My client is a mid-sized professional services firm. They are in the process of acquiring the practice of a competitor whose principal is very sick and unable to continue the practice. My client is obviously very concerned about how to announce the new acquisition to the clients and employees of the firm being acquired with the utmost sensitivity and integrity. The firm being acquired is small (under 10 employees), but has a healthy sized client base comprised primarily of small to mid-sized businesses, as well as individuals. The goal is to keep both the employees and clients of both firms well-informed, to promote comfort and confidence in the change, to openly and sensitively deal with questions and concerns that will undoubtedly arise, all while treating the matter with the sensitivity and integrity it deserves. What kinds of communication strategies and tactics can you recommend that would help fulfill these goals?

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Jay’s Answer: I would first have the leader of the competitor hold a meeting with their staff (potentially even without your client in attendance). The obvious questions: What about my job? What will happen? should be discussed. Giving the competitor room to come together and grieve would be a healthy thing to do with such a small group. The next internal meeting would be to have your client’s president/CEO in attendance to answer the questions. At the same time, have the competitor’s leadership meet with the client’s staff. The goal is to introduce everyone to each other in a healthy/clear way. This must be done before the public is involved, so that the public gets a consistent message.

The clients are next. Pre-emptively attempt to answer their key questions and schedule 1 on 1 meetings (phone, in person, etc.) with them in the coming weeks. You want to listen to their needs and respond to them.

Change happens. Show how combining the 2 companies will actually improve things for the better for everyone.

I am looking for marketing ideas for my business I am a physical therapist and would like to know how can I reach more clients for PT. I also offer wellness group classes such as belly dance, yoga, zumba, and private and semi private pilates I have a nice group of women coming to my classes but how can I attract more men as well as overall new clients.

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Jay’s Answer: Is your business focused around helping the healing process or prevention? Prevention is always a harder sell – people want to make a problem go away, but don’t want to invest time and money to avoid a potential problem (they’re generally too busy). What’s the competition like in your area? What’s your specialty?

As for getting more male clients. Men aren’t generally interested in wellness. They are more attracted to things like strength-building, aerobic-conditioning, and stress-reduction. Focus on these themes for your marketing.

Reach out to martial arts schools in your area. As a long-time martial artist, I know that different arts put repetitive strains on the body. Approach the head of these schools, and find out what problems are common. Then create a class for avoiding/healing the injuries at (and co-marketed with) the school.

Which of the following strategies is better for improving retail sales $;
A: take my best offer- 40% everything and run it the duration of my entire weekend sale
B: Take my best offer- 40% of everything and make it good only during my historical slow periods, Fridays, 8a-1p.

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Jay’s Answer: I’d pick choice "C": Do something dramatic. During the time period of your sale, your customer picks the discount by spinning a wheel, picking a piece of paper, popping a balloon, etc. The catch is that one of the random options is 100% off, the majority being 10%, and scattered other discounts. Take a picture of the 100% winner and put it in your window, ads, etc.

Long term, this isn’t a good strategy, though. You don’t want people getting trained to come in only for a discount, nor do you want to be known for low prices. You want to be known for quality, unique goods, etc. Short-term, it might be what you need to clear out older goods and generate some cash for your business.

Do you know of free (or low cost) software that scans your press release and tells you if it is optimized for search engines, or how to better optimize it for search engines? I believe the idea is that if your press release is optimized for the search engines, and then you submit it through the wires, that it is more likely to show up in Google News and such, giving your web site more traffic.

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Jay’s Answer: While it might seem to be a good idea to focus on your keyword density and the right keywords, I’m going to suggest that your focus on the value of the copy itself.

Yes, it’s a great idea to know what people are searching for. If you know that 1,000,000 people each month search for "new homes san diego", and there are 25,000 websites that already target these keywords, having your site rank well is likely to be a waste of your time (short-term).

Instead, focus on the "meat" of the press release. Remember a press release has a specific format. It’s not intended as a sales piece – it’s to announce something newsworthy. Make your PR newsworthy and you’ll get more than just search engines interested – you’ll get actual editors interested in giving you free space in their media.

If you had a SEO person, you could give them your high-value PR and let them tweak it slightly. But since you don’t, focus on what makes your company services interesting in the eyes of prospects.

My client is sells football memorabilia from around the world; signed and authentic high-quality products. We’ll be launching the website with e-commerce facility soon. In this sector, besides the usual SEO and PPC, what other methods would you recommend for attracting visitors to the site, increasing newsletter subscriptions, creating word-of-mouth and, obviously, increasing sales?

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Jay’s Answer: The #1 thing I’d suggest is getting a trusted 3rd party to authenticate/guarantee the memorabilia. That would be my first concern – Can I believe that the football is really signed by who you claim it is?

Make sure you have high-quality photos of each offering and lots of supporting text (for the search spiders).

Get listed on various memorabilia sites, such as:

http://sporting-goods.pricegrabber.com/football-memorabilia/p/1779/

Create an eBay store, list products on Amazon, etc.

If you have truly unique products, consider a press release.

If your products are from a limited number of sports teams, co-market with them.

Find memorabilia blogs and write about what’s special about your products.

We are hosting a webinar with a known author to show people in the software industry how to delivery surprisingly compelling demos in a virtual environment. The author is going to talk about the do’s and don’ts in demos to avoid boring ones. We are going to talk about some of our customer successes.

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Jay’s Answer: Focus on your target market: the software industry. Get even more specific: managers? programmers? web designers? CEOs? What type of software? For what audience?

Next, find where your target market goes online.

Finally, create a video of the webinar, and consider uploading it to Google Video, YouTube, etc. where it will eventually be found and get a lot of play. Make sure that the video clearly leads viewers back to your website for follow-up information, handouts, etc.

I have a small retail store/boutique located in a shopping center that doubles as a local harbor. Most of our customers are local, but there is a perception among many locals that we are only for tourists. We get some tourists, but not a lot, definitely not enough to support a shopping center. We have about 25 stores and a dozen restaurants and a coffee shop. The coffee shop is packed with locals every morning and the restaurants are packed w/ locals every night. As you know getting a group together to market is like herding cats, but we do have a bit of a budget. As we are in a public harbor, the county is our landlord and they are in the process of redoing the website to attract more people. According to the marketing co. that was hired to do a survey our customers are ‘upper crust’ with incomes over $75K a yr, mostly over 50, but with a sprinkling into younger age groups. This holds true to the informal tracking I do in my store. My question is: Do you have any ideas as to how to market our harbor/shopping area to reach more locals and get them to look on us as a local attraction, not a tourist trap. I am hoping you could give ideas both for us as a group & maybe some things that individual stores could do. Most of the stores merchandise is not geared towards tourists. Right now the harbor does a Xmas open house, a whale watching festival and a tall ships festival. They have really been expanding the holiday boat parade also. These events bring a lot of people to the harbor, but many of them come with children & most people coming to the events do not come threw the stores.

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Jay’s Answer: Offer locals-only discount. People need to show their driver’s license to prove it. This is a stronger benefit for lower-income groups, but may help.

Provide free (or discounted) meeting spaces for local meeting groups (clubs, non-profits, etc.).

You hired a marketing company to analyze your customers. Did you ask the customers, "What would make you come here more often?" It may be perception, it may be parking, it may be competition, it may be price, etc.

Support your local artists. Each month have an art show in a different store in the shopping center. The point is to get people to see the store and support the local artists at the same time.

Changing habits doesn’t happen overnight.

I am a girl living in Guangzhou, China. Canton Fair is hold in this city twice every year. Hundreds of thousands of foreigners come to attend these trade fairs. Most of the foreign businessmen can’t speak Chinese and cannot communicate with the Chinese businesses well. So I would like to solve their problems by offering my interpretation services. However, I have so many competitors: government, businesses, individuals, organizations… I find it difficult to compete with them to have good customers. The difficulty for me is how to let my target customer know me and what I do. And I can’t spend much money for this.

In effect, compared with others, I believe that I have much more advantages, because I am very familiar with the wholesale markets in and around Guangzhou, I can show them around the markets and help them find the lowest cost supplier, I can also hire cars at lower prices, and I am willing to offer quality inspection services for them.

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Jay’s Answer: You’ve listed some good benefits: translation skills, familiarity with wholesale markets, familiarity with rental cars, and inspection services.

You haven’t (yet) identified WHO you’re trying to help (other than "foreign businessmen"). Is there an industry that you can specialize in? The more specific your specialization (niche), the easier it is to get your message to them.

Your letter to your prospects should focus on the problem you solve for your potential customers: We help global buyers new to China to efficiently find quality suppliers. We know the Guangzhou market, can translate all of your business negotiations, and provide ongoing quality inspections for your goods. Here are a list of services we can provide: Market Investigation, etc.

I have owned a very successful furniture showroom in New York City (NYC) for almost 10 years and would like some ideas to increase my business. NYC has become a very tough and competive environment for high end furniture venues. Rents just have climbed to astromical levels and I need to increase traffic! I think that the NYC housing market at the median level is in big trouble. Any information on how we can increase our business would be greatly appreciated. We are not a chain store so we have to be frugal.

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Jay’s Answer: The obvious questions are: What makes the furniture you sell unique (or is it available at other stores in NYC)? How can you justify the "high-end" label/price for it? You mention competition – are other stores having similar problems (i.e., is there a glut of stores) or is the problem specific to your business? Who is your target customer (age, demographic, etc.)?

Obvious suggestions include: contacting (by phone, email, mail) your previous customers. Based on what they purchased before, tell them something that might be of interest to them now. The holidays are coming up – think entertaining. Do they need a new sofa? bed? Invite the furniture maker (if they’re local) to present at a show – invite the public to your art/furniture show, serving wine & hors d’oeuvres. Co-market with art galleries, jewelry designers, clothes boutiques.

If you’re feeling the pinch from Ikea – then you need to advertise why it’s worth paying $$ for products from your store instead of Ikea.

We make and sell a line of alternative energy products directly to end users (customers). Historically, our web site gave info about the products and invited people to call and order. In addition, several online retailers buy the products from us at a discount and re-sell them for various prices; some identify the products as ours and some don’t. We recently entered the 21st century, up-dated our web site, and added the option to order the products online.

Now that we have the ability to sell on our web site, we’re more aware of the fact that our search engine ranking will affect how many people find our site first and buy from us directly rather than from one of the retailers. But that’s about all we know about SEO.

We’re batting this question around: Does it hurt or help our SEO that our products can be found on several sites? Some of the retailers use photos and text from our literature and/or web site- does this strengthen or weaken our SEO?

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Jay’s Answer: Ignoring the search engine ranking – do you want more dealers to be reselling your products? What is the profit you make when a dealer purchases it vs. a consumer (don’t forget to include customer service, billing, shipping, etc.).

Each of your dealers is actually doing you a huge favor – they’re sales reps for your products. You’ve basically been the manufacturer and didn’t have to deal with the public much. They’ve been doing the advertising and customer service.

If you attempt to compete with them, you may be cannibalizing your sales (taking from the dealer and selling direct). This may in turn reduce the number of dealers/resellers wanting to compete with you.

That said, you asked about SEO. What you really want are customers buying from your website. So what you need to first do is figure out are what keywords are people using to find your (and your competitors’) products? Ignore your resellers (unless you find that one of them is extremely good at getting traffic, in which case you’ll be learning from them). Once you know how people are looking for you, then provide a website full of information. Not just your existing pictures and text. Lots of descriptions of how the products have been used. White papers comparing energy saved (and money, too). Online calculators to compute time of payback. Make your site an authority on your type of product. Now, for the dealers that will cooperate, have them link to your site. Publish your articles in various article banks online. Submit them to various consumer journals.

SEO is a small piece of a bigger picture. Focus on your marketing strategy for attracting customers. Everything else will take care of itself organically.