Can your business offer a subscription?
More and more, subscriptions are becoming a common way to pay for products and services. Generally tech enabled; streaming service subscriptions, subscription services for basic goods like razors and toothbrushes, free shipping subscription clubs, newsletter and podcast subscriptions, monthly clothing subscriptions, gaming and e-sports subscriptions, creator subscriptions, food of the month subscriptions, coffee of the month subscriptions, wine of the month subscriptions, Amazon Web Services, reoccurring donations, subscriptions, subscriptions, subscriptions. There’s a lot of subscriptions, and there’s a reason for it! Subscriptions are a fantastic way to keep customers engaged with your business and offer them the flexibility of being able to cancel their membership at any time.
It may be hard to remember, but the primary way of making money on Apple’s App Store, a $64 billion business, used to be selling access to an app as a one time purchase. It was only in 2011, when Apple started offering subscriptions for apps on the App Store, four years after the iPhone was announced. Back in the early days of the App Store, developers would usually sell their apps for 99 cents, or more if the app was a professional grade app or premium service. This was great at the time, as it was a new way for software developers to monetize their work, and a brand new way for consumers to find and buy apps for their cellphones. As smartphone adoption became the mainstream, app stores became common and subscriptions became standard, Apple’s App Store and others like it became platforms that enabled whole new industries that created billion and trillion dollar companies.
If you sell an expensive product or service, can you turn that price tag into smaller monthly payments? Photoshop used to be an extremely cost prohibitive software for people to use, or let alone buy to see if they like graphic design. Because of this, graphic design was much more expensive and difficult to find people with experience. As more people started using computers, and Adobe introduced a new monthly subscription plan, more people are now able to download creative software, and figure out if that’s a skill that they’d like to learn.
Software isn’t the only business that is going to a subscription model. Panera Bread, known for bread bowls, bagels and baked goods is now offering customers a coffee subscription plan. For the cost of a couple cups of coffee a month, subscribers can get unlimited coffee. This keeps those customers coming back for their coffee in the morning, where they now may now buy a breakfast sandwich. That customer may now go to Panera for lunch now too, because of the free coffee refill. Subscriptions can be any part of your business that keeps your customers engaged with your business.
Most website platforms that offer commerce tools also offer a subscription plan for businesses to create. You can get creative with what you offer, like a surprise of the month club, or use a subscription to collaborate with a local nonprofit, like a book of the month club for a local coffee shop. If you’re a yoga studio, can you offer a subscription to unlimited classes, or virtual classes? If your business has an expertise, then maybe you can create a paid newsletter for information and advice on your domain. What will your subscription be?
Don’t have time to blog? Aggregate!
Blogging is a fantastic way to develop a presence online. Blogging gives your customers, audience, followers, donors and readers something to read that can inform them about your brand identity. Blogs can be used to publish information, lifestyle content, pure entertainment, art, embedded videos or podcasts, or really any other form of media can be made into a blog. Blogs are the building blocks of a website, and as such websites with a lot of blog posts are generally ranked higher in search results. Blog posts can also be posted onto social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Reddit, bringing readers and potential customers into your website through published content.
Blogging is great for businesses. Pretty much the only downside to blogging is actually taking the time to blog. Blogging is writing, and writing can be a grind if you aren’t already a good writer or really enjoy the process of writing. Blogging for people who don’t like to write can be a lot of staring at a computer screen without typing, frustration, and procrastination. Blogging means that you have to think up a bunch of different random ideas that are related to your business, brand or organization, then think up 250-1000 words on a subject. Then you have to find images that go along with what you just wrote, while also being on brand for your organization. Blogging is great, unless you don’t like to write or don’t have the time to sit down and write.
The good news is that if you don’t want to blog, or don’t have the time to write, you can still gain some of the benefits of blogging for your business. Services like Google News don’t actually publish anything. They aggregate links and curate content. You still think of Google News as a news source, as it “publishes” a list of algorithmically curated news (that pulls a short excerpt from the article), much similarly to an actual newspaper.
Your business, brand or organization can do this same content aggregation with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. You can even quote from articles to incorporate into a video or image post for Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. By acting as a curator by aggregating content, you can still inform your customers and following of topics relevant to your operations and gain domain credibility. The only thing different than blogging, is that when someone clicks on a link that you aggregate, the reader will go to a news site instead of your own website.
If you absolutely have no time at all to blog, or absolutely do not want to publish blog posts, then aggregation can be the next best thing for your business, brand or organization. You can still aggregate content on your social media accounts (or website by embedding), and still build your brand. Aggregation keeps you in conversation with your audience, and if blogging isn’t a possibility, it’s easy to start. Figure out what topics relate to your business and start Googling for some links. What does your business do?
Collaborate with local nonprofits to build community
Collaborating with local nonprofits is an easy way to build community around your business, brand or organization, while also giving back and helping a local nonprofit support your area. Depending on what your organization does, you can collaborate with nonprofits in many different ways. If you operate a restaurant, you can run a fundraising campaign where you donate a percentage of sales on a given day to a nonprofit in your area. If you provide a service, like graphic design, you can donate your services to a local nonprofit. Event the smallest collaborations can make a big difference. If you run a boutique, you can keep a jar and info card next to your cash register for donations, if you have a storefront or community board, you can let nonprofits put leaflets up to advertise their campaigns and events.
Figure out a nonprofit that resonates with what your business does. If you have a tutoring business, then you could start a college scholarship for local students. If you’re a local grocery store, specialty food store, or coffee shop, you can donate extra food to a food bank, or a percentage of monthly sales. Basically every business, brand or organization has something that can be thematically tied to a nonprofit, or at the very least, is located somewhere, and collaborating with your local government or rotary club can be just as impactful.
Working with a nonprofit or local government group means that you’re doing a good thing that helps benefit your community. This is just a baseline good thing to do, that many people already do. When your community thrives, your business, brand or organization thrives as well, and by becoming an active contributor to benefit, you become even more of a stakeholder in your community.
Collaborating with nonprofits or local government groups at its most immediate, gives both you and the group that you’re collaborating with a campaign to promote, other than your business or their group. If you start a trash cleanup walking group in collaboration with your local park district and conservation nonprofit, then the three of your organizations now lead a regularly meeting group that promotes your organizations while also benefiting your locality’s green walking spaces.
When figuring out what to do and who to collaborate with, it’s important to keep in mind what your organization stands for, and to only pitch collaborations that really speak to what your business, brand or organization actually does. This way, you can avoid confusing collaborations, or seeming like you’re only interested in the collaboration to benefit yourself. The best collaborations are symbiotic, and benefit everyone involved. Make sure the organizations you choose to pitch align with your work, and that you can provide real value. Don’t be a nuisance, and if you get no’s for your pitches, learn from any given feedback and try the next organization.
If done successfully, working with local nonprofits or government organizations helps generate positive affinity towards your business, brand or organization. A long running collaboration between your business, brand or organization can potentially even become a real changemaker in your local community, bringing positive change. You don’t have to start with a big collaboration with a state-level nonprofit. You can really just start with a tip jar at the counter of your boutique store that is donated to your county homeless shelter. Small changes make all the difference, and if it helps your company and the organization you’re working with, why not try something?
How offline and online advertising work together
Digital advertising is a powerful and efficient tool that can be used to reach the exact audience that is relevant to your business, brand or organization, making it easy to find potential new customers. Online platforms like Facebook, Google, and other social media companies collect data shared on their platforms and combine it with other data sources that they purchase, giving them ample information to create profiles on their users about what people are interested in. These platforms then make this information available to advertisers, who can then create ads that will show in the newsfeeds of people who may be interested in what they are advertising. Online advertising is a great tool because you can keep your advertising budget solely for people who might actually be interested in your business, brand or organization, and only spend when someone actually sees an ad.
Offline advertising is almost anything else that isn’t online advertising. Billboards, leaflets, traditional media, business cards, t-shirts, car wraps, etc. are all examples of offline advertising. Offline advertising is great because at its best it can be easy and highly visible, with good return. Printing out 100 leaflets for an event is cheap to do, and putting them on local community boards or the windows of coffee shops and boutiques can be a low cost way to get your event’s ad in front of a lot of people, quickly. Keeping business cards on you at all times and if, “what do you do?” ever comes up (or if you’re just good at networking), is a zero effort offline marketing tactic that can have long term payoff, if you ever meet a potential customer or client.
Each advertising channel has its own unique set of benefits and pitfalls. Advertising on Instagram Stories is an excellent way to get your content in front of a wealth of people, but if your business isn’t prepared for that traffic or if you target to the wrong audience, you’ll waste a lot of money quickly. If you rely solely on leafletting, but never actually get around to researching where to place your leaflets, or don’t go around pinning and taping up your printouts, then that channel becomes useless. Ideally, you find a few different channels to advertise through, and by using a blend of strategies, the benefits and detractions of the channels can even themselves out.
When you pick a few different marketing and advertising channels that are both online and offline, you can get the benefits of both, and use the channels in some interesting ways. Notably, you can blend the visibility of offline advertising with the hyper-specific targeting of online advertising to create a symbiotic boost to both marketing channels. If you make leaflets for something that you’re trying to advertise, then only target your online ads to the newsfeeds of people in the specific areas that you leafletted, then the chances of someone remembering your ad or business goes up. If someone sees your ad at a local coffee shop, then is served an ad of the same graphic through their social media newsfeed, that means there are two points in time where someone would be hypothetically seeing your ad. The second time they see the ad, they will likely remember the first one, and that will add to the chances of them remembering your ad.
The offline/online strategy is really helpful, because you can be extremely specific in your ads relative to the location that they exist in. You can reference something that only local residents may get in an offline context, then run that same ad online, keeping your business, brand or organization in mind. This makes your ads more effective, meaning that they will be cheaper to run, meaning that it will cost less money to achieve your advertising goals. Offline/online helps you reach exactly who you need to reach online, while also creating the broad visibility of offline advertising.
Offline/online can be used by both local businesses, brands or organizations, but it can also be used by large companies that have a wide range of markets they serve. As a small local business, all you have to do is keep your messaging consistent and utilize both online and offline channels. As a larger company in many locations, all you have to do is find a primary goal for your advertising, then personalize it for a local audience. This is how Chicagoans get advertisements from multinational conglomerates that speak of the city being windy, or how New Yorkers get ads from the same big companies that make puns about large apples or pizza. A great thing about offline/online is that it can be utilized in any sized market. Messaging can get even more specific the less people in a given area, so you don’t have to focus on big cities to try this strategy.
Some social media advertising channels will even let you type in a list of addresses where you offline ads are, and they’ll send an online ad to anyone who has visited your retail location (or where you leaflets are), meaning that you can reach only the people that you need to if you’re running a super specific advertisement. If you’re advertising for your coffee shop, what’s something that a customer leaving your shop might remember? Reference it in an online ad, inviting them back to your retail location. It’ll feel personalized, because it’s directly referencing a customer experience, and they’ll be more likely to visit your shop again.
By combining offline and online advertising, businesses, brands or organizations can get the best of both strategies and avoid the pitfalls of solely relying on one way to advertise to people. Utilizing offline advertising in addition to online marketing strategies, you create multiple different opportunities to reach a potential customer, making the chance that they remember your business, brand or organization much greater. By trying different strategies and learning from what does and doesn’t work, you’ll increase the efficacy of your advertising and also save some money while you’re at it. Because you can reference a local area with online, then follow up online, your ads will be more effective. How would you mix online and offline advertising? What channels will you utilize?
What is your business’ lifestyle?
Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle, or a story that can be told to describe itself. Some businesses have an easily identifiable lifestyle, like a hotel or travel brand. Brands that are lush in experience can readily show what time spent at those businesses may be like. Businesses that are less focused on vacationer hospitality, and say tax preparation or other professional services, have a more challenging task when determining how to visualize the story of their brand. While difficult, telling a brand story about a hypothetical client success story about a business that is up to date on all of their paperwork, and how that business can now focus on their core operations. Every organization has a story to tell, a way to show how their operations work, and a community that it exists in. Even a vending machine exists in a place, and that place has a story, and people that live within it. Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle and thus, a story to tell.
You may already be aware of lifestyle bloggers, or lifestyle social media influencers, or people who create content surrounding the life they live. Lifestyle bloggers or influencers generally work with brands to make content that promotes products and showcases how to use them. Lifestyle bloggers or influencers also typically rely on monetizing the audience that follows them, either through advertising, brand collaborations, sponsorships, or events. If you think of your business in the same way, you can start to think of how your business entity might tell these same stories. Are you a retail storefront? You can make the same how-to content about the products you sell that an influencer might make on their own. You can even hire lifestyle content creators to work with you on how to best create a brand lifestyle.
So what is your lifestyle? Think about your core business operations. What do you do and what industry are you in? Do you sell things, offer services to others, or are you a community organization? Where are you located, do you work online? Think holistically about your business, brand or organization and really zero in on what makes it what it is. Your business isn’t just a list of products, think about what people who shop at your store do with what they buy.
Now that you have an idea about what the lifestyle of your business, brand or organization is, you can begin to create content surrounding that thesis. Posting on social media is a great way to reach existing customers, social media platforms will also share your content algorithmically, heling you reach new people. Blogging is another great way to communicate with customers. Blogging helps you go a little more in depth on a subject than a social media post, and can also be shared by Facebook or email. Blog posts will also be indexed by search engines, so people can find your business when they search online.
Think in terms of campaigns or content franchises. A dentist can create a campaign about low sugar foods and post new recipes regularly. A bank could run a quarterly spotlight about their business banking clients, showcasing the successes and stories of their clients. The best content franchises can be run evergreen and are simple to understand. Don’t start by thinking you’ll do something daily or weekly, because you might find that it’s hard to generate that number of ideas while also running a business or organization.
You don’t need to be trendy in your communication or follow what lifestyle bloggers and influencers do. Stay true to what your business does, or what your operations are. By communicating to your customers through storytelling and valuable content, you will show that you know what you’re talking about, and if your business operates well, customers will return. Lifestyle content keeps customers engaged with your brand, because it gives people something to read, watch or listen to that is related to, or presented by, your brand, but not necessarily explicitly transactional, like only posting an image of a product and asking for people to buy it. When the time for a purchase decision arises, your business will be in you customers’ minds, because they have been engaging with your lifestyle content.
Lifestyle content and multimedia storytelling benefits from longevity. Stick to what works and adapt to what doesn’t. Pay attention to what your customers say and how they engage with your content. Monitor analytics provided from your social media or website accounts, and let them tell you where to potentially focus. Be regular, but don’t burn yourself out. After some time, you’ll begin to notice a depth and range to what you’ve been posting and your business’ lifestyle will start to be readily communicated to anyone visiting your online or marketing presence.
Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle and a story to tell. Communicating in a way that draws customers in by showcasing your operations and community will go much further than simply stating what you sell. Show existing and new customers how your business operates, give people how-to’s or walkthroughs to inform them beyond a product listing, keep engaged with your local community and how your industry interacts with it, visualize a lifestyle for your audience and how what you sell will help them achieve it. Lifestyle content is simply showing people what your business does in a way that communicates more information than price and purchase. What is your business, brand or organization’s lifestyle?
Every business should be blogging
Blogging. Blogs. Blog. What is a blog? Blogs are online journals or informational websites displaying information in reverse chronological order. Blogs are articles that you publish on your business’ website. Blogs can be about your business, what you do, your business processes, what you sell, your announcements, and your plans. Blogs can be posted as often as you want, and they’re great for speaking directly to your customers, as well as for finding new people to inform about your business. Blog about your location and where you operate. You can really blog about whatever, as long as it is relevant to your business. All you need is a website, and most website platforms have blogging built in.
Simply put, blogging will increase traffic to your business’ website. By publishing regular blog posts, you are creating new information rich webpages for search engine to index, and if your blog posts are relevant to your business, search engines will reward you with traffic. Search engines “scan” the entire Internet often, mapping out domains and keeping track of website quality. Blog posts are pages that people like to click on when using search engines, as they generally answer a question, explain something, give a how-to, or announce news. By keeping your blog posts high quality, search engines will notice when people stay on your website and re-visit it. These are indicators that search engines use when deciding who to rank at the top of a search page.
Your business can blog as much as you’re able to, and anything helps. You can blog every once in a while, and it’ll still grow the amount of you business’ website pages indexed by search engines. Blogging more frequently is rewarded with more traffic because search engines will begin to consider your business’ website to be a good source of information that they can rely on to send traffic to. As reported by Oberlo, “Businesses that produce 16 or more blog posts per month experience 3.5 times more traffic than blogs that post fewer than four posts.”
Blogging is a common practice in big business that can easily be adopted by any small business, nonprofit, artist or organization. Brands often announce product launches on their own company blogs, and companies like Facebook use blogging to inform their business customers on how to use Facebook for business and announce new ways to advertise. These companies use content marketing because it works, and is an effective means of corporate communication. According to Oberlo, “86% of content marketers use blogs as part of their marketing strategy.”
Not only does blogging give you the ability to speak directly to your customers, maintaining a regular blog for your business is an excellent way to find new customers organically when people search online. When blogging, use phrases that people may be searching when making purchasing decisions. If you provide a service to a local area, be sure to mention the specific towns that you provide service for, and when someone searches for that service you provide along with their town, you’ll start to show in results the more you blog and mention that phrase. If you’re a pizzeria in the northwest Chicago suburbs, write blog posts including your service and location, like “pizza delivery in NW Chicago suburbs."
When search engines think of your business’ website as a good source of information, they will send relevant local traffic to it. This new traffic consists of people who are searching real questions on search engines, and are actually curious about the topic since they made the search (as opposed to being served an ad). If your website provides good information and is easy enough to navigate, people who find your website via search can become new customers. Again, Oberlo published in a study, “55% of marketers gained new customers because of blogging.”
Blogging is free and easy to do. Start by writing about what your business does. Write about your industry and how these things are relevant to the area in which you serve. Post your blog posts onto your social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and your existing customers will be able to start reading your posts right away. As you post on you blog, keep posting them to social media, and you’ll begin to get even more traffic. Blogging is the best free way to build your business’ brand and communicate to new and existing customers. What will your first post be?