Many people hear the word “marketing” and wonder what the heck it really is and if they should be doing it in their shops. And if they are supposed to do it, where do they begin? The world is changing, and it’s time you sunk your teeth into the power of marketing instead of shying away from it. I’m here to help clear up some of your confusion and set you up for marketing success.

It’s not uncommon to hear business owners talk about Yelp in a way that screams of a love/hate relationship with the widely used review site. Understanding how a review is posted on a business profile, requiring payment to remove competitors from a company’s page, and an inaccessible support team has been enough to make plenty of business owners want to leave an explicit one-star review on Yelp’s own Yelp page (which, conveniently, doesn’t exist).

Google Analytics can make most shop owners’ eyes glaze over just thinking about it. This article will surprise you. Though the setup is easy, let someone who “speaks the language” get you started. Once you see what you can learn and how easy it is to find the information, you will be hooked. Let this article be the bait.

Shop owners and managers have to make decisions every day on parts, personnel, supplies, budgets, free time, family, balance, etc. The list goes on and on, right? From a budget standpoint, you, as an owner or manager, look at sales and expenses. You want to make sure your sales at least meet your expenditures and hopefully exceed your expenditures by a great deal.

These days when you get into your car and you want to listen to music, you wirelessly connect your smartphone via Bluetooth to your car’s sound system and rock Spotify. But it wasn’t always like that, kids. First, there was this thing called radio. You turned it on and hoped it would play something you wanted to hear. Most of the time, you just took what you got because the alternative was silence.

You can write – and pay for – advertising that will try to convince prospective customers to give you a call. Or, for free, you can get satisfied customers who are far more believable to write it for you. Consumer reviews represent, perhaps, the most powerful advertising messages you can develop. The good news is you don’t even have to pay to get them published.

What used to be 2,700 words is now 4,200 words – and a major security breach brought it to pass. I’m talking about Facebook’s new data privacy policy. Like you, I usually just click “accept” on policy statements for things I participate in online, apps I download to my phone and software I purchase. I don’t typically read these overly complicated, vague legal documents. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quick to point out, in front of Congress in the last month, that more than 2.1 billion of us agreed to their terms.

There are fancy Google terms for it, but the bottom line is you create a single webpage that is dedicated specifically to any town from which you want to pull business. This page is known as a service-area-specific page or sometimes referred to as a geo-targeted page. For our purposes, we will adopt a term that has become more popular as more people learn about the power of this strategy: “city pages.”
