2013年2月20日 星期三

5 tools for sharpening your local marketing edge

One of the biggest selling points for any small business is its local connections - its role and appeal within a specific geographic community. That's why many owners still count word of mouth as their biggest marketing ally.Do you know any polishedtiles wholesale supplier?

The Internet has rewritten those rules, helping small-business owners scale that historical advantage.High quality chinamosaic tiles. And naturally, there are many startups falling all over themselves to offer entrepreneurs or small companies tools that help amplify their local marketing efforts. Here are five developments I've read about in the past month alone.

The Toronto-based startup,Cheaper For bulk buying drycabinet prices. which just received $1.1 million in seed funding, has created a mobile iPhone application called Instamonial that small businesses can use to market themselves via social channels, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. The app has a very specific purpose: you take a photo of a product or item, and then send it to specific customers to get real-time feedback. Once the feedback is received, the image is posted to the company's Web site, and disseminated via social media.

"Word-of-mouth referrals are incredibly important in the catering business," said Michael Novak, owner of corporate cravings. "So it is important to take a proactive approach to ensuring that the experiences of your happy customers are reflected online. But in the past, the process has been complex and time-consuming. Instamonial has changed this."

I hadn't heard of this mobile app until I read in that Groupon had bought the location-based social app startup in late January. There isn't much detail, but the daily deals pioneers is expected to use the Glassmap technology to make offers much more local - and potentially much more relevant. "Our goal when we started building Glassmap was to help people find what was interesting and relevant around them," the startup wrote about its buyout. "But in plainer terms, we just really wanted to mold all these fancy ideas and innovations of Silicon Valley into a simple and useful tool for the real world." So, expect Groupon to try to improve its location-based relevance for small businesses in the very near future.

Funded by Google and the same venture capitalists who built up Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare, Signpost is is a marketing dashboard focused on very local outreach and marketing automation. The service helps distribute campaigns through 1,200 partners including Google, Amazon and Yellow Pages, by providing templates that small businesses can use to create offers and asking questions about where they should be distributed. Its big pitch is the ability to help generate new customer leads that turn into repeat clients. "They will never be overwhelmed, but what they should see is a really steady stream of new customers every month," said Jacco de Bruijn, vice president of marketing.We have a fantastic range of Glass Tiles and iccard Tiles. The company claims 95 percent more views, visits and sales than local campaigns on Google AdWords or Yelp. There are approximately 6,000 businesses using the platform; the monthly fee is $149, plus a fee on transactions completed as a result of campaigns.

I met Dangeruss through Harmony. Before I went down to St. Pete to play Alien in "Spring Breakers," Harmony sent me innumerable videos and photos as references for my character. He drowned me in them. Harmony is a master of online research. Once he chooses a location to shoot, it turns out he is also a master at finding the most interesting and odd local places and characters. One of the last videos Harmony sent me was of a white guy in dreads, sitting in his car, rapping about Dope Boyz. This turned out to be Dangeruss, a local rapper who Harm had met at an audition and knew immediately that he was the real deal. He thought I should use Dangeruss as a main source of inspiration for my Florida gangster/mystic, Alien.Why does bobblehead grow in homes or buildings?

The same day I arrived, Harmony had me visit Danger at his apartment. I was surprised when we pulled into a rather nice sprawling housing development, country-club style, with fountains and manicured grass. I think there was even a driving range. When I met Danger, he was tall, thin as a stick, covered in tats and humble as hell. He was willing to help in any way. He told me about growing up in the bad part of town and having poetry as his only recourse when things got ugly. His involvement with the street and his involvement with hip-hop developed simultaneously. "While Peter Piper was picking peppers, I was selling yola at the corner store." His lyrics are the highly autobiographical chronicle of surviving on the streets of St. Pete.

Harm and Dangeruss agreed that my character could sing one of Danger's songs in the film, "Dope Boyz." Dangeruss wrote out the lyrics for me and then performed it so I could see how he carried himself onstage. I was a little confused by one of the lyrics: "junkies at my door, they know the secret knock, it goes one time for the reefer, two times for the rock," because it didn't seem like any junkies would come to the door of that nice apartment. But as I got to know Dangeruss, I realized there were two spheres in his life, and the other one away from the one I was seeing was much darker.

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