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[Editor's note: While today's guest article focuses on location based marketing for franchises, it is equally applicable to any off-line business - from the local "mom and pop" store, to the niche marketing enterprise. The whole point is to increase traffic to your store and/or sales leads for your business. As technology advances, location based marketing - and the Internet sites that support this type of marketing - will become an ever more important part of the local, or niche marketer's, overall marketing strategy. ~Scott]

By Bob Richman

Internet marketing has revolutionized the way that people can find your franchise business. However, many owners of franchises aren’t aware that they can use their website as more than just a fancy brochure. In fact, the combination of social media, smart phones and your website can create a powerful system for getting more feet in your business’s door.

Here are five tips for using location-based online marketing in order to increase the success of your franchise business.

1. Learn the location based marketing platforms.

Although your website is an important piece of the puzzle, the main components of location-based marketing are going to be with a variety of third-party sites that allow smartphone users to learn about businesses around them. They range from service selection engines (that allow users to select a service in their area based on the location of their phone) to review sites (that aggregate reviews of a business for other users to read). Local customers can “check in” with these platforms when they are at your location or have used your business. By using these sites you can keep local customers updated on special deals and also make sure that there are good things being said about your business. The most popular location-based marketing platforms are FourSquare, Loopt, Brightkite and Google Latitude. Others are Yelp and Facebook.

2. Decide how you’re going to use these sites to market your franchise business.

Before you start plugging yourself into these networks you need to set some goals. Do you want more fit traffic in the store? Do you want more people at a particular time of day? Do you want to sell more of one item? By specifying your objectives you’ll be able to better approach these sites.

3. Register for each site to list your business.

Make sure that your business is listed with each of the major sites. If it’s already been listed by local customers and the information is incorrect, be sure to contact the site owner. They are normally happy to help you correct errors. If you have a physical location, place stickers or signs in your location in order to make sure that customers now that your business can be found on foursquare, Yelp etc.

4. Use fun and exciting promotions on the site.

Location based marketing sites can help you run promotions for your franchise business that can get people in the door or more people calling. For example, on foursquare you can run a special that allows users to get a free item if they check in with the site a certain number of times. This creates a lot of activity on your profile on a certain location-based marketing site, which can in turn encourage more people to patronize your business. You can run raffles, specials or when a customer first checks in or something like what is described above (a type of “digital punch card.”)

5. Get involved with the community.

A lot of franchise owners shy away from review style site because they think that the ability for customers to post to a bad review is a bad thing. However, social media is not a one-way megaphone. You need to interact with your audience. Thank customers for good reviews and try to respond to bad reviews as much as you possibly can.

With these tips you can make location-based marketing work for you. Visit any of the sites listed above to get started today.

To view additional franchises and profiles for 1,500+ franchises for sale, please visit FranchiseGenius.com.

FranchiseGenius.com is a free, comprehensive franchise selection resource, with 1,500+ franchise opportunities summarized. Franchise Genius is used by prospective entrepreneurs to research franchises in all industries and price ranges.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bob_Richman

http://EzineArticles.com/?Marketing-Tips-For-Franchises—Use-Location-Based-Marketing&id=4819142

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Technorati Tags: Brightkite, Foursquare, Google Latitude, location-based marketing, niche marketing tools, Yelp

By Scott Spooner

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz going around about “QR Codes“.

A “QR Code” (for “quick response” code) is a 2-D extension of the traditional bar codes. The difference is that a QR Code can carry a lot more information than a traditional bar code. For example,  the following QR Code contains my contact info (name, address, phone), web site, email and more.

Now here is where it gets real interesting: if you are a niche marketer and part of your strategy includes location-based, or promotion-based, marketing, then you’ll want to take a close look at QR Codes. Why? Because these codes can also carry promotional content. That means you can create a promotion for your store, products, or services, and carry that promotion through to your QR Code. Since QR Codes are easy to create, you can change promotions often and still use these codes to help with the marketing.

So, how do they work?  It is simpler than you may think.

You start by going to Google, typing in  “QR Code generator”, and selecting any of several free generators. Enter in your content and generate your code for download. From there, you can print up the code onto anything you want to promote; a flier, a poster, even a business card!

Someone with a smart phone can point their phone’s camera at the code, capture the code with any of a number of free application software, and be sent directly to your web site for detailed information on the product, promotion, and/or company.

So, take a look at QR Codes. They are easy to set-up and they just might help generate the type of traffic (and sales) you are looking for!

I’ve included the following video (below) that helps explain the whole concept.

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• What is a QR Code? – QR Codes – Library Research Guides at Boise State University (guides.boisestate.edu)
• How to use QR codes on Android phone (cash-bandit.com)

QR Code Video

Advertising with QR Codes

CNET’s Natali Del Conte showed how QR codes may change the future of advertising. Customers scan the codes with their cell phones to receive information.

Technorati Tags: location-based marketing, niche marketing, niche marketing tools, QR Code

Image via Wikipedia

Editor’s note: Today’s guest article focuses in on “qualified traffic”, and how it is differentiated from general visitor counts to your web site.  Learn how to spot traffic and watch your conversions increase. ~Scott]

Every website has different things that will separate those who count as qualified traffic, and those who are merely visitors that are inflating and skewing their analytics numbers. A good marketing idea for small business is to define clearly who their qualified traffic is, and where it is coming from. Then, you can start to focus more on those sources of traffic and draw in more qualified visitors to your site. Ultimately, the quality of your visitors can matter far more than your total site views.

To begin, we must first define what is meant as a qualified visitor. In essence, a qualified visitor is one that we feel is actually potentially a customer. When you’re using raw data, such as Google Analytics, you never know how many visitors are actually coming to your site and looking for the data that you want them to be looking for. Some may be bot hits, some may be miss-clicks and some may be people just wasting time on the internet. So, you need to define your qualified visitors are.

A good way to look at it is that you need for a customer to have three things to be qualified. First, they need to actually have the money required to make a purchase from your site. Second, they must fill any prerequisites involved in purchasing your product. For example, a course in French as a second language wouldn’t make much sense for a native French speaker.

Alternatively, a site that sold car floor mats wouldn’t have much use for visitors without cars (with the rare obvious gift-giving exception). And finally, they must be the kind of person that actually buys products online. There are many who do not.

The reason this information is useful is that it can help you target some of your advertising efforts. Truth be told, targeting the first and third qualifying factors can actually be quite difficult. However, there are often many opportunities for targeting the second. One way to do this is with any PPC campaigns. If you pay to put ads on the Google content network, carefully selecting which sites you want to pay to have your ads on can be a good way to make sure that you’re only targeting those with an actual interest in your products.

Another way to do this is to buy ad space, or to work with people who run related websites to yours. For instance, if your product required people to own a car in order to be qualified, you could target websites that are built for car owners. You could buy ad space, but you could also post on car owner forums, you could comment on car owner blogs, join social networking groups targeted at car owners, and create off-site content that should draw the attention of those who own a car. Getting back links from related niche sites is also something that you should find extremely valuable, and which can definitely help increase the flow of qualified traffic to your own site.

Article Source: http://www.articlesnatch.com

About the Author:
Rich Reese is a consultant for a marketing idea for small business company and has expert knowledge of selling online marketing.

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Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, niche marketing, niche marketing tools, qualified traffic, target marketing

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[Editor's note: Today's guest article focuses on Foursquare.com and its application for location-based marketing strategies. If you have a brick and mortar business, and are focused on a particular local niche, you should consider employing Foursquare, or similar applications. ~Scott]

I’m not a game person but FourSquare caught my attention since the beginning. Some call it a game but I see it as a location-based application that works with most smart phones.

Most social media gurus focus on tactics and telling people how to use the tool, but they seldom talk about business strategy.

Let me show you how businesses can benefit from Foursquare. Have in mind that the application is addicting because users will compete for mayorships and badges which is something that ends up benefiting businesses. The app promotes exploring the town and trying new things which is great in itself. It will tell you if a place is trendy by the number of check-ins, and if you accomplish some requirements that vary from business to business you may win a badge.

Why is all this important to businesses: visibility, popularity, more customer loyalty, more business.

Why do people do it? They like to compete, they have [an] ego, it is fun and they can promote your business even though you might not be aware of it happening.

Have in mind that people want to become mayor of locations and oust previous mayors. When this happens they get posted publicly to twitter and Facebook with your business name and a link to your business’s profile page on foursquare.com. The same may happen when they arrive at your business.

Well, there are already savvy businesses using Foursquare to promote their business. A bar in San Francisco gives free drinks to the mayor of their location, and gives $2 off any performance night for those that show the phone and prove they checked in. This obviously motivates people to come back to the business and to use even more the application. In Las Vegas if you become the Mayor of the Miracle Mile Shops you’ll get your face and name on the 126-foot LED video screen. Big companies like Brave network, Pepsi and the New York Times are also using Foursquare. AJBombers a restaurant, did a Foursquare party and increased business in 110%.

Foursquare is already working on showing banners with the promotions.

The other day we were checking in at the movies and a message popped up telling us to try a restaurant around the corner with a coupon for us to use. What a proactive way to promote businesses in nearby locations!

The application allows people to recommend the place and suggest favorite dishes. It allows businesses and people to connect, bring foot traffic to the place and recommend to others. What more can a business wish for?

Badges for your business and badges to sponsor events is another possibility. For the users the more badges they have the more fun it is.

So, to put it into perspective, here are a few things you can use Foursquare in your business for:

• Coupons
• Special rewards for mayors or check-ins
• Encourage customers to come back
• Special promotions on slow days.
• Be a sponsor of Foursquare leaderboard.
• Brand awareness
• Deeper connection between customer and patron
• Instant feedback
• Promote events

I always say that the gold rush today is for being found, and getting attention.

About the being found part: Google and Bing maps are showing Foursquare venues when people search locally. Foursquare pages rank on search engines which means your business name, phone number and link come up.

Foursqare has the potential to revolutionize social media and turn it into a form of currency.

Out of the over 1.4 Million venues, only about 1200 venues have special offers. Less than 1% of businesses are going after this amazing opportunity. It is free.

Remind me how much you’ve spent with advertising that didn’t work? So what are you waiting for?

Article Source: http://www.articlesnatch.com

About the Author:
Shahar-Nash is a mother-daughter team who focus on new media marketing for small businesses. To find out how to turn a dull, boring, life-sucking business into a multi-faceted money-making empire, visit http://www.BuzzInnerCircle.com

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Technorati Tags: Foursquare, location-based marketing, niche marketing, niche marketing strategy, niche marketing tools

It’s not very often that I can offer you a powerful tool that can actually help you make some money, AND that is free of charge. This tool comes in the form of a PDF report, and it explains, clearly and in detail, how to increase the AdSense revenue on your blog.

There is nothing to purchase, and no sign-up is required.

The author of this PDF is Michael Campbell. Michael has outdone himself by offering this downloadable PDF. This report is the result of many months of research, and the finished product is simply fantastic.

As excerpted from Michael’s blog:

I overlaid hundreds of heatmaps, clickmaps, web usability studies, eye tracking reports and ad placement suggestions from the bigger ad networks. I then created 30 templates based on this data, and tracked the amount of ad revenue generated, depending on ad position.

The result is a set of nine heatmaps that show you exactly where to set up your AdSense ads on your blog. This is powerful information and it won’t cost you a dime. If you are looking to increase your AdSense revenue, you simply must have this PDF.

To get your PDF, click on the following link: The Ultimate Heatmap

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Technorati Tags: AdSense, Eye tracking, Heat map, market research tools, Michael Campbell, niche marketing tools

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Mobile marketing continues to evolve as retailers test the boundaries of consumer behavior with new and innovative purchase technologies. The latest salvo has come from Starbucks.

After reporting success success with its Starbucks Card Mobile payment pilot program in select San Francisco, Seattle and Target the premium coffee retailer is now ready to extend the program to nearly 300 company-operated stores in New York City and Long Island.

According to Starbucks:

“Starbucks Card Mobile for iPhone and BlackBerry lets users pay for their coffee by holding up the 2-D barcode on their smartphone to the scanner at the counter. The application allows customers to manage and reload their Starbucks Cards as well.

Customers have responded positively to the mobile payment option, Starbucks reports.”

The trend is catching on. Starbucks reports that “one in five of all in-store transactions are paid for via Starbucks Card (mobile or physical), and more than $1 billion will have been loaded on to cards by year’s end.”

So, as mobile marketing strategies merge with mobile payment options, consumers will become ever more dependent on their smart phones for locating and purchasing goods and services.

Love it, or hate it, mobile marketing is here to stay; and it is already becoming a game changer.

How will your company compete in this new environment?

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Technorati Tags: BlackBerry, iPhone, niche marketing, niche marketing strategy, niche marketing tools, Starbucks

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[Editor's note: Today's guest article offers a 10-question "aptitude test" that will help you focus in on the areas of your niche marketing efforts that need attention. Taking this 3-minute test will pay off in terms of sizing up your compeition and gaining an advantage over them. ~Scott]

By Roy Primm

Why is niche marketing so hot now? If you’re in business one fact comes with the word recession and that word is competition. Would you like a way to jump ahead of your competition? If your answer is yes then you need a way to increase your niche marketing aptitude. The niche is your answer and solution in a time of growing competition.

In tough economic times, with tight money and stiff competition, it’s essential to find ways to get an edge on your competition. There have been truckloads of articles, books and newsletters on how to improve your niche marketing skills. Finding your niche is job one for every business who wants to succeed long term.

To increase your niche marketing aptitude, take the revealing quiz below, it acts as your microscope and road map to a stronger niche marketing aptitude. The importance in having it gives you a sense of confidence in the middle of stiff competition.

This is not one of those articles you passively read and then toss aside forever. This is an active involvement article. Meaning, to get the best results from reading this you must take action. How? By taking the test and answering the questions honestly. The answers will help you quickly form a solid niche strategy.

To get the maximum benefit, keep taking the test until you can get a perfect 10. The 3 minutes spent with this quiz will be worth their weight in gold to your financial future. With the enormous number of me-too products, services and businesses in the marketplace, it’s essential to keep your niche aptitude strong and vigorous.

If you fail to find ways to separate yourself from your competitors, you risk getting lost in the crowd of competition. This is especially true if you’re a small business with limited capital and resources to work with. Finding your best niche requires focus and a strong knowledge of who your target market is and their current needs.

You often see a business develop a product or service, enjoy a burst of sales success, then suddenly sales fall flat or even nosedives. Your first impression goes to the economy, competition or limited capital. Those may have added to the problem, but the core problem goes back to the niche marketing aptitude of the owner and management.

Often a failing business didn’t have a sales, money or profit problem, they had a hidden niche marketing problem. For example, most failing businesses had a weak, unfocused or changing niche market long before they noticed the other obvious problems.

To increase your niche marketing aptitude take the Niche Marketing Aptitude test below: Give yourself 1 point for each yes answer. Take it for each new business, product or service you create or obtain. Continue taking it until you reach a score of 10. Your goal should be to maintain a score of 10 for each business, product or service you control.

1. Do I know who the next 3 competitors ahead of me are?
2. Do I know what my competitive advantages are over them?
3. Do I have them written down? And do I constantly try to add to them?
4. Can I name at least one new problem my target customers are facing that I can solve through my product or service this week or month?
5. What extra service can I provide that my competition can’t provide?
6. What ways can I speed up service to my customers without sacrificing quality?
7. What ways can I get my satisfied customers to recommend me to others?
8. Do I aggressively seek comments, complaints or questions from my customers?
9. Do I know my competitors latest competitive advantages over my product or service?
10. Do I aggressively seek and test new ideas while holding on to what works?

Roy Primm helps you improve your niche finding and development skills with Free Niche Idea Course. Conquer and dominate your market by finding hidden niches. Dozens of the latest tips and ideas. Plus get free “Niche Improvement Chart” your At-A-Glance road map to increasing your niche finding skills. Don’t wait go now to TheNicheMan.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Roy_Primm
http://EzineArticles.com/?Niche-Marketing-Aptitude-Test—Your-Road-Map-to-Success&id=1884702

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Technorati Tags: niche market, niche marketing, niche marketing tools

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By Andrew Rossillo

You could have the finest product line or set of services in the marketplace, but if you fail to market your offer right, no prospects will ever see or hear about it. Even if you are employing one of the latest online marketing tools, the outrageous rate of saturation of today’s marketplace means that people are constantly bombarded with a virtually infinite amount of marketing and advertising messages throughout the day. This makes it even more of a challenge to reach your target audience.

Because of this onslaught of marketing and advertising, our brains have actually become programmed to filter out a great degree of the messages that are fired at us. What new marketing tool consistently passes through our marketing and advertising filter? Mobile marketing and the awesome power of text messages! One of the reasons why businesses are experiencing great success with mobile marketing is because it features a fraction of the competition than other media-Internet and email tools are engrossed in a jam-packed and highly competitive environment.

For example: An email message usually has around a 10 percent success rate of actually being read. Text messages, however, feature over a 90 percent success rate of not only being read, but being read within the first 30 minutes of being received! While getting your marketing message out is important, having your message actually read is key to your business or organization experiencing record-breaking sales. What adds even more potency to this special type of marketing? It’s the only marketing media that reaches prospects and clients while they are on the go! Mobile marketing and text messages allow you to automatically update, announce, invite and communicate when you want and how you want!

Top Mobile Marketing Benefits:

• Generate leads that you can continuously market to
• Build a mobile database for lucrative follow-up
• Reach customers instantly
• Build relationships with customers
• Learn more about your customers through surveys, polls and demographic info
• Drive traffic to your business with the use of coupons, special deals, and event promotions

Your Chance to Be a Wealthy Pioneer

Very few businesses are actually taking advantage of mobile marketing right now. That’s because this type of marketing is where Internet marketing was back in 2000. That means you can get a gigantic head start by incorporating mobile marketing within your business today. Plus, you can easily integrate mobile marketing and text message marketing within any offline and online marketing campaign. Of course, this type of marketing is substantial enough to form a standalone marketing campaign.

If you’re questioning the type of potential you have with text message and mobile marketing then consider that there are 270 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. alone, and 91 percent of them are said to keep their phones within just a few feet of themselves 24 hours a day throughout the year! In addition, text message marketing has an incredible reach of almost 5 billion compared to Internet marketing’s reach of 1.7 billion.

Lucrative Lead Generation

Every time a prospect or customer opts into one of your text message offers (e.g. to get informational updates, coupons, discounts) that creates a lead. You now have the means to market to that person as much as you’d like. Take this opportunity to upsell, build belief in your business, provide additional value, increase attendance at events and just about anything else you can think of.

This is made even easier with the accompaniment of super simple database options that allow you to file all of your leads, so you can send out a blast to your entire database or use simple filters to send out to select groups within your database. Build a herd and market like there’s no tomorrow.

Plus, mobile marketing offers one of the most significant ROI’s possible among today’s leading marketing and media tools. Text message marketing is like having hundreds of obliging little marketing assistants hustling around doing all the work for you. All you have to do is press a few buttons and you’ll have instantly reached out to your entire database of leads, customers and prospects-with a 90 percent success rate of being read!

Andrew Rossillo is the primary copywriter and co-owner of Business Ball; a comprehensive business resource website. We’re all about helping as many people as possible, so please feel free to post our article on your website. We simply ask that you don’t alter the content and that you leave our link intact (http://www.businessresourcesdaily.com/).

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Rossillo

http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Make-More-Money-With-Mobile-Marketing&id=4698379

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Technorati Tags: Lead generation, Mobile Marketing, niche marketing, niche marketing tools, niche markets, Text messaging

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By Alain Portmann

A single site that aggregates content from a variety of social network sites would be a blessing for consumers; who signed up for a variety of social-networking sites from MySpace and Facebook to LinkedIn and Flickr cannot keep track of them all. This development parallels the Instant Messaging space, which saw the launch of Trillian, a proprietary multi-protocol instant messaging application for Windows created by Cerulean Studios.

Google is funding a project dubbed “Socialstream” which could be the world’s first unified social network, aggregating all existing social networks into a single interface. The reality is that Google’s social network offering has not taken off. Google’s lone current social network offering, Orkut, is not ranked in the top ten by Hitwise for U.S. social-networking sites. But Google is not alone in the race to deploy the first aggregated social network. Blue Swarm a startup in private beta, and Wink have some features to aggregate social networks. Also, Mozilla is developing a social-networking browser that compiles different social networks.

The advent of an open source social network would undoubtedly impact the entire social media segment, forcing social networks to begin addressing churn and reactivation of dormant users. A unified social network would cash into the chronically unfaithful of social media. Nielsen figures confirm that network promiscuity is a factor, showing that 444,000 Britons visited all three of the leading rivals MySpace, Facebook and Bebo this year. The dangers of network promiscuity are illustrated by the fate of Friendster. The social network accrued more than 20 million users after its launch in 2003. In 2006 that figure had fallen to less than one million as users migrated to sites with better tools.

An aggregated social network would also allow for the application of collaborative filtering to social media. By aggregating from a larger set of information the method of predicting (filtering) the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users (collaborating) would be facilitated.

The trivialization of publishing brought on by social media is creating thousands of “publishing bubbles” which when aggregated can become incredibly powerful. John Blossom from Shore provides further perspective.

“Social media is challenging search engines as a starting point for finding answers to questions in part because people come to trust the insights and expertise of specific communities to provide both their own insights and insights from their own research. Answer-oriented communities such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers and LinkedIn Answers provide audiences the ability to vote on answers to specific questions – a competitive aspect to publishing that helps to both aggregate potential high-quality content and to rank its value.”

Alain Portmann, Web Liquid

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alain_Portmann
http://EzineArticles.com/?Social-Media-Aggregation—The-Next-Big-Thing&id=2206797

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Technorati Tags: niche marketing, niche marketing tools, niche markets, social media, social media aggregator, Social network, Social network service

In this Snowcast ( http://snowcaplabs.com/blog ) Loren demonstrates some simple techniques to finding “keyword seeds” and expand them to get hundreds (or thousands) of keywords relevant to a given market niche.

Using freely available tools, such as the excellent (and free!) Keyword Tool available from SEOBook (http://seobook.com), we see just how easy it is to learn a lot about the web traffic available to your markets.

For more web marketing screencasts, advice, and consulting, check out http://snowcaplabs.com

Duration : 0:9:58

Technorati Tags: keywords, market research, niche marketing tools, niche markets