TOP RETAILER/BEST PRINT ADS OR PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGN

The Village Artisans Gallery
PJ Heyman, owner
Boiling Springs, Pa.
www.villageartisansgallery.com

How do you use your brochures to help the store?
The “Artists in Action” brochures are distributed to area visitor bureaus, restaurants and shops. We give one to every customer with an explanation of the contents. They are also given to the demonstrating artists to hand out at craft shows. The remainder of the year, we use our rack cards for the same distribution.

How important do you think advertising is, and do you plan to continue/expand advertising?
Consistent and continuing advertising and publicity are very important to emphasizing the pleasure of shopping locally for American handmade products and to keeping The Village Artisans Gallery in the public eye.

There is no denying that e-mail is a powerful tool for marketing your business. Best estimates show that e-mail marketing will garner $1.5 billion in sales by the end of 2011. But as a small business, how do you reach out to other, sometimes bigger, business enterprises to your advantage? With a new survey from BtoB Magazine, “B-to-B State of E-mail Marketing: Best Practices,” b2b marketers can access information they need to keep their efforts from going straight into junk mail.

The research was gathered from 414 interviews with b2b marketers and includes 35 charts and graphs along with six in-depth conversations that represent the plans of marketers for 2011. Readers will learn how to budget for e-mail marketing, what e-mail strategies marketers find the most effective, how metrics are used to judge success and how marketers are integrating e-mail with social media.

By staying relevant and examining key performance metrics, budgets and industry trends in “B-to-B State of E-mail Marketing: Best Practices,” b2b marketers will be able to improve upon the tools they use on a daily basis.

Interested in reading more on “B-to-B State of E-mail Marketing: Best Practices”? Visit http://www.btobonline.com/section/researchreports4.

For her article, “48 Guerrilla Marketing Tips from Top PR Pros,” Linsey Knerl asked some of the most experienced public relations professionals to share their secrets on how to market a company on a small budget. The result is a list of some of the best ways—including everything from social media to word-of-mouth marketing— that you can gain a competitive advantage while keep an eye on your wallet.

One of the public relations professionals on the list is Amy Mannarino from The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Md. At The Walters, she said, multiple staff members “co-tweet” about their organization on Twitter. In this set-up, each person highlights different aspects of the museum. A marketing professional might tweet about an upcoming exhibition or a curator might add artwork to Flickr and tweet about its meaning. Their method of “co-tweeting” has increased their audience diversity on Twitter.

For the complete list of tips from PR professionals that originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum website, visit http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/money/article/48-guerrilla-marketing-tips-from-top-pr-pros-linsey-knerl.