Digi-promotion.com

At digi-promotion, we obviously talk a lot about marketing in the digital sense, which primarily means online. As we talked about in our last post, we’ve moved into looking at marketing local business as well.

These are unique from online businesses, in that they need to take care of marketing from a whole range of perspectives, including offline activities and signage for their shop fronts.

However, in working with a local signwriter and signage shop in Brisbane, we’ve discovered that there are a huge variety of signs for local businesses to get their message out in the offline world. One in particular that we’d never given much thought to is vehicles signage as illustrated in the attached picture. They do this by vinyl wrapping the vehicle, and I’m told it is quite flexible so you can choose to wrap the whole car or just a part of it. There’s also less permanent options like magnetic signs which you can take off as you please to use on different vehicles.

While signs are just a small part of an offline marketing strategy, in learning about all of these things we are able to better help our clients and teach more in our marketing courses.

With this sign business we have been working with, I think they relationship has been just as beneficial to them as it has to us. Of course we’ve helped them with their signwriting business as we were contracted to do, but have also learnt a lot about different advertising options for local business because of their extensive exposure in this area.

In our new course which is coming up in 3 weeks time (If you’re not already signed up to our mailing list, do so now to find out about it), we’ll be covering a lot of these tactics.

Stay tuned, and as always if there is something in particular you’d like covered, whether that be business signage related or something totally different, let us know and we’ll try to accommodate that in the course if we feel it could benefit most people.

 

I’ve recently been doing a lot of work with local businesses. The one I’m working with at the moment is a house cleaning service in Brisbane, Australia. It’s very interesting to see in these sort of service markets, how a business differentiates itself. They basically all offer the same thing, your house cleaned with mopping, vacuuming, dusting and bathrooms cleaned.

What makes a good house cleaner?

Well it comes down to the actual cleaner, not the business they work for. You could have a cleaning business that promises you the world, but if the actual cleaner they send to your house isn’t good at their job, or they just don’t really care about doing a good job, you won’t be happy with how they leave your house. I had a friend once tell me that the cleaner she hired through an agency was sitting on the couch when she came home. When the rate you pay a cleaner is per hour, you don’t want to be paying them to sit on the couch!

The cleaners with the best reviews tend to be independent domestic cleaners – they work for themselves and only take on a small number of clients that they clean for on a regular basis. I think the difference here is they they are the business, if they don’t keep their cleaning clients happy, then it’s up to them to find another one. They don’t have a business or boss taking care of sending them the work.

To sum it up, here’s what I would look for in a quality cleaner:

• Independent cleaner who only does house cleaning
• One who has references/testimonials from happy clients
• Not the lowest rate – you get what you pay for
• Someone who will come and meet with you before starting the cleaning job

If you happen to be located in Brisbane Australia, here is a top quality house cleaning service, and yes, this is the website I have been working on www.supremecleaning.com.au. Rhonda who runs the service prides herself in doing all of the things that make a quality cleaning service.

While on the surface the cleaning businesses you find online may seem the same, take the time to really look into what they provide, and more importantly who will be in your home doing your housework. If the rate they charge for their service seems too good to be true, it probably is!

 

It’s always interesting to see how indie/retro products are marketed, particularly online. In this weeks webinar, we looked at a site that specialises in hipster clothing along with 4 other similar sites to see how they market their products.

As we discussed at the start of the webinar, we thought this would be an interesting market to look into, as the fashion industry in general is very good with creative imagery and selling clothes through photos. We expected that the indie sort of sites selling vintage, retro and hipster styles might be even more creative to match the quirkiness of their wares. However, what we found from the 5 sites we analysed, 4 of them their marketing and imagery were quite mainstream, and the other 1 was quite creative but appealed to a very narrow demographic.

There’s a couple of reasons this could be:

• Limited budget – alot of these indie brands are marketed on a shoestring and therefore they don’t have the opportunity to be as creative
• Lack of knowledge to execute – A creative marketing campaign takes skill and knowledge to develop and execute properly. Many indie businesses are a one man show, and that one man is generally a jack of all trades.
• Website limitations – Many of these sites are on ‘out of the box’ ecommerce platforms, which means they can be limited in their functionality and ability to customise the site.

Providing services to these kinds of clothing/fashion businesses could be a great market for someone that can provide it at the right price point as we see more and more hipster, vintage and retro clothing sites emerge.

Anything to do with weddings is quite personal to the bride and groom, though with so many wedding vendors and blogs writing about the industry nowadays, it is interesting to see how they approach this personal topic and still try to capture the brides heart in the hope she will choose their service or product.

Particularly, with the things that would normally be tried on in real life like wedding and engagement rings, the dress, the grooms vest etc. But now, alot of couples are buying these things online for convenience and a much wider range to choose from. But how does a retailer or blogger connect with the buyer or reader and get them to take the desired action (click on their ads or buy more). We looked at opposite ends of the spectrum with wedding and engagement rings, from sites like Camo Wedding Guide.com who simply provide images of the camo wedding rings they specialise in, to Bluenile.com who provide a whole guide and more help with the ring buying process.

In comparing these two vastly different sites, we had to keep in mind their different demographics and also price ranges. Camoweddingguide’s price range is between $60-$400, where’s as Bluenile’s is in the thousands. Having the lower price range, Camo wedding guide can get away with providing far less detail and guidance, as the smaller purchase doesn’t require as much thought or buy in from the customer. Where as if a higher end site only provided this minimal detail, their sales of rings would more than likely suffer as the customer doesn’t have enough information and reassurance to make a purchase for their wedding.

As discussed on this weeks webinar, please go out and find some examples like this in the wedding industry and take notes of all their differences, demographics, whether they are targeted at the bride, groom or bridal party and their price ranges. Any other observations you would like to share will be greatly appreciated.

Well the last webinar did go a little off topic at the end, but I hope you all learnt alot from it anyhow. As promised, here is the Australian backyard and landscaping site we were talking about promoting, http://landscaping-oz.com/, along with this particular page about pool contractors http://landscaping-oz.com/best-pool-builders-brisbane/ and the definitions we discussed on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscaping. We look forward to the next webinar, and as always, if there is something you would like us to focus on in particular, please let us know.

Don’t forget to email me the websites you have found that you would like to have shared with the group at next Tuesdays webinar, I’m sure you’ve found heaps!

As discussed in last weeks webinar, here are the links to the sites we were talking about and that you should review for their website layouts. Australian designer gowns on kristahochwallner.com.au and ShoppeClique.com.au where they cover all sorts of designer handbags, clothes shoes etc. Unrelated to fashion but interesting was the Books like Fifty shades of grey page on this site.We’ll talk more about these at the next webinar before moving onto the new topic.