All Posts Tagged With: "marketing"

I’ve been trying to figure out just how effective Twitter can be as a marketing tool. After all, how much mileage can you get out of 140-character tweets?

Apparently, a lot. Tweeting forced a major drug manufacturer to deep-six a new marketing campaign. Seems as though thousands of irate new mothers, upset at what they felt was an unfair depiction in an ad for Motin, turned to Twitter to voice their displeasure. The outcry was so loud and so forceful that McNeil Consumer Healthcare, maker of Motrin, decided to pull the ad.

Now, you can argue about how offensive the ad was — as a 53-year old man, I thought it was kind of clever — but you can’t argue that Twitter was a powerful vehicle for social change.

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I’m a sucker when it comes to free reports. If I come across something online that looks useful or interesting, I’ll gladly give up my email address for the privilege of downloading it.

Of course, the downside is my inbox is immediately flooded with a steady stream of emails asking me to subscribe, buy, join or otherwise spend money for some product or service. A few examples, without naming the guilty parties:

• After downloading a free report on October 20, I have received 14 emails from one company, including two on one day and three on another.
• After downloading a report on Nov. 1, I’ve received seven emails from another company, including two in one day.
• In a third instance, I’ve received 80 emails from a company I downloaded something from on June 26.
• By coincidence, a client I work with showed my an increasingly aggressive, almost annoyed series of emails he received from a company begging him to sign up for a several hundred dollar coaching course.

So, my question is this: when it comes to autoresponding systems, how much is too much? Once a day? Twice a week? Three times a month?

At what point does the recipient become numb and stop paying attention? Or worse yet, unsubscribes? Now you’ve turned off a potential customer who, at one point at least, thought you had something valuable to offer?

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Most marketers know testimonials are a powerful sales tool. But not all testimonials are created equal.

What is the best kind of testimonial to generate new sales, to produce extra profits for your business? Is it best to have the President of the United States endorse your product? Or is it better to have a no-name from down the street say the same nice things?
Continued

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A little late on this week’s Stumbling report…enjoy!

1. The world just witnessed one of the greatest sales job of all time. A relatively unknown, relatively inexperienced Senator from Chicago defeated a celebrated war hero with a 30-year track record public service and politics to become President of the United States. As if those odds weren’t long enough, Barack Obama also had to overcome the reluctance of a nation to elect an Africa American to the highest office. Yet, he accomplished both of those feats by a wide margin. At WebInkNow, Scott Merrmen offers 10 marketing lessons from the Barack Obama Presidential campaign, many of which can be easily transferred to your business.
2. Sometimes, writing a blog can feel like claping with one hand — difficult to make any noise. You come up with a great post idea, craft your words carefully, and sit back to wait for reaction and good conversation, only to be disappointed when your work is met with deafening silence. BlogKori suggests seven ways to get more comments on your blog post.
3. Speaking of blogging, getting visitors to leave comments is sort of of like icing on the cake. Getting them to even read your post is the first challenge. At SEOptimise, the oddly-titled “The Lazy Bloggers Guide to Quality Content & Social Media Success” offers 5 reasons why you should forget about writing the perfect piece of quality content.
4. As the previous Stumble showed, adding interesting photos to your blog post can increase interest. But where can you find photos? Google images is sometimes a good source, but often you are seeing copyrighted work that someone else is using. The folks at Digital Image Magazine have compiled a list of 25 free stock photo sites and a brief review of each one.
5. Keeping a journal seems so old-fashioned these days. I rmember my creative writing professor requiring us to keep a journal way back in the Stone Age (1974). It seemed like such a burden when I had much more important things to do. Writing at makeGenius.com, Ivan Rios makes a compelling argument for keeping a journal and offers several suggestions of the kinds of things your should keep in it. Come to think of it, I wish I had kept a journal all these years; it might help explain how I got to where I am.

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The other night, I sat on a panel at a local business organization meeting to discuss how entrepreneurs can cope with the the difficult economy. The keynote speaker was Jim Donovan, an internationally known author, business coach and motivational speaker.

In a truely inspirational presentation, Jim shared several strategies business owners can use to thrive — not only survive — these tough financial times:

1. Ignore Reality. Try to imagine what your business would like like five years from now if everything was running perfectly. Make that your goal. it is pretty much accepted in psychology that we attract what we focus on or, to put it another way, our minds move in the direction of our thoughts. Taking that a step further, it becomes apparent that for our lives to change, we must be focusing on not what is, but rather what we want; hence, ignore reality. We must start telling a different story about how our life is. So many people cling to their “story” about how their life is and why and then wonder why it’s not changing. It can’t! As long as you’re constantly reinforcing conditions as they are, they cannot change. Only when you are willing to let go of your “story” and start telling yourself a new one, will things on the outside begin to change.
2. Change Your Focus. Beginning immediately, stop talking about anything that is not working. Stop defending and justifying why you’re not doing better. Stop blaming the economy or whatever else you deem to be the cause of your troubles. If something is not working, continuing to talk about it will cause you to start seeing more things going wrong and continue the downward spiral. Ask only, “What’s working?” and continue asking every day. Make a list of what is working and have your team do the same, individually and as a group. Change the tone of your meetings. If you understand that you get more of whatever you focus upon, it’s obvious why you’ll want to do this.
3. Fire some customers. The rule of thumb is that 20 percent of your customers account for 80 percent of your revenue. Take a hard look at the 80 percent that are producing only 20 percent of your revenue and get rid of the ones that drain your enthusiam. They’re not worth the energy they require; by getting rid of them you’ll have more time to devote to the customers who generate your revenue.
4. Be creative. Find new products that meet the needs of your existing customers. Understand their problems and figure out how you can solve them. It’s much easier to sell to existing customers than it is to cultivate new ones. You can also find new markets for existing products. Arm and Hammer’s sales of baking soda, for example, were flat until someone realized it was also a good way to absorb odors in a refrigerator. Sales skrocketed. Now the company is offering a whole line of products based on baking soda. The essential product didn’t change; it’s use did.
5. Take advantage of technology. So many options exist for marketing products and services online but most small businesses do not take advantage of them. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are just as few examples. If you can’t master the technology yourself, find someone on staff who can. Or outsource your technology needs to an expert who can maximize their use.

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