Vancouver Business

Vancouver Small Business

Each Vancouver small business faces its own respective array of challeges. The cost of merely renting a location is formidably high in Vancouver, especially in the downtown core. A small narrow room to use as a shop will easily cost $4000 a month on Denman Street, while larger spaces will cost $9000 or more a month. That is on ongoing expense, as well as such costs as inventory, equipment maintenance, and electricity.

Marketing

Shops go out of business at a frightening rate on Denman St, Davie Street, and Robson Street. Marketing campaigns often cost more than any extra cash flow that they may bring in. Typically, a small business owner in Vancouver will not even know which marketing strategies are yielding the best results. This is because they don't usually have a system in place to trace which ones are working and which aren't.

Enter Social Media Marketing

More and more businesses are engaging in social media to help connect with existing and potential customers. Social media includes such sites as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

As you likely know, YouTube is a free video sharing site. Anyone with a YouTube account can upload videos to share. How can a business take advantage of it? There are places for each YouTube video for a description of what the video is about as well a place to put in keywords that would relate to the video. These are the words that Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo will pick up. Often a google search will include at least a couple of video results.

It's been shown that a business will get the best results from YouTube by offering informative or playful videos rather than obvious advertisements. This helps establish the business owner as a helpful expert. The Ford Modeling Agency experienced a 140% increase in profits after uploading reality-style videos onto YouTube.

Myspace and Facebook are two huge social networking sites where users can write blogs (web logs), share videos, take part in discussion forums, have private chats with other members, and more. A small business can strategically use these sites to its advantage.

Twitter is a "microblogging" site where you publish messages of a 140 words or less. What are the advantages of this?

1. It isn't as intimidating as having to write an entire article.
2. A vast and increasing number of people have Twitter accounts.
3. Iit is well suited to cellphones and easily integrated with cellphone owners accounts.

Many small businesses have experienced increased profits as a result of using Twitter alone.

Vancouver Business Websites

Business owners sometimes put a large sum of money into the creation of slick and fancy websites. In many cases they are not sure what if any effect their websites are having on their business. Why don't they know? That is because they have no system offline or online of tracing marketing results.

Existence Is Meaning

Potential customers need to first be aware that a business exists, before it can have any meaning for them. A lovely flash site that no one sees is not going to help broadcast its own existence, never mind the business it represents.

Small Business Search Engine Optimization

A fancy website without traffic is like A beautiful billboard in the middle of an empty dessert. Perhaps some vehicles wander their way onto the lonely dessert road and see the billboard, but that's about it. Some of that traffic is likely to be more random than targeted.

Offline Marketing Techniques

One simple strategy that a business may apply is the use of inexpensive promotional products such as pens with business name, address, and website info imprinted on it. A business may even sell them and even make a little extra money in promoting itself.

A business can print their business name and address or website onto T-shirts which employees may wear or that they sell or hand out to customers. Everyone wearing that T shirt will be advertising the business. You don't even have to produce such shirts in high volume. You can get a Tshirt with your business log and website printed on it for a mere $10 at MyOffice on Denman Street.

How a Vancouver Small Business Can Be Competitive

If a Vancouver smail business were to properly make use of social media in connecting with existing customers as well as potential new customers, it would already have a distinct advantage over most of its competitors.

While running a business in Vancouver is expensive and competitive, surprisingly few businesses in Vancouver fully utilize social media and emerging technologies. The few that do, tend to carry it out with a half hearted effort has best.