporatethings I really enjoyed your class! (reply)

or

I attended a great class by @corporatethings today. (reference)

Referencing other people is kind of like a cc in email. It includes them in the conversation without talking to them directly. On your Twitter homepage, there’s an @replies tab. This will show you any tweet with your @username in it. @replies that you send are visible to anyone and will show up in your public Twitter stream.

Direct Message

Talk to someone privately via direct message, or “DM”. You do this by typing “d username” (this time WITH a space!)

Example: d corporatetings I really enjoyed you class!

These messages are private and go to your DM “inbox”. You can only send DM’s to people who follow you (and conversely, you can only receive DM’s from people you’re following).

Re-tweeting
The re-tweet, or “RT” is like an email forward. When someone else tweets something interesting or useful that you want to share with all your followers, you can re-tweet it. Be sure to reference the person you got it from by including their @username. Re-tweets are either preceded with RT, or are noted by including “via @username” somewhere in the tweet.

Example:

RT @corporatethings Free webinar class! http://www…

or

Free organizing class! http://www… (via @corporatethings)

#hashtags

Hashtags are a huge part of the functionality of Twitter, and are (loosely) akin to an email’s subject line. (However, not every tweet needs to have a hashtag.) Hashtags are basically a way to “tag” a tweet in order to make it easier for people to find by searching. You add a hashtag by typing the # symbol, followed by your tag word or term of choice (no space).

Example:

@corporatethings I really enjoyed your class about #webinar today.

or

Want to get #webinar? Check out this free class by @corporatethings http://www…

Hashtags are commonly used to organize around events or popular topics. For example, people tweeting about American Idol might tag their tweets #americanidol. Or, people attending a business conference could arrange a “tweet-up” (yes, that’s a Twitter meet-up) or share info about the conference by using a hashtag.

If this all still seems confusing, follow some people who tweet regularly and just observe. You’ll see them using all these interacting tools, and it will start to make more sense.

Twitter is what you make of it. By understanding what Twitter is (and what it’s not) and by using @replies, DM’s, RT’s, and #hashtags to connect with others, you’ll be able to get more out of Twitter, give more value to your followers, and use Twitter effectively for your business.

All this being said, it works for some businesses and not for others. It also depends how you use it to get the best benefit. I admit I do not use it to its full potential, and I know enough to know what to do, but finding the time to do it and making sure it generates results is another full time job. So for now I suggest people get on it and do what you can to build conversations. Don’t expect to generate revenue but use it to generate awareness. Think of it as the skipping stone in a ripple effect on water. Throw it out there and see what happens.

The number of ways to sort your customers really depends on the needs of your business. Here are just a few of the ways you can segment your most profitable customers:

1) What do your best customers have in common? Are they in a common industry? Do they seem to have the same role at their company? Do they face a similar problems or challenges? Similar buying patterns? How does your service help them? Do they belong to similar clubs or charities? Do they have the same interests, attitudes and habits?

2) How did you attract your top customers? Website? Advertising? Conference? Networking? Cold calls? On-line Newtorking? Referals?

You may be surprised at the results! Once you’ve divided customers into sub-segments, consider the implications for your marketing strategy: Make sure your initiatives are aligned with the profile of your best customers!

My Best,
Kathy Kane
Market Insights, LLC