Avoid Business Marketing Mistakes and Identify Profitable OpportunitiesWritten by R.J. Reiterman
Without referring to statistics (assuming that such statistics exist) it's safe to say that most marketing campaigns, advertising promotions, and small business marketing ideas produce disappointing results and a smaller-than-expected ROI. The reasons for this include following: advertising in wrong medium, misidentifying your target market, selling a product or service for which there is little demand or too much competition, noncompetitive pricing, bad location, poor customer service, a weak sales strategy; or absence of a compelling marketing message, a distinctive company identity, or unique selling proposition. In other words, act of simply taking out newspaper ads, buying radio spots, making sales calls, and distributing brochures is not, in and of itself, going to make your phone ring off hook or cause your cash register to overheat. The foundation of your marketing strategy must be rock solid, first!Remember, your target market is constantly being inundated with advertising messages, commercials, sales pitches, and an endless parade of business signs, billboards, empty promises, special sales, shouting announcers, and dubious advertiser claims. The burning question for you, small business owner, is: how do you reach right people, stand out in crowd, inspire believability, and get people to respond to your offer (preferably in droves)? Successful Advertising Campaigns Begin with a Captivating Advertising Message Perhaps most effective way to become attuned to what works and what doesn't is by getting in habit of noticing and evaluating hundreds of marketing messages and strategies that you're bombarded with every day. Constantly ask yourself what messages, advertising techniques, and images cause you to stop what you're doing and pay attention, whether it's a radio spot, billboard, a TV commercial, or a magazine ad? Chances are, messages that do best job of attracting your attention are ones that focus on how a product or service will make you feel better, provide you with comfort, pleasure, solve a problem, infuse your marriage with romance, attract opposite sex, bring your family closer together, make your life easier, healthier, safer, more secure, prosperous, exciting, or more fun. The list goes on and on; but point is that ads and marketing strategies that focus on benefits, good feelings, and positive emotions that a product or service can evoke are ones that typically generate most response and sales. In your ads, brochures, and sales presentations, emphasize desirable outcomes, results, and benefits that your prospect will enjoy as result of using your product or service. Features are important, too; but are generally secondary when talking about powers of persuasion and sales success. As you begin to pay attention to and notice all advertising messages that capture your attention and arouse your interest, give some thought to something else: how can you reach your target audience most effectively, without spending more marketing dollars than necessary. By paying attention to what other businesses and entrepreneurs are doing, and by thinking creatively, you will start formulating innovative and sometimes unconventional ideas that you can apply to profitably marketing your own products or services.
| | Take No Prisoners Marketing Written by Bill Daugherty
There are more web sites on WWW than there are people on earth. And at one level or another, you are in competition with everyone of those billions of sites for your share of site traffic. To maximize your marketing efforts you need a strategy that includes a large arsenal of marketing tools and a plan that uses those tools consistently and simultaneously. I have recently developed such a strategy to market my own Internet businesses, and results have been spectacular.I call it "The Take No Prisoners Marketing Strategy," because it utilizes a relentless 100% marketing effort. Previously I approached my site promotion in an unorganized and haphazard way. As a result, my traffic was up and down, mostly down. Since following this new strategy, my traffic has consistently grown and my sales have never been higher. My first step was to devote a portion of each and every working day to doing nothing but submitting ads. That's every working day. No exceptions. Step two was keeping a log of all my search engine and ad submissions. I enter name and URL of site, ad copy, date of submission, duration of ad and when I can resubmit. This is extremely important. If you don't know when to resubmit, you will either over-submit and be branded a spammer, or you will under-submit and fail to maximize full benefits from those sites.
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