Frugal MarketingWritten by Charlie Cook
You want to market your business but you don’t want to spend a lot of money. You may be just starting out and have precious little capital or you may have a successful business but want to spend as little as possible for greatest results. Or, you may just be cheap. How can you create a marketing strategy that results in a steady stream of new clients on a shoestring budget? The key is having KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, SYSTEMS and TOOLS to create and implement your marketing plan. KNOWLEDGE While service professionals and small business owners are experts in their business, they often don’t have marketing knowledge they need to grow their businesses. If you aren’t attracting dozens of new prospects each week and converting at least one of them to client status, you need to learn what to do to market your business. Depending on your budget, you can: 1. Visit your local library and read a dozen books on marketing. 2. Spend one or two hundred dollars on a couple of marketing manuals from marketing masters on web. 3. Hire a marketing coach or consultant to help you learn what to do and how to do it. 4. Pay a marketing expert to do your marketing for you. SKILLS Once you have a marketing plan you’ll need to develop some marketing skills, no matter what your role is in your organization. The three most important skills are: 1. Asking Right Questions Open-ended questions are best way to direct prospects to engage prospects, direct their thinking and learn what they want. Do you know: - What your prospects care about? - The problems your prospects want to solve? - What information your prospects want? Use questions to get answers. Put together 5-10 questions to ask your prospects. 2. Listening Listen carefully to understand, provide a synthesis of their responses and use a problem-solving approach to provide link between symptoms and causes. 3. Writing Compelling Copy The copy in your marketing materials and copy you use for your “elevator speech” will make difference between attracting or boring prospects. Demonstrate to prospects, that you understand their concerns and their business context, and that you are expert they need. Start by regularly giving them an idea they can use.
| | Quit Discounting and Start Packaging to Make More MoneyWritten by Nicole Shields
We all know consumers are motivated by good offers and great deals. They want to feel like they are receiving a great value. Business owners are often inclined to discount their goods or services to appeal to their customers and prospects. Discounting by offering a dollar amount or a percentage off is certainly an easy and enticing way to stimulate sales and/or increase trial. But, there may better ways to accomplish same tasks. Instead of taking money off sale it may behoove you to get a little creative and consider some unique deals for your customers. Here are some ideas to get you going: ·Buy One Get One Free ·Gift with Purchase – try offering a free gift with a purchase of a particular product or dollar amount. ·Package your services or products together offering a savings over purchasing them individually. There are several advantages to making offers such as these. ·Your offer will have a higher perceived value, thus better response ·You can often negotiate deals from suppliers, which may be more profitable for you than giving a percentage off. ·In some cases, you may be able to make surplus/unused inventory work hard for you, while freeing up space in your stock room. The goal is to create a deal which is too hard to pass up. Keep an eye on infomercials. They are great at using bonus items, ‘If you order now, you’ll not only receive……’ In many cases, it is just calling one element of a set bonus item. I recall watching an infomercial for a set of knives. They took one of knives, which really would round out set and called it ‘Bonus Knife’, plus they added a set of steak knives, all if you ordered in next 7 minutes. The case was very compelling as you really felt that you would have every knife you would ever need in this one set.
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