Thursday, September 22, 2011

Small Business Marketing lessons from an NFL Game

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As a life-long fan of the NFL (and of the Buccaneers), naturally I was watching the game this past Sunday;? while I was watching football, I was also being ?schooled? in small business marketing. Specifically, I was seeing the future of small business marketing unfold on my 52? TV set. Perhaps you saw it too (but did not notice).

Let me explain. Every few minutes the scores from other games were being shown at the bottom of the screen. Every time they showed the scores there were two other messages included in the scrolling updates.

They were ?Have a question for our NFL officiating guru Mike Pereira? Visit Fox Sports.com/askmike.? When you visit that site, you?ll see this:

Small business marketing lessons from watching the NFL

What is happening here is that the NFL and Fox Sports are using their ?media?, in this case a scrolling scoreboard during a TV broadcast to draw my attention to, and invite me to engage with them live and in real time. Once I choose to see what is going on, I?m asked to participate by asking questions about rules and rulings in the game through Twitter. Engagement with your targeted audience is the essence of small business marketing today.

The other message was leading me to NFL.com/Mobile and when I visited this link, I was shown this page:

Small business marketing learned from watching NFL football

The significance? Simple ? the NFL has been investing in mobile platforms, because they know that so many fans carry smart phones and that mobile phones and tablets are outselling desktop computers now. They are merely extending their ways of reaching their audience through new technology.

What should you take away from these lessons? If your prospective customer is using Twitter and is carrying a smart phone or tablet computer and your small business marketing is not optimized for them or using them too, you?re losing sales to a competitor who is.

If your industry is not fully engaging with these types of tools (yet), you still have a chance to take a dominant position. Think about it ? back in the days when phone books provided effective small business marketing, if you?re business was? listed first for your industry you got more calls.

Today if you?re found at the top of the results for your Google Places map and for your keywords in organic search results, you get more calls than companies listed lower in the results.

A Subtle Small Business Marketing Lesson

There was another, perhaps more subtle lesson learned too, and if you start watching closer, you?ll see it. It?s that most forms of media (Internet, TV, radio ? whatever) will produce more effective results the narrower the call to action is. Visit NFL.com/mobile ? versus just NFL.com. Sending targeted traffic to a page that meets the need of that targeted audience will always work better than just sending traffic to your home page.

If you have questions about whether your small business marketing strategy is effective or not and to learn your options on improving your marketing results measurably, contact us and request a no-cost strategy session.

Source: http://floridainboundmarketing.com/things-i-learned-about-small-business-marketing-while-watching-bucs-game/

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