Marketing for Local Business Series Gets Great Reviews
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Tag Archives: Marketing For Small Business
October Classes Start Oct 24, 2017
DETAILS AND REGISTRATION
- Classes are conducted at our facility in the heart of the Museum district of Houston, Texas at 4802 Travis St
- LUNCH IS INCLUDED WITH YOUR REGISTRATION PRICE
- Desktops, notebooks, and smart phones are welcome as classes are conducted while using live platforms
PRICING
Individual Classes $30/per person
2 Classes $57/per person
3 Classes $81/per person
4 Classes $105.00/per person
USE PROMO CODE B1G1 AT REGISTRATION AND RECEIVE 50% OFF! REGISTER HERE
Summer Classes SOLD OUT
Today our Marketing for Small Business Summer Seminar Series completely SOLD OUT! This is our 4th series in a row to fill to capacity, and we are so excited. Can’t wait to meet the many exciting businesses and entrepreneurs attending. The classes are always interactive and a hotbed for learning.
Our next scheduled series is Marketing for Small Business, The Basics to be scheduled in January 2018.
The train has left the station, again! Our Marketing for Small Business, The Basics summer seminar series has SOLD OUT! The Basics covers 5 topics over 4 weeks starting on Wednesday, May 24th, with Corporate Blogging. Social Media, Email Marketing, Direct Marketing and Organic Search Engine Optimization round out this very popular series.
Next round of classes begin in July with our new Marketing for Small Business, Advanced Classes. Check out details, pricing, and times here.
Blogging Class Ranked Excellent
Check out survey results from previous attendees for our Marketing for Small Business Classes. Our Corporate Blogging class was rated Excellent by 100% of attendees that completed surveys. Check it out here.
FACEBOOK Class Ranked Excellent
Our HOW TO: Facebook class, the second of our five seminar fall curriculum, was at full capacity yesterday.
We met some fantastic entrepreneurs with amazing companies…again! The class covered details on how Facebook decides who sees posts on your newsfeed, why your organic reach from your company Facebook page is waning (the latest statistics show that less than 6.5% of followers to your company page will see your posts), and a detailed explanation of insights.
We surveyed our participants and 100% ranked the class as EXCELLENT. Next week is HOW TO: LinkedIN!
TWITTER 101
Why should your business be on Twitter? It’s a great way to stay connected to your customers, it’s an excellent lead generation platform, you can share information quickly and gather feedback in real time.
Twitter is a recipient driven platform. People choose to follow your account. Messaging is quick to read and write, exchangeable anywhere and is easy to integrate into multiple networks such as Twitter, Instagram, and your website.
There are a few cautions to note. 
Be sure to check out the profile before you follow someone. Pornography sites are prevalent, hackers are present, and stay away from people selling “followers”. Lastly, be careful about aggressive tweeting – hounding people to follow you, pushing people to interact, you could get your account shut down. Respect the platform and see who starts to follow you and be sure to follow those whose tweets you want to see more of.
Messaging is limited to 140 characters per tweet (for now). This includes website links and pictures. Be sure that you write well though. Don’t start using short hand unless it’s necessary. You’ll find the more you’re on Twitter, the more concise your writing will become!
Best Practices
SHARE! Share photos and behind the scenes info about your business. Even better, give a glimpse of developing projects and events. Users come to Twitter to get and share the latest, so give it to them!
Listen. Regularly monitor the comments about you, your co-workers and your company, brand, and products.
Ask – Respond – Engage
Ask questions of your followers to gain valuable insights and show you are listening.
Respond to compliments and feedback as soon as you can.
Engage existing & prospective clients; it may not seem so, it adds a personal touch.
Demonstrate Wider Leadership. Reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates 
to your business.
Champion Your Stakeholders. Retweet and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers.
Establish the right voice.
Twitter users tend to prefer a direct, genuine, and of course, a likable tone from you, think about your voice as you Tweet. How do you want your business to appear to the Twitter community?
The very best way to become comfortable within Twitter, is to start using it. Search for people and businesses to follow. Start with following your current clients. Then start Tweeting.
You can also attend one of our many Marketing for Small Business classes. We offer training on how to choose the right social platform for your business as well as how to use those platforms. Our next HOW TO: Twitter class is on Wednesday, October 5, 2016 from 11:30 – 1:00pm. Register here today!
FACEBOOK’S FOUR NEW ADVERTISING SOLUTIONS
Last month, Facebook announced 4 new advertising solutions launching in 2016 during the Cannes Lions Festival in Cannes, France. The focus is on accelerating the shift to mobile advertising as the platform boasts 1.6 billion active users on Facebook and another 500 million on Instagram. The new solutions include:
- Audience Insights Application Program Interface (API)
Facebook partnered with a small group of advertisers, like Mondelez International (an American multinational confectionery, food, and beverage conglomerate based in Illinois which employs about 107,000 people around the world) and Anheuser-Busch InBev (the world’s largest brewer with 25% global market share), to develop insights from composite and unidentified demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ. The teams have been able to use these insights to create effective campaigns. The Audience Insights API will be available to partners early next year.
- Improvements to Canvas
Introduced last year, Canvas is a post-click, full-screen, immersive mobile ad experience that
loads instantaneously. It is designed to help businesses tell stories and show products on mobile devices in a beautiful way. Updates include steps to make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights, the ability to share Canvases with stakeholders to simplify the review process and it will have a new feed unit to help entice people to engage. In addition, Canvas will be available for all Pages to use in a post (even when it’s not promoted as an ad). Also, marketers will be able to access detailed metrics such as dwell time per component and clicks per component to track performance.
- Enhancements to Slideshows
Slideshow ads make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos. It gives the ability to create, edit and promote video ads in seconds and are five times lighter than the average video file, which means they’re ideal to reach people on slow connections. Audio and text overlay, an easy “video-to-slideshow” creation tool, the ability to create from a mobile device and integration with Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock image library are the latest enhancements. These tools will be available to all advertisers and can be used however you would use a video.
- Introduction of Creative Hub
People consume content on mobile in fundamentally different ways than they do on other channels. Creative Hub is an online interface, a “sandbox” where agencies can test different ad formats for online and mobile and experiment with what works best. In the past, most ad creation happens on desktop, but that is changing fast and Creative Hub’s experience is for a mobile device. The Creative Hub gives ad creators an easy way to preview their work in a dynamic mobile feed. They can also share mock-ups through a preview URL.
The Creative Hub is currently in test mode and should be available to everyone later in the year.
Facebook for small business continues to change almost daily. We’ll (try) to keep you abreast of the latest updates and opportunities as we learn them.
For more details, be sure to check out our Marketing for Small Business Classes too. We offer two curriculum, The Basics and Intermediate.
The Basics course was specifically created for business owners and staff that are branching out their marketing to include digital. The course includes four, 90-minute classes over four weeks. Classes include Blogging, Social Media, Email Marketing, Direct Mail Marketing and Organic Search Engine Optimization.
The Intermediate courses (also four, 90-minute classes over four weeks) are: HOW TO: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Constant Contact. Check out details, dates and pricing here.
St Paul’s Marketing Class
We had a great class with the fine people of St Paul’s Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Texas today! St Paul’s has new leadership and and they want to make a positive impact on their community. We created a two-day Marketing for Small Business class, geared specifically to their needs. We covered blogging, email marketing, direct mail and social media. We also reviewed how using multi-channels to market can radically increase your Search Engine Optimization.
What a great group of people and a fantastic organization. Thanks for making this class so productive and fun! Check out their new website here!
Summer Marketing Classes Set
Back by popular demand, our Marketing for Small Business, The Basics Summer Classes have been scheduled!
Click here to see a short video on the Marketing for Small Business Summer Series
This 4-part series covers marketing basics that every business should use. Our first class covers blogging. Learn the reasons why a business should blog and the importance of keeping your website content fresh and consistent. We’ll discuss topics for content, when and where to find suitable content, how often to post and how to create back links to your website that will help with your organic Search Engine Optimization.
Next up? Social media. What is the value of a “Follow”, a “Like” or a LinkedIn endorsement? Does social media bring new clients within a B2B platform? Does Twitter or Facebook generate revenue? Learn the value that social media can bring to your business, understand the demographics of the people on different platforms, and learn how the most used social media environments differ.
The 3rd class in our wildly popular series covers email & direct mail. Learn about the
Classes are kept to a maximum of 15 people to enable accelerated interaction.
minefields surrounding email blasts and privacy regulations. We discuss how to study, catalog and build your email list and identify content and links that can help with your organic SEO. We’ll also review several online email services available to make online marketing easier.
Learn how direct mail has become a digital driving machine with a long shelf life. The printed piece has become interactive with QR Codes and Augmented Reality and tracking results is easier than ever before.
The last class is about organic Search Engine optimization (SEO). Our partners at Siteboxpro, a local leader in SEO and web marketing, will conduct this class. Learn about the process of organically improving the visibility of your website in search engine results.
Our guest lecturers will review the parts that make up a search engine result. They’ll show you ways to take advantage of local searches using free services like Yelp or Google maps. We’ll discuss target-paid listings, budgets, and learn about different kinds of searches.
Classes are kept to a maximum of 15 people to enable accelerated interaction and enhanced learning. Lunch is included with the registration fee. This series has consistently been rated Excellent by our over 50 graduates. 97% of all attendees surveyed say they would recommend the series to a friend.
Classes are conducted at our facility in The Museum District of Houston Texas (near I69 & Main Street). Special rates are available for multiple classes. Classes usually SELL OUT, so register TODAY! Click here for more details.
