Author Archives: Jodi Kaplan

About Jodi Kaplan

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How to Make Your Business Remarkable

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How do you make your product stand out when it’s not unique? Say you have a coffee cart. It’s in a good location, and gets lots of traffic, but you’re no different from any of the thousands of other coffee carts in your area. What do you do?

The answer is to make the stand (and the experience) remarkable – build a tribe.  The key is to differentiate it from all the other stands and all the other coffee places in the area and make it a fun and special place to go and tell  your friends about.

Offer something worth talking about

1) Offer free Wifi – draw customers in, make your stand a place to hang out, stay, and order more coffee.

2) Hold a contest for customers to invent a new blend of coffee.  The winner gets a cash prize or say 10 pounds of the winning entry.

3) Have customers submit quotes (either their own or from famous people) about coffee, or just inspirational, to be printed on the cups.  Have a new quote each week or each month.  Have customers vote on the best ones.  Winners have their quote printed, along with their names.

Build a story around your company

This works for anything, t-shirts, music, dolls, Lego…make the product experience special:  be the company that gives away free t-shirts with every order, or the one with no time limits or scripts for customer service reps.  And, you don’t need a big budget to do it. What can you do with a $500 budget to make your product worth talking about?

(i) by Bonnie Larner

Ten Free Ways to Market Your Business

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1. Comment on blogs and forums (be helpful, not promotional).

2. Send press releases. Make sure it’s really newsworthy, not a puff piece about your company.

3. Build a Google pages Web site.

4. Interview someone and upload the mp3 file to your Web site with Audacity.

5. Blog on Medium.  Share your expertise, and strut your stuff, but don’t spam people with “me! me! me!.”

6. Write articles and send them to trade publications in your field.

7. Start a blog at WordPress or blogger.com.

8. Add referral and sharing tools to your Web site, such as Add This or Share This.

9. Answer questions at Inbound.org, or  Marketing Professionals Know-How Exchange.

10. Sign up for HARO (help a reporter out). It’s a free service with queries from reporters who need sources for stories.

Getting Bad Customer Service? Complain About It

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Is it worth complaining about poor service in restaurants or other places?  Does anyone really listen?

It turns out they do. A few months ago, my doctor fired my insurance plan. It was disruptive, annoying, and irritating. I don’t go to the doctor often, but he’s convenient, he has my records, and I rarely have to wait.

Well, two weeks ago, I got another letter saying the economy is bad, patients’ options are limited, and the doctor’s practice was able to negotiate with the insurance company to ease some of the administrivia. So, he’d changed his mind. He would continue to take the insurance and apologized for the “disruption, hardship and angst” that many patients endured after the original decision.

I thought that was remarkable. He realized he’d upset his “customers” and he took steps to fix it.

Chase Visa is Destroying Their Tribe

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I was just going through my mail/bills and found a note from Chase Visa.

Canceling is helpful?

It thanked me for being a customer… and then proceeded to tell me that because my account hadn’t been used in a while, they assumed that I didn’t need it and had closed it! The whole thing was presented as if they were being helpful.

I couldn’t see how so I called Chase to find out what had happened. They said, oh it helps you because your credit score will go up, and in this crisis we can’t have open and unused credit lines because the credit bureaus charge us (in case you might use the credit).

Is this about me?  Or them?

Aha! So, it’s not about ME at all. It’s about THEM!! The scary thing is, I just nearly used the card about 10 minutes ago. I was buying model train stuff for my dad, and the site didn’t take Amex.

I finally settled on my debit card instead because a) I figured I hadn’t used the Visa card in a while and model trains were so odd (for me) they might think it was fraud and b) one less addition to my credit card bill next year. Imagine if I’d tried to use the card!!!

Chase doesn’t care

I promised to blog about it. They said they’d seen lots of other people complaining too (including today). But, they didn’t seem to care. It didn’t bother them at all that thousands of their customers were angry. The rep said there was “nothing she could do” and she didn’t even seem sorry about it.  Guess they forgot there’s a person at the other end of the bill.

Don’t hurt your tribe – build it

I wonder, instead of canceling the account, why not send me a letter offering me something to get me to use the card? A discount? Coupons?

Many years ago, when my dad hadn’t used a gas card for a while, the company sent him a letter saying , “We miss you”. Got his attention AND he talked to other people about it. It was viral! Why not make people feel happy instead of angry? Encourage/strengthen your tribe of customers, rather than break it.

Five Free Web Marketing Resources

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1. Web Color Combinations
Need to pick colors for your site? Or give direction to your Web designer? This site lets you pick colors that match (not clash). Color swatches include the Web color numbers so you can easily recreate the combinations you like.

2. HTML code checker
HTML code errors can leave your whole site looking like it’s had a bad accident. All bold, all purple, or just plain wrong. This tool checks your code, makes sure it meets Web standards, and points out any mistakes.

3. HTML help
Stuck on how to create smart quotes, special characters, or an indent? This site has tutorials, cheat sheets, and more.

4. Google Analytics
This free tool gives you easy-to-understand reports showing how many people visit your site, which pages they look at, and how much time they spend. You can also create your own reports showing results for specific keywords, visitor locations, and cash earned from e-commerce.

5. Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
Get the scoop on SEO straight from the source. Find out how to make your site more search-engine friendly, how to name your pages, and what not to do.

Thanks to Greg for pointing out the last one.