Marketing tips for small businesses using Constant Contact

Karen Rice is the Regional Director for Constant Contact in Northern California. As Regional Director, Karen travels around Northern California and talks with business owners about helping them with their marketing needs and in particular using Constant Contact.

In case you are not familiar with it, Constant Contact provides an online tool to help business owners build a list of customers that buy their product or service and then make proactive contact to their customers using email, events, social media marketing campaigns, surveys and more. I’ve been a Constant Contact customer for over 4 years and find it simple to use, very cost effective and their customer support next to none.

As a guest on my radio show on 105.5FM and Money 2.0 on April 02, 2013, Karen and I had a conversation about how business owners can use Constant Contact in their marketing. Some of the topics Karen and I spoke about include:

What can a business owner do to help differentiate their message with so many emails hitting their inbox every moment of the day?
What are some of the strategies small businesses should use when incorporating social media marketing?
Apart from email marketing and social media marketing, how else can it be used?

Karen’s answer to this question was Event Marketing and Karen then went into detail about the value of event marketing and how it’s an active tool she uses to reach potential Constant Contact customers in Northern California with the events she co-ordinates including her support team.

How does Constant Contact make event marketing easy?
What resources are available to small businesses and nonprofits looking to learn more about effective marketing?
Are there any case studies or examples of success?

My next question to Karen was “What advice can you offer small business owners seeking to build their business?” The answer from Karen went into the subject of Engagement Marketing and why she believes it is important for small businesses. As a result of her answer, Karen and I then spent time talking about Engagement Marketing and here’s some of the questions I had for her.

What is the three-step Engagement Marketing Cycle?
What tips can you provide small businesses to get involved in Engagement Marketing?
What are some tips you can share for generating social visibility and word-of-mouth?
What are some common obstacles from small business owners?
How can one over overcome those obstacles?
What are some useful metrics for evaluating an Engagement Marketing Program?
Do you have any specific example of successful engagement marketing in action?

If you would like to hear my conversation with Karen, you are welcome to listen by clicking on the following link – Karen Rice from Constant Contact. Karen and I spoke on air for about 40 minutes so there is lots of good tips and suggestions if you own a business and want to take your marketing to the next level.