Key West Marketing – Part 2 – Hit em where they sit.

Posted by Colin Clark on Jul 31st, 2009 | Comments home title

advertise everywhere
If there’s 1 thing I learned about marketing your business in Key West, it’s that if there is a flat surface in a public place IT IS FOR SALE AS ADVERTISING SPACE.

I mean it. There were ads on our rental bikes, the traditional

bathroom advertising, there’s even a company there that sells ad space on the side of napkin dispensers which are left on the table while you eat. (kind of brilliant really, you’re bound to look at it while you’re eating)

Okay, I’m definitely not saying that it’s a good investment to buy ad space all over your city or town, but just think about it. Is there someplace where a carefully placed ad could get you business?

Stop selling ads; sell service (businessmedia.co.uk)
Small business marketing and advertising (slideshare.net)
Ex-NYT Execs Launch Marketing & Ad Company (mediabistro.com)

Key West Marketing – Part 1 – Word of Mouth

Posted by Colin Clark on Jul 29th, 2009 | Comments home title

As many of you know, I just returned from my honeymoon in Key West, Florida. Key West is an interesting town. It’s almost entirely dominated by the tourism industry and every business there is trying to out market their competition.

For this reason, I got lots of great marketing insights while I was there, so I decided to do a series of blog posts highlighting what I learned. Today is part 1.

Word of Mouth Marketing in Paradise

Key West marketing - clothing optional Everyone has their favorite place to go in Key West.

As soon as we started telling people we were going to Key West they would start rattling off their favorite party spots.

That’s the first degree of Key West WOM (word-of-mouth). The best places get talked about and tourists want to go there because their friends insisted on it before the plane even landed. (by the way this is a picture of Laryn’s uncle’s favorite place. On the roof their is a clothing-optional bar. It was indeed a great time, even though we didn’t get nude).

Tourists always ask locals where they should go.

On our second night we rented bikes and asked the bike rental guy “Where should we eat dinner?” The next night we shopping for souvenirs and we asked the girl at the checkout “Where’s a fun place to get a drink around here?’

The point is that it is profitable for both parties for these relationships to exist. I didn’t see evidence of anyone leveraging these relationships intentionally, but still. Can you think of ways that you can leverage this principal in your business?

Get in with the hotel concierge.

This one’s almost not even fair. Laryn wanted to get her hair cut. We asked the concierge. We wanted to go see the coral reef and snorkel. We asked the concierge. Para-sailing? Ask the concierge.

Who are the concierges in your market. Hazel Walker would calls it a ‘hub firm’. If you’re in someone’s hub firm then they pass you business simply because they need someone to pass it to and they know and respect you. Find the concierge, make friends, and make money. What do you think?

Officially Announcing Tribeswell

Posted by Colin Clark on Jul 29th, 2009 | Comments home title

There have been a lot of changes in my life in the last few months. For those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, you might have noticed that I changed my relationship status from ‘engaged’ to ‘married’. On July 18 I had the privilege of making the beautiful Laryn Pfrommer my wife.

We spent last week honeymooning in Key West (that will be a separate blog post – I got some great marketing insights there). Yesterday I was catching up on the posts in my Google Reader and noticed that Douglas Karr announced his new company DK New Media. I thought it was time to make an announcement of my own.

A few months ago I resigned from Brandswag to start a new venture. I decided to call the new company TribeSwell. My mission is to help smaller businesses grow by leveraging cutting edge marketing techniques.

Here’s how it works…

Tools like Twitter, Facebook, niche social networks (SmallerIndiana comes to mind)… They’re all free! All it takes is a little bit of strategy and know-how to figure out a scalable marketing strategy. TribeSwell provides the strategy and knowledge to make it happen.
Email marketing is cheap! CRM tools are dropping in price as well. It is possible to create effective strategies with very little cost.
Wordpress has changed the game when it comes to websites. There are some fantastic website templates that are extremely easy to customize to use as your business website. It has never been easier or less expensive to have a great-looking and effective website.

I ask you to bear with me on a few things…

This website is pretty close to being complete, but not quite. It will be finished soon and new content is being added on a daily basis, so stay tuned.
I realize that the logo at the top of this page is not very good. You might have noticed on the list above that I didn’t include graphic design services. It simply not in my skill-set to create logos and branding materials. I’m working with Jill Harding of Boundless Designs to get a great new logo designed. It will be up soon.
I’ve been relatively quite in the social media world. That silence ends today. There will be new daily blog posts, twitter updates, and I’m committing myself to exploring all the marketing potential of Facebook.