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As a business owner, you’ve likely been using the internet to market to customers and social media fans throughout the year.  With the holidays approaching though, it’s time to kick your strategies into high gear.  There will be more shoppers out on the web than ever this year, which is why that’s where a lot of your marketing should be as well.  To make the most of this holiday season, be sure you’ve covered each of the following five steps.

Stock Up on Social Media Fans

First and foremost, you have to get your fan counts to an all-time high.  Encourage current fans to share your content in order to get a boost in exposure and offer website visitors more content to Like and Follow.  If you’re really hurting for fans, try investing in a fan package from a social media fan service.  With a package like this, you can get thousands of targeted fans delivered right to your social media pages.  With such a huge increase in fans, you’re sure to expand your marketing potential for the holidays. 

  If you can’t afford to give each of your profiles a fan package, prioritize them for the biggest effect.  Focus on the social media sites you update most regularly first.  This list is often prioritized as such:

  1. Twitter:  Go for a big package here, as these followers check their feeds regularly and so will have a high rate of exposure to your marketing.

  2.  Facebook:  Your next priority should be Facebook because of the high number of people sharing content and connecting.  There is a good possibility that new fans from a package will connect you to even more branches of potential fans.  Also, it’s a great place to share multimedia content- which is great for showing off products for sale.

  3.  Pinterest:  If your pictures make your products look tempting or interesting, then a Pinterest follower package may work for your company.

  4.  YouTube:  If you put out videos now and then, it might be a good idea to get a few more fans to see your company’s Christmas message or holiday charity project.  Use it to make viewers want to share in your holiday spirit.

  Get Your Products on Recommended Gift Lists

There are a lot of news sites, blogs, and e-zines out there recommending products for the holidays.  If you sell a product, you’ll want to make sure it gets on a few of them.  Submit your product for review at the e-zine sites and blogs and send the news sites a press release.  You can also create your own recommendations list on your company blog.  It might also be a good idea to recommend a product each day leading up to the holidays on your social media pages.

  Create Holiday Shopping Related Content

Speaking of blogs and articles; make sure you have your own up and running.  In fact, during the holiday season, you should be optimizing for your site’s searchable keywords like crazy.  Add content to your site that talks about products and gets those words to come up for your company in the search engines.  Try tying your topic into the holidays somehow.  You can suggest gifts, explain practical winter tips, or get inspired by some other aspect, like religion.  This can give you lots of ideas for new articles, blogs, and videos that people will be out searching for.  Keep an eye on your Google ranking in particular, since that’s where most of your traffic will come from (in terms of search engines).  Also, don’t forget some mobile-friendly content.  With more people shopping online, and more people shopping from mobile devices, you’ll want to accommodate the trend with a long, narrow page design and lots of big, touchable buttons.

  Increase Ads

Even if you have a lot of fans, there are still plenty of other people who aren’t one of your fans and who may not come across your social media page or website on their own.  You probably already have ads up in a few places, but you might want to consider increasing your ad budget for the holidays.  Of course, you’ll want to get your order in as soon as possible, as holiday ad space may become limited quickly.  If you have the money for it, get your ad on all the popular shopping sites, like Amazon, Ebay, and Google.  You may also want to increase your investment in backlinks in the form of contextual links in articles, blogs, presentations, and/or videos posted around the web- preferably on high PR sites.

  Get Coupons/Discounts Out to Fans

Once you have your name out there and have informed your social media fans and the rest of the web about your great products, it’s time to give them a tempting invitation.  Get coupons and other discount details into regular profile updates.  This way, for fans who were considering a purchase, they now have that added push that makes them click to your site.  Once there, hopefully your site design will be engaging enough to keep them there and lead them to a purchase.  You could even give fans discounts for getting a friend to click your link or share your content.  This way, not only are you instigating a purchase but also a cheap and highly effective marketing boost.

You know that a blog for your business is an excellent way to get new customers and develop a following online. Even if you’ve done all the research and figured out what your blog will be covering, it can be surprisingly difficult to think of topics that are both valuable and entertaining. Even if you think of a few, you might wonder if they truly represent your brand and your company.

  This is not an uncommon problem, and you shouldn’t give up just yet. There are many ways you can brainstorm good blog topics, but one in particular will give you a new outlook on the whole process. Try treating every new blog post as a new product. Even if you’re in a service industry and don’t produce real products, put yourself in the shoes of a company that does. Each product needs to be successful to make it worth the production costs, so a lot of thought should go into every one. Nothing hits the shelves before careful inspection and research. Use the following tips to improve your blog and give every topic a new spin by acting as if each one is a new product.

  Think about Supply and Demand

Before selling any type of product on the market, companies first find out where there is demand. An entrepreneur probably wouldn’t design a fast food joint with a specialty in hamburgers, because the market is already saturated with this type of fast food. Instead, the company would look for ways to supply the demand of a new type of food craving. A fast food salad place or soup drive-through might supply the demands of those tired of low-quality burgers. In the same way, you need to identify the demand of your audience and supply it. Look for article topics that have not yet been covered. When you supply a new demand, people will most definitely “buy your product,” or read your articles. By answering specific questions they might have, your site will be the only destination where they can find the information they need.

  Never Stop Researching

Similarly, when a company releases a new product, they don’t simply forget about it and move on. They pay attention to the changing opinions of their audience so that they can alter the product as necessary. Luckily, this research process is a lot easier for blog posts than for actual products. To research any of your posts, you can follow the comments on the actual page. First, people might critique you on grammar or spelling, and you can change the post accordingly. Next, they might suggest new topics or alternative solutions to any that you’ve presented, which you can then add to your original post. Finally, they might post nothing at all, which is a sign that they’re not very interested. By measuring your web traffic, shares on social media sites, and comment responses, you can find out which articles are more popular than others, and you can tailor upcoming posts to fit the interests of your target audience. Unlike product developers who have to spend thousands of dollars on focus groups and surveys, your research insights are built into each article.

  Make Sure It Represents Your Brand

Each product a company releases ties into the overall brand message of the business. L.L. Bean wouldn’t create bed sheets with Disney princesses on it just the same as Burger King wouldn’t produce a line of exotic tea flavors. Every brand has a specific style and message. Before writing any more blog posts, you and your team should sit down and determine your brand identity. There are hundreds of abstract exercises you can do to determine the voice and message of your brand, but you should be left with one takeaway for your audience. Your blog might have been created to give your audience the best cooking advice, or it might be to teach people with celiac disease to enjoy their meals. When you decide on a brand identity, you should make sure every article represents it. Without representing your brand, your audience will feel that they could easily find the same information elsewhere.

  Would Your Customers Pay for Your Blog Post?

In actuality, no one would pay for a blog post unless it was part of a bigger subscription. However, you should ask yourself this question in theory. Every blog post you create should provide value to your customers. Though such value is immeasurable on the Internet, try thinking about it in terms of money. Determine whether or not someone might pay for your blog post, which is the same question you might ask yourself when creating a product. If your post doesn’t seem worth the money, figure out why not and tweak it. In most cases, your post might not be worth money because it isn’t original, so make sure you add your own spin to it for a boost in value. Only once you have decided that your post is worth paying for should you upload it. You won’t be getting any money for it from your audience, but it’s a good way to measure your value prior to posting.

  Update Constantly

In addition to researching the success of your post and tailoring those you create in the future, you should also constantly update your articles so that they fit with the times. Where would video games be if we were still on the original Nintendo Entertainment System? How would we communicate effectively if we were still using the rotary phone? These products have kept up with new technology, and your article should keep up with trends in social media and blog posts in general. You might have gotten a lot of shares on Facebook and Twitter initially with your article on smartphone apps last year, and it probably even helped you get more Facebook friendsand followers. However, a lot has changed since then, and your article might be irrelevant now. To keep people interested around the web, consider updating the article to include new apps and new technology.

If you manage your company’s Facebook page, you’ve probably faced the dilemma of being able to predict an appropriate Facebook post for a future date, and then being forced to keep it in mind when the date finally approaches. For example, if you have an upcoming event, sale or special occasion, you’ll want to make a Facebook post about it. Now, Facebook offers scheduled posts to help page owners better plan their overall strategy. When you create a scheduled post, you won’t have to worry about making a post at the time of the upcoming event, because the post will be uploaded automatically.

  The new feature was introduced in May of 2012, so many business owners have already taken advantage of it. Scheduled posts actually allow Facebook page admins to spend more time engaging with their fans. When they don’t have to spend most of their day making posts, they can connect with fans by responding to comments and making comments of their own. Especially for people hired as social media managers, scheduled posts offer a way to plan the day more effectively and free up time to interact on social media sites.

  Creating a scheduled post is easy, and it only requires a few extra steps beyond your usual post updates. After you’ve added the status or photo you’re looking to schedule, click on the clock icon in the lower left-hand corner of the post window. From there, you can choose the time, day, month, and year you’d like the post to show up on your timeline and in the newsfeed of your fans. Posts can be scheduled as far as six months into the future. As with your regular posts, you can also add language and location targeting to scheduled posts to reach fans more effectively.

  There are many benefits to scheduled posts, and they can be a vital part of your Facebook strategy if used correctly. You can post more regularly by planning ahead, which will make your company page seem more valuable to existing and potential fans. In fact, you can even schedule a weekly post to appear at the exact same time on the same day of every week so that fans can expect your clever posts weekly. By using scheduled posts, your social media manager will spend less time each day writing out the content and more time interacting with fans and getting more attention for your social media pages. More attention on these pages will translate to more sales and more web traffic on your site.

  Scheduled Posts are Not Linked to Twitter

If your Facebook is set up to automatically share every post on Twitter, this is especially important. When you create a scheduled post, it will not be posted to Twitter. Companies that take advantage of scheduled Facebook posts but don’t realize they aren’t linked to Twitter could get into trouble with this one when their Twitter feed suddenly becomes inactive. It’s important to stay relevant both on your Facebook and Twitter pages, so make sure you add supplemental Tweets to make up for the scheduled posts. Otherwise, your Twitter followers might soon lose interest.

  Backdated Posts will Show Up in Your Fans’ Newsfeed

When you use scheduled posts on Facebook, you’ll have the option to backdate your post. In other words, you can create a new post that will have a time stamp from the past so it will look like you had posted it then. This is helpful if you want certain information on your Timeline from before you were active on Facebook. For example, you could make a post about a time you were featured in the local paper in 2009 before your company page was established. However, you need to remember that this post will still show up in the news feed of each fan. Though it will appear in the correct place on your Timeline, it will also show up as news as soon as it’s posted. Therefore, you should be careful about what you post. Fans might find it strange that you’re promoting past events.

  Not Every Post Can be Scheduled

When you start planning your scheduled posts on Facebook, you might accidentally include a post that cannot actually be scheduled. It’s important to know which types of posts can be scheduled and which cannot. Links, photos, videos and regular status updates can all be posted automatically at a specified date and time. Photo albums, events, offers, questions and milestones cannot be scheduled. The feature is still relatively new on Facebook, so there’s a good chance these types of posts might have a scheduling option eventually, but for now they can only be posted in real time.

  You Can’t Edit the Content of a Scheduled Post

Once you have created your status update and scheduled it to be posted in the future, you cannot edit the actual content of the post. You can change the date and time of upload, but the entire post will need to be deleted and remade if there is an error in the content. For that reason, you should be especially careful when creating scheduled posts so that you don’t waste time cancelling every one that has an error in the information or even grammatical errors. Be diligent in proofreading each scheduled post before it’s posted, and make sure each is double checked if you have a social media manager working on the Facebook page.

While you’re trying to increase traffic to your site and widen your audience, you’ve probably been focusing a lot on linkbait. Linkbait is the irresistible content that will get people to visit your site because it sounds too interesting to pass up. However, as you’ve been focusing so heavily on keywords and innovative topics, you might have forgotten to ask yourself a very important question—who is your linkbait reeling in? It’s easy to forget that not all web hits are created equally, and there are some people that will be worth a lot more than others.

  It’s true that every hit your site gets counts. Each visit is one step closer to your web traffic goals and your higher search engine page ranking (SERP). However, there are groups of people on the Internet who have a lot of weight when it comes to links. Rand at SEO Moz calls these groups the “linkerati”. To many, their word is gold, so their seal of approval is invaluable. When they like your site, there’s a good chance they’ll share it with their followers.

  As you’re building your web traffic strategy, keep these four groups in mind: 

  Bloggers

On the Internet, the bloggers are the influencers. There’s a reason companies pay popular blog writers to try their products and write about them, and it’s because people are listening. Even small blogs with less widely read content are influencers because people visit their sites specifically for advice and information. If a single mom is writing a blog post meant for other single moms to read, it’s most likely about her recent life experiences. Her followers will likely take any advice she hands out because they trust and respect her opinion.

  If the majority of your web traffic comes from bloggers, there’s a good chance each visit will go far. They might post a link to your page on their site so that all of their visitors have the opportunity to click through to your page. If you are trying to focus your web traffic efforts in one area, you should start by reaching out to bloggers. Every visit is a potential share, and their audience is more easily influenced than the people reading a Facebook status update or a Tweet with a link.

  Content Creators

Though their name sounds similar, this group differs from bloggers because they are not necessarily creating original content for their readers’ best interest. Instead, they’re trying to beef up webpages with keyword-heavy content that are essentially summaries of different articles. Content creators are not necessarily appealing to a wide or a large audience, but they provide one of the most valuable perks of all: backlinks. Every time a content creator references your site, they’ll need to link back to it on their page. Every backlink serves as a “vote of confidence” on Google’s SERP algorithm. So, while the content creators might not be sharing your page with the masses and giving you more traffic directly, they will boost you on a list of search results and therefore get you more traffic indirectly.

  Social Taggers

There are sites on the Internet specifically designed for link sharing. People don’t visit these sites unless they’re interested in wasting some time by browsing hundreds of links and clicking whichever pique their interest. Sites like Reddit are extremely valuable for building web traffic and getting more visitors. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to identify “social taggers” as a specific group. Unlike bloggers who constantly upload content or content creators that set out with a single purpose, anyone can be a social tagger. According to a survey of Reddit users, the majority are between the ages of 18-24. But even people age 65 and up are using the site, so link submission knows no bounds.

  Since the audience is so varied, there is no way you can specifically target social taggers and encourage them to share your link. As with most other strategies, excellent content is the only way you can gain popularity in this way. However, you could have members on your team that submit your site to popular sites such as Reddit, Digg and Delicious in the hopes that you’ll gain more traffic. Often, sites that make it to the front page of Reddit go down because the unprecedented amount of traffic. As long as your bandwidth can handle it, it could bring you unmatched success.

  Web News Writers and Journalists

Getting traffic from this group of link-clickers is not necessarily easy, but it is most definitely valuable. People that write news for popular sites such as CNET and Wired are always looking for new content, so you should try putting your website in a positive light to appeal to them. You won’t necessarily attract their attention simply by having a good search engine ranking or a large following, so you should be more traditional in your approach to entice them. Consider creating a press release about your products or services and sending it to them via email, or try using industry connections to get in touch with them. Unlike many of the other traffic categories, this one might take a little bit more finesse. Thousands of sites and companies try to get coverage every day by these major web news outlets, so you’re competing with a wide variety of other people and businesses. Set yourself apart by taking the traditional news approach to get their traffic.

It’s not something you can ignore any more: social media is having a huge impact on marketing, the way people do business, and the strategies used to attract customers. While originally, never intended to be anything more than a casual, fun way to use the Internet and connect with others, its very popularity has made it a potentially powerful marketing tool.

In a way, the development of social media mirrors that of other, earlier forms of advertising: if a lot of people saw something, that something was a good advertising medium. From signs in the outfield in a baseball stadium to billboards on the highway, mass-viewed signage followed the first rule of advertising back in the day: saturate. The rule when you couldn’t control who got your message and who didn’t was: hit as many people as possible. Gradually, more “efficient” methods of advertising developed, such as targeted marketing.

What does this have to do with social media, you ask? Well, the lesson to take away is that for the first time in the long history of advertising, businesses don’t have to target their marketing; the businesses have become the targets. If you had suggested to an advertiser 20 or 50 years ago that he would be able to market only to those people who had shown an interest in his products, he would probably have fainted from sheer joy. Mass marketing was a hugely inefficient strategy, but it was really the only one available if you wanted to get your message to enough customers. Now, your marketing can be tailored to those persons who want to be your customers. This is a tremendous gain in efficiency, and a correspondingly huge reduction in costs.

How do I Market on Social Media?

One word: differently.

Most of the advertising we see is still conveyed via mass media. As a saturation rather than a targeted technique, mass media advertising assumes that the vast majority of the people who see/hear it have no particular interest in, knowledge of, or inclination to buy the product. Thus, most of its message is persuasive; the idea is to talk that disinterested person into buying the product. You might notice that there often isn’t much description of the actual product or what it does; this is because there isn’t time for persuasion and description both.

Social media marketing is a different animal altogether. Your audience has presumably already passed through the persuasion phase when they have agreed to “like” you on Facebook or “follow” you on Twitter, etc. This means that the content you show to your already loyal customers should be sharply different in tone that traditional persuasive advertising. Your update content, therefore, should be informative and entertaining rather than persuasive. You can perhaps gently lead the customer toward a more expensive product or introduce something new, but you should definitely not be heavy-handed about it. Since most mass media advertising is pretty loud and blatant, you might have it embedded in your consciousness that advertising has to be that way (otherwise, presumably, it would be ineffective). The tone of your updates and loyal-customer marketing, however, should be muted rather than loud; confidential rather than broadcast from the rooftops.

A database of loyal, interested customers is an asset beyond price for a business. Social media updates and marketing tools allow a business to cultivate that pool of customers as well as add new ones to the pool; the business’s webpage can contain prompts to like or follow on social media. Make these invitations visible but not so obtrusive that they detract from your website content: if people are interested, never fear; they will click on your +1 button.

Small Businesses and Non-Profits

Social media-based targeted marketing is a boon for entities that have severely restricted budgets, such as small sole proprietorships and non-profit charities. Ask any small businessman what his biggest worry is, and he’ll say “cash flow.” Ask him what his greatest need is, and he’ll say “affordable advertising.” Social media marketing is both very cheap and very effective. This becomes more and more true the more specialized is a business and/or the products it sells. It is simply impossible (and financially inadvisable) to try to reach every person who might be interested in Lebanese food or Harley-Davidson repair via mass marketing. It is easy (and financially savvy) to use a well-constructed website, good SEO content, and social media marketing to reach only those people who are interested in your products. The good marketer no longer randomly fires arrows into the dark, hoping that a few of them will hit the target; he now holds up the target and invites people to hit it.

Non-profit organizations in particular can benefit from the efficiencies of social media marketing. One of the thorniest problems for non-profits is soliciting for donations. Mass marketing is usually too expensive and, since the set of people who are willing to donate to a given cause, charity, or organization is usually very small compared to the general population, inefficient. If funds are limited (as they usually are), a non-profit will want to spend those funds (and the finite amount of time its volunteers and employees have) on the best and most efficient marketing strategies.

When any type of new technology is available to the general public, new ethical standards and laws must be made to suit the opportunities it presents. For example, body scanners in airports caused uproar as travelers felt that they were being violated. The scanners produced a frighteningly accurate picture of the body under clothing, so standards had to be set regarding how the images would be used. Even an invention as far back as the radio caused a stir for a while as advertisers, broadcasters, and the FCC worked together to create laws about what could and couldn’t be said. Social media, which is used by many companies as a way to reach out to customers around the world, is causing a similar stir, and people are unsure about what’s wrong and right on the sites.

  In its basic form, social media is easy for anyone to use. Even octogenarians are learning how to comment on their grandkid’s photos and upload some of their own. Companies—especially those with in-house social media gurus—are really getting into the swing of things and using sites such as Facebook and Twitter to connect with their audience. It gives them a sense of power that they’ve never had before. Instead of communicating with customers in a one-way channel such as print or TV advertising, they can start a conversation and learn more about their consumers than they’d never have known otherwise. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and every company should be careful about how they use any social media site.

  Access to so much information can be dangerous, and many companies are accidentally abusing the laws of social media. There is certainly a lack of clarity in digital advertising law as it relates to social media. These vague guidelines become a major problem when companies try creating their policy handbook and feel stumped at the section about social media. While they might have ideas about what will and will not get you fired, these ideas are sometimes utterly illegal. Employer-employee relationships can be touchy. A company could get in serious trouble if it implied that women who cut their hair short could be fired, for example. While its obvious why that scenario would be a problem, discrimination and policies based on social media can be just as bad, but more difficult to define.

  As we all try determining what should be legal on social media sites, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been working towards making the laws clear. There are hundreds of ways that you could potentially break labor laws with your social media policy and not even realize it. Instead of guessing whether or not something is illegal, always work with a professional legal consultant when creating or adjusting your company policies. If you’re already working under a set of guidelines for your company, take great care to heed the following legal warnings. 

  Employees Cannot be Fired for Criticizing the Company

Technically, the NLRB states that employers cannot create policies that prohibit employees from posting negative things on Facebook or any other social media site. Employees are allowed to rant and rave about the company all they’d like. They’re even allowed to discuss any legal claims openly with their social media friends. However, if you did get fired over bashing your company online, you might not win in the court case. Your company or supervisor specifically could charge you with libel, and the evidence would be all too easy to find. If your company policy is that employees could speak negatively about your business over social media sites, the NLRB might rule against it. However, if you fired a rude employee over harsh negative statements, you’d likely win in the court of law. This one is complicated, so just hope that none of your employees would do such a thing, and don’t hire ones that might. This was most recently an issue with national chain Costco, and the employee won in the end.

  Employers Cannot Ask for the Passwords to their Employees Social Profiles

Recently, a trend has started in which employers ask for the password to their potential employee’s social media sites as part of the interview process. It seems outrageous, but when people are desperate for a job, they’ll often hand it over. This is a major privacy breech, and the NRLB deems it a violation of the laws of the digital world.  The government is also working on a bill to stop this request permanently. It’s perfectly legal to look at the Facebook and Twitter profiles of your potential and current employees. Tech companies use LinkedIn and Twitter profiles to find out how savvy their applicants are. However, you should never ask for access to their personal accounts.

  Employees Cannot be Fired for Friending Coworkers

Connecting on social media sites is a fun way for people to stay in touch. Social media friendships don’t always indicate any romantic involvement, and sometimes they aren’t even signs of a friendship in real life. Much like a policy against inter-office dating, some companies are taking it upon themselves to prevent their employees from becoming friends or followers of their coworkers. The NLRB has approached companies regarding statements about friending coworkers and has deemed each one illegal.

  Employers Cannot Tell Employees that They Can’t Use Social Media Sites at Work

This one is surprising, considering all of the employers in the United States that block sites such as Facebook and Reddit from their company servers. Technically, the NLRB states that employers are not allowed to tell their employees that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter cannot be accessed with company resources or on company time. This is because doing so would rule out the possibility of using the sites off-hours at the office or during lunch breaks, which is illegal. The sites are harmless in nature, so preventing employees from doing what they’d like to do is the bigger issue.

These days, it seems as if everyone has a smartphone, iPad, or some other “smart” mobile device. The reason it seems that way is that it’s rapidly becoming true. The number of smartphones owned by U.S. consumers, for example, passed 100 million earlier this year. As the number of devices grows, so does the number of apps for those devices. There are hundreds of thousands of apps out there, varying in degrees of usefulness, but one thing is certain: if it’s a human activity, somebody, somewhere, has invented an app for it.

One of the most common human activities on the planet is shopping, so it was only a matter of time before someone invented apps for it. There are problems though.  Many such apps change fundamental aspects of shopping that we enjoy. While the consumer shopping experience may change fundamentally and radically in the very near future, there are some elements of the shopping experience that probably should remain as they are. A brick-and-mortar retailer may, in fact, survive and thrive precisely because it offers a part of the shopping experience that is unavailable online.  Imagine, for example, a candy store, and what makes a trip to a candy store fun.  Then ask yourself to what extent that experience can be duplicated online.

Live Shopping Apps—What’s Needed and What Isn’t

The logic of an app is that it makes something easier, more convenient, more possible, or less tedious. It follows, then, that the only useful apps are those that modify activities that are difficult, inconvenient, not (very) possible, or tedious.  An app that changes the shopping experience for the worse, even if it adds convenience, is counterproductive. The brick-and-mortar retailer, then, has to ask herself what it is that makes customers come to her shop in the first place. If it’s a women’s clothing store, why aren’t they at Target or Sears? If it’s a bookstore, why aren’t they at Barnes & Noble or shopping online at Amazon? The answers to these questions can help the storeowner to evaluate what to streamline with an app and what to leave alone.

Fancy or Quick Fix?

Let’s say that a retailer does decide to incorporate a suite of apps to get traffic to their site and/or to their store. For example, a smartphone app could prompt the shopper/user to enter a product code and then be given information about the product (more detailed than that which is available via signage, tags, labels, etc.). Then the decision is whether to use a preprogrammed app that will interact with customers’ mobile devices or one that is custom-written for the business. Now, two things that no small business owner has enough of are money and time. To hire a developer to create a custom app costs money; to write the app yourself (assuming you have enough knowledge to do so in the first place) takes time. It is probably better, then, to use premade apps and, if necessary, adapt the business to their use.

Middleman

Possibly the most common type of app used by small-to-medium-sized businesses is the marketing app, which is meant to attract and gather website traffic rather than to deal with them directly once they arrive at the store. This is sometimes referred to as a “push” app in that the customer is presumably impelled to investigate the business as a result of doing or investigating something related to the business’s products or services.  These are often the subject of reciprocal agreements.  Push/pull apps are popular because they are an inexpensive form of targeted marketing, which has traditionally been both the most effective and the most expensive form of marketing.

Supplying Information

A business that supplies information may benefit from a mobile app that provides some of that information free of charge. A realtor, for example, may find it useful to provide the customer with an app that does searches based on location, price, or other criteria. This not only eventually draws the customer to the retailer but also saves the time of each, as the customer will already be informed when he arrives at the business’s location. For many other types of products, supplying information can be very helpful in drawing the customer in, such as uses for the product that the customer may not have considered. This encourages the customer, in turn, to visit the physical store location, armed with the information he needs.

Increasing Brand Loyalty and Customer Motivation

The second part of a two-pronged customer base strategy is converting visitors to customers and making them loyal. The key here is to use apps to give them “special” offers that are only available to loyal customers. It is important to emphasize this exclusivity, as you want your customers to feel invested in your business. We tend to be creatures of habit, so we will revisit the same retailers if our experiences are positive, but you shouldn’t rely on that tendency. A loyal customer is a very valuable asset, and you should take special pains to not only retain but cultivate that asset. Many retailers are surprised and pleased when a customer who has only bought small-ticket items up to this point makes a major purchase.  This is a positive effect of brand loyalty. Service businesses, such as car repair shops or beauty salons, in particular benefit from brand loyalty. Another aspect of business where brand loyalty is supremely important is when the products are not strongly differentiated from one retailer to the next; airlines and casinos come to mind. An app that fosters brand loyalty encourages the customer not to defect and choose similar products from another retailer.