Modern Marketing: Using Technology in Creative Ways

From smSmallBiz

Timothy Lee of the Arkansas Small Business Development Center in Little Rock, Ark., recommends exploring new technologies. One simple way, he says, is to reformat your business's web site so it will function on mobile devices. That way, consumers can find you while they're on the road. Or, for those with a little extra cash and technical know-how, he suggests buying a hypersonic sound device to market your product or service. First used by the military to communicate over long distances, these devices direct sound to the exact location where you want it to be heard. Now, they are commercially available (for prices ranging from $399 to $599). "Imagine this device shrunk down and focused on an area just outside a retail store. Anyone walking through suddenly hears a marketing message," says Lee.

While embracing high-end technologies like hypersonic sound may not be for every entrepreneur, there are plenty of other low-cost and easy-to-use options out there. Here are some ways to help boost sales using the latest technologies.

Geotagging: Put your business on the map

One way to make sure prospective customers know where you are is to use "geotagging" or "geocoding." This process enables you to add the latitude and longitude coordinates of your business's location to digital content, including web sites, photographs, videos, news articles and blog posts. Once this digital media gets tagged with your business's geographic information, it can then be added to online maps – creating what's known as a mashup.

The Beer Mapping Project , a site that supports various mashups for beer enthusiasts, for example, has pinpointed nearly 6,000 watering holes, shops and breweries in more than 20 countries since its launch in 2005. With between 5,000 and 10,000 visitors each day, Jonathan Surratt, the site's founder and chief cartographer, says "I have no illusions that Beer Mapping's users are [little] more than a small percentage of [a pub or brewery's] day-to-day business, but we are doing what we can to help get people into their bar stools."

Beyond breweries, however, small local businesses that tend to rely on word of mouth such as grocery stores, hair salons and restaurants also stand to benefit from the technology, says Simeon Simeonov, a technology venture capitalist in Boston. "Geotagging [gives] small businesses better discoverability," he says.

Wising up to widgets

Beer Mapping is also using " web widgets " to get the word out to ale enthusiasts. Widgets allow users to cut a piece of a web site or blog they find interesting or useful, like a recipe, and paste it onto another web site or blog. Beer Mapping's web widgets allow breweries to show where their beers are available. Watch City Brewing, a brewery in Waltham, Mass., uses Beer Mapping's web widget to show the location of pubs and shops in the area where customers may purchase Watch City's brands.

The most important consideration when you're developing a widget should be the content, says Will Price, chief executive of San Francisco-based widget provider Widgetbox . "If you think about the number of web sites that are out there, especially if you're a small business with limited resources, [widgets] allow you to pack up the best of what you have to offer and bring people in," he says.

Abrakadoodle, a children's art education company based in Reston, Va., commissioned two jigsaw-puzzle-like art game widgets inspired by French artist Henri Matisse and graffiti artist Keith Haring. Since February, Abrakadoodle's widgets have been picked up by close to 1,000 other web sites, while somewhere between 500 and 800 Internet users play with the widgets each day. This exposure, says Mary C. Rogers, Abrakadoodle's founder, speaks to the beauty of widget technology. "By putting [the widgets] on their web sites, we have our little piece of Abrakadoodle all over the Internet," she says.

And since the games also provide a link back to the site, Rogers says, they also boost Abrakadoodle's search engine rankings. "If you type in 'art classes for kids' under Yahoo ( YHOO ), we come up first or second and then around fourth or fifth on Google ( GOOG )," she says. "Our goal was to become more visible on the Internet, establish ourselves as an education provider and develop our brand," she says. To that end, Rogers anticipates that the games will be featured on 50,000 to 70,000 sites by the end of this year.

If you don't have the technical skills to create your own widget, you can pay someone to make one for you. It will cost you, though, on average about $3,000, according to Widgetbox.

As seen on Internet TV

Via his site Wine Library TV , Gary Vaynerchuk, the owner of Wine Library, a 37,000 square-foot wine retail store in Springfield, N.J., airs a 20- to 25-minute episode on wine tasting each day. The show, which consists of four wine reviews and answers to reader questions, attracts an amazing 80,000 viewers a day, he says. Vaynerchuk's zany and down-to-earth approach to what's commonly perceived as a pretentious hobby has helped him retain viewers, but getting people to watch at first was hard work.

When he began filming the wine spots in 2006, Vaynerchuk says he spent a lot of time on social networks and various chat forums to get the word out. "After I pumped out a 25-minute show, I would spend eight or 10 hours becoming a part of a community," he says. But rather than joining groups and simply leaving self-serving comments like "hey, check out my business," Vaynerchuk sometimes didn't even mention the store. "The only link back would be my name," he says. Eventually, that personal touch helped him build brand recognition.

While everyone's approach should be different, Vaynerchuk urges businesses to consider video, podcasting or something similarly novel. "Spamming is not part of the culture anymore," he says. Instead, businesses must provide something informative and useful to consumers. "Transparency and authenticity are going to be at the forefront of good business in the future."

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Write to Diana Ransom at dransom@smartmoney.com .