5 pricing tips for small companies

The sluggish economy has everyone talking price. Dollar stores are thriving – Family Dollar Stores stock price is up 60% over the past year; Dollar General’s stock price is up 27% since November – putting pressure on industry king of cheap, Wal-Mart, whose stock price in comparison eeked out a 3% increase over the past year as it struggles to maintain top-line growth. What can small companies do in this price squeeze? I contacted Rafi Mohammed, a pricing strategy consultant and author of the pricing strategy book, “The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow,” for his thoughts. He offered the following 5 tips:

What Advertising Agencies And Clients Must Do Differently To Succeed

The shift to analytics-driven marketing and technology-enabled business growth has changed the nature of advertising agencies. The era of “Mad Men,” where advertisers primarily focused on TV, radio, and print advertising is gone. In its place are specialists who focus on social media, digital media, and traditional media. And, there are behemoths who attempt to pull all disciplines into a single house.

On top of it, the traditional agency model was built on a revenue generation approach that included media placement; while there were different models, the most common one was based on a percentage of the media placed (e.g., 15% of the value of media placed). That model is being disrupted as programmatic media buying takes hold and clients push for changes in the agency compensation model.

Social Media Marketing; What's the point?

Advertisers lost control of the media years ago when the internet gave all the target audiences the power to run their own message delivery systems.

I’m not sure we had fully recovered from that peaceful revolution when another gigantic wave hit us, then another and another: Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, blogs, Yelp, Foursquare, and on and on.