How to use this Page

How to Get in on the Daily Deal Craze

By Annie Franklin

Living Social, Groupon, and other daily deal websites have proven themselves as a great way to promote small businesses. As the popularity of daily deal sites has grown, however, the criteria for businesses to qualify has become more rigorous. If you would like to get your business in on the daily deal craze, here are some things you will need to do in order to qualify:

A Business Website

If you want to qualify for inclusion, you will need a good business website. This will help to prove how much you are willing to put into digital marketing. The higher the quality of your website, the better your chances will be of being approved for inclusion. On some sites, a Google+ or Facebook page but only if they are very active and have a deal of posted content. The reason this is necessary is that sales of deals depends upon customers clicking through. If there is no readily available business information online, that is unlikely to happen.

Reputation

The more positive reviews you have on consumer review sites, the more confidence people will have in your business and your brand. Not only will these reviews help you to be chosen for inclusion in daily deals, they will also lead more people to purchase the deal you are offering.

Proof of Pricing
Before you can be included, you will need to prove your consistent pricing. This is best done by publishing prices on your website, but may also be proven through email.

Security

If you offer a type of service that requires you to be bonded, licensed, or insured, you will have to provide proof that you meet the qualifications before you will be approved for inclusion. This is a no-brainer, since customers will want to be ensured of their protection before spending money with your company. Since you must meet the requirements in order to meet legal standards, providing proof should not be a problem.

Physical Storefront

While many daily deals are for online purchases only, local daily deals require that you have a physical business location with an operating storefront. This is necessary in order to allow customers to visit your store and do some research before and after they make the choice to participate in your daily deal.

These are some of the standard criteria that are required for being included in daily deal offers. Be aware, however, that there may be additional standards that you will need to meet in order to gain approval with a particular site. If you are not sure what to do, speak with a local organization representative to discover the entire list of qualification criteria for your particular type of deal. This will make it far easier to establish yourself before applying for inclusion.

Annie Franklin is a writer for HowDoIBe.com. If you are interested in marketing and web design, check out the site.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Other Reading

Small Business Marketing – Know What Consumers Buy
How to Create an Ebook – 5 Simple Steps
SEO Marketing Tips to Help Get Links to Your Site

Display Comments Add a Comment

Small Business Marketing - Know Your Customer’s Online Behavior

Small business marketing, specifically internet marketing, boils down to predicting online behavior in terms of what it will take to turn a visitor into a customer.

According to the “experienced marketers and expert testers” at MarketingExperiments.com, this is a key element to success.

You’ve done your research and created a product or service to sell to others. And, you’ve researched your target market. Everything is in place to attract potential customers to your site.

But, once you get the prospect to your site, then what?

The purpose of bringing visitors to your site is the have them buy what you’re selling – this is called conversion. The ratio of the number of visitors to the number of buyers is your conversion rate.

Knowing your customer’s online behavior will help you enhance your site’s conversion rate.

According to a webinar presented by Marketing Experiments, How to Increase Conversion in 2012, for every action or step you want a visitor to take, it must be worth his time and money – it must be worth the opportunity cost.

In other words, the buyer must feel that choosing your product or service is of greater benefit compared to spending that money and time on another product or service. And, each step in the buying process must equate to a perceived benefit. The perceived value must outweigh the perceived cost, including time and effort.

The webinar offered four factors or key principles to small business marketing that will help guide the potential customer to the desired online behavior:

1. Appeal – Is your product desired enough by the prospect? Have you made your product and promo copy effective and enticing enough?

2. Exclusivity – Can the prospect find your product or service elsewhere online or is your offer unique and exclusive?

3. Credibility – Are your promo copy claims believable enough for the prospect to take action?

4. Clarity – Can the prospect quickly and easily understand what your site and offer is about? And, are the steps needed to purchase what you’re offering easy to follow and minimal? Having an effective heading that conveys the value of the offer, is essential to this element.

These four key principles are necessary to your small business marketing strategy – they’re needed to effectively lead a customer through the steps of buying.

Testing and research demonstrate that you must have “an unbroken chain of Yeses” in order to get the conversion. Along with this you must reduce buyer anxiety that usually appears during an involved buying process.

This means you must simplify the buying experience for the customer to allow for a smooth flow that maintains “cognitive momentum.”

Steps you can take to simplify the customer’s buying experience include:

• Have an effective image on your site – studies show that images increase clicks
• Have a clean and uncluttered page – clutter causes distraction, which breaks the “yes” chain
• Make the shopping cart steps as minimal as possible – keep it short and simple

In its simplest form, your ‘small business marketing customer value proposition’ needs to answer the question of ‘why should that customer buy from you, rather than from your competitor.’ And, you must convey that answer

Add a Comment

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Add a Comment