Thinking of Reducing Your Advertising In This Economy?

Because of the sluggish economic today, local businesses everywhere are slashing their budgets to make ends meet. A typical (but disturbing) business trend is that they think they can make it through these hard economic times by drastically reducing their advertising or worse yet, not advertise at all. Personally this mentality leaves me scratching my head and leaves me wondering what business school taught that way of thinking.

Savvy business owners don’t run & hide when the economy slows, they see opportunity. They do not think of decreasing their advertising, in fact many see the value in increasing advertising budgets. When the economy is good, people spend openly. When the economy takes a turn for the worse, people’s buying habits change. Experienced business owners search for the new trends in consumer spending. A sluggish economy means consumers will look for ways to save money, while maintaining the same level of product quality. Therefore, brand loyalty is not as relevant anymore. What’s most important is finding a brand that caters to consumer wants, while satisfying needs.

If anything, marketing is more important now than it ever was. People are willing to try different products. If they are satisfied with these new products, there won’t be a reason to switch back once the economy gets better. Aggressive advertising and marketing will put your products in front of the consumer when they are looking to find that great new product.

How can you find these consumers? Get them online! With every dollar being more important than before, consumers are researching almost every purchase they make. In fact recent survey’s have shown that over 70% of consumer search online for local businesses, products or services prior to making any purchase decisions. Serious thought is now put into everything from what toilet paper brand to buy to where to eat dinner to what model of car to drive.

Online advertising can be done most economically through search engine optimization. It does not involve a lot of money toward advertising, and the people it drives to your website are better qualified leads if keyword research is done properly. Now is the time for your business website to be thinking about Search Engine Optimization. Local businesses such as TucsonMerchant.com are here to help implement and handle your SEO for you. Good internet marketing firms will get to know your company and products, and work with you to determine the best strategy to implement and monitor your SEO campaign. Taking this route will free your time up to work on other things, and you’ll get regular reports and advice on the progress and direction of your site.

More customers, better results, less cost….just what any local business experiencing this sluggish economy needs.

Other ways to reduce costs in today’s economy:

• Increasing your “marketable customer database” but implementing a “customer capture campaign” with proven permission based email marketing. “The money is in the list”, as your marketable database list grows, so does your business. Recent survey’s show local small business reporting an average return of $43.08 on every dollar spent on an effective email marketing campaign.
• Fixing your broken or ineffective business website. Build new, or Re-Design, either way your business websites need to meet the demands of this Internet crazed society we live in today. Can new & existing customers easily find your business on the Internet? A well designed, easy to navigate, information packed business website turns visitors into paying customers.
• Get your business and your advertising out in front of “targeted customers” by Geo-Targeting your advertising per zip code….yes, per zip code! No more wasted advertising dollars spent on un-targeted marketing. Link to your website, add photo’s, menu’s, logo’s & maps with directions to your front door. All for less Value-Pak Mailers” or any other local form of advertising. Up to 50% less in most cases.

Now, take your newly designed business website, stuffed full of information, marketing features & SEO techniques…..Add the power of an effective permission based email / newsletter campaign, capturing all those new visitors to your website, adding them to your marketable database….with an effective, efficient Geo-Targeted Advertising Campaign.

That makes for an extremely powerful marketing campaign, one that produces better results & saves you money!

Visit www.TucsonMerchant.com to find out more. Use the contact form to st up your 100% risk free appointment & get your business geared up for today’s economy.

Direct Mail Dropping in Popularity. E-mail Marketing Thrives

direct mail spending,2004-2009

direct mail growth, by industry, 2008

direct mail spending,2004-2009

direct mail growth, by industry, 2008

Direct Mail Drop
MARCH 9, 2009

Lickety split.
Consumers may call it junk mail, but for over half a century marketers considered direct mail to be the “old reliable.”

Now, for the first time since direct mail began to be tracked in 1945, figures show that both direct mail spending and volume declined sharply in 2008.

According to “A Channel in Transformation: Vertical Market Trends in Direct Mail 2009,” from the Winterberry Group, US direct mail spending fell nearly 3% last year.

Spending dropped from $58.4 billion in 2007 to $56.7 billion in 2008.

Worse, Winterberry projects that direct mail spending will fall another 8% to 9% this year.

Mintel Comperemedia found that the volume of direct mail among the leading vertical industries fell an average of 12.1% in 2008.

“Direct mail volumes declined dramatically—even more precipitously than the falloff in spending, in fact—as mailers sought to integrate more precise targeting methodologies, production efficiencies and other value focused initiatives in an attempt to cut costs and preserve the economic return of their mail programs,” Winterberry analysts wrote in the report. “Direct mail has seen its influence as a high-volume, mass-oriented response driver all but vanish.”

The crisis in the financial services industry—a sector that mails on a mammoth scale—helped fuel the decline. Other reasons for the drop were rising costs in postage, labor and production.

Consumers’ ever-growing involvement in digital media was a factor, too.

In a Winterberry survey of service providers, 87% said they were seeing higher demand for digital products such as e-mail and search.

Nevertheless, direct mail still accounts for over $50 billion in US spending and, this dip aside, remains a viable industry. However, in the place of many old tried-and-true tactics, a wide variety of new mail applications are now beginning to emerge.

In the face of challenging conditions, mailers are shifting to lower-volume, more targeted and higher-value campaigns, and saturation mailings—call them “batch-blast,” “spray-and-pray” and “junk” mail—may soon be relics of the past.

“This report was produced by e-marketer.com. To see the report, Click Here.

TucsonMerchant.com offers effective, efficient, cost savings Permission Based Email Campaigns to Local Small Business here in Tucson, AZ. Local Small Business Owners are beginning to see the value of a strong Permission Based Email Campaign and how it can Geo-Target your customer base, reducing advertising budgets, while effectively atracting new, targeted customers to their business.

By combining the effectiveness of a strong Permission Based Email Campaign with the powerful, low cost geo-targeted advertising of LocalAdLink, it creates a most unique, one – two marketing punch that no other small business marketing firm in Tucson offers.
Call Ken, 520-797-0572 at TucsonMerchant.com and put this unique combination to work for your Tucson business.

LocalAdLink.com quite frankly is the future of local advertising for small business. It’s unique Geo-Targeted Technology gets your business advertisements seen by targeted local customers, in specific zip codes. This is extremely effective, complete marketing / advertising solution.
To find out more, visit: TucsonMerchant.com or TucsonAdLink.com

Other articles regarding Permission Based Email Campaigns, Geo-Taregted Marketing or Geo-Targeted Advertising, visit:

http://www.squidoo.com/localadlinkworks

http://www.squidoo.com/localadlinktucson

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/business/pressrelease/post/365

TucsonMerchant.com Teams With LocalAdLink.com, Bringing Affordable, Geo-Targeted Advertising to Local Small Businesses.

TucsonMerchant.com has joined forces with LocalAdLink.com, an extremely effective, geo-targeted local advertising network. Local Tucson Business Owners now have the opportunity to “Laser Target” advertising efforts to customers in specific zip code locations, maximizing their advertising dollar.

“This is huge!! I am extremely excited to be a part of the LocalAdLink.com family,” states Ken Perry of TucsonMerchant.com. “This creates the low-cost, extremely effective, geo-targeted advertising that Local Business here in Tucson needs to keep ahead of current economic conditions. To have the opportunity to zero in on specific neighborhoods and zip codes only goes to show how far and how powerful the internet can be. For any local small business who is not taking advantage of the internet to grow your business, the time is now!”

Until now large companies have been the main ones benefiting from being able to advertise on the Internet. LocalAdLink changes all that! LocalAdLink.com uses a process called geo-targeting technology – a modern process which determines the physical location of a website visitor and delivers content to that visitor based on his or her location! Thus, the results of a ‘search’ gives priority to display paid classified ads for local businesses. This is a huge break through for local small business, leveling the playing field, enabling the small business owner to compete with those “big box stores”.

LocalAdLink.com combines the powers of social network marketing, internet e-commerce and customized geo-targeted local advertising to create a massive advertising network which includes highly traveled websites like MySpace, FaceBook, CNN, BoomJ.com, I-Supply.com and Photography.com. Well over 1000 websites, with more joining everyday, create this unique advertising network.

Combining LocalAdLink.com with the already effective small business marketing solutions TucsonMerchant.com offers, creates an amazing one-two punch that no other local marketing company offers. Local Tucson Business Owners need to “take notice” and see the true value of these combined, cost saving services.

Small Business Owners who seek additional information on how you can integrate these effective, efficient internet marketing and low cost geo-targeted advertising techniques into your small business marketing program, can contact Ken Perry at (520) 797-0572 or visit and