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Marketing Strategies, Business
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Featured Article: Marketing Ideas and Marketing Strategies to Help Your Business Thrive
by Joel Sussman, president Optimal Marketing Communications How do you grab people's attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you've identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your business or profession. To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and evolving marketing strategies and trends in our culture. While not all inclusive, the following list of marketing strategies, marketing tools, and free marketing ideas can help establish a marketing framework that can put your small business on a faster track to growth. (Note: Ten additional marketing strategies have recently been added to this page. Take a look.) Small Business Marketing Tip #1: Gain Customer Confidence. Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It's up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or added value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence and overcome sales objections. If you haven't clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they'll be hesitant to commit and the sale will go to your competitor. Marketing Tip #2: Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using integrated marketing strategy, which in many cases would include a well-planned website marketing strategy. Stated simply: the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing strategy is partly the result of exposing your target audience to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible (frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.
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Want to increase sales, generate referrals, and create an influx of new prospects and repeat business? These powerful, fill-in-the-blank instant sales letters will help make your next direct mail campaign more profitable.
The Marketing Plan
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How to Develop a Strategic Marketing Plan:
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Marketing Tip #3: Sincere enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious. If you deeply believe in your products, services,
your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you. Your words are important, but your nonverbal communication -- your tone of voice, inflection, rate of speech, volume, facial expressions, your listening skills, eye contact, and overall responsiveness -- can have an even greater impact on how you influence and persuade your prospective customers, clients, or members.
Marketing Tip #4: Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales and marketing process as focusing attention on product features and benefits. Marketing Tip #5: Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction whenever possible, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations. Marketing Tip #6: Impose a deadline. Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendancy to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it's often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Marketing Tip: Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.
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Marketing Tip #7: Create a small business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your marketing planning strategies should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, target market analysis (know your customers), and readily available marketing tools, as well as marketing strategies and tools that you need to research or acquire. Marketing Tips #8: Embrace Web marketing, because it's powerful, it can be very effective, and it's here to stay! If you already have a web site, make sure it's "optimized" for keywords that your prospects are actually looking for.
Another vital aspect of raising your visibility and exposure on Google is to get other sites to link to your site. It's generally referred to as getting back-links or incoming links. This technque will bring you the optimal benefit when the sites linking to you are well-established, have a similar theme to your site, or are considered an "authority site". (The ultimate authority sites from which to get links are government sites (dot-gov), educational institutions (dot-edu), and organizations (dot-org). Web sites that have gained quality incoming links from other sites tend to be ranked much higher by Google than those that don't. |
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by Joel Sussman
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Marketing Article #2:
Marketing Planning Strategy #1: Perhaps the single, most important marketing strategy that should be practiced by all small business owners is to make marketing a daily routine. Granted, there may be 101 different priorities vying for your attention at any given moment, but if you neglect marketing on more than just an occasional basis, then you risk losing potential sales, being overtaken by the competition, and placing self-imposed limitations on your income growth. In a challenging economy it's more important than ever to be known as a company that provides value, dependability, and great service. Without some sort of regular marketing program, your existing and prospective customers may find themselves to be unexpectedly interested in your competitor's latest offerings -- which may have been brought to their attention through a postcard mailing, a trade show exhibit, a blog posting, a phone call, a press release, a brochure, a door-hanger, or a well-written sales letter. (It's the old "out of sight, out of mind" principle.) Marketing Strategy #2: Develop a "marketing consciousness". If you can get yourself to become just a little "obsessed" with marketing, then you'll tend to read more marketing books, attend more marketing seminars, and discover more marketing websites, newsletters, and blogs that will provide you with valuable ideas and inspiration. Of equal importance is becoming more attuned to how other people are marketing their businesses, and learning from their successes and marketing blunders. Marketing Strategy #3: Continually ask questions, re-evaluate what you're doing, and be flexible. If your website isn't converting the way it ought to be, try to pinpoint its weaknesses and correct them. The same holds true for print ads that are not generating responses. If the solution doesn't jump right out at you, ask your associates, acquaintances, neighbors, or spouse what their initial gut reaction is to your latest print ad, website landing page, a marketing postcard, or a radio ad. Instead of asking them what they think of it, ask them the more pointed question of how they think it could be improved (and assure them that you won't be offended by their constructive criticism). Useful feedback can often come from unexpected sources.
Marketing Strategy #5: Email a press release to your local media whenever you have anything newsworthy to announce. It's a free way to keep your name in front of the public, and it should be a part of an integrated marketing strategy. Two tips 1) Insert your press release into the body of your short, introductory email message. The reason for doing that is many reporters and editors don't like to open email attachments. 2) Only send press releases if you have something newsworthy to announce. That could include hiring new employees, getting a government grant, organizing a successful fund raising event, a grand opening, a new web site, being a keynote speaker at a seminar or graduation ceremony, a business expansion or relocation, and that sort of thing.
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Marketing Strategy #6: Speaking of media relations, another strategy worth exploring is to let the media know that you're an expert in your field and are available as a company or industry spokesperson.
Depending on your credentials, as well as your comfort-level with being interviewed by a reporter, you might want to send a brief letter outlining your accomplishments and expertise, and encourage them to call you if they need comments, quotes, background information, or opinion on a news article or feature story they're working on. The positive publicity, credibility, and recognition you could potentially get from this kind of coverage can potentially give your business or practice a real boost.
Marketing Strategy #7: Business cards can either by a waste of paper or an effective bridge between a prospect and their potential as a long-term client. Business cards are an integral element of your company's branding strategy, and can sometimes make or break you when it comes to getting prospects to take you seriously. A lot of companies skimp on business card design, concept development, and printing; and that lackluster image is conveyed directly to prospective clients. Bottom line is: Your chances of favorably impressing prospects will improve substantially if your business cards are printed on high-quality paper, display a professional-looking logo, and use a font style that's easy to read and is representative of the nature of your business. Your business cards should also contain either a well thought-out slogan or a short bulletted list that capsulizes your services, your expertise, and your commitment to excellence. Marketing Planning Strategy #8: Anticipate why a prospective customer might be reluctant or ambivalent about doing business with you, and then make sure to address their concerns in a clear, deliberate, and confident way. Guarantees of satisfaction, believable testimonials from satisfied customers, and assurances of dependable customer service after the sale are a few of the ways that you can reduce sales resistance. Marketing Strategy #9: If you find yourself chatting with a blogger who's in your profession or industry, but does not directly compete with you, offer to fill in for him, occasionally, as a "guest blogger". Blogging can be a pretty arduous undertaking, so they might welcome the chance to take a break and present their readers with a slightly different point of view. Make sure, of course, that you are allowed to include one or two links back to your website. This will accomplish two objectives: 1) You'll probably draw in anywhere from a "trickle" to a "flood" of additional traffic to your website, and 2) Inbound links to your site from other relevant, high quality sites can help improve your search engine positioning (ranking) in Google, resulted in more targeted traffic and potential customers. Marketing Planning Strategy #10: When developing a marketing plan, don't forget that there is a huge range of marketing ideas you can employ, many of which are free or inexpensive. Marketing ideas and techniques include yellow pages advertising, Pay Per Click advertising on Google and other Internet portals, exhibiting in trade shows, networking at local/regional professional conferences and business groups, knowing how to write a business proposal (and a good business proposal letter), using direct mail to your advantage, distributing coupons, brochures, flyers, postcard marketing, sponsoring contests, and of course, traditional media advertising, such as radio, TV, newspaper, and magazine display ads. Raising your visibility through participation in online social networking sites, such as Linkedin.com, is becoming an increasingly effective way to gain valuable exposure. That's just the short list of marketing strategies you can pursue as part of a planned marketing campaign, so devise an exhaustive list of possibilities, target your audience, and then plan a marketing campaign based on your budget and your goals.
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