Boost Your Sales with the 3-Step "Branding Made Easy" Program‏

Announcing the Branding Made Easy™ system from the experts at StepByStepMarketing.com™. A complete how-to method for competitive brand-identity planning that is essential to your business success. It's a part do-it-yourself system and part lean-on-the-experts series of training events.

Completing the Branding Made Easy™ system will help you:

1. Clearly identify your key competitors and what makes you uniquely different
2. Ensure you understand and can leverage your core competitive advantages
3. Find more and better prospects to increase your sales
4. Define your brand attributes and develop a Brand TopSheet
5. Complete an Elevator Speech™ that will keep everyone that works with you on target and on message in every market you serve

Nail Your Edge, Bury the Competition‏

And here is your best resource for establishing your competitive edge — sign up for this Webinar: How to Identify and Prioritize Your Competitors with 6 Easy Steps. Complete with FREE templates, built in Microsoft Excel, that allow you to follow along live during the Webinar with your own company's confidential information. Led by StepByStepMarketing.com™ resident marketing expert Diana Pohly, you'll be guided through the 6-step process to establish your own competitive edge:

1. Define Your Business: 6 easy-to-follow data points about your business — the things that really matter!
2. Identify Your Competitors: Describe the competition, and make a list of who they are. It's easy to fill in with the template provided.
3. Rank Your Competitors: Complete the critical information about your competition, then assign the simple rank: A, B, or C. With this Webinar, you'll get great ideas for research sources about your competition.
4. Review Top Competitors: With this step, the template will automatically sort only your top competitors and allow you to review the critical data points, at-a-glance.
5. Compare Top Competitors to Your Business: With factual comparison analysis, you'll describe the impact on your own business of every key item for your competitors. Diana Pohly will help you craft your analysis and give you concrete examples from a variety of industries.
6. Create Your Competitive Edge: Here is the big benefit — you'll walk away with 5 clear statements about the positive ways your organization differs from the competition. Complete with examples and guidance from Diana Pohly, you'll develop a powerful competitive edge statement that can be used to pump up your brand identity and boost sales and marketing messages

Identify New Prospects, Watch Profits Soar!‏

And this Webinar is hosted by StepByStepMarketing.com™ expert Diana Pohly — Diana will walk you through how to complete the templates and why each step is important. You'll get hands-on guidance about the marketing power of customer and prospect profiling that will show you how, and why, understanding who your best customer is — and how to reach them — is worth more than gold. Your marketing efforts will be far better targeted, and therefore, get better results, when you've completed the training in this Webinar.

Follow the 3-step profiling method in this Webinar:

1. Describe the Buying Process for Your Products/Services:4 easy-to-follow steps to capture the "who," "why," "when," and "where" of your customers' buying process. All the things that really matter for developing an accurate profile!
2. Describe Who Buys Your Products/Services: Whether you have one key product or service ... or up to 16 that serve distinct customer segments ... this step will guide you to pinpoint the key characteristics and traits of your typical buyers. It's easy to fill in with the templates provided, because you'll have clickable drop-down menus and helpful examples of real-world businesses.
3. Create a "Needs Profile" of Your Typical Customer: Once you've identified the buying process and pin-pointed your buyers' traits and characteristics for each customer segment you are targeting, you can build a clear set of needs and desires against which you can develop strong brand messaging. Profiling the emotional aspects of your customers' thought processes is just as important as knowing their demographic characteristics

How to Set Yourself Apart from Competitors‏

Complete with FREE templates, built in Microsoft Excel, that allow you to follow along live during the Webinar with your own company's confidential information. Led by StepByStepMarketing.com™ resident marketing expert Diana Pohly, you'll be guided through the 6-step process to establish your own competitive edge:

1. Define Your Business: 6 easy-to-follow data points about your business — the things that really matter!
2. Identify Your Competitors: Describe the competition, and make a list of who they are. It's easy to fill in with the template provided.
3. Rank Your Competitors: Complete the critical information about your competition, then assign the simple rank: A, B, or C. With this Webinar, you'll get great ideas for research sources about your competition.
4. Review Top Competitors: With this step, the template will automatically sort only your top competitors and allow you to review the critical data points, at-a-glance.
5. Compare Top Competitors to Your Business: With factual comparison analysis, you'll describe the impact on your own business of every key item for your competitors. Diana Pohly will help you craft your analysis and give you concrete examples from a variety of industries.
6. Create Your Competitive Edge: Here is the big benefit — you'll walk away with 5 clear statements about the positive ways your organization differs from the competition. Complete with examples and guidance from Diana Pohly, you'll develop a powerful competitive edge statement that can be used to pump up your brand identity and boost sales and marketing messages

Develop Your Business by Developing Your Brand -- Easy 3-Step Process‏

Announcing the Branding Made Easy™ system from the experts at StepByStepMarketing.com™. A complete how-to method for competitive brand-identity planning that is essential to your business success. It's a part do-it-yourself system and part lean-on-the-experts series of training events.

Completing the Branding Made Easy™ system will help you:

1. Clearly identify your key competitors and what makes you uniquely different
2. Ensure you understand and can leverage your core competitive advantages
3. Find more and better prospects to increase your sales
4. Define your brand attributes and develop a Brand TopSheet
5. Complete an Elevator Speech™ that will keep everyone that works with you on target and on message in every market you serve

Branding Made Easy™ comes with all the tools and templates you need to make the entire program easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow

Find New Prospects Quickly & Easily with 3-Step Profiling System‏

Follow the 3-step profiling method in this Webinar:

1. Describe the Buying Process for Your Products/Services:4 easy-to-follow steps to capture the "who," "why," "when," and "where" of your customers' buying process. All the things that really matter for developing an accurate profile!
2. Describe Who Buys Your Products/Services: Whether you have one key product or service ... or up to 16 that serve distinct customer segments ... this step will guide you to pinpoint the key characteristics and traits of your typical buyers. It's easy to fill in with the templates provided, because you'll have clickable drop-down menus and helpful examples of real-world businesses.
3. Create a "Needs Profile" of Your Typical Customer: Once you've identified the buying process and pin-pointed your buyers' traits and characteristics for each customer segment you are targeting, you can build a clear set of needs and desires against which you can develop strong brand messaging. Profiling the emotional aspects of your customers' thought processes is just as important as knowing their demographic characteristics.

Land New Business When Your Tell Your Story Effectively‏

StepByStepMarketing.com™ resident marketing and branding expert Diana Pohly, you'll be guided through the 4-step process to establish your company's brand identity:

1. Define Your Organization's Value Proposition: 3 easy-to-follow steps for capturing your mission statement; the eight key descriptors that define your company's values; and a one-sentence "Passion Statement" that combines your company's functional capacity with your company's emotional commitment to excel at what you do.
2. Describe Your Company's Marketplace: Complete five key sections that describe what business you're in; areas and regions you serve; your primary customer segments; the products or services you offer; and how you market what you have. Easy to do with the step-by-step templates provided!
3. Create Your Own Brand TopSheet: Presto! The template automatically creates your Brand TopSheet, capturing internal components of your brand identity (your mission; your core values; and your "Passion Statement") and external components of your brand identity (your market and your brand promise). Complete it all with a powerful "WE ARE BEST IN THE WORLD AT...[you'll fill in this sentence yourself, using all the data you've compiled]" statement.
4. Create Your Own Elevator Speech™: Your Elevator Speech™ is exactly that — a speech you can deliver to anyone you meet on an elevator (or anywhere else), telling your company's story in 15 seconds or less. The templates will populate the data you've already entered, and you'll be ready to print out your one-page Elevator Speech™ in a neatly designed format. Then hand it out to your entire team and practice it together!

Complete Brand Marketing System in 3 Easy Steps‏

Completing the Branding Made Easy™ system will help you:

1. Clearly identify your key competitors and what makes you uniquely different
2. Ensure you understand and can leverage your core competitive advantages
3. Find more and better prospects to increase your sales
4. Define your brand attributes and develop a Brand TopSheet
5. Complete an Elevator Speech™ that will keep everyone that works with you on target and on message in every market you serve

Branding Made Easy™ comes with all the tools and templates you need to make the entire program easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow. And the best part is that, unlike other systems, the team of marketing experts at StepByStepMarkeing.com™ is available throughout the process to help you, guide you, and advise you.

The Branding Made Easy™ system is a series of 3 Webinar training events, complete with easy-to-follow templates, that will provide you the guidance and format you need to develop a quality brand identity and competitive position. Sign up for all three events as a package and complete the entire program over the course of just a few days. Or, sign up for any individual event that you need

Best Targeted Marketing with 3-Step Prospect Profiling System‏

Follow the 3-step profiling method in this Webinar:

1. Describe the Buying Process for Your Products/Services:4 easy-to-follow steps to capture the "who," "why," "when," and "where" of your customers' buying process. All the things that really matter for developing an accurate profile!
2. Describe Who Buys Your Products/Services: Whether you have one key product or service ... or up to 16 that serve distinct customer segments ... this step will guide you to pinpoint the key characteristics and traits of your typical buyers. It's easy to fill in with the templates provided, because you'll have clickable drop-down menus and helpful examples of real-world businesses.
3. Create a "Needs Profile" of Your Typical Customer: Once you've identified the buying process and pin-pointed your buyers' traits and characteristics for each customer segment you are targeting, you can build a clear set of needs and desires against which you can develop strong brand messaging. Profiling the emotional aspects of your customers' thought processes is just as important as knowing their demographic characteristics.

Get Marketing Advantage When You Identify Your Strengths‏

At every organization and company, no matter what size, you should identify your competitors, rank them, analyze how you're different from the competition, and then create your competitive edge list: the unique and positive differentiators that make your products and services special.

When you identify your organization's competitive edge, you are well on your way to building your brand and growing your business ... or making an already-strong brand even stronger. Establishing, or even honing, your competitive edge will help every aspect of your business, but it must begin with a well-executed competitor analysis — performed at regular intervals, at least once/year — that will lead you to a clear and concise strategy for effectively selling your products or services.

Now, you can conduct a competitive review, and arrive at your powerful competitive edge, with a simple 6-step process that will guide you, step-by-step, through the method for accurately pin-pointing every relevant data point. It's easy to use, and with this Webinar, you'll learn how to complete every section of the review, with sourcing suggestions for your research and crystal-clear examples of how other businesses have arrived at their competitive edge.

Register now for this Tues., June 14th event...

Sometimes, you may think you know everything about every competitor, but things change quickly these days — new competitors can pop up suddenly, or an existing competitor might change their products or business model ... or simply go out of business. To maximize your position in your marketplace, you must conduct — at least annually — a formal review to certify how you are different and special.

And here is your best resource for establishing your competitive edge — sign up for this Webinar: How to Identify and Prioritize Your Competitors with 6 Easy Steps. Complete with FREE templates, built in Microsoft Excel, that allow you to follow along live during the Webinar with your own company's confidential information. Led by StepByStepMarketing.com™ resident marketing expert Diana Pohly, you'll be guided through the 6-step process to establish your own competitive edge:

1. Define Your Business: 6 easy-to-follow data points about your business — the things that really matter!
2. Identify Your Competitors: Describe the competition, and make a list of who they are. It's easy to fill in with the template provided.
3. Rank Your Competitors: Complete the critical information about your competition, then assign the simple rank: A, B, or C. With this Webinar, you'll get great ideas for research sources about your competition.
4. Review Top Competitors: With this step, the template will automatically sort only your top competitors and allow you to review the critical data points, at-a-glance.
5. Compare Top Competitors to Your Business: With factual comparison analysis, you'll describe the impact on your own business of every key item for your competitors. Diana Pohly will help you craft your analysis and give you concrete examples from a variety of industries.
6. Create Your Competitive Edge: Here is the big benefit — you'll walk away with 5 clear statements about the positive ways your organization differs from the competition. Complete with examples and guidance from Diana Pohly, you'll develop a powerful competitive edge statement that can be used to pump up your brand identity and boost sales and marketing messages

How to Create Your Own Brand TopSheet and Elevator Speech™ in 4 Easy Steps

For your sales and marketing efforts to be most successful, you must develop a set of guiding principles. At StepByStepMarketing.com™ that means creating a Brand TopSheet and Elevator Speech™. When you capture all the relevant data points about your business, you can convert those key components into a handy one-page Brand TopSheet that conveys your brand identity and your brand promise to employees, customers, and prospects. And your one-page Elevator Speech™ will enable you and your entire team to consistently tell your company's story in 15 seconds or less (or 5 floors or less)!

A lot of organizations make the mistake of jumping right into tactical sales and marketing efforts without doing the necessary planning to ensure optimal results. You should build and document your business' brand identity first, to ensure your messages are consistent, powerful, and on-point — all of which are important first steps to running a company that is efficient and prosperous. Even your customer service, operations, and administrative efforts will benefit from having your differentiated brand identity nailed down!

Now, you can create your organization's own branding documents with a simple 4-step process that will guide you, step-by-step, through the method for accurately capturing every relevant data point and creating your Brand TopSheet and Elevator Speech™. It's easy to use, and with this Webinar, you'll learn how to complete every section, with examples of how other businesses have arrived at their brand identity.

Register now for this Wed., June 22nd event...

You may already know what your brand is all about, but going through this brand identity process will ensure that you "live" your brand every day, in everything you do. And not just you, your entire team, too! This special training Webinar is like having your own on-staff "Branding Expert" to help you efficiently develop your brand identity.

And here is your best resource for establishing your brand identity — sign up for this Webinar: How to Create Your Own Brand TopSheet and Elevator Speech™ in 4 Easy Steps. Complete with FREE templates, built in Microsoft Excel, that allow you to follow along live during the Webinar with your own company's confidential information. And led by StepByStepMarketing.com™ resident marketing and branding expert Diana Pohly, you'll be guided through the 4-step process to establish your company's brand identity:

1. Define Your Organization's Value Proposition: 3 easy-to-follow steps for capturing your mission statement; the eight key descriptors that define your company's values; and a one-sentence "Passion Statement" that combines your company's functional capacity with your company's emotional commitment to excel at what you do.
2. Describe Your Company's Marketplace: Complete five key sections that describe what business you're in; areas and regions you serve; your primary customer segments; the products or services you offer; and how you market what you have. Easy to do with the step-by-step templates provided!
3. Create Your Own Brand TopSheet: Presto! The template automatically creates your Brand TopSheet, capturing internal components of your brand identity (your mission; your core values; and your "Passion Statement") and external components of your brand identity (your market and your brand promise). Complete it all with a powerful "WE ARE BEST IN THE WORLD AT...[you'll fill in this sentence yourself, using all the data you've compiled]" statement.
4. Create Your Own Elevator Speech™: Your Elevator Speech™ is exactly that — a speech you can deliver to anyone you meet on an elevator (or anywhere else), telling your company's story in 15 seconds or less. The templates will populate the data you've already entered, and you'll be ready to print out your one-page Elevator Speech™ in a neatly designed format. Then hand it out to your entire team and practice it together!

Branding Made Easy™: How to Establish Your Competitive Position and Brand Identity to Boost Your Sales

Announcing the Branding Made Easy™ system from the experts at StepByStepMarketing.com™. A complete how-to method for competitive brand-identity planning that is essential to your business success. It's a part do-it-yourself system and part lean-on-the-experts series of training events.

Completing the Branding Made Easy™ system will help you:

1. Clearly identify your key competitors and what makes you uniquely different
2. Ensure you understand and can leverage your core competitive advantages
3. Find more and better prospects to increase your sales
4. Define your brand attributes and develop a Brand TopSheet
5. Complete an Elevator Speech™ that will keep everyone that works with you on target and on message in every market you serve

Branding Made Easy™ comes with all the tools and templates you need to make the entire program easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow. And the best part is that, unlike other systems, the team of marketing experts at StepByStepMarkeing.com™ is available throughout the process to help you, guide you, and advise you.

The Branding Made Easy™ system is a series of 3 Webinar training events, complete with easy-to-follow templates, that will provide you the guidance and format you need to develop a quality brand identity and competitive position. Sign up for all three events as a package and complete the entire program over the course of just a few days. Or, sign up for any individual event that you need.

Here is what you get with all 3 of the Branding Made Easy™Webinar events:

Webinar: Tuesday, June 14th, 2011
1:00-2:00 p.m., Eastern Time/USA

How to Identify and Prioritize Your Competitors with 6 Easy Steps

This one-hour training webinar provides hands-on guidance for small business owners and managers who want to quickly identify their key competitive advantages versus their direct competitors. With a step-by-step template, users will input and complete important competitive data and arrive at strong differentiating aspects of their business. Register now for this Tues., June 14th event...

Webinar: Thursday, June 16th, 2011
1:00-2:00 p.m., Eastern Time/USA

How to Identify New Prospects for Business Growth in 3 Easy Steps

Continuously identifying prospective customers, and ensuring you know what makes a good customer for your business, is a constant challenge. This webinar will enable you to identify who your best customer is and based on that profile, will also help you find new prospect opportunities. Focusing on your best customers saves you time and money and finding new prospects will help you grow your bottom line

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Power of Advertising

Power of Ads and
ways to avoid it...

Advertising affects us more than we think it does. They are masters of manipulation. I’m sure you’ve watched a TV commercial for a certain candy bar and 30 minutes later you start thinking you’d like a candy bar. Advertisers want you to feel like you are not enough. You aren’t good looking enough so you need their cream or body wash. You aren’t sophisticated enough so you need their watch. You aren’t sexy enough so you need their car. How can we protect ourselves from these messages?

Watch less TV. Even the TV programs have Ellen drinking Vitamin Water and Warehouse 13 Myka eating Twizzlers. The major point of TV is to get you to buy something. And seeing other’s fantasy lives doesn’t help you feel better. A study from the University of Maryland found that unhappy people watch 20% more TV than happy people. This was after analyzing 34 years of data from more than 45,000 people.  Happy people spent more time socializing, reading, doing religious activities and being politically active.

Be aware when reading magazines. Everything in the magazines are airbrushed. They are creating a beautiful world that is not true. Go to sites that show celebrities without makeup. Remember that the beautiful room you see, took 20 people to get looking right and no one actually lives there. That gorgeous Martha Steward meal was prepared by actual cooks. Keep saying to yourself, “It’s not real.” Better yet, quit reading them.

Advertisers like to make you laugh. They know when you laugh, you feel good. And when you feel good while watching their ad, then you associate feeling good with their product.

We all like to save money. Watch advertisers trying to get you to buy because you are “saving money.” Maybe it’s a 2 for 1 sale, 40% off, a hefty rebate. Unless you were going to buy anyway, you aren’t saving money. You are spending money.

New is not always better. In fact it may not be new, just re-packaged. The older appliances used to last longer. Most of the older products were made better. So do your research before deciding if this new product is better. Same with upgrading to the newesttechnology. If the technology is working for you, why don’t you hold off on upgrading?

Beware of trends. As adults, we still follow trends. Maybe it’s the Blackberry or iPhone, leopard print or ugly 70′s graphic prints. The problem with trends, is they go away. And you still have the stuff. If you must buy a trend, get a cheap version you won’t mind giving away later. Never buy full price and an expensive line for a trend.

Examine competiveness. When you want something only to show you are better, smarter, more moral or richer than someone else you aren’t going to be happy with your purchase. Look for thoughts like, “Wait till Dave sees this,” or “I think this is better than Gary’s new car,” or “Won’t Gloria be so jealous?”

Be aware to keep money in your wallet.

Simple strategies for monitoring your brand online

Be On the Lookout

What are your customers saying about your brand after they do business with you? One easy way to find out is by monitoring online postings. By paying attention to customer perceptions about your brand, you can learn what you're doing right (or wrong), what you might want to change about your business moving forward, and what your customers really want from you. Here are some simple ways to keep an eye on customer comments in cyberspace and build buzz for your brand:

1. Sign up for Google Alerts. This free monitoring serviceautomatically notifies you via email every time your business is mentioned in content posted on the web, as detected by Google's search engine. You can sign up using your own name, your company name, and your website URL as keywords. Of particular importance, the service allows you to head off any repercussions from erroneous or negative comments before they get too entrenched in the search engine databases.
2. Create your own search results. Keeping an active presence on LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site, can help generate positive search results for your brand. Also, consider contributing to other websites using your company's name. For example, write product reviews on Amazon.com, post comments on professional blogs, or write interesting articles on topics you know a lot about for online publications.
3. Encourage positive online buzz. Once you know where your customers are posting comments about your brand online, ask customers to post there, too. For example, if you own a restaurant and find that many of your customers have reviewed your location on Yelp.com, ask customers to post their reviews at that site. You can remind them to do this at your website, in your online newsletter, and on your takeout menus. The more positive posts there are about your business, the stronger your brand will be for those who seek you out.

Take the High Road

How to turn a service mistake into a relationship

How your company responds to complaints can make or break your relationship with a customer. If your company does everything in its power to fix a service mistake, a complaint can turn into an opportunity to dazzle customers. Follow these tips to turn a potential service mistake into a smooth recovery plan:

1. Learn to listen. Understanding each customer's individual concerns comes from knowing how to read people. For example, if you own a restaurant and receive a complaint from a family, their concerns may be coming from a different place than those of two adults on a business luncheon. As a result, the solutions will be different. Sympathizing with your customer and understanding the context of their distress is the best way to find a fix.
2. Be specific. The more specific you are when handling a customer service issue, the more at ease your customer will feel. For example, if you run a motel and a guest reports a broken fixture in their room, give them a definitive timeframe for when it will be fixed. Knowing when a problem will be dealt with immediately decreases customer anxiety.
3. Act fast. If a customer has taken the time to tell you about their complaint, then you're lucky: they're giving you a second chance. Deal with all issues brought to your attention promptly, and do your best to make amends. Take advantage of every complaint as an opportunity to rebuild your relationship with your customer.

Case Study: In the Cards

How VistaPrint has built a loyal following

Problem: VistaPrint, a global online printing company, was founded with a very specific market in mind: cost-conscious small businesses. Robert Keane, founder and CEO of VistaPrint, recognized that larger printing companies don't usually accept the small printing orders of small and emerging businesses for things like business cards, pamphlets, and letterheads. Although he knew there was a market for VistaPrint, he needed an advertising campaign that spoke specifically to the company's target audience.

Solution: VistaPrint decided to use online advertising to catch the attention of small business owners. The company used email, text and banner ads on third-party websites, and pay-per-click advertising. However, the company had another trick up its sleeve to make its online advertisements go viral: free business cards.

VistaPrint's tagline, "Business cards are free at VistaPrint.com," says it all. The company offers 250 free business cards to their customers, regardless of whether they make other purchases, with only a $5.67 shipping and processing charge. The free business cards feature VistaPrint's tagline on the back. That means there are more than two billion business cards being passed around with VistaPrint's logo and tagline on them, generating a lot of word-of-mouth advertising.

VistaPrint capitalizes on the promotion by offering customers the opportunity to upgrade the free business cards to ones that do not carry the company tagline on the back for a $9.99 fee. Many customers visit VistaPrint's website after becoming intrigued by the prospect of free business cards, then find the enhanced version more appealing.

The takeaway: This inventive approach to drawing in customers with a new, integrated strategy helped launch VistaPrint into the successful, global printing company it is today. In 2010 alone, VistaPrint sold to more than 1.4 million new customers. Over 66 percent of the company's sales come from returning customers, many of whom came originally for the free business cards, only to then become loyal brand advocates.

Go Green to Stay Out of the Red

Ways to save both money and the environment in your next direct mail campaign

According to Greg Brown, marketing director at Melissa Data, six million trees and 300 million pounds of paper are used each year just for marketing mailings with incorrect addresses. And those mailings cost direct mail marketers more than $6 billion per year. "Going green in your direct mail campaign is a common-sense business initiative that will save mailers a tremendous amount of money," Brown says. Follow these simple tips to save money — and help protect the environment — in your next direct mail campaign:

1. Keep mailing lists updated. Update your mailing list every chance you get. Today's customer is highly mobile: every year 12 to 18 percent of the U.S. population moves and 10 to 15 percent of businesses move or close. Keep track of customers by asking them to confirm customer information after every transaction and by keeping carefully organized records.
2. Ensure delivery. Try adding "or current resident" to the end of every address record. That way, the Postal Service will deliver your piece of direct mail to the address you have written — even if the person you have on record has moved.
3. Target your mailings. Send out mailings only to prospects likely to be excited by your promotions. Targeted direct mail campaigns can increase response rates and get you more bang for your buck.
4. Keep it short and sweet. If possible, cut back on the number of pages in your mailing. For example, if you are a clothing retailer that sends out a comprehensive catalog, review how many products you're featuring. Focusing solely on the things that have a history of really exciting customers will save you printing and mailing costs.

Case Study: Game of Tag

How IKEA built buzz for a new store opening

Problem: When IKEA announced the opening of its new location in Malmo, Sweden, the company wanted to generate buzz as quickly as possible. The catch: IKEA had a relatively limited marketing budget, which ruled out traditional advertising outlets like television and radio.

Solution: Media agency Forsman and Bodenfors came up with an ingenious way to utilize Facebook as an online marketing tool for the Malmo store. The agency created a Facebook profile for the new store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. The move put a friendly face on a large company and proved to customers that the new IKEA would integrate well into the existing structure of the city.

The real buzz started when IKEA posted pictures of the new store's showrooms on Gustavsson's Facebook page. Gustavsson's Facebook friends had the ability to "tag," or identify, themselves in the pictures — and win the product they tagged. Over the course of two weeks, 12 pictures were uploaded to the manager's site. The photographs quickly made their way through the social networking site as people tagged themselves, and the photos showed up on those users' profiles and in the "news feed" of their friends. Word spread and soon customers were checking Gustavsson's profile more frequently to see if he'd posted more pictures. They also interacted with Gustavsson to ask questions about the new Malmo store.

The takeaway: When participation is made easy, customers are more likely to join in. The campaign promised value and delivered on that promise, an essential part of any online marketing campaign. And by keeping the promotion interactive, IKEA kept its users engaged and involved throughout. Creating a successful online marketing promotion such as IKEA's doesn't have to involve major giveaways. As long as the promotion grabs the attention of potential customers, promises something of perceived value, and creates excitement, your business could build significant buzz for your business through social media.