Marketing made Manageable

Patricia Norins, publisher and CEO of Pinnacle Publishing Group, Inc., prefers employing marketing tactics that maintain visibility within the marketplace and do so on a modest budget. She stresses the importance of incorporating marketing into your business plan and presented 50 Low-Cost Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Bottom Line at the January Market. Having and implementing a smart marketing plan results in increased sales because it keeps your business “top of mind” while building strong relationships with customers to create a larger sense of community.

Since marketing as a whole can be somewhat abstract and overwhelming, Patricia recommends business owners write a brief marketing plan and spend more energy on implementation. Her formula for a six-sentence plan is as follows

• 1^st sentence: State your purpose (To motivate people to visit and buy from my store and website).
• 2^nd sentence: Emphasize your primary competitive advantage (I carry the widest selection of eco-friendly gifts).
• 3^rd sentence: Describe your target audience (men, women and children ages 2-100).
• 4^th sentence: List the marketing tools you’ll use to implement your plan.
• 5^th sentence: Identify your niche and what you really stand for (quality gifts from around the world).
• 6^th sentence: Provide your marketing budget. Patricia recommends this be 10% of your store’s budget.

Patricia suggests incorporating some of the following tools into your marketing strategy. List them in your 4^th sentence.

• Patricia notes that 80% of sales usually come from the top 30% of buyers. Motivate your current customers to buy from you through referral programs, frequent buyer cards, money-back guarantees and personal contact, such as hand-written thank-you notes. Ask your customers to engage through surveys, polling, testimonials and reviews.
• Establish a social media presence; add fresh content frequently; and interact with your customers through Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to create a sense of familiarity and community. Maximize your reach by using Facebook and Google advertising.
• Increase your email marketing by improving your email list, sending information on a regular schedule with call to action points and tracking your results. She suggests learning the CAN-Spam Act guidelines to make certain you are in compliance with the law.
• Improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by investing in your website and online presence. Add useful content to your website and update it regularly, blog frequently and link it to your website. Make certain your business is listed on websites like Google Maps and Yelp.
• Host events to offer customers a reason to come into your store to shop and tie in themes like a sale or charitable benefit. Partner with other businesses in the area to co-op marketing and advertising efforts and expenses. Create a newsworthy angle for the event and promote it to your local media through a press release.

Better Selling Leads to Better Sales

William Smith of William Smith Counseling returned to the AmericasMart Education Center to present “Getting to ‘I’ll Take It.’” According to William, successful retailing comes from properly hiring and training staff to increase the amount of daily transactions while raising the total dollar-amount-per-transaction through up-selling. By accomplishing these goals, you’ll both increase your bottom line and have satisfied customers wanting to return to your store.

He suggests training your staff to recognize the two main personality types – thinkers and feelers – and know the approach to selling that appeals to each individual. Thinkers use their brain to make purchases and want to know the details, facts and features of a product to help them determine if they want to buy the item. Feelers are emotionally driven to purchase and often select items based on form over function. Being able to identify customers’ personality types will help your staff control the shopping experience.

William suggests these steps to better retailing:

• Properly greet each customer.Make sure that the customer is addressed as they enter the store and that a salesperson is always on the floor.

• Create a personal and emotional connection with them.

  Most people buy from people they like. Therefore, it is important to engage each customer and make them feel comfortable.

• Discover their needs and get them to the proper merchandise.

  Ask probing questions (Who, What, Where and Why), rather than questions that they can answer with a “yes” or “no.”

• Explain merchandise features and their corresponding benefits to the customer.

  Make sure your staff is knowledgeable about the merchandise you sell and understands the features of those items.

• Carry unique merchandise.

  Make certain you offer items that are unique to your store and aren’t readily available for purchase online. Carry a selection of items that will give your customers a reason to return, rather than buying online.

•  Close the sale.

  Be able to identify visual and verbal clues that indicate the customer is ready to close the sale. Then, suggest additional items that are related to what they are purchasing, why they are making the purchase, or for whom they are buying. For instance, if the customer is purchasing a birthday gift, ask them if they have other upcoming events that may require a gift.

Finally, William stresses the importance of thanking your customers with either a follow-up email or hand-written thank-you note to reinforce positive feelings about their shopping experience and make them more likely to return.

Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles’ Top Ten Under 40 Tastemakers

Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles names its ten under 40 class

Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles magazine has presented an annual list of Atlanta’s top young tastemakers since 2006. Editorial Director Clinton Smith announced the ten members of the 2012 under-40 class during The Atlanta International Gift & Home Furnishings Market^® at AmericasMart. These creative and innovative individuals are making a lasting impression on the city’s interior spaces, creating works of art, and spreading the importance of dining, shopping and supporting all things local. This year’s list includes:

• Tucker Berta – director of marketing, W Atlanta-Midtown
• Kevin Gillespie – chef and author of Fire in my Belly
• Sarah Dorio – commercial photographer
• Amy Musarra – chair of the 2012 Decorators’ Show House & Gardens and manager of special events and projects for ADAC
• Amy Osaba – owner, Amy Osaba Event.Floral.Design
• Hillary Linthicum – co-founder, Design Collective
• Michel Boyd – owner and principal designer, SMITHBOYDinteriors
• James Farmer – author, A Time to Plant and A Time to Cook
• Kelly Ottinger – kellymarket.com
• Garnie Nygren – director of operations and head of real estate sales, Serenbe

To read more about each of these young tastemakers, pick up a copy of the February 2013 issue of Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles.

HGTV’s David Bromstad Brings a Splash of Color to Market

We were delighted to have David Bromstad, host of HGTV’s Color Splash, at Market where he presented, The Power of Color, to a packed, enthusiastic audience. David is passionate about color and its use in his designs, noting that color is an important part of how we live and the decisions we make on a daily basis. “Color is so important,” says David. “If you ask someone ‘Do you love the color purple?’ they will either be ‘yes,’ or ‘no,’ and it is a very hard response.” He continues “your favorite color is always something that is very true and dear to your heart.”

In the hour-long talk, David discussed the function of color, summarized positive and negative color associations, examined its psychological effects and explained why certain personality types tend to favor certain colors. For example, red is known as the most sensuous of all the colors. According to David, it represents love and sexuality, but it can also represent the opposite extreme of hatred and violence. It brings energy and warmth and is known to stimulate blood pressure and appetite. It is associated with people who love, are passionate and have great energy. They’re impulsive, assertive and aggressive. They have courage, strength, and power, and are adventurous and a little dangerous with a need for personal freedom.

David stresses the importance of color, especially when designing your store and storefront, setting up windows and when designing your own products. “Using the right color to stimulate that right person is so key,” states David. He suggests that every designer and storeowner research the psychology of color and how it affects behavior. He recommends that if you own a gourmet foods store, use warmer colors like red, orange and yellow, since these colors stimulate appetite and make people want to eat. He notes that certain colors can make people want to spend money and others can make people want to just hang out.

Using a bold color can make someone walk by a store and entice them to enter, but if you are displaying items like clothing, it is best to use a neutral like white or grey. Grey is the easiest color for the eye to adjust to, considered psychologically neutral and it promotes serenity. David stresses that a blank slate doesn’t need to be boring: “Bring in texture or use white-on-white or neutral wallpaper to create visual interest.”

Crystal Vilkaitis Explains QR Codes

Crystal Vilkaitis is today’s guest blogger. The owner of Crystal Media, a company dedicated to helping retailers and manufactures integrate proven social media and mobile marketing strategies into their businesses, Crystal will be presenting at The Atlanta International Gift & Home Furnishings Market® in January 2013. Her first Education Center seminar, Seven Sure-Fire Social Media Tips to Increase Traffic and Sales, will be at 1 p.m. on Friday, January 11 and again on Saturday at 11:30 a.m. Her second seminar, Proven Mobile Marketing Success, will be on Friday at 3 p.m.

Crystal’s post offers a look into how Quick Response (QR) Codes work and the potential future of this expanding technology.

Mobile Marketing with QR Codes

QR Code Marketing has been adapted by businesses around the world with ease and excitement. Along with social media, the new deal phenomenon and flash sale sites, mobile marketing is changing the way we sell goods and services. Before all of these innovative game changers surfaced, the business landscape looked much different.

For those of you who are new to QR Codes, the QR stands for ‘Quick Response.’ To scan a QR Code you must use a QR Reader application, which are free, using your smartphone. You simply open the Reader application and scan the QR Code just like you would take a picture. Once scanned, your phone will display a message and take you to a URL or something else depending on what the code is being used for. Often these codes are black and white, but now they can be any color. Below you’ll see an example of a QR Code. If you have a smartphone, I suggest you download a QR Reader application and scan the code it to test out this technology.

Try it out – scan this code with a QR Reader with your Smartphone to ‘Like’ my business on Facebook.

Now, “back when I was kid,” tech companies were strategizing how to get businessmen, families and qualifying individuals to buy a machine that sat on a desk, plugged into the wall, turned on, dialed up and allowed you to talk to others around the world. We no longer had to hand-write a letter. We didn’t even have to pick up the phone anymore, the Internet completely changed the way we communicated with others.

Businesses had to adapt and figure out how these tools could speed up their processes, produce more for less money and increase their exposure, both online and in the physical world. Marketing changed. We started building websites for our businesses, buying online banner ads, creating email addresses and trying to collect email addresses to digitally send marketing communications.

Now, a business can create a black and white (or red, yellow, blue, rainbow) QR Code in seconds that is filled with a message to their customers. It’s a real-world hyperlink that takes you to a video, website, Facebook Fan page, product information, special savings code, phone number, email address and more. Then, you display it wherever you’d like it to be – in the window, at the cash register, on a t-shirt, sticker, hat, sign, post-card, building – anywhere! To create a QR Code for your store, check out http://qrstuff.com.

More consumers are becoming familiar with this technology, especially with the help of big brands. Last year Toys“R”Us® ramped up their holiday mobile marketing strategy by integrating QR Codes into their The Great Big Toys“R”Us® Book catalog, which allowed shoppers to learn more about their products before making their purchase. Simard also used QR Codes to increase website traffic and conversions by placing them in magazines their target audience was reading. Each code led to a video hosted on their site highlighting kitchen trends and designs. Through this mobile marketing effort Simard doubled the average time a visitor stayed on their website and sales increased by 18% from the previous year.

Looking to the future, I think we’ll see more social integration and sharing of QR Codes, such as liking a code on Facebook and displaying it on our Wall or in a photo album to gain viral exposure. You’ll begin to see more websites offering better code design features, such as clip art, the ability to turn logos and photos into codes. More products will feature QR Codes directly on them, which may include product info, price or a YouTube video about the item.

The possibilities show us that now, more than ever, it’s important for independent retailers to drive traffic into their stores and provide value so customers won’t turn to doing all their shopping online. Attend my Market seminars to learn more about how to use QR Codes to market your store, as well as gain insight on other mobile marketing tactics. Visit my retail-focused blog and sign up for free social and mobile marketing tips at crystalmedia.co.

– Crystal Vilkaitis

Lindsay Roberts on Creating Picture Perfect Posts

Lindsay Roberts, founder of TheGiftInsider.com, is back with her final guest post. Today she shares how to boost your business’ exposure by utilizing photographs on some of the most popular social media sites. Be sure to add Lindsay’s seminar, Top Picks in Gifts, to your MyMarket! Plan for the January 2013 Atlanta Gift & Home Furnishings Market. Her seminar is Thursday, January 10 at 10 a.m. in Building 2 WestWing, Floor 6, Escalator Lobby.

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*First, get on Pinterest! Pinterest is a huge traffic source and is very important for building your brand. For example @TheGiftInsider ‘s number 1 traffic source is Pinterest. It’s especially great for shops with creative, personalized or custom gift ideas as these gifts are popular pins on the site. Follow us for updates on our top trends in gifting. http://pinterest.com/Thegiftinsider/

*Second, pictures are what it’s all about these days. Take high quality and high resolution photos of your products and shop, then post them on Facebook, add them to a blog post, pin them to your Pinterest boards, and add them to Instagram. People want to see and share what your shop is all about.

*Finally, people love sharing their own pictures. Ask your customers to send you photos of them using or gifting products they’ve purchase at your shop. Use a dedicated hashtag, ours is #gifthelp and let people show off their gifting success. One of our most popular blog posts is a gift one of our users shared with us: http://thegiftinsider.com/blogs/2012/05/29/how-cute-gifthelp-in-action/.

– Lindsay Roberts

Lindsay Roberts’ Guide to Garnering Attention Online

Lindsay Roberts from TheGiftInsider.com is presenting a seminar, Top Picks in Gifts, at the January 2013 Atlanta Gift & Home Furnishings Market. Our second guest post from Lindsay is focused on ways you can garner more online attention, as well as local press. Be sure to attend Lindsay’s seminar where she’ll share her 10 favorite gifts found in the permanent showrooms at AmericasMart. Thursday, January 10 at 10 a.m. in Building 2 WestWing, Floor 6, Escalator Lobby.

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*Ask a Tastemaker, like a top blogger or relevant expert to curate your holiday gift guide or a board on your Pinterest page. People are much more likely to look to influencers or curated commerce to determine their next purchase. Incorporating this marketing tool will help bring you credibility and additional exposure.

*Create video demonstrations and recommendations of your top Holiday gift ideas. Videos are easy to share and a great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool. Have a couple of your employees be the dedicated video gurus and let people see the personality behind your shop. Be sure to set up a page on YouTube to get the full search benefits. Here’s ours as an example: youtube.com/lindsayeroberts.

*Get yourself some press! Reach out to bloggers and your local news station to get your products and store featured in their Holiday Gift Guide posts and segments. Be sure to highlight these mentions on your website and social media pages for instant credibility. Bloggers won’t know about you unless you reach out to them, so spend some time pitching people who are a good fit for your brand.

– Lindsay Roberts

Guest Blogger Lindsay Roberts’ Tips for Increasing Holiday Sales

Lindsay Roberts is the founder of TheGiftInsider.com. Her passion for seeking out unique and creative gifts for friends and loved ones prompted her to start her website as a way to share her knowledge and great finds with others. AmericasMart is looking forward to having Lindsay join us at the January 2013 Atlanta Gift & Home Furnishings Market. She’ll be scouring the Market to select her 10 favorite gifts found in the permanent showrooms at AmericasMart and share these treasures, along with her gift-giving tips, during her seminar Top Picks in Gifts.

Lindsay will be offer her insights into the gifting business over the next few weeks. Today she shares a few things that you can do in-store to help increase your gift sales during this holiday shopping season.

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*If you own a small business, be sure to participate in Small Business Saturday, on November 24th. People love supporting local retailers, you just need to give them incentives and this is an easy way to do it! Find out more information at www.smallbusinesssaturday.com.

*Make it easy for shoppers to theme and bundle gifts. Display small items with similar themes in the same section of your store. If people don’t find a larger gift perfect for who they are shopping for, this makes it easy for them to purchase a few similar items that they can wrap together.

*Encourage shoppers to stock up on go-to gifts by offering deals for buying multiples of the same items. Having gifts on-hand will alleviate some holiday stress when things like last-minute hostess and thank you gifts or people not planned for pop up. This is a win-win for both you and your customers.

*My trend pick: Geek is chic, as is anything retro. People currently love to give and receive nostalgic gifts with a new or updated twist. Be sure to stock up on these for your store this Holiday season. The Geeky category has been the most popular on my website. Check it out here for inspiration: www.thegiftinsider.com/sub-category/geeky.

– Lindsay Roberts

Daily Strut – Umgee U.S.A.

This gallery contains 37 photos.

It’s More Important to Be Kind than Clever

One of the more heart-warming stories to zoom around the Internet lately involves a young man, his dying grandmother, and a bowl of clam chowder from Panera Bread. It’s a little story that offers big lessons about service, brands, and the human side of business — a story that underscores why efficiency should never come at the expense of humanity.

The story, as told in AdWeek, goes like this: Brandon Cook, from Wilton, New Hampshire, was visiting his grandmother in the hospital. Terribly ill with cancer, she complained to her grandson that she desperately wanted a bowl of soup, and that the hospital’s soup was inedible (she used saltier language). If only she could get a bowl of her favorite clam chowder from Panera Bread! Trouble was, Panera only sells clam chowder on Friday. So Brandon called the nearby Panera and talked to store manager Suzanne Fortier. Not only did Sue make clam chowder specially for Brandon’s grandmother, she included a box of cookies as a gift from the staff.

It was a small act of kindness that would not normally make headlines. Except that Brandon told the story on his Facebook page, and Brandon’s mother, Gail Cook, retold the story on Panera’s fan page. The rest, as they say, is social-media history. Gail’s post generated 500,000 (and counting) “likes” and more than 22,000 comments on Panera’s Facebook page. Panera, meanwhile, got something that no amount of traditional advertising can buy — a genuine sense of affiliation and appreciation from customers around the world.

Marketing types have latched on to this story as an example of the power of social media and “virtual word-of-mouth” to boost a company’s reputation. But I see the reaction to Sue Fortier’s gesture as an example of something else — the hunger among customers, employees, and all of us to engage with companies on more than just dollars-and-cents terms. In a world that is being reshaped by the relentless advance of technology, what stands out are acts of compassion and connection that remind us what it means to be human.

As I read the story of Brandon and his grandmother, I thought back to a lecture delivered two years ago by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, to the graduating seniors of my alma mater, Princeton University. Bezos is nothing if not a master of technology — he has built his company, and his fortune, on the rise of the Internet and his own intellect. But he spoke that day not about computing power or brainpower, but about his grandmother — and what he learned when he made her cry.

Even as a 10-year-old boy, it turns out, Bezos had a steel-trap mind and a passion for crunching numbers. During a summer road trip with his grandparents, young Jeff got fed up with his grandmother’s smoking in the car — and decided to do something about it. From the backseat, he calculated how many cigarettes per day his grandmother smoked, how many puffs she took per cigarette, the health risk of each puff, and announced to her with great fanfare, “You’ve taken nine years off your life!”

Bezos’s calculations may have been accurate — but the reaction was not what he expected. His grandmother burst into tears. His grandfather pulled the car off to the side of the road and asked young Jeff to step out. And then his grandfather taught a lesson that this now-billionaire decided to share the with the Class of 2010: “My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, ‘Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.'”

That’s a lesson I wish more businesspeople understood — a lesson that is reinforced by the reaction to this simple act of kindness at Panera Bread. Indeed, I experienced something similar not so long ago, and found it striking enough to devote an HBR blog post to the experience. In my post, I told the story of my father, his search for a new car, a health emergency that took place in the middle of that search — and a couple of extraordinary (and truly human) gestures by an auto dealer that put him at ease and won his loyalty.

“What is it about business that makes it so hard to be kind?” I asked at the time. “And what kind of businesspeople have we become when small acts of kindness feel so rare?”

That’s what’s really striking about the Panera Bread story — not that Suzanne Fortier went out of her way to do something nice for a sick grandmother, but that her simple gesture attracted such global attention and acclaim.

So by all means, encourage your people to embrace technology, get great at business analytics, and otherwise ramp up the efficiency of everything they do. But just make sure all their efficiency doesn’t come at the expense of their humanity. Small gestures can send big signals about who we are, what we care about, and why people should want to affiliate with us. It’s harder (and more important) to be kind than clever.

Source: BILL TAYLOR, William C. Taylor is cofounder of Fast Company magazine and author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, published January 4, 2011.