Hi guys. I know Thursday is not my usual day for posting, but we recently received an interesting e-mail here at TatStore that I wanted to pass on to you guys. Before I get into this topic I’d like to express the two distinct reasons I’m sharing this post with you. One, I think this could be a great opportunity for our customers. Two, Visa’s marketing strategy is very interesting, and at least nominally, we received this because we blog.

As for the first point, the Visa Business Network is an application developed by Visa to cater to the needs of (small) business owners, specifically their networking needs. This program is unique in a couple of important ways. First of all, it is legitimately free and accessible. That’s kind of a big deal when information products and business networking services are fetching a pretty penny, many of which fetch it monthly. Also, they developed it to synthesize with facebook perfectly. I’m hesitant to call it a “facebook app,” even though they do, because it is not exclusively available on facebook to the best of my knowledge. It seems like the content is consistent no matter where you access it whether at visabusinessnetwork.com or apps.facebook.com/visabusiness. However, the app parts of it seems well executed.

Once within the program you will have access to several tools and resources that seem to include video training programs, forums, and networking tools. I would like to say that I only signed up yesterday and didn’t poke around a whole lot, but I felt like I looked around enough to know that at least it seems valuable. If you’re still not sure whether it’s worth checking out or not, Visa is willing to offer you a $100 credit toward facebook advertising. The one piece of advice that I have heard that I would like you to keep in mind is that you need to be very careful when managing your facebook advertising campaign. I have heard from several sources that you should be incredibly focused with your targeting, and also track it closely. Make sure that it’s making customers and making money for you, because people on facebook tend not to want to be advertised to.

Now the second larger point that I would like to make, is that this particular marketing effort pursued by visa is very innovative, and I think will be successful and become more common on our steady march into the future. Mark received an email from a real person containing the following opening paragraph.

“Tatstore Blog last week and I’m digging you guys. Kudos to you and your team for being a well-written and informative resource for your readers. I dig the hybrid of geeky tech reviews, tattoos and marketing. I’m hoping that you guys will find my information below useful and relevant to your readers. Hopefully, it will be another resource in making their business websites more search-engine optimized and a platform where they can show off their unique art work. Please don’t take this as spam. I’d truly love to get you and your staff’s feedback on our launch announcement.”

Now, for a very simple paragraph this tells me a lot of things. First of all, this may be spam, in the fact that I may not want the content (in this case I did), but it is definitely not spam in the sense that it was not written for me. This salesperson at least took a moment to quickly scan our blog and put together a pretty concise and pertinent compliment. But not only that, with her first comment she actually transferred to us something of social value, namely a digg. Not surprisingly, it seems that Digg was not particularly happy with her and banned her account, but the marketing principle is right on. And then, the most important element to any marketing campaign, is the quality of the offering, and she follows through with a wonderful form email which explains her program and her incentives. Keep in mind though, it could have been an even better offering, and we would have missed it if we didn’t have a blog for our business.

Like my grandpa says, “Let this be a lesson to ya’.”.

Read the press release from Visa here.