New Year’s Eve is a little over two weeks away, prompting small businesses to take a look at their business strategy. This year, make a New Year resolution for your business that is accomplishable and important! Commit to planning ahead with these small business tools.

Sale and Promotion Tools

In a city like St. Augustine, small businesses don’t necessarily need to create sales or promotions because of the large number of tourists, snowbirds, and travelers constantly passing through. However, who doesn’t aim to enhance their business each year? Hypothesis: If a (small) business has few promotions and sales, then a customer will shop where there are more promotions and sales (corporation.)

Promotions and sales are important, but so are promoting your sales and promotions. Use these small business tools to plan your future promotions.

  1. Use a Customer Information Sheet. Gathering customer information is crucial. Currently, email marketing is a huge part of many business strategies. In fact, here are 10 eye-opening statistics by Constant Contact to back that up. One shocking statistic is that 61 percent of consumers enjoy receiving promotional emails weekly. However, text messaging (SMS) marketing is becoming increasingly popular as well, because it is easy, fast, and reliable. Download and print our PDF file, Customer Information Sheet, located at the beginning of this paragraph. Place it by your register and have employees ask customers for their information.
  2. Canva is a free graphic design tool that is used by professional designers and everyday people. They have numerous easy-to-use templates including a Sale Flyer template. Use Canva to create compelling flyers, coupons, and point of purchase material.

Social Media Tools

A few of St. Augustine’s small businesses have a strong social media presence like The St. Augustine Distillery, The Surf Station, The Hyppo, and Old City Web Services very own OldCity. Social media is a fickle thing, but the St. Augustine community is loyal to their small businesses. Therefore, with a little dedication and extra planning, you too can benefit from utilizing social media platforms.

  1. HootSuite is a social media management tool. They offer a free plan which allows you to schedule up to 30 posts in advance and manage up to three social media accounts.
  2. Trends Map is free and tells you what is trending on Twitter, in a specific area at that moment.
  3. Google Trends will give you insight into what is trending in your area and nationwide. Type in your topic of choice, and Google will tell you how many times that phrase or word was entered into the search engine. Use the most popular search-terms in planning your social media posts. Google Trends is free to use.

Check out these unbelievable social media facts.

Google Trends

In the photo above, Google compares the search terms “Jacksonville” and “Orlando.” Google scales the terms based on the highest amount of times they were ever searched. For example, if during Biketoberfest people searched the word Orlando more times than ever before, that is what the results for search term Orlando will be compared to.

Big Box Stores vs. Small Businesses

Luckily, St. Augustine’s community of residents and visitors are predominantly loyal to small businesses. However, with many more large companies moving into St. Augustine in 2018 and the years to come, will loyalty bring home the bacon? Let’s not find out.

A major difference between the marketing strategy of a large corporation and that of a small business is that corporations have entire teams dedicated to each segment of their business plan. Behind the scenes of a corporation are crews focused on enhancing sales and promotions and a social media strategy. But with the small business tools we share in this article, you won’t need dozens of teams to beat out the large corporations.

Old City Web ServicesSocial media can scale businesses of all sizes. Therefore, it is important you put in effort towards learning how to manipulate your platforms for your business. Although each outlet has essentially the same purpose, different people (depending on their age, hobby, income, sex) use different platforms. Achieve a better social media presence by altering your strategy for each outlet.

Mission Statement

Our mission at Old City Web Services is to navigate the world of web design, web development, and advertising for our clients so that they can focus on what they do best – running their business! Our business intentions go beyond the metrics of graphics, coding, and SEO. Located on Florida’s First Coast, we run a personable home front service and consider our relationship with our clients as a partnership in their success. If you are looking to increase your business’ visibility give us a call at (904) 829-2772 or contact us today.

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