Thou Shalt Not See Marketing as a Department When you get right down to it, everyone in your company is a marketer. From receptionist whose voice is first thing your buyers hear, to delivery person whose rear-end may be last thing they see, every one of your employees plays a pivotal role in orchestration of your marketing efforts. Good companies imbue every employee with healthy reverence for customer so that company, from every point of contact it has with its market, knows how to market.

Thou Shalt Follow Ninety Day Rule Your customers, prospects and champions (those who refer business your way) should hear from you every 90 days. People are just too busy to remember you otherwise. If you don’t follow 90-day rule, you risk getting shouted down by any competitor of yours who does.

Honor Concept of Tinkering with All your Heart If you’re a 70’s child like me, you remember hugely successful rock group Fleetwood Mac. But I’ll bet you didn’t know that their seemingly overnight success came only after years of tinkering. That’s right, before release of their monster album Rumours, they endured no less than 14 personnel changes across 10 years. In marketing, as in rock and roll, success seldom happens with your original line-up.

Thou Shalt Not Quit Moses and Israelites wandered desert for 40 years without giving up. You owe it to yourself (and maybe Moses too) to try any new marketing initiative at least three times before throwing in towel. Your prospect could have been out of country first time you ran it, and tending to his sick mother second. Repetition is a marketer’s best friend.

Thou Shalt Feed Thy Prospecting Funnel Suspects become prospects, who then become customers. And these customers then generate referrals who create more prospects and cycle begins anew. For thousands of years, this marketing process (also known as prospecting funnel) has governed marketing activities for all companies, and I feel safe saying that it will continue this way for another thousand years.

#10 A powerful tagline In 10 words or less, a good tagline reinforces a company’s reason for being. And smaller companies will find it to be one of hardest working tools. To get one, first boil down to a single sentence, benefits of doing business with your company. Then, take write up a few version of this and take them to a good copywriter. After deciding upon one, marry this tagline up with your company name and logo wherever they appear.

#9 Consistent branding elements During 19th and early 20th centuries, a rancher would mark his cattle with an exclusive brand. This brand, depicting a unique visual image, distinguished his cattle from another rancher’s. A branding effort for a growing company works same way. The consistent use of branding elements (i.e. name, tagline, logo, colors, fonts, and typestyles) clearly identifies your company from competition.

#8 Search engine positioning Today, just having a high-quality website doesn’t mean success. Having large numbers of qualified prospects visiting your site does. If you’re not spending equally on promotion of your site through search engine positioning, then your website isn’t working hard enough. One recent client of mine who found my site through a search engine, generated a whopping 1,500%+ return on my search engine investment.

#7 Calls-to-action It’s not enough to just rattle off your product’s features and benefits. You must go one step further by telling your reader exactly what you want her to do next. Too often marketing materials effectively present a company, then leave next step up to reader’s imagination. This is a missed opportunity. Instead, spell out exactly what your reader should do next. “Visit www.emergemarketing.com and register to win”, “Call our estimating department for a free quote” or “ Email us with your suggestions” are calls-to-action that leave no doubt about what you want your reader to do next.