Web Help for Small Businesses, Borders' New Segment and How to Handle Competitor's Misleading Ad

Posted by Paul Christ July 22, 2009

Labels: Advertising, Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Targeting Markets

Highlighted Marketing Stories:

Luring Local Traffic to Your Web Site (CNN Money) - Many small businesses still struggle with the realities of how the web can help their business. This story offers a number of very good suggestions for those in this situation.

There are three key elements you'll need to focus on: content, search-engine rankings and design.

What options does the small business owner have for gaining customers from the web if they know little about how to create and maintain a website?

Borders Aims to Capitalize on Teens With New Shops (Wall Street Journal) - Borders has struggled in recent years for many reasons including what some see as problems with too many stores found in shopping malls where the serious readers may not want to go. But teens do go there and this new strategy is designed to attract that segment of the market.

The Borders Ink shops, which will stock graphic novels, fantasy and young-adult titles together, are expected to be available in 80% to 90% of the 513 superstores Borders operates nationwide by the end of August.

If successful with this strategy, how can Borders leverage this in other ways such as through the Internet?

How New Is "New"? How Improved Is "Improved"? (Slate) - Who do you turn to if you feel your competitor is running a misleading ad? This story has the answer.

Dyson challenges Oreck's claim that a vacuum "reduced up to 99.9 percent of bacteria in laboratory testing." Cepacol challenges Chloraseptic's claim that it's "the strongest medicine you can get without a prescription." Dell challenges Apple's claim that the new MacBooks are "the world's greenest family of notebooks."

What ads currently running may one day be a case heard by this group?