I was at The Taste of Wheaton event this past Sunday. As I walked around sampling the culinary delights, I couldn’t help but put on my marketing cap for these restaurants and see how much more money these restaurants could really make.

Most restaurants that participate in a Taste Of event are well intentioned in that they want to bring in more customers and hope to use this event as a platform for attracting new customers. While giving out samples of their food is a start, I believe is simply old-school marketing. In fact, that’s what everyone else is doing at the event!

If these restaurants were coming to me for marketing consulting, here are some simple and yet powerful tactics that I’d offer them to attract new customers;

1. Give out coupons with each order that will encourage them to come back to your restaurant at a future time and spend more money.
2. Give out brochures or business cards with each order as well. Amazingly, most of these stands didn’t have brochures or list their address anywhere on their signage!
3. Incorporate your online social media presence (assuming you have one) into your print handouts. For example, include Twitter and Facebook profile urls into your brochures. Encourage them to follow or add you by giving away a discount or freebie.
4. Collect email addresses of the patrons.

I’d also devise a long-term strategy that would incorporate word-of-mouth tactics into the above.

I always tell my website clients to not waste a visitor by simply letting them browse your site and then leaving. I tell them to have a newsletter for them to subscribe to, or to integrate their Twitter, blog, or Facebook accounts into the site so they can connect with customers in other places long after they’ve left.

The strategies and mindset used for website marketing is the same at an offline event like this. Chances are, a one-day Taste Of event will not make or break your business. However, developing strategies and tactics that will encourage customers to ‘connect’ and remember your business long after they have tried your samples is a strategy that will handsomely payoff in the long run. Don’t be myopic and focus on just today. Innovate and be creative.

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Yes- it’s true that it is a storage company. What right do they have of bringing up such a hot topic, critics say.Honestly, they don’t. But the storage company doesn’t care about a conversation about abortion. They care about the conversation that apparently everyone is having about them now. Genius. Why? For starters;

1. It’s great copy. I’m sure you’re thinking that any copy writer or marketing agency could have done this. Possible. But not many would have the gumption to actually suggest nor implement it.
2. It’s controversial. If you ever want to get people talking, then don’t play it safe. The messages that get people talking the most are those that are controversial. It polarizes the community into two sides. There will be those who love it and those who hate it. This back and forth that will be played out in conversations and in the media will fuel word of mouth. Remember the law firm and their ad encouraging people to get a divorce? Same tactics.
3. It is timely. The ad introduces timely topics that are on the minds of many. The ad taps into conversations that many of us are already having. Some of the storage company’s other ads include references to Paris Hilton and George Bush;

   “Your closets scarier than Bush’s Agenda” Image

   “Your closets so shallow it makes Paris look deep.”Image

If a boring ho-hum storage company can create this type of publicity, then surely a drycleaner, plumber, realtor, and other smaller businesses could do the same. But before we get trigger happy and decide to implement this, here are a few things to remember.

First, be prepared for the backlash. It’s easy to sit there and dream of the PR and sales that can come in, but not everyone has a thick skin to handle the criticism that will come in.

Second, remember to make sure that people are saying your company’s name when they are badmouthing you. Some of the news articles mentioning this controversy never mentioned their ad. Everyone can have their fifteen minutes of fame, but you’d rather be memorable for far longer than that.

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The problem with many professional service firms’ website is that they lack an effective content development strategy. Pretty graphics to a website can’t do anything unless there is power packed content behind it.

The lack of a content development strategy results in a few negative consequences such as;

• Customer is overwhelmed with too much information.
• Customer doesn’t have enough information to make a decision.
• Customer can’t connect nor relate to the business
• Customer doesn’t trust what the business has to say.

After awhile, I just got tired of seeing one professional service provider after another skip out on the most obvious content strategies and lose money that is waiting to be taken.

To cure this disease, I just released my free website content guide, “Talk To Me-A Guide To Helping Professional Service Firms Develop Killer Conversational Content For Their Website”.

It is about developing web content that help you “talk with” your customers rather than talk at them. In doing so, your online presence will appear as more genuine, relevant, and position you as the provider of choice for your client needs. Ka-ching.

Download the 13 page guide here.

While anyone can benefit from the guide, I found the following professions and vertical markets to be most relevant to the guide’s content.

• Lawyers and law firms,
• Real estate professionals,
• Business consultants,
• Coaches,
• Agencies,
• Marketing professionals,
• Virtual assistants,
• Human resource firms,
• Accounting and accounting firms,
• Financial services firms,
• Information technology,
• Management consulting,
• Information technology,
• Independent professionals

I welcome feedback. This is version 1.0. In future releases, I would like to include more about how blogs and other forms of social media can add more conversational content to your online presence.

What to do with this guide?

You can print this out and read it at night before smacking yourself on the forehead wondering how much money you may have lost with your own website.

You can forward it to other friends and colleagues who run their own professional service firm and let this be a hint that they need to start having a conversation with their customers as well.

Download it, email it, or just blog about it.

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I’ve been giving it some thought and I’m starting to realize how powerful a story can be used in a business setting. Or in a personal setting as well. I was talking to Maria the other day, and she gave me a good reference on the art of storytelling. It also led me to the book, “The Story Factor” to which I ended up buying. Wow- what a great book on this unknown art.

It seems that one can actually make it a decent living out of storytelling as well as seems to be the case with local professional storyteller, Ira Koretsky. I think I found him through Cynthia
Perhaps I should reconsider my current title of Chief Web Evangelist to Chief Story Evangelist? Or maybe, Chief Fairytale Evangelist? Hey- everyone loves to hear a happy ending, right?

Every business, especially entrepreneurs, have a story to tell. Through my services of web and blog design and consulting, I am able to help entrepreneurs use this form of medium to communicate their story to their customer base.

I must have known this for awhile since I told everyone at the beginning of this year that everyone you meet has a story to tell and I am made it a personal goal to learn more about the stories of others. Of course, this means that I’ll have to rebrand myself and my online image. Hmmm…ok, maybe not.

But at the least, I will certainly find ways to make my services to be more desirable by implementing the power of stories into my business brand.

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My buddy, Leesa Barnes at Podonomics and Caprica Interactive Marketing, will be traveling from Toronto, Canada to London, England in the early spring. She’ll be holding a buzz marketing workshop that will teach attendees on how to use blogs and podcasting as a viable online marketing application tool.

Most of Leesa’s work is in podcasting consulting while her other partner, Claire “Blog Angel” Raikes, will share insights from the blogging side at the workshop.

As they are 3 months away from the actual 2 day workshop, they’d like to know what your biggest challenges with blogs and podcasting are. Is it the technological setup? Is it knowing how to actually market yourself once you are up and running? Do you just feel overwhelmed with all of the technology to begin with? Inquiring minds want to know. Feel free to comment with your angst and pains about these two great marketing application tools.

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Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising writes up the definitive beginners guide to Digg.com. It’s a pretty long post but half of it are screenshots of Digg’s website to aid the reader in understanding various areas of the Digg. He talks about the origin of Digg, why it’s so popular, how to use it, and offers a few tips. You also want to check out the list of Digg resources that he offers at the bottom of the entry. If you’re a veteran, then it’s a waste of time for you, but probably makes for a good reminder on how to use Digg.

Nick Usborne offers 4 tips on how to write a more effective homepage webcopy. It sounds like simple stuff but the majority of people make the same mistake over and over again with their homepage webcopy. I especially liked the fourth tip- make your visitors feel comfortable and confident. It sounds alot like what I am preaching in my upcoming Website Content Development Guide. It’s another week or two from being finished. It can be found in the Resources section of my site within another week. The guide teaches website owners how to write and develop effective content that will make them look credible and trustworthy in front of their prospects.

In Jim Boykins’s blog entry, he rebrands and improves his “Cool SEO Tool” to “The Top 10 Analysis SEO Tool“. This is truly a cool tool. You simply input your site url and enter a keyword phrase you trying to rank for. Here are just a few things that the tool will show;

• The top 10 sites in google for that phrase, compared to your site.
• It will also show how those top 10 sites rank in Yahoo and MSN.
• It will show the number of pages those sites have indexed in Yahoo
• It will show the backlinks to the page that ranks in the top 10 (Yahoo)
• It will show the total backlinks to that domain (Yahoo)

There is more. It’s a very effective tool if you want to get a feel of where your site ranks for certain keywords relative to the competition and it breaks it down to various factors as listed above.

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