Everyday Marketing

By Mike Bova

(April 2011) As I write this, my wife and I are in the process of booking a hotel in Anaheim, Calif., for our family vacation this week. We are checking out multiple hotels on such sites as Expedia and Hotels.com.

We are having a hard time making a final decision because we want the most bang for our buck. The two keys for us: price and amenities.

Some of the motels/hotels charge you for wireless Internet and parking, which is ridiculous. Some of the motels/hotels don’t offer microwaves or refrigerators, which is also ridiculous when it comes to lodging at a place near Disneyland when you want to save money.

These establishments don’t realize something: Little things mean a lot.

As a business owner, you need to offer added value. If you are a restaurant, you should offer free refills on soda. Also, you may want to offer a night where kids eat free. Believe it or not, that is very attractive to parents who are on a tight budget.

If you are a car dealer, you may want to consider offering discounted oil changes to your customers or some other incentives.

For the rest of you businesses, offer something. The benefits and features of your products are just not enough. You need to offer a little more.

Do some brainstorming and figure out what that “more” is. Talk to your customers, and listen to what they have to say. Your customers might give you some great ideas.

Just a word of advice: it’s OK to implement those ideas. Don’t discount them because they came from someone else and not you. Don’t be that prideful, because pride goes before the fall.

This should help you in your quest to increase business, and remember: little things mean a ton.

Mike Bova is vice president of M3P Media LLC and publisher of the Madison County Courier. He can be reached at Mike@m3pmedia.com or 315-404-8200.

Everyday Marketing

By Mike Bova

If one is the loneliest number, then six is the un-loneliest number. Let me tell you what I mean. If we are supposedly all six degrees of Kevin Bacon, then we are probably all six degrees of everyone.

The number six is also significant because according to marketing statistics, your message is best remembered when a person sees it or hears it six times. Because of these things, I like the number six.

Oh yeah, and the joke: Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7-8-9.

Now let’s talk about the six-degrees concept. As a business owner, you need to connect with everyone you can. You can make a lot of connections offline, but the way to make the most connections is through social media.

Websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and other sites like these have made it possible to connect with old classmates, long-lost relatives, acquaintances, co-workers and even people you don’t know.

In an effort to connect with as many people as possible, you’re going to need to be extra extroverted. You have to take the bull by the horns and search out people from your past and present because they will help you with your future.

Don’t assume people from your past, you know those people you haven’t spoken with in awhile, are in the same profession or working the same job they once did. People do oftentimes switch professions.

Take me for example.

I was in and out of the construction business for 17 years, seven of those years owning my own construction business. Because of a back injury and a new baby, I decided to stay in the wood business, just a different form: newspaper!

I want to encourage you to be as social as you can. Offline, be a social butterfly, which is difficult when you have a family. That being said, you need to pick your battles. Go to as many events as you can, and join as many groups as you can. Online, put your hands to the plow, and spend some time searching people out and ‘friend’ them.

Join every social website you can, and be diligent in checking and responding email from these sites, posting to these sites and sending and accepting ‘friend’ requests. Try to make contact with as many people as you can to let them know who you are, what you do, why you’re the best at what you do and your call to action.

The more social you are, the better your results.

Mike Bova is vice president of M3P Media LLC and publisher of the Madison County Courier. He can be reached at mike@m3pmedia.com or 315-404-8200.

Everyday Marketing

By Mike Bova

Let me give you some helpful information about websites. First of all, your business, no matter how large or small (or what category of business you fall in) needs a website. We live in a digital age, and almost everyone uses a computer.

Having a website does not guarantee your business will be successful. Your website has to be search engine-friendly. Go to one of the major search engines and type in some keywords related to your business. Is your website listed in the first two pages? If not, you need to optimize your site.

Please do not attempt this yourself. Getting your website found in the major search engines is best left to a professional. If you contact me, I can refer you to someone who can help you.

Out of the approximately 183 million websites in the world, how does your website rank? Go to alexa.com, click on the “Site Info” tab, type in your URL, i.e. madisoncountycourier.com, and hit the enter button.

If your traffic rank is “No Data,” your website is not ranked at all. It’s not even in the top 20 million. This means you need more traffic to your website.

You should have a page on your website entitled “Resources.” You should have a directory on this page of area businesses, related businesses or any other business that would want to exchange links with you.

Traffic to your site comes from three sources: direct traffic (people going directly to your website), referral sites (other sites where you have a link to your website) and search engines.

So, exchange links with as many sites as you can.

Content is king. The more content you have on your website, the more you will be found in the search engines. The more you update your website, the more the search engines will crawl your site and the more the search engines will consider your website important or relevant.

Lastly, I want to talk about bounce rate. Have you ever done a search and clicked on a listing only to find out it wasn’t what you wanted? What did you do? Chances are, you clicked the “back” button.

That is called a “bounce.”

Your website has a bounce rate or bounce percentage; the lower your bounce percentage, the better. You don’t want people to visit your site and click the back button. If your bounce rate is too high, your website will fall dramatically in the search engine rankings.

For more helpful tips on websites, sales, marketing, advertising, management, leadership and business in general, drop me a line at mike@m3pmedia.com or call me at 315-404-8200.

Mike Bova is vice president of M3P Media LLC and publisher of the Madison County Courier. He can be reached at Mike@m3pmedia.com or 315-404-8200.

Everyday Marketing

By Mike Bova

(March 2011) A lot of people ask me how I’m doing. I tell them, “I’m plugging away.” I am amazed about how many people now use that expression.

You know, sometimes the efforts you make to promote your business seem to be in vain. Sometimes doing the right things seem to go unnoticed or unappreciated.

I want to encourage you, keep doing the right things. It may not seem like it, but people notice, and not only that, people tell others about the things you’re doing.

In business, you never want to cut corners or take shortcuts. Making your business successful is hard work. It takes time. I can’t think of one business on this planet that was an overnight sensation.

So, keep plugging away. Keep opening your pie hole and tell people about your business. Keep making customers extremely happy so they will open their pie holes and tell people about your business. Keep advertising so people never forget about your business.

Now, there are some things I want to warn you about. If you feel like you’ve done everything there is to do and nothing is working for you, it’s time to seek professional help. Not a shrink, a marketing professional. A professional that will help you come up with creative and affordable ways to not only get a message out to people, get the right message out to the right people.

Have you ever felt like you were missing something? This is where a professional would come in handy. You can brainstorm, come up with some great ideas and implement them.

Sometimes it only takes one great idea to put your business on the map.

Mike Bova is vice president of M3P Media LLC and publisher of the Madison County Courier. He can be reached at Mike@m3pmedia.com or 315-404-8200.

Everyday Marketing

By Mike Bova

When you are in business, you have to educate your customers and potential customers. You might need to tell them why your product or service is superior to your competitors’s, why your product or service is priceless or maybe even why your product or service is even needed at all.

This is easier said than done because you will have to educate and re-educate most of these people. You have to tell people again and again and again. That’s because we are human, and what we believe is not always correct.

I am constantly educating my customers and potential customers. It is my duty to inform them that the minimum they should advertise in a weekly newspaper is 13 consecutive weeks, because marketing research shows a person needs to see an ad six times before it “sinks in.”

It is my duty to inform them that advertising is an investment and a write-off, and that they need to advertise all the time because if they don’t, potential buyers will remember a competitor who is always advertising.

Because we are human, educating people can be frustrating. I want to encourage you to not get frustrated. You may think “I’ve told this person over and over, and they still don’t get it.”

Remember the “six times” rule I spoke about earlier. If it takes a person six times for an ad to sink in, it may take educating people six times before your message sinks in. When you educate and re-educate, you are planting and watering seeds.

So keep educating. Keep preaching your message to as many people who will listen.

Keep planting and watering seeds and, in due time, you will reap a harvest!

Mike Bova is vice president of M3P Media LLC and publisher of the Madison County Courier. He can be reached at Mike@m3pmedia.com or 315-404-8200.