Frugal Marketing

Written 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 forrepparttar 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 havingrepparttar 120879 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 haverepparttar 120880 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 fromrepparttar 120881 marketing masters onrepparttar 120882 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. Askingrepparttar 120883 Right Questions Open-ended questions arerepparttar 120884 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 getrepparttar 120885 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 providerepparttar 120886 link between symptoms and causes.

3. Writing Compelling Copy The copy in your marketing materials andrepparttar 120887 copy you use for your “elevator speech” will makerepparttar 120888 difference between attracting or boring prospects. Demonstrate to prospects, that you understand their concerns and their business context, and that you arerepparttar 120889 expert they need. Start by regularly giving them an idea they can use.

Quit Discounting and Start Packaging to Make More Money

Written 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 accomplishrepparttar same tasks.

Instead of taking money offrepparttar 120878 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 onrepparttar 120879 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 setrepparttar 120880 bonus item. I recall watching an infomercial for a set of knives. They took one ofrepparttar 120881 knives, which really would round outrepparttar 120882 set and called itrepparttar 120883 ‘Bonus Knife’, plus they added a set of steak knives, all if you ordered inrepparttar 120884 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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