4 Hot Marketing Techs for Small Businesses

October 27, 2019

As the year draws to a close it’s time to start thinking about what investments you want to be making in 2020.

Unfortunately, and if you’re like most small business owners, you’ve got too many things you need to do and limited resources to get it all done. Technology is, of course, one of these considerations. There are many, many ways for you to spend on tech next year. Your job is to make the right decisions so that you can maximize your return on investment. So, where to start?

Of the many small businesses that have recently been polled, here are four technologies that are drawing their attention… and their dollars for next year.

Instagram

The numbers don’t lie: while Facebook continues to struggle to maintain and grow their user base in the wake of all the controversy that the company has experienced over the past few years, another Facebook property — Instagram — is crushing it.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal column, Instagram has been the “star” of the latest Facebook earnings reports with data suggesting spending on Instagram ads is up 42 percent over the past year, which is 10 percentage points higher than social media advertising in general. Instagram is where your customers are and there are many reasons why the social media service is a hot marketing tech for small business owners in 2020. The demographics are strong with those in their 20s and 30s (and even those in their 50s and 60s) and the platform is perfect for inviting, edgy and humorous content that can be targeted to a very hyper-local audience. The social service provides many tools that can enable bar owners do not only create engaging stories but offer coupons, contests and other inexpensive yet alluring marketing campaigns to attract potential customers.

Just be careful. To be successful on Instagram you need to create top quality videos. You’ll need to target the right audience and then engage with them. And your success with this technology won’t happen overnight. Like all good things, it will take effort . . . and people to help you.

GoogleMyBusiness

Search is everything online and of course, like any business owner, you want people be able to find your company. You can spend thousands on online advertising to accomplish that and you should be considering investments there. But the best technology to optimize your online presence is a free one: GoogleMyBusiness.

We recommend you get your business set up on GoogleMyBusiness because Google will then provide more info to potential customers when you take the time to do this. If you cannot do this yourself, let us know and we will help you. Like Instagram, GoogleMyBusiness is hyper-local. It will direct people within a few miles looking for you to your page, and it will reward you when you add photos, blogs and get lots and lots of online reviews. GoogleMyBusiness integrates with Google Maps too.

Get set up on GoogleMyBusiness. It’s the most cost-effective search engine optimization tool out there.

AudioGo

But it’s not just search. It’s seeking new audiences, and radio advertising can be powerful. Radio and streaming audio stations provided by nationally recognized services such as Pandora and iHeartRadio are how people consume their music, podcasts, etc. The problem in the past was that this kind of advertising was prohibitively expensive for most small businesses, and difficult to track results. New audio advertising technology products like AudioGo are fixing this problem.

With AudioGo, a small business owner can easily create an ad via a simple online process and then, using the same online portal, target the ad to a specific audience based on location, demographic information, and even music or spoken word genres. These are then run many times over the course of a specified date range, and because the ads are run on digital radio they can easily track how many people listened to them. Plus, no ad budget is too small, so the technology is perfect for small companies. We’re telling our clients in many industries, especially food and beverage, to take a hard look at this technology in 2020 as a potentially powerful way to market.

Convergence of POS, CRM & Loyalty

There used to be point of sale. And customer relationship management. And loyalty. Those days are gone — it’s all coming together.

In the food and beverage space also gone are the days of ringing up a drink order or taking a credit card from a customer and then forgetting that they were ever in your bar. Today’s technology is helping to ensure that those same customers keep coming back. It’s a world of big data, and smart bar and restaurqant owners are collecting data wherever they can. That’s why many are upgrading their internal systems and implementing technologies that incorporate not only POS, but CRM and loyalty as well. They’re doing this by collecting data from their server’s smartphone or — more and more — having the customers do it themselves via a tablet or other similar self-service kiosks.

As customers complete their orders, this new generation of POS/CRM/loyalty systems are equipped with capabilities that make it easy to not only collect this customer data but then store that data for future marketing via email or social campaigns. And the data can be quite specific.

A customer is partial to red wine? A fan of specific appretizers? Is a vegetarian? Customized messages can be created to reach back out to those customers based on the choices they’ve made and entice them to return. Smart food and beverage idustry owners are making investments in marketing consulting companies — even on a limited basis — to help them create surveys and automated campaigns offering coupons and special deals to customers who visited before in an effort to draw them back for more business. But really this can be adjusted for any industry that services customers on regular basis. It’s CRM. It’s POS. It’s loyalty. It’s all together.

Recommended systems include: ShopKeep, Revel Systems, Toast, LevelUp.

These are just a few hot techs that the smartest small business owners are considering and investing in for 2020.

What about you?

Need some help and want to learn more? Contact us to today for a no-obligation discussion about all of your marketing needs for the coming year.

Sources: Questex Publications, Entrepreneur and TechNewsWorld

Studies say we not only lose hundreds of millions of dollars during the daylight saving time transition, but it impacts our health and more.

And while many people enjoyed the extra hour for sleeping or getting an early start of the day, many also dread when we’ll all turn our clocks forward again in the spring and lose an hour. More people have been calling for an end to the practice of daylight saving time, and numerous studies have found links between the time change and negative consequences.

Researchers have linked daylight saving to increased risk of heart problems like strokes, heart attacks and atrial fibrillation. Women undergoing in vitro fertilization and had a prior pregnancy loss experienced higher rates of miscarriage during daylight saving time.

The start of daylight saving time sees a measurable increase in criminal sentence lengths, while the end coincides with a decrease in assaults, studies found. Teens lose sleep on school nights after springing forward. More people are diagnosed with depression after falling back. And researchers have even found increased “cyberloafing” among office workers after the start of daylight savings time.

“In the spring, the day after we move into daylight saving time, there are more car accidents, greater stock market losses, more workplace injury, reduced test scores and higher suicide rates,” Greg Ridgeway, who co-authored a 2017 study from the American Association for the Advancement of Science on daylight saving’s effects on sleep, said in a press release.

Health effects from daylight saving time are caused by a mismatch between the body’s internal clock and the external clock of work, school and the sun, circadian biologists told The Associated Press. Till Roenneberg, a circadian rhythm specialist at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Germany, told the AP that a mismatch of just one hour daily is enough to cause negative effects related to metabolism, blood pressure and hormones.

In 2016 the JPMorgan Chase Institute found that the switch back to standard time is associated with a drop in spending between 2.2% and 4.9%, depending on where you live.

Chmura Economics & Analytics looked at the total economic loss caused by daylight saving time via increased heart attacks, workplace injuries and cyberloafing. They estimated a total cost of more than $433 million across the U.S. in 2016.

Daylight saving time runs from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. The U.S. government first enacted daylight saving time in 1918 as a way to conserve coal during World War I. The practice became law in 1966 with the federal Uniform Time Act.

Hawaii and most of Arizona are the only two states that don’t observe daylight saving time. But at least 18 states have considered bills in the past few years to move permanently to either to standard time or daylight saving time.

> How Can Small Businesses Take Advantage of the Economic Impact of Daylight Saving Time? <

If small businesses can’t depend on unexpected daylight hours to stimulate sales, are there any benefits they can extract from the practice? Is there any economic impact of daylight saving time on small businesses?

Some businesses actually plan their inventory rollouts around the change in time, such as online custom bedding site Flaneur.

“Based on previous years’ experiences, we launched the Introducing Flaneur collection that includes red, purple, and warm earthy tones because of consumers’ interest in creating a bed set that either brightens their room during the dark winter days or provides a cozy refuge,” says the company’s spokesperson.

Companies also recognize that the end of DST serves as a reminder to consumers that the holiday season, the cold, winter, and so on, are right around the corner.

“When the clocks roll back in the fall, it serves as a cue for people that it’s nearly winter and the cold will be coming soon. This helps remind them about the best way to stay warm while enjoying the outdoor scenery—hot tubs,” says Jay Labelle, the owner of hot tub cover company The Cover Guy. “It signals to my client base to check if their hot tub is in good condition, as well as their covers. My sales rise this time of year, and anything that helps my customers remember the cold is coming is the reason for it.”

If you have a seasonal business that does its best sales in the cold months, the end of DST is probably the best time to gear up for your cold weather run.

Sources: American Association for the Advancement of Science, JPMorgan Chase Institute, Chmura Economics & Analytics, Fundera and Money.com

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