Increasing sales and building stronger bonds with your customers. Are you the only game in town that offers the financial services that are available at your stores? Probably not. There are probably plenty of competitors in your stores’ neighborhoods.

Do you sell your services for less than everyone else? Also probably not. Most services available in the alternative financial sector are either fixed by regulation or market...

Will prospects walk on by or walk right in? A New Look for Windows Can Drive Store Traffic Suppose you were offered a free billboard on a heavily traveled thoroughfare. Would you ignore the marketing opportunity?

Of course you wouldn’t! But far too many overlook the power of the retail storefront for promoting their business. When you own a retail store, your storefront windows are the first chance you...

Do you have a brand? I don’t mean a name or a logo, but a brand. Your brand is about the customer experience with your business, the way you differentiate your store or chain of stores from other financial service centers, the personality of your business. Everybody has a brand. It’s how they use it that makes it a successful brand or just another also ran. One way to strategically use your brand is to create trust...

Are you connected? I don’t mean as in who you know, but how you keep in touch with friends, family and most importantly how your business stays in touch with its customers.

Social Media, SMS / Text Messages, Websites, e-mail and so on are in the forefront of many discussions on the topic. It’s interesting to note that many of these are marketing tools were not even around as recently as ten year ago. So how do you keep up and how do you...

Whenever neighborhood financial service centers consider marketing strategies for their businesses, the first things that tend to come to mind are the store signage, interior posters and teller signs, buck slips to be distributed to customers, advertisements in broadcast media or outdoor venues, social networking for word-of-mouth and the like. Seldom do many operators consider the marketing power that lies within their employees. One simple...

If you were investing your hard earned dollars into purchasing advertising space, you would not place a tattered, out of date image that made you look bad into that medium, would you? Not likely. You would want that ad to make the best statement about your business that it possibly could in order to attract new customers, create a positive image for your company and maximize your return on the investment.