Four States Small Business Blog

Contributing to local causes can help bring brand awareness and show corporate social responsibility amongst your community, which is why it is worth including it in your marketing plan. According to the 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer, 80 percent of consumers think that companies should make an extended effort to improve social and economic conditions in their region while increasing their profits.

When developing a new brand, there’s so much to juggle that it can be all too easy to focus on short-term needs at the cost of long-term goals. Perspective is important when developing something as critical as advertising, and that’s why you need to focus on brand strategy first. In today’s post, we’ll discuss the seven core aspects to a brand strategy that should be addressed.

When you are buying radio advertising in Joplin, you want a radio group who will partner with you to achieve success, who helps you craft a unique message, and who can reach more listeners than anyone else. At Zimmer Radio, Inc., we have the tools and experience you need for a successful radio advertising campaign.

The types of music people love, and the radio stations they listen to, usually say a lot about their demographic qualities and overall consumer preferences. That’s why radio advertising is so unique. It gives businesses the chance to access segmented audiences by targeting certain radio station formats and the listeners they tend to attract.

It’s not hard to recognize that we live in an instant gratification world. From fast food to movies on demand, we’ve become accustomed to rapid response. Kissmetrics, an internet data company, reports that 47% of consumers expect a website to load in under 2 seconds and 40% will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. For some consumers, two-day shipping for online orders is too long; they desire click-and-collect services that allow them to order online and pick up their items the same day.

The concept of a marketing bridge for business was first introduced to radio advertisers in 1968, and it is arguably one of the most important elements of a company's marketing strategy. Simply put, it is the connection between what your advertising says about your business and what your customer experiences. It’s the forces that combine to make a sale. If your advertising tells people something about your business and they don’t see, hear, or experience it when they arrive at your store or contact a salesperson — in other words, if there is a disconnect — that's a problem. If any of these connections in the marketing bridge are broken or ineffective, it can affect whether your business makes a sale, thus affecting your bottom line. Advertising is the glue that holds the bridge together, but it is not a substitute for strengthening weak links.

As the market space becomes increasingly mobile-focused and reliant on multi-screen marketing, it becomes more and more important to know your customer's journey and the touchpoints your brand needs to capture in order to influence it. Customer Journey mapping is the key to truly understanding it in a visual way; it allows you to see the story behind the process from initial contact to consideration and purchase from the customer's perspective. This blog post will inform you on how to map your customer's journey along with insights for the customer journey mapping process.

A key factor of running a successful business is to have a plan, and while the marketing strategy is a huge part of that plan, budgeting for advertising efforts can often be overlooked. Typically, a significant portion of the marketing budget is allocated to advertising, which is why it’s important to monitor what is being spent, analyze the efforts, and make adjustments when needed. A strategic advertising budget is crucial to increasing revenue for your business. Without a plan, a business might overspend on opportunities that don’t create a positive ROI, resulting in a loss, or they might miss out on opportunities to save money by waiting too late and missing deadlines offering advertising opportunity bundles and extras.

Certain elements are critical to every successful marketing strategy, no matter how large or small your business is. Some are obviously more important than others, like having a unique selling proposition, but others might not seem critical at first glance. Consistency is one of them, especially if you're engaging in marketing across different media, like radio, TV, print, digital, and more. In today's blog post, we'll take a snapshot look at the importance of brand consistency in your marketing and how you can ensure you’re doing it right.