Daily deals sites such as Groupon and Living Socials have been getting lots of bad reps lately. You probably heard horror stories from local businesses that actually lost money from running daily deals. Although there’s no disputing that these things did occur, running daily deals doesn’t have to turn out that way. The keys to success are planning and managing your expectations.

In this post, I will go over 5 things that businesses should invest their time and effort in to maximize their chance of success when running daily deals.

1) New customers vs. Profits
Running daily deals should not be focus purely on the profits, but rather new customer acquisition. One of the highest cost for most businesses is acquiring new customers. Daily deals sites provide business owners a great opportunity to attract new customers and the opportunity to entice them to coming back in the future. Since the very nature of running any types of deals involve significant costs to the business, focusing on the margins alone is not a good idea.

Businesses should put the efforts into customer royalty program and up selling people that redeem deals on additional products and services.  They should also place emphasis on capturing contact information so that can market to them in the future.

2) Be sure you can handle the increase traffic
A common issue for many businesses is that they overlook is the ability to handle increase traffic from the deal.  The surge of traffic can put a lot of stress on businesses that haven’t invested the time to plan ahead.   It can also lead to disruption to other business functions.
According to research figures from research site Yipit, on average 25% of daily deals redeemed during the 1st and last month of the offer.  Its a good idea to contact the deal provider to find out the volume of traffic that can be expected based on similar deals that was offered in the past.  Employees should also be trained to handle the deal redemption process and still maintain great quality service to everyone.

3) Know your margins
Daily deals are usually offered at 50% discount off regular price. 50% of that amount are usually allocated to the deal site. Therefore your cost should not be over 25% of the retail price to break even.  Make sure you take this into consideration before running your deal to ensure that you are not losing money from the start.  Remember that they goal of running daily deals shouldn’t be the profits, but rather acquiring new customers so that they will come back in the future. By breaking even, you essentially attracted a surge of new customers at “no cost”.

4) Trained Your Employees
Your employees should be trained to provide positive experience for each and every customer that redeems the deal.  If customers feel like they weren’t well serviced or are mistreated in anyways, they will most likely not be back.  It might also lead to negative reviews about your business.  In addition, your employee should be trained on how to convert these people from bargain hunters to repeat customers.

5) Other deals providers
Aside from Groupon and Living Socials, there are many other deal providers that merchants can look into.   In fact as of this writing, there are well over 200 deal providers that merchants can choose from.  Among the most notable are Google Offers and Facebook Deals.  Google for instance is the 800 lbs gorilla that has the resource to offer benefits to merchants that Groupon can’t compete with.  Google offers are still not as widely available yet, but that should change very shortly.

Smaller deal sites such as KGB Deals can also be used to run multiple deals at the same time. The important thing is that you prepared your business to handle the spike in volume and  be ready to handle the issues from running multiple deals at the same time.

Daily deals should be viewed as long term strategy.  When done right, daily deals provide your business a “free” way to acquire new customers.  Many of the negative issues of daily deal site can be greatly reduced of businesses invest the time and effort in the planning and research.  As daily deals provider  to continues evolve,  it would be in their best interest for them to invest in ways to increase the merchants chance of success.

The post 5 Daily Deals Tips That Help Grow Your Business appeared first on Local Marketing Boost.

Some of the most innovative marketing strategy today involved the use of QR Codes.  QR or Quick Response code was originally developed in Japan in the mid 1990s for use in the automotive industry.  Today, these 2D codes has grown far beyond its originally intended use and are being used by savvy marketers all over the world.  In fact there was a 1200 percent increase in QR code scanning between June to December 2010*.  In the last few years, many businesses large and small started marketing campaigns with QR codes. While some campaigns were very successful, others wasn’t as fortunate.  By discussing 3 successful case studies here, we might be able to learn something and apply it toward our own QR code campaigns.

1. Home Plus Super Market

Homeplus is the 2nd largest retailer in South Korea. They want to better compete with E-Mart who is  number 1 retailer by solving problems for their target market.  How to save time and make the grocery shopping experience more convenient for busy professionals. By focusing on their customer’s problems, they came up with an innovative strategy that would allow them to capture more market shares while not having to increase  the number of physical stores.

They make use mobile technologies along with QR codes to create a shopping experience inside of subway stations. By reproducing full size print displays of groceries items, customers are able to use their smart phones to scan QR Code next to the items and make payments right on their phones. By the time they get back home, the groceries are already delivered to their doors.  Homeplus innovative marketing approach lead to an 130% increase in online sales and they are now the number 1 online retailer in South Korea.

2. Taco Bell QR Code Marketing

The post 3 of The Best Business Uses of QR Codes Today appeared first on Local Marketing Boost.

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Knowem is an free online tool and you access it by visiting knowem.com website. This tools works by allowing you perform a name search on over 550 popular social media sites and domain names and let you know within minutes if the names are available or not. If the names are available you can reserve it by signing up to each websites manually. If you want to save even more time, you can use Knowem premium service to have them automated this process of setting up profiles to hundreds of websites for you. The start cost of the service starts from $99. When doing search on Knowem, the results and shown in different tabs.
The first tab show all the most popular social network sites and domains. The 2nd tab contains over 550 social networks split group by different industry categories and the 3rd display all the domain names availabilty.

In addition to reserving your brand name, Knowem can also help you discover smaller social networking sites that you might not have known of. For example, if you are business in in the fitness industry, you might find out that a site such as Fitday.com contain lots of people that could be your potential customers. If that’s the case, then you shouldn’t ignore establishing a precense on Fitday.com. Visiting some of the smaller social sites can help you generate new content ideas as well. Setting up an account with Knowem is free and it allow you to save your searches for use at future uses.

Whether you do business online or offline securing your online brand is now more important than ever. Using tools like Knowem you can save lots of time in searching and securing your brand and prevents competitors from taking using your brand name in ways that can potentially harm your company’s reputation.

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