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.

When you walk into a retail business, whether you are grocery shopping, shoe shopping, or buying furniture, what’s the thing that will make you walk out declaring “I’m never going there again!”

How about being ignored? A successful business knows that it needs to make an effort to win over every single person who takes the time and effort to seek them out and pay a visit. Think of all the places you go where you expect to encounter a greeting within seconds of entering the door. Even Wal-Mart is blind to the fact you arrived to buy just a gallon of milk instead of an HDTV, and adds that extra touch of greeting you and helping you with a shopping cart.

Video Spokesperson is your door greeter and the small effort that can make your website memorable. Especially for a site that is promoting a service or product, a Video Spokesperson offers that touch of human interaction, delivered by a professional who inspires trust and expertise. Isn’t that who you want holding open your door to potential customers?

When placed to immediately launch upon arrival to your website, Video Spokesperson is a fixed advertisement that delivers your message to every single visitor, at a cost of fractions what you’ll pay for a traditional print ad or a web banner on someone else’s website. You can use a Video Spokesperson to talk about a recent recognition you’ve received, or inform about special pricing or deals.

A knowledgeable voice, a smile, a warm greeting – while the web is a medium that promotes anonymity, people still respond to the human touch.

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.

A friend recently gifted me an item that I mistakenly called “antique.” It’s properly termed “vintage,” and indeed, that one word makes all the difference. You can never be too up on what’s out. Antique is a relic; vintage – that’s hip. Tip #1: Clever marketers keep abreast of the language, the presentation style and minute-by-minute evolution of what – or who – is popular.

Recently, when reviewing a body of ads purchased by a client for “good will”, I was struck by the way the client’s business was slapped into these publications without apparent regard to appropriateness. “But we need to reach the locals, and be supportive of the community.” But you also are paying precious marketing dollars for your ad. Don’t consider it charity. Consider it marketing. Place an ad in the senior citizens’ activity newsletter if you must, but be cognizant of the reader. If you sell running shoes, don’t run an ad that says, “Hey, we sell sneakers in downtown Akron.” Say “10% off all phone orders and free gift shipping in December!” Tip #2: Don’t dismiss the potential of any audience. Adapt.

Just as the words, “But we need to have this in the left-hand navigation” are leaving my mouth, data is coming in that says, web visitors don’t really read the menus. They scan – this we’ve known for years now – and even more surprisingly, they click. And click, and click. That vital piece of information isn’t right there on the menu bar? Not to worry. The trend is to embed the most important information in links within the body text. This enable the search engines to scour the site, from link to link, more effectively cataloging the references of key words that your potential audience will type into a search engine. Tip #3: You can never know much about web marketing; be alert to the data.

Ever run across one of those web sites that has just about every bell and whistle that’s ever been coded? Thankfully, at some point web site designers got over the thrill of adding flashy thingies, huge take-forever-to-load ani-graphics and totally irrelevant background music that broadcast when you least wanted your boss to know you were surfing the ‘net. And aren’t we all glad frames are a thing of the past?

All those gizmos had their day, but the web is an evolving creature and a never-ending source of new ideas. So how do you know what’s so yesterday, and what you really should pay attention to?

The simple guidelines to follow are those that eventually weed out the useless clutter-tech and let the really good stuff grow at warp speed.

We’ve all got one, had one, or encountered one: the next generation of world leaders, current household opinion leaders, and affluent spenders. You got it: the American teenager.

Who is this stranger and how can you get their attention? Teens today are more affluent than ever. Responsible parenting has given them access to cash – through their own savings and checking accounts meant to teach them fiscal responsibility. Teens are more technically savvy and discriminating than ever. They are not as brand loyal as they used to be. They care about the environment; they look for companies with social conscience.

The teen population is most likely to go online and research a company before making purchase. Teens are influential in their parents’ purchases, too. Your web site design, email marketing and web marketing campaigns should have teen appeal, even if your product is aimed at the head of household. Here are a couple tips:

• Be sure your web site is rich with key words that will be indexed, so when teens Google a product, your site will hit their radar. Think like a fourteen-year-old. What words would they use?
• Add a blog that speaks their language. If you are selling a product that a teen would want (clothing, jewelry, music, entertainment, for example) help them out with compelling reasons that will persuade their parents, too. Even better: hire a teen to blog for you.
• Teens are bombarded with email. Add an irresistible offer to your email marketing campaigns to grab their attention. Be sure to keep in touch with teens who have purchased before and keep making offers that will get them back.
• Personalize! Know your teen customers and what’s important to them. Let them customize their offers!
• Play up your social responsibility. Whatever you do to help the world, be sure you let your teen market know.

Be sure you know the fastest growing, most culturally diverse group of consumers in the United States. 

The main function of the web is to provide information and connections among human beings – what a perfect scenario for marketing! One of the best things about the web is how it serves as an incubator for new ideas and applications. Just as quickly as we become accustomed to applications for grabbing attention, like Twitter, a new service comes along to bolster the benefit and make it more effective. Blogs, like this one, and social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, and so many more are loaded with conversations and feedback about everything you can imagine.

If you could only aggregate the comments by topic and get a look at today’s buzz on your favorite topic – say, your product. How valuable would that be?

You guessed it – someone already thought of that. Amidst the onslaught of marketing messages now flying in all directions, people are creating applications to sort out the stuff they actually care about. One such application is Backtype. This is a nifty, simple tool that allows you to track conversations through more than a dozen (yes, there are more than that!) applications including Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Blogger and WordPress. Backtype is basically a search engine that crawls social media networks and offers a simple interface. Enter a search term, like “social media marketing” and you’ll see, in this case, over 500 comments, which you can filter by date to get the freshest perspective.

Another spinoff of the social media frenzy –- use it to understand your audience, your product appeal, and enhance your web site marketing strategy.

I am often approached by prospective clients who want to achieve top search engine rankings in time to capitalize on the holiday shopping season. Even in this year’s tough economy, online merchandise sales have increased by 10%. The growth of online shopping, or ecommerce, is without a doubt the fastest growing method of commerce. In order to successfully take advantage of the holiday season marketplace, businesses need to plan way ahead of time. Depending on your area of business, you may need to be moving forward on your SEO plans now in order to reach the rankings you need to succeed for next years holiday shopping frenzy.

Not every business expects the holiday season to be the height of their annual sales. There are many companies that experience seasonal trends to their sales. An ecommerce website that sells suntan lotion probably isn’t going to do as well in December as in June. However, there is still going to be some qualified traffic searching for these products at all times of the year. Having great search engine rankings is the best way to get a strong share of the available online sales. Once strong rankings have been achieved through a solid search engine optimization (SEO) effort, websites can expect to improve on their historically successful seasons. Equally as important, these businesses can expect to increase their sales during times of the year that are traditionally slower for their industry.

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.