Since the 50s, with the image of the modern day house wife, women have been seen at the forefront of major shopping decisions in consumer spending, particularly with groceries, beauty products, and clothing. They balance the household income, pay the bills, and influence their husbands on what to purchase. Considering their purchasing power, targeting women in your marketing plan is a smart idea that could provide monetary rewards!

Mommy Bloggers

Times have changed since the 50s, but women are still spending. Enter: Mommy Bloggers. Typically a stay at home mom, this vast genre of blogging has a wide reaching community of women who help provide for their family. Many mommy bloggers host giveaways sponsored by companies for readers to win free products. It’s also a great way to promote an Etsy shop if you have one.

Career-driven Women

More women attend college than men and are starting up business ventures. Even mommy bloggers are thinking outside the box by looking for ways to earn money at home. Entrepreneurial women are everywhere, and they have a lot of clout. Women like relationships and connections. They like dialogue and conversations. Use this to your advantage by getting your small business, brand, or product in sponsorship programs. Get involved with the community or donate to specific causes. This involvement will be more valuable to women and differentiate you from the competition.

Women are not a minority. They make up at least half of the world’s population and thinking of ways to market to them will give small business owners a smart advantage.

It’s that time of the year to review our successes and missteps in business – and what a humdinger of a year it was. While post-holiday slump sets in and everyone settles into 2009, take a few minutes and list your business resolutions – your own road map to a successful new year.

Ask yourself:

• Did my marketing plan get me where I wanted to be in 2008? Evaluate your tactical marketing plan for hits and misses. Use the hits as a jumping off point for creating a new, evolved 2009 plan. In a year where competition for consumers’ attention will be fiercer than ever, your plan should include new and updated creative to ensure you rise above the fray. Don’t back away from your goals of growth in a recession economy, but do take cautious measures to be sure your messaging is exactly on target – you can’t afford misses.

• What challenges are my clients going to meet? Few industries are immune to today’s economic struggle. Anticipate what your customers are going to find most valuable from you and focus on building that aspect of your business. It’s a perfect time to introduce new timely and relevant offers on your web site.

• Where can I trim my budget and where should I maintain? It’s more important that ever to win and keep your clients’ trust. You don’t have to undergo an entire redesign of your web presence to reassure your consumers that your business is healthy and thriving. The simple addition of personalized communications, such as a weekly blog, gives you a vehicle to speak directly and with authority to your target market about topics that have immediate impact in their organizations. Likewise, a Virtual Spokesperson — full-motion video representative whom you designate to deliver a spoken message — adds a personal touch without demanding a complete site overhaul.

Trends in online business, Internet marketing and email marketing are constantly shifting. Stay alert to the latest and you’ll be keyed in on how the competition is spending their marketing dollars. Those businesses that maintain their integrity and poise will emerge as leaders in 2009.

Before you know your competition – know your customers. What do your existing customers value most about your business? Identify the top three drivers that motivate customers to choose you. Then look at how your competitors meet those demands.

It’s not just what “they” are doing, but what they are doing well. You may not like the competition’s web site. You can definitely come up with a better design, better content, but can you beat them on search engine rankings? Are they utilizing pay-per-click strategies to draw a targeted market? Determine what works for them, and if you have a comparable plan for online marketing.

How does your competition respond to the market? You know what’s going on in your business arena. Take a look at the key issues in your world and check out the rival’s response. Every website needs to be fluid and ready to react to current trends in your industry. Be a leader.

Evaluate your own success – why is it working? Some strategies are keepers – before you ditch what you have for what you think is working for your competition, be sure to give yourself credit for what you’ve done right. Above all, you want to make sure you are producing happy clients, listening, and learning every step of the way.

Finally, keep an open mind. Reacting to the market, responding to a tough competitor or upping the stakes in the online battle for visitor-share doesn’t have to mean a huge investment in a website redesign. If you are on a tight budget – and who isn’t these days – you may want to make smaller, incremental improvements while investing in a plan to drive targeted traffic to your site, bypassing the competition.

The feds finally made official what most of us felt early last year. Marketing experts wrote about “How to run a business in a recession” in January 2008. Now, a year later, we are all looking at the world through recession-colored glasses. Marketing budgets are slashed or eliminated. We know; we work in marketing.

Take off the glasses and come out of the fog. Web marketing remains the most cost-efficient tactic you have in your toolbox. It’s time to squeeze the most you can out of the web – in fact, there is no better time than now. Your clients and customers need to hear from you now, more than ever.

One way to reach out is by adding a blog to your existing web site. Just like this one. A blog can be about any aspect of your business, updated frequently (once a week is ideal), and as fresh as this morning’s coffee. A blog gives you the chance to speak personally and directly to your audience about what is going on in any aspect of the world in which you do business. Blog updates also give you an excuse to contact your email-marketing list with a message, which drives traffic to your site.

Plus, a well-crafted blog will help elevate your search-engine rankings. An experienced business blogger will include key words about current topics that your customer base may be searching for. That’s the blog bonus.

Here’s one consequence of not keeping in close touch with your clients and customers during a recession. An email recently made the rounds discouraging people from buying gift cards for their holiday giving, listing a number of stores that it claimed were going out of business by the end of 2008. Much of the information in the email was bogus or incomplete – in fact, it neglected to clarify that some of those businesses were closing locations while opening others. (Read the email and the Snopes.com report).

Bogus or not, imagine the impact if that email was the only communication your customers had about you during the holidays?

Anytime in the month of January is the appropriate time to post a 2009 message on your own business blog. Remind your customers that you are there for them, recession or not.

How well do you know your customers? You might be surprised. Recently, I sat on a team of experts tasked with choosing one of three marketing brochure designs, all of them outstanding. The goal was to present a high-priced product to a very choosy audience. I had my favorite from the get go: it was everything I ever wanted in brochure: it was fun to read; informative; completely original; and so slick I would put it on my coffee table. The team all agreed: this could be the one. But for one nagging inclination: we weren’t entirely sure our persnickety target demo would like it.

I threw together a couple focus groups consisting of college freshman, who are anything if not distracted and way too tired to be “marketed at.” I was sure that reviewing these three design proposals would perk them up and they be nuts for #3, my personal favorite. I was right – they were very opinionated. Not only did they hate it, one even used the word “insulting.”

How could we have been so out of touch with our market?

It doesn’t take long for your target demo to grow out of your scope of understanding. It’s an unbelievably fast-paced world we are living in. Communication is more vital than ever, whether your personal multimedia repertoire includes web marketing, web site maintenance, blogging, tweeting, RSS feeds, or the other many tools out there. Every once in a while, it’s okay to check in with your customers and just ask,” hey, what do you think about this idea?”

Encourage two-way conversations whenever possible by asking timely questions, such as, “what is the most important decision you made this week?” or other queries that will encourage customers to spill a bit of insight into their daily lives and priorities. Keep at it, and keep talking!

The web isn’t the hard sell it used to be. Most businesses recognize without a lot of persuasion that if you’ve got so much as an apple cart, you’ve got a reason to be on the web. Similarly, if you’ve done any kind of online marketing to drive business to your website, “target marketing” is so much a part of your daily vernacular you likely don’t even hear it anymore.

If anything has been exploited in the realm on online marketing, it’s the concept of targeting. That’s not to say you should not narrow your focus to the right audience; by all means, don’t aimlessly hurl your messages into the chaos. But targeting is about more than getting to the right customer– it’s getting to the right customer, at the right time, with the right message. That’s not one target. That’s one in a million.

Love me, love my spam

You can send all the emails you want to your customers, once you’ve got the magic opt-in go-ahead. That’s the virtual equivalent of seats in the nosebleed section. You’ve got a lot of work to do before you earn your way into the stadium suite. If you overuse the privilege you’ll alienate yourself in no time. If you send the wrong message, you risk being blacklisted. You’ve got to get to know your customers just like your best friend. The first step in getting to know your customers well enough to predict their behavior is knowing what they did with your message. Did they read it? Did they click on a link? Did they visit the website you so painstakingly constructed for them? Which offer proved irresistible? And, at what point did this informal contact convert them into a loyal paying customer?

Results, Results, Results

In case you didn’t know, the days of sending an email blindly into the void without any real method of tracking results are long gone. Email marketing services let you tailor messages, templates, and entire campaigns to a particular segment of your customers, for example, those who have just made their first purchase, or those who have abandoned shopping carts. If your website is a lead generator, your communication can inform potential clients of new success stories or updated service information. By knowing who they are and what they did, you’re on the track to building more than just results. You’re building relationships.

Before you hit send on that next mass email campaign, investigate the options that let you create more meaningful communications. Your customers will tell you exactly how to reach them, if you are ready to listen.