11 Powerful Marketing TipsWritten by Bob Leduc
11 Powerful Marketing Tips Copyright 2004 Bob Leduc http://BobLeduc.com Each of these 11 marketing tips is based on a marketing strategy or tactic proven to boost sales. How many are you using? Tip 1: Your customers buy your product or service to feel a certain way after their purchase. Keep this in mind as you develop your ads, web pages and other sales tools. Use vivid word pictures to dramatize pleasant feelings your customers experience when they use what you are selling. It intensifies their desire to have it and motivates them to buy now. Tip 2: Continually test new advertising and marketing methods ...and old methods you never tried before. A good guideline to follow is to allocate 80 percent of your budget to proven promotions and 20 percent to testing new things. Most businesses using this formula keep growing regardless of changing market conditions and intense competition. Tip 3: Reduce size of your ads so you can run more ads for same cost. Don't be surprised if your short ads generate a higher response than long ads - giving you a bigger return for your expense. One of most effective ads I ever used was only 11 words. Tip 4: Print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. People read postcards when message is brief. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your web site and generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost. Tip 5: Active, stimulating words and phrases keep prospects interested in reading your sales copy. Look for dull passive words and phrases and replace them with active ones. For example, change a phrase like "...it's practical and inexpensive" to "...it's fast, easy and you save $99". Tip 6: After telling prospects what they gain when they buy your product or service, tell them what they lose if they do not buy it. Most people fear loss more than they desire gain. Customers want your product or service so they can enjoy benefits it provides. But they will want it even more if you remind them of what they lose by not buying it.
| | Internet Time RevisitedWritten by Andrew Eklund, CEO, Ciceron
In Summer of 1995, I was having dinner with some early Internet "pioneers" in San Francisco at Lulu's Bistro just off of Moscone Center. These "pioneers" were snotty little twenty- and thirty-somethings, like me at time (at least snotty part), hell bent on changing world through Web connections, Mountain Dew, iguanas running office corridors, "just say no to senior management," and countless fanny packs full of stock options."The Market be damned!" they'd say. "This is Internet economy!" "The old paradigm is OVER," they'd drool between sips of Sierra Nevada. "Wells Fargo. Wall-Mart. Berkshire Hathaway. O-V-E-R. Like Pearl Jam." (Remember, this is '95.) Drunk on power and visions of world domination I raced home to Minneapolis to start Ciceron. We all know how California version of Internet bubble ended. You probably know an ex-CEO who now mixes martinis for hire south of Market Street. Recently, I revisited one of Old New Paradigms: "Internet Time." You remember that one? The one where everything happens faster on Internet. Is it still true? Does this dusty ol' ditty still play well on e-jukebox of time? I'm going to make argument that, of all paradigm-shifting, new age, margon-jargon (that's modern for "mumbo-jumbo"), geek-speak of '90s, "Internet time" is one that still stands for something. That "something" is speed in which we can gain empirical knowledge about how consumers behave in marketplace, as represented on Internet. Customer research is next Big Boom on Internet. Right now, as you're reading this, perhaps tens if not hundreds or thousands of people (depending upon size of your online marketplace) are online, at your site, creating data. They're "behaving" in some form or fashion, either in a way that you want or in a way that you should know about. Either they're "getting it" or they're not. They've either bought something from you, signed up for that newsletter, filled out that form, downloaded that document, or forwarded that page to their boss, or they haven't.
|
