New Changes

So it has been about two years since I last worked on this blog. The Mirth Cafe is still in business but no longer online. As part of an effort to get the business back on track it is my new goal to post at least once a day. Out here in KS, a bunch of highly motivated bloggers are doing some pretty damn good work, and I thought that I should at least try to work myself back into shape.

Which leads me to my thought for the day. The Mirth Cafe was a little coffee shop I was hired to do some marketing for in the hopes of building some additional business.

I decided that the shop should have a website and advertise online as a way of getting the word out about the store. We also handed out flyers at the local campus, and instituted customer comment cards in house.

The flyers served a purpose, but without any sort of takeaway or “meaningful” information, the fliers did not much more than briefly introduce the store to students. Having looked back at the numbers, it was almost negligible.

The comment cards helped, but looking back at it, we should have made the cards line up much more with forward thinking objectives with the store instead of the traditional “Who was your server?”, “How was your meal?”, etc. I believe the cards would have been more successful if customers were asked what changes they would have liked to see to the menu AND if the cards had been followed up with a coupon as a thank you.

The last thing that I think didn’t work well was the website. These days any small business needs to have a site, but the real beauty of it is how you use it and how you build a following with it.

Having the menu online is good for new visitors, and advertising in local newspaper or community sites is great (for low costs btw), but websites for small businesses need to incorporate functionality like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter to keep the audience informed. Using a posting service like ping.fm is an amazing tool for store owners to not only keep their customers informed, but to also help achieve the holy rail of marketing their business with new recommendations for customers from other existing ones.

Thats all I got now. Keep you posted.