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Marketing Tip from Heather Hammack
Steal These 3 Social Marketing Tricks From Top Brands
In order to succeed in being a great Marketer, you must be able to do one of these 3 things:
- Connect with your audience's passion and/or interest.
- Entertain your audience with your engaging personality.
- Provide interesting and/or important information to your audience.
If you take a look at great marketers, it is easy to spot the Passion Brands, Personality Brands, and Transparent Brands. Passion Brands are about activities that a brand is associated with, not for activities the brand actually performs. A great example of a Passion Brand would be Nike or Adidas. They feed off of your love for sports, and they highlight both professional and amateur athletes to celebrate athletic achievement. A Personality brand would be Oreo. They love to get their audience involved by allowing consumers to enter in contests where they can pick the colors they would like to see in the next Oreo. A Transparent brand is one that tells you what they are doing in the real world. IBM hosts more than thirty thousand individual blogs from its employees and produces a fire hose of content about all the technologies it has unleashed on the world. Auto brands and technology brands are also great for using this approach.
Following one of these three marketing tricks will help clarify your social media strategy. In social media, brands need to focus on engaging consumers by offering something of value and capturing their attention. If you are a small business owner, you may want to consider which of the three strategies you are following. These approaches are interchangeable and you can switch back and forth and dabble in more than one at the same time. The most important thing and the strongest play for a brand is to stay true to their DNA -- identify what you are best at, what you can offer consumers the most of, and focus on that. Doing this will allow you to better engage with your consumers and help you better market your brand.
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Technology Tip from Heather Hammack
Integration Provides Seamless Records for Your Business
One general misconception is that automation and integration are identical. Integration produces immediate useful information and provides user-friendly tools so you can utilize your information to do better business right away. Automation simply reduces the amount of manual labor that you do. Intuit's example of integration is shown through QuickBooks Point of Sale, Go Payments (mobile solution), and QuickBooks accounting software.
QuickBooks POS
One of the top-selling solutions for small retailers, this product allows you to ring up sales, manage inventory, and build customer relationships with Loyalty Programs and Gift Cards. QuickBooks POS also comes with reports that help determine what is selling and what your most profitable days are. The latest version allows retailers to accept credit cards directly into the software so there is no need for a third party Merchant Service or a separate terminal.
Mobile Payments (Go Payment)
Go Payment allows you to have mobile check-outs that connect effortlessly with your QuickBooks POS. Whenever you ring up a sale on your mobile device, it automatically updates inventory in your QuickBooks POS. Go Payment is compatible with most popular mobile devices.
QuickBooks Accounting Software
QuickBooks continues to be a hit with their small business solutions by allowing small businesses to stay on top of their finances and prepare for tax time. QuickBooks POS data can also be transferred to QuickBooks with a click of a button. This creates greater accuracy by removing the need for double entry.
At SME CPAs we have certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors to help you get started managing your business. We offer a full range of services for QuickBooks, Point of Sale, and Enterprise Solutions. Call 706.722.5337 to set up an appointment with your certified advisor today.
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