Get Business Now: Play by the Marketing RulesWritten by Charlie Cook
Marketing a business is like any game. If you know rules you are much more likely to win. All to often small businesses spend their limited time and money on advertising, networking, making calls, mailings, meeting with prospects, yet only achieve middling results. The problem isn’t that they don’t know their business or provide high quality products and services, its that they don’t know rules of marketing game. Marketing To Win To win marketing game, you need to know rules. The key rules to getting clients you want are:1. Market Solutions 2. Target Your Market 3. Demonstrate Value 4. Build Your Network 5. Stay in Touch 1. Market Solutions Most service professionals focus their marketing on their expertise, their approach and products and services they offer. While competence is a key to doing work, most clients' primary concern is getting problems solved and having their spoken and unspoken needs met. Instead of marketing your credentials, your processes and methodology, market your knowledge and solutions you offer. Marketing is about making connections, specifically between a client's unmet need and solutions you provide. The best way to impress clients is to show them you understand problems they are experiencing. If you want to leverage your credentials, mention past clients when you provide examples of how you solved similar problems. 2. Target Your Market Are you getting a positive response to your marketing efforts? If not, then you may not have targeted your market and their specific needs and interests precisely enough. Independent professionals or small business owners often try to do impossible and be everything to everybody. Instead define your niche market and get attention of this group.
| | Publicity Stunts Still Earn AttentionWritten by Marcia Yudkin
Publicity Stunts Still Earn Attentionby Marcia Yudkin Who says publicity stunts are passé? Outrageous staged events designed solely to show up on evening news still get job done when they're clever and fun. Stan Heimowitz, owner of Celebrity Gems in Castro Valley, California, not long ago successfully dramatized in streets of San Francisco fact that IntraLinux, a small software company -- Heimowitz's client -- is challenging Microsoft, industry giant. Outside Moscone Center in San Francisco, where Microsoft was launching its new product Windows 2000, a Bill Gates look-alike was matched against a Penguin (IntraLinux's mascot) in a boxing ring whose four corners were held up by Penguinettes. The Penguin pinned Gates, naturally, while a plane towing a banner that read "IntraLinux" flew overhead. This creative bit of street theater made its point to onlookers and media alike. Publicity stunts go back at least to days of showman P.T. Barnum, who announced his circus' arrival in town by hitching an elephant to a plow beside train tracks. This raised such a ruckus that it's still against law in some states to plow a field with an elephant. Suspense became an element in a stunt featured on front page of Los Angeles Times in 1980 when paper challenged Bob Allen to make good on his boast that he could be dropped into any city with $100 and 72 hours later own several properties without paying down payments. While readers wondered if Allen could really do it, author of Nothing Down indeed pulled it off. Attention-getting can go high-brow too, as when actor Norman George, who portrays Edgar Allen Poe in a one-man show, persuaded city of Boston to rename Carver Street, where creator of "The Raven" was born, for poet in connection with 180th anniversary of Poe's birth in 1989.
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