4 Ways To Get Consumers Talking About Your Small Business

Small businesses are in a unique position to truly benefit from customer reviews.  Chains are pretty well locked into their branding and there tends to be very little differentiation city-to-city and state-to-state.  They will build reputations for being consistent and predictable, but rarely break through to extraordinary.  However, small businesses are unencumbered by these expectations; small businesses have the opportunity to make a name for themselves as something really special.  Soliciting customer feedback can play a crucial role in building this reputation.  Here are 4 things to keep in mind as you encourage your own customers to review your business.
 

1)  Incentivize.  Give your customers a reason to review your business or service.  Offer them a coupon or discount off their next purchase if they go to Yelp, Citysearch or EZlocal and leave a review. 

2)  Link your business profiles on your own website.  Don't count on customers tracking down your listing on Yelp, InsiderPages or EZlocal.  Add links to your website for each profile and further encourage customers to go leave reviews. 

3)  Encourage a constant stream of reviews.  Keep the reviews trickling in, this serves two important purposes.  First, it looks better.  If you are visiting a profile whose reviews are all clustered around 3 or 4 dates, it looks questionable, a little bit planned and spammy.  A constant stream of reviews spread across all dates looks much better and will build more trust with potential customers.  

Secondly, a constant review stream will add up in the long run.  Make no mistake, review count matters so always keep that stream trickling in, it will add up and pay dividends, especially if your competitors are only making sporadic pushes for reviews.

4) Don't discourage bad reviews.  We don't live in a perfect world and no one expects your business to bat 1.000.  In fact, if your business has nothing but 5-star reviews across the board it might strike consumers as a bit suspect, is anybody that perfect?  Also, negative reviews offer a golden opportunity for you to prove yourself, to go above and beyond. The Consumerist actually has an entire category dedicated to incidences where businesses stepped up and made things right after something went wrong.  

The strength of small businesses often lies in customer service and attention to detail.  If a bad review falls on your doorstep, rejoice—you have a chance to showcase your talents and turn a negative review into a positive experience, something they will be impressed with and tell their friends about.  This word of mouth will prove to be incredibly valuable to your business.

For more information on growing your business clientele and marketing. Please contact the Montari Brooklyn Team at 1-855-We-Sale-U or visit www.MontariBrooklyn.com


 

Why MillerCoors Passed On NFL Advertising Deal

Coors Light will lose one asset this year that arguably helped its ascent — its deal with the NFL as the league’s official beer sponsor. The pact terminated at the end of this season and now belongs to Anheuser Busch InBev, which negotiated a six-year deal worth an estimated $50 million a year for Bud Light.
A-B has the exclusive right to use the NFL shield in Bud Light advertising and retail displays. MillerCoors can still run ads during games, just as A-B did when MillerCoors was sponsor. (It all may be a moot point this year, of course, if the NFL and its players union fail to strike a labor deal in time to save the season.)
In an interview with Ad Age, MillerCoors CMO Andy England acknowledged the deal’s value: “This was a great partnership,” he said. “It was a good deal for us. We were paying an appropriate price. We activated the heck out of it and it did for us what we wanted to do.” But he also said that the timing was right for an exit, noting that when Coors Light first struck the deal in 2001, it was before the 2008 merger that created

MillerCoors, bringing Miller Lite and Coors Light under one roof. MillerCoors CEO Leo Kiely, who oversaw Coors before the merger, “will tell you that the No. 1 reason he did that deal at that time was because he wanted to make sure that Coors had more attention through the NFL season than Miller did in Miller/Coors distributors,” Mr. England said. Now, he said, “the No. 1 reason that deal was done has actually gone away because we are now MillerCoors.”

Mr. England said the value in sports league sponsorships is all about retail activation, such as in-season displays that leverage popular NFL imagery. MillerCoors bowed out because the brewer could no longer get a return on investment with the price tag the league was looking for, Mr. England said. That may be so, but at least one distributor indicated to Ad Age that he was at least a little bit concerned, noting that being able to use the NFL shield on brand-sponsored NFL team schedules posted at bars was a valuable tool.

Mr. England emphasized that MillerCoors still has individual sponsorship deals with 21 of the 32 NFL teams, a point subtly hammered home to distributors with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ appearance at the brewer’s spring distributor convention in San Antonio last week. MillerCoors “will still be all over NFL broadcasts,” Mr. England said. “We have deep relationships with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, all of that.”

The brewer is shifting some of the freed-up sponsorship dollars to Mexican soccer teams and leagues and the National Hockey League, with which it recently inked a seven-year exclusive sponsorship deal estimated to be worth $400 million. MillerCoors hopes to take advantage of hockey’s cold imagery to push Coors Light, while making the NHL a core part of the branding for Molson Canadian.


Published: http://adage.com/article/news/millercoors-passed-nfl-deal/149592/ March 28, 2011