You could have the most unique, highest quality product or service in the world and you’d still be broke if you don’t market it every single day! Websites are not magic wands and your place of business isn’t a magnet. You must have marketing pieces that are perpetually in play, attracting new prospects and new clients, creating a steady stream of revenue.
It is your marketing, not your product or service, that is the lifeblood of your business. Marketing is what gets your offer out in front of the public, persuades people to buy, educates prospects about your business, builds your brand, outrageously increases sales…well, short of babysitting your kids for you, there are few things marketing can’t do…actually, you could create a marketing campaign for the best babysitters in your local area, so there’s actually nothing that marketing can’t do.
Market your business every single day and you are guaranteed to achieve financial freedom.
Give People Everything They Want and You’ll Get Everything You Need
Countless companies fail because they maintain an egocentric perspective in the way they conduct their business. If you continue to execute your marketing and customer relations in a manner that fails to truly perceive the needs of your clients and prospects then you will fail to connect with them.
Before you begin any marketing campaign or project you must get in the mindset of your prospective clients, focusing in on their hot buttons. Zero in on your target audience’s most frequent problems, worries, fears, aspirations and dreams and you’ll break all of your previous sales records.
Incorporate a completely genuine desire to help others within your marketing and it will generate a natural energy that will pull people in for life.
Article Marketing for Permanent Presence
Since consistent, frequent marketing is key to the success of your business, you need to consider the relationship of how much you get in return for your efforts—this is especially true for those of you working with bootstrapped budgets. Ideally, you want to be able to put one unit of effort in and get several units of success in return. Those of you doing your marketing on a one-for-one basis are sure to be going bald from pulling your hair out in anxiety. Successful businesses are those that incorporate leverage in their marketing.
Article marketing provides one of the best ways to market your business every day without actually having to do something every day. That’s because once you publish an article online, it’s there to stay, creating a permanent presence online. Articles pull people in from the search engines through your keywords, provide value through useful information, and drive Web traffic back your site through backlinks that you plant in the article.
This permanence also makes article marketing one of the most cost effective means of marketing. One price, one unit of energy, infinite potential.
Plus, you can print your online articles and send them out in direct response mailers to your leads. (Always think of how you can get the most use out of a single piece for the best use of your budget.) Providing helpful information in your mailers adds a great deal of value and helps establish why your business is the clear choice. Plus, adding an information-based piece in any marketing you do helps soften your sales approach, making it much more attractive than a standalone promotion. Due to a daily bombardment of advertising, people are naturally skeptical about these standalone promotions. When you provide something for free that people can use to make their lives better they’re much likelier to let their guard down and actively consider your offer.
Articles on Legal Steroids
Add video to your articles and you’ll instantly multiply your sales potential. For example, YouTube is now considered the second largest search engine on the Internet; behind Google but ahead of Yahoo and Bing. Is your business missing out on all those potential customers?
In addition, we are naturally sensory driven, so the more senses you engage in your marketing the better your chances of success. Pair your copywriting efforts with video and you give your audience yet another reason to stay tuned and focus on your offer.
Adding videos to your articles also adds potency to your efforts because it allows you to position yourself as an expert. Why do expert opinions and celebrity endorsements still prevail as top marketing methods over all these years? People are more confident buying from an authority.
This opportunity is available to every type of business owner, but massage therapists, salon owners, and yoga teachers have an especially ideal opportunity to create informational videos for their clients and prospects. Create a series of instructive videos, get people interested, show people you truly want to help, and you will motivate them to buy from you.
Money Making Mindset
Above all, it is vital to your success that you remind yourself to have fun during your marketing. Approach your marketing like a drone, drudgingly shuffling through it because you’re viewing it as a mandatory duty, and your marketing message is sure to suffer. Enthusiasm is contagious and can be transferred to others to incite sales. But a complete lack of enthusiasm will leach much of your marketing’s potential as your audience will most certainly pick up on it. Instead, look at it as a fun adventure that promises infinite potential and you will surely unlock the power of attraction, sharing your confidence and enthusiasm with others, and converting record-breaking prospects to loyal customers.
Whatever your job is, when you sit down to do it, often the task at hand can distract you from the importance of the way you do it. If you’re a small business owner or otherwise, you’ll want to save yourself small bits of time that can otherwise add up to entire days of extra work performed. Here are 10 ways to improve workflow.
- Think mise en place, or everything in its place. This idea is popular among professional chefs. Basically put, make sure your work space is organized with everything in easy reach and nothing in the way.
- Your computer desktop is still a desktop. Clean your computer’s desktop of needless links and files. Put relevant files together in folders and create quick links for all regularly used applications and websites.
- Grabbing something? Grab something else. Every time you get up to get something, stop and ask yourself if you need anything else while you’re up.
- No more games. We all need a little release with games and other distractions at times, but if you eliminate these products from your computer, you’ll be surprised how little you miss them.
- Turn off chat. Many offices and Web applications have Web chat. Unless this is essential to your business, turn it off, or put your account on “busy.”
- Keep separate business and personal emails. Doing this will keep you from being distracted by personal activities that can probably wait till after work.
- Swallow the biggest frog first. When you organize your day, do the hardest and most painful task first. This will make everything else easier and prevent you from procrastinating.
- Keep work at work. Don’t allow yourself to carry work over into your personal time. Often, this is an excuse to be lazy at work to limit your work time. This will help you focus while at work and improve your personal life as well.
- How do you work when your boss is watching? Always work as if your boss is over your shoulder—especially if you are your own boss! With this mindset you’ll see greater productivity.
- Time to lean, time to clean. While you might not have anything to clean when you work, keep in mind that there is never down time. Many workers allow this little bit of wiggle room with their time, however it only pushes work off that needs to be done anyways.
In a general sense, your workflow will greatly improve when you make your work area as streamlined as possible for completing a task and creating attitudes that focus work time on work. Thinking in terms of tasks to be done instead of hours to work will also greatly improve your productivity. It may take time to completely adapt these ideas into your work area and attitude, but the extra effort required to do so will pay off large dividends.
Let’s face it—the economy is doing really bad right now. It may not require soup lines, but everyone is feeling the pressure weigh down on them. Wages are going down while expenses are going up, and worst of all as the value of cash lowers, bills start to pile up. This has meant a huge increase in the number of bills being left unpaid. With everything so tight to begin with, creditors and businesses are in a tough spot. They need their bills paid on time because they themselves don’t have much spare cash lying around. This has led to repossessions and canceled accounts for many people because of the apparent necessity to keep payers in line.
However, this isn’t the only choice businesses have. Yes, of course, bills need to be paid just for your business to stay alive, but a single paid bill isn’t as valuable as a customer that will keep returning to you again and again. Even in an economy where businesses may be hanging on from month to month, companies still need to look down the road and think about ways to maintain a strong customer base even in rough times. Moreover, as the economy will eventually begin to turn, the few customers you do have will be ready to spend more once the financial situation improves.
Does this mean not having your customers pay bills? Naturally, this will make them very happy, but it will put you out of business. No, customers still have to pay bills, but leniency should be exercised when it comes to late payments. Severely penalizing customers when they are delinquent for a couple months only trims them of extra cash they might have spent at your business. Now it may appear to be money either way, but it’s probably a definite that your customers won’t be coming back if you give them huge late fees for delinquent payments.
In a slow economy customers are always looking for the best deal. One way to still maintain your prices and offer a competitive edge is to offer a more lenient pay schedule. Doing so keeps your position exactly the same as before the down turn without doing much more than improving your customer relations. Additionally, consider that your customers are often in the same position as your business is—they have income and expenses that don’t always time up exactly. So, just because a customer can’t pay immediately, doesn’t mean they won’t have the money in the future.
Word of mouth is very important—good customer relations spreads the word about your business and can draw other customers from other businesses. You may take a wash for a couple months, but if this turns around and puts more people at your door, it will definitely pay off just like any investment.
Simply put—putting your customers out of business puts you out of business. Remember, your customers are not ATMs, simply distributing cash as you need it. Instead, they are people with memories and will develop loyalty to a company that shows them leniency; especially in a tough time. They may miss a bill every once and a while, but if you let it slide in this tough climate, your customers will be paying your bills for years to come.
Shiny wrappers promising delicious treats inside, perfectly tied bows sealing seductive sweets within, colors of the rainbow catching the eye at every angle…I’d like to address the kid-in-the-candy-store phenomenon and how it applies to your marketing (more specifically, how it shouldn’t apply). Through my years of experience of working with my clients and trying to educate them on their marketing and working with a bootstrapped budget, I’ve noticed that they really appreciate it when I slap their hands and help them slow down before they burn through their budgets like a chocolate-smeared kid blowing through his allowance in a candy store. Granted, there are some very effective marketing methods out there today, but without the occasional hand-slap, you might get as excited as a child and buy up every shiny new marketing solution that you see.
First, the following is not supposed to be considered a popularity contest, and by no means am I claiming to be the coolest guy out there-well, my five-month-old son may think I’m pretty cool! But what I’d like to ask you is: Who do you know? I don’t want to know if you’ve ever seen James Woods in a Starbucks or if you’re the type of person who gets the thumbs up from everyone you pass. I just want to see if you can develop a list of people you know. Why develop a list? Because, whether you’re a first-year small-business greenhorn or a veteran badass, creating a contact list is one of the best ways to get your marketing wheels rolling. And…uh huh, you know what’s coming here…it’s free!
Instead of buying the first shiny marketing package that catches your eye, set aside a significant period of time and develop a list of all the people you know. By first creating a list of contacts that you can solicit and present your business to, you’ll be taking advantage of verified, warm leads; leads you didn’t have to spend a single marketing dollar on. The first phase of creating your list should be done through a stream of consciousness, writing down every single name that comes to mind. Subsequently, you’ll use a filter and qualify each of the name’s you’ve written down. Try categorizing them into Direct Purchase, Referral Prospects, Barter Candidates and Sleepers.
- Direct Purchase: Who on your list is ready to buy? Which names did you write down that fall under your classifications for your ideal client?
- Referral Prospects: Want to double or triple your new contact list? Then ask yourself “Who do they know?” For example, let’s say you’re a used-car salesman. Okay, so you’ve got your brother on the list, but he’s always been a new-or-nothing kind of guy and though he loves you, refuses to buy from you. Instead of testing this familial tie’s strength, simply think of who he knows or ask him if he thinks any of his friends might be interested. No matter what industry they’re in, business owners would do well to view their company as a network marketing company or an MLM. Look beyond the surface; there are many levels to a solid business.
- Barter Candidates: Who on your list could you trade services/products with? Perhaps your neighbor doesn’t need a car at this time, but you can still ask him if he’d be willing to trade you a few hours of his skills for some car repair discounts you get through your vendors.
- Sleepers: These are the people you just can’t seem to categorize. Perhaps you only briefly met them on the street once and don’t have an actual relationship with them. Either way, you should never assume a contact is worthless until you’ve made the effort to market to them.
Just as we encourage equality in society, so shall it be with your business. Never assume anything about your prospects or contacts until you’ve dealt with them directly-after that, you can judge them as much as you’d like.
Look for our future feature article on follow-up to help you capitalize on your contact list.
For the first monday marketing tip of 2009 I thought it would be fitting to talk about the biggest way to gain exposure on a daily basis that costs you nothing and also can be done with zero effort, multiple times a day. Email signatures are a great way of promoting yourself, your business and other ventures you may normally not be able to talk about with the current person you are cooresponding with via email. You can utilize it in a variety of ways which I will outline below.
Company contact information
Do not just have your name in your signature line. Put your name, your credentials (are you the owner, president, marketing director?), your website url, your phone number and any physical address (if it is used a lot for your business – add it in)
Social Media Information
Do you want to connect with the people you converse with through email on other platforms? How about twitter or facebook? If you do, and you have a few profiles for them to connect with you on, why not set up a page on your company website listing them? This way, you can list the link in your email without having 10+ url’s pointing to different social media profiles.
To see an example of this, check out my “Be my friend” page on iamMikeSmith.com
Other ventures
Do you run other websites that are semi-related to the one that your emailing through? I know I do and that is why I have a link to my two blogs in the footer of my emails. Not only does it help show who I am in other realms, it also gives the people I’m talking to the ability to see that I have various amounts of knowledge on marketing, social media and design.
Contests & Exclusive Offers
Want to make the people you conversate with via email feel more important? Drop a line in your email signature that gives them 10-20% off their order, gives them exclusive bonuses that noone else gets or let them know about a contest you are running. It’s a great way to boost the effectiveness of your emails and will definitely show the people you’re writing to that generosity is defintiely on your side.
So lets make sure you’re utilizing those few lines of space to their fullest capabilities. You never know who might be looking.