All Posts Tagged With: "marketing"

These days, an effective marketing plan can be the difference between a business surviving the economic crisis and going under. Properly developed and executed, a marketing plan can actually help you thrive in tough times, and be ready to capitalize when the inevitable recovery happens.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you put together your marketing plan:
Your message gets lost in the crowd. If you look and sound just like everyone else, no one is going to notice you. Be distinctive; stand out from the competition.

Your marketing targets an audience that is too broad. Remember, you can’t be everything to everybody. Be something to somebody.

You ad budget gets blown in a one-shot marketing gamble. It would be nice to blow $3 million on a 30-second Super Bowl ad, but if you don’t do anything the rest of the year, no one will remember.

Your marketing isn’t consistent. Some businesses panic when the phone don’t start ringing off the hook the minute an advertisement hits the street. Marketing is cumulative; it takes time to build some momentum.

Your marketing fails to tie different media together. There’s no excuse for not integrating print, with electronic, with social media, with video, with special events, with networking.

You ignore your target audience. Maybe the worst sin of all. You have to know your customer.

You try to do things on your own. If you’re not good at something, hire a pro. Plus, it allows you to spend more time running your business.
You change your image with each ad. Stick with a color scheme and font. People need to recognize you.

You fail to make a clear call to action. Tell you customer what do do: call, go one line, stop by. Make it clear and unmistakeable.
You fail to keep a marketing calendar. It helps to plan your campaigns in advance.

Popularity: 93% [?]

Did you ever wonder what happens when a customer stops buying from you? One day you have a great relationship, everything is progressing nicely and you’re looking forward to a long-term relationship. And then for reasons you don’t quite understand, your customer goes away. Unless you take the initiative to find out, you may never know why that customer left.

Now, the folks at RainToday.com have come up with some answers, any or all of which may apply to your business. In a new report “How Clients Buy,” the most commonly experienced problems clients have with their service providers is that the vendor:

1. Did not listen to them – 38%.
2. Did not understand their needs – 30%.
3. Did not respond to requests and correspondence in a timely manner – 30%.

Doesn’t sound like a major challenge to keep your customers. Just spend a little more time listening and understanding how you can solve your clients’ problems. Take a few extra minutes to respond personally to an email or phone call from a customer.

Those little things can go a long way in keeping your customers from leaving. In fact, the survey indicates that 96% of them will be “much more likely” or “somewhat more likely” to consider continuing to work with you. And we all know its much easier to get more profit from an existing customer than it is to cultivate a new one.

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In his book “The Contrarian Effect: Why It Pays (Big) to Take Typical Sales Advice and Do the Opposite” author Michael Port provides some tips on how to boost your sales even in the worst economic periods.

“It’s the perfect time for contrarian tactics because everyone is so ramped up trying to do so much,” says Port, a marketing guru and founder of “Book Yourself Solid,” a consulting firm that provides tools for attracting and retaining customers for life.

Port offers four scenarios where taking a contrarian approach can be more advantageous than the safe, traditional approach:

Typical: Close Early and Close Often.
Contrarian: Always Be Opening. Port says it’s about always having something to invite people to. Apple welcomes customers to play with their computers. Home Depot offers demonstrations about how to take care of a house. Softracks, a software company, used to do cold calls; now they offer free webinars and bring in experts to provide information to their customers. “Instead of selling all the time, invite them to things that will be valuable and relevant,” Port says.

Typical: Play the numbers game. Sell to everyone who has a checkbook and heartbeat.
Contrarian: Red Velvet Rope Policy. Focus exclusively on customers who are most ideal for your business. Really target your efforts, not just from a circumstantial perspective but from a personal perspective — the people you sell best to. “We are all different and we connect more with some people than with others,” says Port. “If we get good at understanding what this filter is, what this red velvet rope is, we will get better at identifying who we sell best to.”

Port says this philosophy may be more important in tough economic times as your customers begin to pull back. If you keep pushing more in a kind of shotgun approach you seem more irrelevant to them; sales and marketing are all about relevancy, he says.

Typical: Speed Sell. Move as much inventory as you can as fast as you can.
Contrarian: Slow down the sales cycle to build trust over time. If you want to seem remarkable or special or stand out from the crowd, Port says, you need to create these experiences, these no-barriers for entry opportunities and then, over time, build into the higher relationships. “If you can weather this storm, you will build much stronger relationships so that as people become freer with their money you’ll have loyalty.”

Typical: Never tell the price before the features and benefits have been really demonstrated.
Contrarian: Be Radically Transparent. Be upfront about everything your product does well and doesn’t do well. ‘The more open you are about who you are and who you serve, what’s wrong and what’s right, the more people will begin to give you the opportunity,” says Port. “Tell the truth, not in a manipulative way but in a honest, straightforward manner.”

Popularity: 36% [?]

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.

Popularity: 34% [?]

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?

Popularity: 24% [?]