Four States Small Business Blog

A big challenge for any local politician is staying in touch with the community. You gained their support to get elected, but now that you’re in office, it’s not possible for you to go out and shake each and every hand like when you were on the campaign trail.

Every region has its collective favorite local attractions and businesses. These might include diners, parks, landmarks, hotels, historical downtowns, or amusement parks. They could include restaurants; for example, when we know we have family and friends coming to visit us, we'll make reservations at our favorite local eateries so our friends can have a taste.

Sometimes companies make the mistake of thinking, if they have a great company logo, they’ve done all they need to do in terms of branding. Your logo represents your brand, but it is not, in fact, your brand. In this post, we’ll discuss what your brand is, why it’s important, and why having a good logo is not enough.

Branding is a term that was once reserved for business marketing, but it’s expanded far beyond that now. Celebrities and entrepreneurs have personal brands that are as valuable and powerful as the organizations and companies that fill our marketplace. Recently, however, political branding has taken center stage. Applying brand to a political campaign isn’t actually new, but adapting the corporate terminology that surrounds branding is new in the mainstream. (This is, perhaps, most clearly demonstrated by the film, Our Brand Is Crisis, which centers around two consultants who are, essentially, political marketers.)

I’ve been in the broadcast industry for nearly 30 years. To this day, I still remember how excited I was to get started. Just imagine, a 19-year-old boy so excited he could barely control himself. I knew I would be talking to thousands of people at once, playing their favorite songs, and keeping them company throughout the nighttime. For a 19-year-old kid, this was a dream come true.

At the end of Q2 2017, Procter & Gamble, the biggest advertiser in the U.S.A., announced that due in part to the fact that it cut back its digital marketing budget by as much as $140 million, it was able to beat earnings expectations. Specifically, despite a slump in consumer spending, P&G reported a 15% rise in all-in net earnings to $2.3 billion, or a percentage point of profit margin, and at least half that gain is a direct impact of cutting its digital advertising budget.

When it comes to marketing healthcare, radio might not be the first thing that comes to mind. However, 2017 is a great year for healthcare brands, practitioners, and hospitals to consider marketing themselves on the radio.

Brand awareness plays a vital role in the success of your small business. But how do you know whether your brand awareness strategy is working? Like every other aspect of your marketing strategy, it’s important to track and measure brand awareness to understand if you’re getting the results you want and maximizing ROI. Tracking brand awareness can be challenging, so in this post, we’ve put together some tips for getting started.

There’s something fun and exhilarating about visiting a casino for Americans. In fact, Americans spend much more on casino visits than they do on movie visits, and an annual $59 billion dollars are spent at casinos across the country.

Believe it or not, 18% of small businesses admit that they don’t track any metrics or key performance indicators (KPI) related to their marketing, however, tracking marketing metrics is critical to the success of every marketing campaign, not to mention an overall marketing strategy. That’s because marketing metrics are the only way to know for sure that you’re seeing the results that you need, along with the ROI you want, from each of your marketing efforts. Without them, you have to guess whether you’re reaching your audience effectively, spending your marketing budget on the right channel and tactics, and growing your business. Tracking these metrics provides a history and basis of comparison to ensure you’re improving along the right track.