Resource of Marketing & Advertising

Building a dynamic small business is a constantly evolving, increasingly demanding role.

It is very easy to get so caught up in the day to day running of our business that we neglect to take the time to look from the outside in to see what we could do to improve our profitability! Well here are 5 Strategies that could boost your productivity overnight!

They are not rocket science and you may have even heard some of them before, but they are 5 proven principles that you can review today to help you stay on track regarding the real issues to grow your business from here.

So why don’t you take 15 minutes make yourself a coffee and recharge your batteries!

1. Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in one sentence

What is at the heart of your business that makes it unique and attractive for your customers? Summarise your key selling points that make your product or service a ‘must have’ for your clients.

You probably went through this exercise when you first started your business but have you need to remind yourself regularly why you are doing what you are doing! Read More »

Eventually every small business owner must consider what needs to be included in order to produce a successful advertisement or piece of marketing material.

You begin with a fancy graphic, your company logo, a slogan, and perhaps a special offer. However, more needs to be included in your sales copy to actually get your customers to buy. You need to include some your product’s features. But, more importantly, you have to list the benefits of your product or service.

Let’s begin with your product or service’s features. These can include the price, colour, options, or availability. Your customer will need to know some of these features to determine if what you have to offer is what they want to buy. Read More »

Multimedia here and multimedia there. Is it just a flashy thing you don’t need or the reason why your competitors are getting ahead? Today’s reality is that people live on a fast pace so their time is important. They watch tv going from one channel to the other, get a satellite dish so they can watch their favorite show on a different time schedule after putting the kids to bed, go through mail as fast as you can count up to 3, surf on the web with an average of 55 seconds spent on a web page, read the newspaper by going through the big titles, etc. It is a matter of facts, today’s companies and entrepreneurs need to get the best out of every second a potential customer, or current customer, will spend paying attention to their offer. There are many ways to improve receptivity and develop time saving solutions such as using repetivity and faster technologies but how can multimedia work for you?

Have you ever noticed how easy children learn songs from commercials on tv? Do you really think they would learn as fast if all they could see was as static text on tv? As you know, the answer is no. The combination of dynamic images, music and narration improves the receptivity of any audience.

Imagine how more effective a digital business card could be versus the traditional piece of paper! Such a multimedia presentation of your company or services could make a difference between a sale and another time wasting meeting. Now imagine how a great interactive marketing campaign could support your professional multimedia presentation or multimedia portfolio! The repetivity effect of your multimedia production would improve even more the receptivity of your audience. In addition, your interactive marketing campaign could be used to generate valuable data from respondants, which would then allow you to filter those respondants and only target high potential customers with future multimedia presentations or direct marketing campaigns.

In the same path, interactive websites using flash animations can also improve receptivity if used the smart way. Remember how much time people spend on a web page in average? Taking that into consideration is an essential key to the success of a flash website. Don’t overload your flash animation or make your website navigation too complicated. The point here is to get visitor’s attention and keep them awake, not make them loose patience and leave your overloaded flash website!

In many ways, multimedia can help you improve the receptiveness of your message but it goes way beyond that. You can also save time to your customers by developping multimedia applications such as an interactive training or multimedia tutorial! Offering that kind of multimedia support to your customers could greatly improve their learning process and save them time. As you know, saving time to your customers and offering effective support is a step forward in your customer retention efforts.

Over years, multimedia and interactive marketing services got more affordable. Many multimedia companies are now offering solutions that even smaller budgets can make room for. Are your customers worth it?

If you’re like the rest of us, you’ve spent a lot of time trying different things to make your online business come together. There are countless methods of conducting a viable marketing career, but there are also as many ways to destroy one as well.

In any endeavor, there are costs. You need to weigh the costs before even getting started. Oh, you know about up front capital, advertising costs, webhosting monthly rental fees, and the like, but the costs that many entrepreneurs aren’t thinking about right off is the price of your reputation, your intergrity, and your name!

Whenever you put your name on something, you’re staking your reputation on the product and how others view your sales pitch about it. The best way to ruin your business and any future business you might come up with, is to make false claims about it, or use deceptive methods to get people to read what you have to say.

One example that comes to mind is the over use of the “Re:” in your email subject heading. I know who I write to, and I know what I write to others about. You’re not going to fool me into thinking that your “Re:” is a reply to me. How stupid do you think people are?

Dishonesty only makes the rest of us think you have no confidence in your product, or you’re selling us the same old thing that everyone else is. If you have no confidence in your product, or you have nothing new to sell us, it’s time to rethink your business strategy!

Using subject headings that have nothing to do with your sales pitch is another way to get people to hit the delete button every time you send out emails. Do you really think people won’t notice that you’ve interested them in something that you aren’t prepared to offer?

In business, integrity is the greatest cost of all! Honesty is the best policy to maintain your integrity in tact and afford yourself the priviledge of continuing to prosper in business.

If you don’t trust the quality and value of your product enough to lay it on the table, then how are you going to expect everyone else to trust you?

Remember, the most important thing you’ll ever have to sell!

How many of you made as much money as you wanted to last year? Don’t be shy; raise your hands. Hmm, I don’t see too many hands out there. What would you say is the cause of this gap between your goals and your earnings?

While you could certainly name the economy or inadequate marketing as the culprit, I’d like to suggest a third alternative. It may be the constraints of the billable hours model that keep you from your financial goals.

Let’s face it, there are only so many hours you can actually bill to clients. For example, the national average for consultants is 22 billable hours per week. You can only raise your rates so high and still find enough customers. And if you spend more time on marketing, that’s less time you have available to bill.

But there’s a way out of this trap. No matter what type of business you’re in, you can use intellectual property to crack the billable hours ceiling. Here are just some of the ways to start tapping into this resource today:

Package your process. What if every time you began work with a new client, they paid an up-front fee before you spent even one hour with them? If you sell a process rather than your time, clients will pay for access to your previously developed materials. Examples are workbooks, forms, assessments, surveys, games, self-paced programs, and train-the-trainer packages.

Give a class. When you assemble a group of people to learn together, you can earn more per hour than working with them separately. Classes can be given at your office, at a rented (or borrowed) facility, on the phone, or on the web. Your market for classes is not just your clients, think about what you could teach your colleagues as well.

Record a tape, CD, or video. The simplest way to make recordings is to capture your live classes or speaking engagements on audio or video. Make your unedited recordings available immediately on the web or by phone. More polished recordings can be made with the help of a local studio or editor, or you can learn to do this yourself with the right equipment.

Write a white paper, workbook, or booklet. Short publications like these are easily within your reach, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer. A simple 20-page booklet might have as few as 4000 words in it. If you’ve written four articles to promote your business, you’ve probably already written this much. These are perfect formats for e-books, which cost you nothing to print.

Author a book. This might seem an impossible task, but if you write one page a day, five days a week, at the end of a year you’ll have a full-length book. If writing isn’t your strong point, find an editor, ghost writer, or even a co-author who has the skills you lack. You don’t have to wait until your book is finished to start selling excerpts as articles and white papers.

Market other people’s products. If you don’t yet have your own product, don’t let it stop you. You can begin earning passive income by selling other people’s books and tapes, becoming a re-seller for software or assessment tools, licensing someone else’s process, or joining affiliate programs.

Any of these products can be marketed in conversations with prospects and clients, in your standard marketing kit, in mailings or newsletters, on your outgoing voice mail message, and on your web site.

If you’ve been counting on hourly fees for your entire income, you may be surprised at the impact developing your intellectual property will have. It will add not only to your revenue, but also your professional credibility. And in poor economic times, you will find that prospects who hesitate to pay for personal service will still purchase classes and information products.

Amid fundraisers’ growing concerns about the current charitable giving climate, dampened by the erratic stock market and shaky economy, a new fundraising opportunity has emerged.

What is a Life Settlement? A Life Settlement is the sale of an existing life insurance policy for a lump sum of cash that is more than the cash surrender value. A life insurance policy is property, like a car, house, stocks and bonds that can be legally sold in accordance with applicable laws. Through a Life Settlement, a policy owner can realize value today from an asset that is generally thought to only have a benefit when the insured passes away.

How can Life Settlements be used in Fundraising? There are many variations and complex estate and tax planning strategies that can be employed when utilizing Life Settlements in a planned giving program. However, in its simplest terms, a Donor who owns a life insurance policy gives the policy to the philanthropic organization that in turn immediately sells the policy for a lump sum of cash through a Life Settlement. Read More »

When you started your business, you dreamed your customers would love your products and services. They would be excited. You would make money doing what you love.

Then reality set in. You put lots of time in your business. You got fewer profits. Now you compete with every Tom, Dick and Harry to sell your product or service. The future is not secure.

Today, you get a second chance to change your business picture. A fresh start! In this article, you will focus on the second of five critical issues that influence how customers come to your business. Last issue we focused on your target population. This time, you can complete an exercise to clarify your marketing message. Read More »

You may have heard the term Marketing Mix used in connection with marketing planning.

Marketing Mix means the combination of promotions, products, places (distribution channels), and prices you chose for your business. Including both short term and long term strategies in the marketing mix can make for a more profitable business.

Long term strategies build brand/company awareness and give sales revenue a permanent, gradual boost. Short term strategies create a temporary, immediate revenue boost by giving buyers an incentive to purchase.

By implementing both long and short term strategies, you can attend to immediate sales goals while building your business reputation and goodwill. Some examples of both types of strategies are below. Read More »

Do you use mini-courses in your online marketing? If not then maybe you should! Mini-courses are an important part of Internet marketing. A mini-course is a tool that enables you to provide valuable content to your subscribers and promote your own or affiliate products at the same time.

A mini-course is fr*ee information on a specific topic. It is normally distributed as multiple articles in e-mail format over a defined period of time. The mini-course also goes by the name eCourse, free report or autoresponder course.

Before attempting to write your mini-course, identify a “niche market” that has a unique need for information. A niche market is a small segment of the total general market. It is a group of individuals with a common interest that have specific wants and needs. Individuals in a niche market may also have a common problem that needs a solution.

Creating a mini-course is similar to creating an ebook but on a smaller scale. You need to select a “killer” topic that is of interest to your niche market and satisfies a want or need or solves a problem. Read More »

A Yellow Page Ad isn’t Enough Any More

An unquestioned “must” for any small business has been to run an ad in the Yellow Page Directory. Since most customers were local, that was enough to establish itself as “open for business.” The annual Yellow Page ad represents the largest promotional expense for many enterprises.

Yet, Yellow Page directory use is declining, while expanding segments of the public don’t rely on them at all. Yellow Page advertising costs keep going up, and the complicated pricing structure is difficult to figure out.

Worse yet, having a Yellow Page ad doesn’t deliver like it used to. People can find most of the information they want without ever opening a directory. Your business needs its Yellow Page strategy to be in tune with the times and your market.

Like most business owners, you must squeeze maximum value from every promotional dollar spent. That requires you to move beyond treating a Yellow Page ad like it’s a separate, stand-alone way to promote your business. It’s not. Your Yellow Page advertising needs to work in tandem with all the rest of the efforts you pursue.

The Internet Expands Your Arena

Every business needs to put itself in front of the people looking for what it does - and that’s not just through the Yellow Pages any longer. An increasing percentage of customers, who spend their money close to home, are Internet savvy. There’s a major overlap between Yellow Page directory users and Internet users. That fact supports integrating your local and Internet promotional methods so they attract more new customers.

Yellow Page users are likely to be Internet users as well. And a business that ignores online activities entirely may have a tough time getting access to or credibility with those customers. It is possible to make online and traditional (offline) methods to attract customers work in tandem - improving the effectiveness of each alone. So it’s no longer an either-or, all-or-none choice whether to promote the business online or off.

People who subscribe to online services consult the Yellow Pages 23% more often than non-subscribers.

Frequent Yellow Page Users are:

18% more likely than average to be Internet subscribers

32% more likely to be among the heaviest Internet users

18% more likely to make purchases on the Internet

27% more likely to spend more than $1,000 on Internet purchases

Source: Simmons

Customer Behavior is Changing

More and more, people are going to the Internet to find, learn about, or select products and services. Even local ones. That doesn’t mean that they will buy online, however. People still prefer to spend their money locally when they can. But, even the smallest business can do a better job of being found by those who prefer to use both the Internet and the Yellow Page directory to make their buying decisions. And, it can be done very inexpensively, too.

Even a 100% local business can pull in more business by getting its low-tech and high-tech advertising to mesh. Visit http://www.yellowpagesage.com for lots of free practical assistance. As you broaden your visibility to buyers, your business will be found more often - by the very people you’ve been looking for.

What Else has Changed?

Buyers are less trusting and more willing to shop around

Customers have more options and ways to find what they want

Availability of Internet Yellow Pages

Aging population uses the Yellow Pages differently than young people

Development of unique niches and specialties

More choices for a “better deal”

More directories competing in a geographic area

More immigrants, or those from other cultures, unaccustomed to Yellow Page use

Area code proliferation fragments cities

Larger cities have multiple directories, rather than one large one

Development of specialized directories - like ethnic, non-English, women, minority, business to business

Become Visible Online - With or Without Your Own Web Site

If your business already has a Web site, treat it as a way to expand the reach of your Yellow Page ad and traditional marketing activities. Jettison the expectation that it should make sales - few do so. But an information-packed Web site can support your traditional marketing methods very well.

Even without your own Web site, your small business can establish an online identity that helps buyers to find you.

Get listed in a variety of Internet Yellow Page (IYP) directories

Send emails to your “regulars” with special offers and useful information

Position yourself for Local Search - a method whereby customers use search engines to locate local businesses by town, state, region, zip code, etc.

Expand the exposure of your business beyond your Yellow Page ad through a Yellow Page strategy that reaches the whole globe. Your operation, whatever its size, will gain more credibility and traffic locally when it puts itself in the bigger picture.