But the cost to Small Business in time and money can be prohibitive.

Images are needed for:

• Web sites
• Digital marketing Catalogues
• Even for HTML email campaigns
• As well as traditional media advertising

Not having images or having low quality images can seriously detract from a Small Businesses Marketing effort.  Detraction that in a competitive market can directly impact on sales.

A key cost driver is often the high volume of product images needed

Many small businesses, particularly rental and hire can have hundred’s if not thousands of products.  Hence paying to have each product photographed is literally cost prohibitive.

Taking adhoc images or using supplier product photographs can create an inconsistent image appearance.

Images with different sizes, backgrounds, borders, orientations etc when placed on a web site or catalogue can look terrible.

Creating a negative perception in the client’s/ prospects mind.

The issue becomes how to create consistent looking photographs/ images that enhance your brand’s advertising appeal and impact regardless of the advertising medium.

Creating Low Cost Quality Product Photo’s

However there are some very effective ways of creating your own consistent high quality images.

Creating you own in-house photography studio is actually far easier than your think.

In a series of step by step video’s you can see how to create these product photographs.

We have collated these from YouTube and all are accessible on our YouTube channel – how to photograph your own products

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

The incredibly easy to use – integration of HireEzy desktop software, with your on-line store and youtube has enabled clients to become creative in video marketing.

Here are some examples of how video, can be used to promote your hire or rental business.

For example:

Specific Solution Video’s: If you offer a solution to clients, such as complete wedding solutions, event solutions, even construction hire or rental solutions – then video’s can be an extremely effective tool in your marketing  armoury.

General Promotional Videos: These are generic video’s demonstrating your full range of services.

Safety or Installation Videos: As discussed in previous posts, this can be a great tool in reducing business risk and product damages.

So how to make a Video, well the link below shows some ideas, further ideas are available on our youtube site.

HOW TO: Create Online Video That Works

Posted using ShareThis

Remember HireEzy helps make marketing, even your digital marketing a standard and natural part of your business processe – HireEzy puts you in control!!!

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

Growth of Social Media is staggering but are the returns worth the effort?

We trailed just using Social Media Marketing for three months.  We dropped Adwords all together and found that our sales leads increased by over 80% and our Alexa Web Site ranking went up 1000% in the same period.

But It Does Takes Effort

Effective Social Media marketing does take effort.  Why because it involves engaging people, its not about SELL SELL SELL.  Its about engagement with interesting content, discussions and even etiquette.

Social Media is just that its social!

Content

People find interesting and informative content appealing.  Rarely do they find 100% sales literature appealing.  Rather they would rather read or view material that informs, explains or entertains.

Generally blogs provide the interesting content and web sites the more specific sales information.  However producing interesting and engaging content articles for your blog does take time and effort.  Allowing 3- 4 hours a week to write articles for the blog is reasonable planning guide.

The type of blog articles you write you should be informative, engaging or entertaining not in your face sales.  For example, if you are a Party Rental/  Hire Company, write articles about how to plan an event , eg a backyard wedding etc.  Or in this case we are writing about social media marketing, not selling our hire and rental business management software that has integrated social media marketing.

One of key point to remember to seed in your key words in to the article.  Blogs are also good for using less frequently used words associated with your business as well.

Let People Know About Your Blog Article

This is the social part of social media marketing.

Having written an engaging article you need to let people know about it.  This is where Twitter and Facebook really come in to play. However you need to invest time and effort in building up your Twitter and Facebook following.  More relevant followers means more people likely to read your post.

However communities take time to build, you need to invest time in listening and responding to what they are saying.  That is being a good community member.  This can take more than a couple of hours per week probably longer realistically if you are serious.

Effort Versus Return

So let us say you spend four to five hours per week on writing blog content and building your social media following then you need to have a return.

Interestingly Nielson cited that around 17% of time on the internet is now spent on social media.

Cost. The cost of your time is not just the salary on-cost it is also the opportunity cost.  That is what else could you have been doing.  Also a consideration is your Ad-words spend.  Social media may enable you to save this money or at least reduce your spend per month.

Return. The return is dependent on what you objective.  For most small to medium sized businesses the primary objective will most often be sales leads.  For us it worked, but for your business it may differ.

Our Returns.  We found that through this process our Blog (content focused) Unique Visitor rate increased from not much to a few hundred per day.  Our web site (product sales focused) increased proportionally leading to an 80% increase in sales leads through the web site.

Key Lessons Learnt

We learnt some critical lessons through our trial, which were:

• Have a Plan;
• Be Disciplined and above and beyond all else; and
• Be Sincere.

We were lucky in that we approached the trial with genuine sincerity in our engagements with our social media community.  We went in with the view of genuinely learning from others in our social media community and we have – it has been brilliant.

For us, yes there is a real effort needed but the returns are greater than just an excellent growth in sales leads – we have gained far more from what we have learnt from others.

If you have any similar experiences or even different views please take the time to add your comments – they are most welcome!

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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On face value the question would seem quite silly, but it is not.

Print Media advertising has a been a key part of the hire industry and rental industry advertising mix for decades!

But is print media advertising it still effective?

Traditional newspapers and serious print media are under serious threat. Not convinced, then consider this – In 2009 alone nearly 90 USA newspapers or magazines have closed or migrated to just web delivery.  Taking nearly 9000  jobs with them!   Erica Smith a journalist herself has been mapping the decline of the traditional media for years, her blog is universally regarded.

Update an article just published today, 1 Sep 09 on social mashable that Newspaper revenues have declined by 29% compared to the same quarter last year.  This is a dramatic drop.  To read the full article click here

Why the decline?

The traditional business model of Newspapers is advertising revenues fund quality journalism which attracts a readership demographic. The attracted readership demographic appeals to particular advertisers who in turn then pay for the newspaper advertising. However things are changing:

1. Increasingly people would rather go on line and read what they want from where they want when they want.
2. Secondly, user generated news content is replacing serious journalistic analysis and commentary.
3. Finally, as readership has declined companies etc have moved their advertising from print to digital.

So back to the Political Cartoonists

Political Cartoonists have become a barometer of the health and relevance of the Traditional Media.  As one USA political cartoonist during a NPR radio interview stated, a decade ago their were over 300 print media employed political cartoonists in the USA now their are less than 50. The reason is that the advertising revenues of newspapers has declined, forcing newspapers to cut back on staff, including the visual editorial staff such as cartoonists.

Cartoonists like journalists are critical in attracting or maintaining a readership. Each incremental loss of such staff, eg cartoonists, reduces the newspapers readership appeal or reach into a market demographic. It is this market demographic reach that appeals to the advertisers.

So if newspapers are cutting back on quality journalism, including political cartoonists then the effect could be a reduction in their readership. Therefore if readership declines (market demographic reach), then the effectiveness of advertising through such newspapers begins to become a consideration.

Print Advertising

The question then arising for all businesses (or our focus specifically Hire and Rental companies) becomes is newspaper advertising still an effective marketing channel?

Judging from anecdotal evidence many businesses,  hire and rental companies included,  have voted with their keyboards and have begun to spread their marketing budgets into on-line marketing and even social media. Evidence also exists in other industry sectors, eg in a recent article in Tire Business one owner cited that in 5 years his print advertising budget had been reduced from over 50% to 11%, (click on quote to access the full article – well worth reading)

..., who operates 15 stores across Michigan, said half his ad budget goes to direct mail and TV, but only 11 percent goes to newspaper advertising. Five years ago, more than half of Northwest Tire’s ad budget went towards newspaper ads.

The Answer

So the question was what have political cartoonists got to do with advertising trends? Well the answer is – as the number of employed political cartoonists in the traditional print media declines so does the business spend on traditional print media advertising.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration.

Hire and rental management systems like HireEzy make the use of such on-line marketing easy to use and part of the natural hire and rental business process.  For more information contact us at sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

However even with the first green shoots of recovery appearing many companies are still forced to ensure that costs are contained.

The question is should the marketing budget be one of the areas in which costs are cut?

Reduce Marketing Spend Yes or No?

For some the question became should you cut your marketing promotion?

The simple answer was no!

According to Malcolm McDonald, emeritus professor at Cranfield University School of Management in the UK, recessions can “focus the mind” and lead {sic companies} agencies to “cut out the waste”. He advises brands to focus on core customers in needs-based segments, adding: “Whatever you do, don’t cut promotional expenditure in the core business. [There is] massive evidence that cutting promotional spend in a recession is disastrous

Green Shoots of Growth

Now the green shoots of recovery are upon us, and many are now beginning to plan for the long term.  The most recent McKinsey report shows that this longer term planning focus is now starting to creep back in to business thinking.  But it also makes the point that many companys’ are still focusing on containing costs.  click here to read the article.

The recession has created opportunities for hire and rental companies that have survived.  Such opportunities include picking up new clients from competitors that are less well placed or who have closed their businesses.

Low Cost Marketing Options

There are a range of alternative low marketing options that can now be considered, the most effective of these is digital marketing.

Why digital marketing, well because as previous research posts in this blog have shown, web leads now account for over 55% of new business for progressive hire and rental companies.  If you are uncertain about digital or social media marketing then read this article, 13 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing is worth your time

Achieving such increases though does depend on doing some basics:

• Web Site: Enabling customers/ prospects to browse your service/ product offering and place in a booking request.
• SEO: Search Engine Optimisation this is a range of things you need to do to help Search Engines, hence your customers find you.
• Blog: Grossly under-rated but shown in the latest UK research to increase web traffic for small business by over 50%.  This is where you post about your solutions, eg how to plan a party, or examples of Marquee Weddings, etc.  Content people are looking for to read and find information, before making a decision to purchase.
• Twitter: Singularly the most effective business tool for letting people know about your latest blog posts or catalogue item changes.

There are a range of other tools that you can use.  But as a basic plan

Making it Easy

If this sounds hard it is not, but it does take commitment.  This is where we can help.  HireEzy provides you with a hire and rental business management solution that has:

WebSite: A fully integrated web site in which customers can browse and place orders requests directly in to your HireEzy system.  HireEZy’s unique web integration tools, any changes you make in your catalogue can be immediately published to your website, if you so choose.  What this does, is to increase your search engine rankings, if you make changes often, that in turn improves you lead generation.

Integrated Digital Marketing Tools: Furthermore it includes a full range of digital marketing tools including Twitter and blog  integration.  A very effective way of maintaining your marketing effort whilst containing costs in times like these is to use HireEzy.  HireEzy comes with an inbuilt range of marketing tools, to assist you producing low cost but highly effective brochures, newsletters etc.  All tools are inbuilt in your Hire Software and are linked to your product catalogue, so that with simple one click steps and you can email, tweet, post on  line or print a range of high graphic image marketing collateral.

Follow us on twitter

What more information or an on line demo, then go to our website  www.makinglifeezy.com.au or email us at sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

To assist Hire and Rental companies understand how it all works, we recommend going to the Social Marketing Journal – link below.

Social Marketing Journal – Social Media Marketing Optimization Blog

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

Easier because there are more channels available to communicate with customers / prospects such as Social Media.

Yet more difficult because customers or prospects have more choices from which to receive communications and more selective in who they invite to send information.

Note: In this article the term customer is used to cover both existing customers and prospects.

Why Is It More Difficult!

Communicating with customers even five years ago was fairly straight forward.   You could communicate directly through email, mail or even the telephone.  Or you could advertise in the newspaper, yellow pages or if you could afford it Television or Radio.

But all of these are now less effective than five years ago

You may well have your customers address, email or phone number

 but are you actually reaching them?

Traditional Mail

This is not new we have all known this for years. Companies are increasingly using electronic means to communicate and invoice and pay bills.  For example according to the Washington Post, the US Postal Service has ..

That downward trend is only accelerating. The Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.

And nearly half of this is junk mail!

the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivered 153.8 billion pieces of mail, of which 43 percent, or 66.4 billion pieces, were junk mail.

Decline of Email

Email is beginning to decline in popularity, as more communication options become available.

In 2003, people spent 46% of their time online using sites which fall into the “communications” category – that is, sites whose core capabilities are email and instant messaging. By 2009, that usage dropped to 27% or a 41% decline in overall use.

May be spam has contributed to the decline in people’s focus on email as a primary source of communication.

In Microsoft’s latest biannual report on the state of computer security, the company says that in the second half of 2008, a full 97.3 percent of email traffic was unwanted spam (or malicious email like phishing attacks and outright viruses).

Tele-Sales Now Seen As Least Effective

Business to Business tele-marketing or sales is also in decline for a number of reasons, not the least of which are changes in the legislation’s around the world governing tele-marketing practises.  Many now view out bound tele-marketing as the least effective option.

90% view Telemarketing as at least as effective as their other marketing mediums.

Decline of Yellow Pages/ NewsPapers/ Television

Even these – the stalwarts of advertising for decades are in decline, see previous post Advertising media types

So Where Are Customers Going

Well it appears they are becoming more interested in Social Media.  However social media whilst opening up new channels also poses some interesting problems.

It is Discretionary

Yes you can communicate with customers now by using Twitter or Facebook etc.  However it is at the customers discretion as to whether they allow you to communicate with them.  Either by adding as a Friend on Facebook or Following You on Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter are arguably direct communication social media type but there are more indirect channels.

Common Interest

Many years ago I read the Dale Carnegie Classic – “How to Win Friends and Influence People” .  In that book, I remember reading the story of how he (or someone) had tried to make an appointment with a prospect for years – but failed.  He then found that they both had a common interest in something.  From this he was able to develop a friendship which led to sales.

This can be the same with Social Media!

For example through say Social Book marking sites (eg Digg, Stumble on) you may find that you have common interests in similar articles.  Developing relationships this way can lead to either direct sales or them even referring you on to their community or contacts.    It also provides a means to commence a discussion leading potentially to being invited to join their discretionary social media sites.

Social Media provides opportunities to engage prospects and customers indirectly, by finding things of common interest.

It Works!

For example, our software is developed for hire and rental companies.  One of our major points of difference is integration with the Web and Social Media.  We therefore are genuinely interested in both subjects.  We write about it (blog posts), we read about it  and we comment about it.  Through this process we have found similar like minded companies and individuals and built really good communities on Facebook (>350 friends), Twitter (>3000 followers) and also on Digg and Stumble On.  It does deliver results for us:

We trailed just using Social Media Marketing for three months.  We dropped Adwords all together and found that our sales leads increased by over 80% and our Alex Web Site ranking went up 1000% in the same period.  See full post – “Is Social Media Marketing Worth The Effort”

Summary

So yes on one hand their are more ways to communicate with your customers yet at the same time it is more difficult.  We are entering a period where increasingly customers are gaining control over who, what, when and how they are communicated with.  This will pose a both challenges and opportunities to marketing people for in the future.

 

Interested in more articles on Social Media and Marketing?

Then follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Networked Blogs or Stumble On

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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Welcome to the Thumbs Down Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I thought were a stupid idea, a bad thing to happen or just payed out on a tech company deservedly that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week.  We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Down I found myself highlighting Google‘s lamo attempt to control the internet and picking out a HUGE problem with Apple‘s new operating system which deletes all user data.  Yeah, you read that right – and people whinge about Windows.  Gosh.

• Haha – Google Wave – Early Impressions: Too Much Effort & Unintuitive http://tinyurl.com/yzhn4st

I’ve blogged before about how I think Google Wave is/will be stupid, worthless and pointless.  But don’t just take my word for it, other people are saying it too – as evidenced by this article.  Don’t know what Google Wave is?  Well, who cares.  If you do, it’s supposed to be an email/twitter/instant messaging alternative – replacement, whatever.  C’mon Google, you employ 20,000 of the smartest people on earth and not one of you can figure out that most people won’t want to ditch email because they can barely breathe without having access to it. #FAIL

• Interesting read, if you’re a geek – YouTube‘s Bandwidth Bill Is Zero. Welcome to the New Net http://tinyurl.com/yfhcuuv

Well, I know most of you aren’t geeks and won’t read the article, so I’ll paraphrase here to outline why I thought this article was interesting – basically, Google has a direct optical fibre connection to the core movers and shakers that make the internet connect to everybody (in fact, I read recently that Google accounts for 6% of all internet traffic in the word at the moment, an astounding statistic for a company that didn’t exist 10 years ago), which means that Google don’t need to pay for internet traffic.  So, all of those YouTube videos are just beaming out of the place with the computer infrastructure built into the rest of Google’s fortress of computer power, essentially making what most people would think to be an extremely expensive operation in pushing out online video actually cost them basically nothing to run – all those ad impressions are pure profit.  This is an amazing contrast to an organisation like Facebook, which spends $1 million a month of infrastructure to make their service super snappy and fast for users.  What the article goes on to detail is how Google hold so much power already, that instead of internet providers charging places like Google to have direct access to each other so that company’s internet users their their site quicker, Google are so powerful that they can charge internet companies to have better direct access to them to provide their services faster to their users.  In the next 3 years this will be a huge debate in the US as their government is trying to regulate this stuff and don’t really know how to approach it properly.  Public outcry ensures.  It’ll be an interesting development.

• LAME – Google enters the e-book arena http://bit.ly/wFDAM

I’m sure if I stood in a newsagent taking pictures of each page of a magazine so I could read it later without having to buy the magazine in the first place I’d be chased down the street by the shop owner and probably have the cops called on me.  Google send people to libraries to scan books digially, build a whole online book store full of inventory and they call it a “business“.  This is criminal.  That’s all I have to say.

• WOW Mac Users should read this – Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data http://bit.ly/10PdGD

So, being the good samaritan that I am, I’ll give you Mac users this tip – don’t allow anonymous logins on your computer.  You’ll have your login that you use and just keep using that – don’t switch to another user and use the anonymous feature, as what happens is that you’ll go to log back into your computer as you and everything will be gone.  Yeah, it’s pretty awful and embarassing problem.  I tweeted this last week and I’m not sure if Apple have patched this problem yet but keep your eyes peeled on the Apple Software Update feature – last I read Apple were looking to put out a 10.6.1 update that addresses this and other problems.

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 Yes we make it easy with HireEzy 2.1 to manage your blog from your hire and rental management system, but you still need good images and content.

Free Image Sources

Often finding images and other multi-media can be difficult and expensive.

This list below is excellent and a great resource for you.

26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog

Posted using ShareThis

Yes make it easy with HireEzy 2.1 to manage your blog from your hire and rental management system, but you still need good images and content.

Necessity is the mother of all invention!

A mantra my father drove in to my head when I was a growing up, not once but repeatedly.

Recently I was reminded of this little childhood memory when reading a recent article by Michael Roth (writes great articles) on Rental Industry Makes Positive Efforts in Midst of Recession .

Michael made the point that companies will be forced to innovate, given the slow recovery.  Innovate because they have to.

Great Point But Where To Start To Look For Innovation?

Keeping things basic, there are only three simple things you can ever do in a business:

1. Increase revenue
2. Cut Costs or
3. Reduce Risks

So What Are Some Ideas for Innovation?

Well look towards Social Media and Digital Marketing as a prospective source.  There is massive opportunity to be had for creative hire and rental companies in adopting Social Media and related digital marketing.

Why, because overall the industry has been incredibly slow to adopt it.

That’s great for innovators as it means there is massive untapped opportunities out there!

First - Increase Revenue

Social media marketing has been shown to be a great way of increasing sales leads if done properly.  A well planned and executed social media strategy ( it’s not hard at all) can really be effective in driving more traffic to your web site, hence your offer.

Articles
Why Social Media is a Natural Channel for Hire and Rental Companies

Second - Cutting Costs

Social media can be used to cut hire and rental operating costs.  For example cutting website development fees by having self web content management embedded in your rental software or hire software.  Not only does this cut operating costs it also can improve search engine rankings, through more frequent changes.

Articles
Options for Reducing Costs

Reducing Risk

Reducing business risks can be in part by considering the use of Social Media, for example using YouTube to show clients how to maintain, set up or dis-assemble equipment.

Articles:
How Hire and Rental Companies Can Use YouTube

Still Unsure?

We are offering Hire and Rental Companies a free advisory service to discuss how to use Social Media in their business.  No obligation etc. Why? Because we dont sell Social Media services – we simple offer our globally recognised skills in Social Media back to the industry.  See our press release for more details, click here.

What do we get out of it?

Well we believe that if you begin to use social media and digital marketing effectively, then you will appreciate the value of the integrated social media and digital marketing tools in our hire software and rental software.

For more information Email Us

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