Too often small businesses fall into the trap of “trying to sell something” to their customers. As a result, the potential customer feels like it’s a one-sided deal, or the deal favors the small business (seller). Customers get the impression “This guy is trying to sell me something, and it’s not clear to me why I need it”. The potential customer can quickly go into a defensive stance, and the deal falls through.

Small business’ needs to focus on what value their products and services bring to a potential customer. Instead of taking a “hard sell” approach, listen to the customer, and help them find the right solution, whether you offer it or not. Even if you don’t get the sale, the customer walks away with a good impression of you and your business, and may return at a later time, or tell other potential customers of the good experience.

Look at any potential sale from the customer’s perspective, and always look out for their best interest. In the long run, it’s a win-win proposition.

Marketing Mix Optimization is a term used to describe how marketing investments are spent across marketing activities (media, campaigns, advertisements, etc.) and how this aligns with customer purchasing behavior. If your Longmont Business is investing a significant amount of your marketing spend in an area that is driving a very small return for your business, your “marketing mix” isn’t optimized. This becomes even more critical if you have a limited amount of marketing budget for your small business.

You must track customer-purchasing behavior and ensure that you are focusing your investments where you get the most impact. There are several marketing tools available that enable you to re-allocate or reduce marketing costs, saving you money and ensuring that your marketing mix is optimized to drive revenue and profit for your company. A qualified Longmont-based marketing firm can help you realize your marketing mix optimization.

As more small businesses migrate to the internet by establishing websites there is an opportunity for small, local marketing firms to network their customers together, so they can leverage each other’s customer base.

Local business networking isn’t a new concept, but it’s typically managed by large international marketing firms that offer local chapters where small businesses work together to give each other customer leads.

This same concept can be done by small marketing firms working a local geographic area. Over time, a small marketing firm may build a fairly sizable client base that serves a wide range of local markets, offering a variety of products and services.

Many small marketing firms overlook the opportunity to bring their clients together, to form their own local business network via forums, blogs, or actual meeting places. This concept offers several advantages for not only the marketing firm, but for their clients:

• Customer referral opportunities (as mentioned earlier)
• Cross linking (back linking) websites across the network, resulting in better search engine results.
• Better customer visibility for each business within the network
• A support network for information and idea sharing for countless general business topics.
• Improved business branding by getting a business’ name more visibility across the network.
• A sense of loyalty and belonging to a local business community.
• This is also a much cheaper alternative to a chamber of commerce membership, or other business networking service.

Small business marketing firms can take a leadership role in establishing the network by simply organizing their own client base, and providing the necessary tools and forums for their customers to communicate.

As we all know, the corporate superstores keep taking business away from local proprietors, and obviously this trend is going to continue unless small business’ fight back.

Think about it. Not that long ago (relatively speaking), small businesses provided the products and services that keep our local economy going. The money exchanged hands locally…

Now that we have big corporate businesses moving into our communities at a scale that Longmont and the surrounding area hasn’t seen…. Do you really think that the profits that Walmart, Lowes, Super Target, Home Depot (just a few examples), and the like are going to be spent locally? Of course not. They are big national and international hungry corporations looking for profit for their investors, offering a lower price.  Same thing with the big grocery chains, the Michael’s craft stores, the Grease Monkeys, etc.
This trend will continue unless local citizens of Longmont take some action.  Next, they will go after our local service businesses, or hold them under contract based on “their terms”.

I for one, would like the City of Longmont to scale the number of large corporations coming into our community, similar to what Boulder is doing.

Obviously the problem is all about corporate taxes and big corporate money, and the lack of foresight of our Longmont city management to look at the long term picture for our community.

I know Boulder is pretty hot on the subject, and we as a community should be as well.

If you have a small business in the Colorado Front Range area, try contacting Longmont Business Marketing. We have several great marketing solutions for small business, and we don’t care much for the big guys.  https://longmont-business-marketing.com

For those of you that want to participate in the Longmont City Council meetings, see:http://www.ci.longmont.co.us/city_council/agendas/index.htm

xcerpt from Longmont Daily Times Call: Google announced Feb. 10 that it plans to install a fiber-to-the-home network that will deliver Internet speeds of 1 gigabit a second — more than 100 times faster than what most people have today — at competitive prices… Click here for the full article.

Longmont Daily Times Call — Google is looking for a handful of cities around the nation where the company would build and test ultra-high-speed broadband networks.

And what Google is planning to do is exactly what Longmont has been trying to do for 13 years.
Click here for the full article.

According to “Internet World Stats”, over 46% of the US population is now using the internet.  For details, see the article from Internet World Stats.

Excerpt – “The number of U.S. searches grew 31 percent across all media platforms between June 2008 and June 2009 (21.9 billion searches in June 2009), according to a new study by TMP Directional Marketing.”   Check out this Webpro news article.