Resource of Marketing & Advertising

Speak to almost any self employed professional and most of them will say that they love their job but don’t care much for selling their services. Here’s some advice to help all those reluctant professionals who need to sell to clients.

We have identified 9 basic selling skills that will help you to sell your product or service. Ensure that you and your sales team master these skills and you will be successful at selling.

Research shows that fear of selling is one of the greatest barriers to business success and, often, professionals are the worst of all. But whether you are an accountant, advertising excec or business coach you still have to sell to keep the business coming in.

We have found a few ideas that will help you to become successful at selling yourself. The main idea is to know your product, know your client and be prepared and professional. The following tips will greatly enhance your ability to sell. Read More »

Wondering to know the most effective marketing solution for your business? While the television ads and printed posters can easily to be ignored by those people, it is now the time for you considering mobile marketing then. Imagine what people will do once they receive text message on their mobile phone? Yes, they will read it and at that point you have successfully to spend your money to the right thing.

CellitMarketing.com is the site where you can get the Cellit Mobile Marketing assistance, the expert mobile marketing provider, which allows you to send your discount offers or special menu promotional messages to thousands of people in simple way. Here you are allowed to specify your market range, such as the gender, age, location, interest, and many more. This will increase your chance to get potential customers through it and obviously saving your money for unnecessary cost as you have narrowed recipients into the potential market range.

For your best consideration, be sure you checked the number of clients been using their service and there you will see that Cellit has successfully to gain trust from many companies in around the country as well as the international companies for their marketing campaign. One thing for sure is that almost everyone now has mobile phone in their pocket, which it means that it should be much easier for you to get the direct marketing campaign through their mobile lines than other ignorable platform. And there Cellit is there to accommodate you with the this mobile marketing system.

The application is quite simple though that you will be given the Short code for the access to their service and there you can publish your advertisement at any way you like it. Thanks to Cellit and its incredible mobile marketing system as now business owners can simply to figure out new effective marketing solution and to spend their money wiser than before.

One of the greatest challenges to effectively marketing a business is determining which marketing method is best suited for your business.

Most people look at what their competitors are doing to market their businesses and then simply imitate that, whether good or bad.

The best marketing strategy does not involve selecting only one or two marketing approaches that we see others using.

The best marketing approach resembles an octopus.

An octopus is very effective at catching food with eight limbs. If the octopus loses one limb it may momentarily lose some of its strength and agility, but it adapts and continues on as an effective hunter and predator.

It’s the same with marketing your business. The more marketing approaches you use simultaneously the more successful you can become and the easier it is to continue growing your company.

You will continue to thrive despite the challenges that your competitors may face. No setback in any one marketing approach will ever devastate you or pose major problems.

Despite the many options available most companies use no more than two or three marketing methods at best to grow their company.

Few realize that there are over 100 methods for bringing in new business, for increasing web traffic, for selling more to existing clients, and for increasing repeat sales that their competitors are not using.

They basically imitate worms in their marketing attempts. A worm’s approach to life is singular. It does not use multiple limbs because it has none. Its existence is slow and labor-intensive. Very unlike an octopus.

The great thing about this is that most competitors are making this same mistake. They may be too busy, too shorthanded, or too myopic to do much more than hand out boxes of business cards and sit around talking ‘fish stories’ of the one that got away.

That is a marketing approach to avoid.

Don’t just settle for an ad in the yellow pages, your local newspaper, or on the radio.

Use as many marketing methods as make sense for your industry, your market, and your company. Then you will become a marketing octopus while your competitors remain marketing worms.

1. Pick 4 or more articles you’ve written that have a common theme and put them in an autoresponder series. Announce it on your site as an e-mail course on the go.

2. If you have a page for related links, create a related links file and put it on autoresponder. This can be a one-page e-mail containing 15-50 links that are of interest to your visitors. Put your own promotional texts or blurbs at the top, middle and bottom of the e-mail.

3. Create a fun or trivia quiz, put it up on your site and put the answers in an autoresponder that your visitors can request. This way, you’ll know the people who took your quiz.

4. Write reviews of books, music, e-books, sites, software or anything you can think of and put each review (or related reviews) in an autoresponder. If what you are reviewing have affiliate programs, use your affiliate links in the autoresponder.

5. Run a contest on your site or e-zine, then have your visitors or subscribers send their responses to your autoresponder. This way, you won’t have to worry about manually sending them a confirmation receipt.

6. Create a frequently updated autoresponder and let your visitors and/or subscribers know about it. You can put in weekly tips or links to useful resources in the autoresponder and a reminder to the people who request it that you update it every week or on a regular basis (e.g. tell them to request for the same autoresponder again a week from now). You can use this method instead of using autoresponders with limited follow up messages.

7. If you’ve written 20 or more articles and you have them on separate autoresponder accounts, create a master list for your articles. In this master list, list the titles of your articles, their autoresponder addresses and their short descriptions. You can then just promote this master list.

8. Put excerpts or free chapters of your e-book, book or paid e-mail courses in an autoresponder series, then include your follow up sales letters at the end.

9. If you’re selling your own products, put your testimonials on autoresponder, along with the description of your products, an excerpt or a free chapter. This will increase your credibility.

10. Keep track of people who download your free e-book, e-report, or free software by putting their download links in an autoresponder. When you promote your free product, you can just promote the autoresponder address.

11. Put links to your hidden pages on autoresponder. A hidden page could be the affiliate page where you have all the graphics, text links, promotional articles that interested affiliates can use. Let people know they can have free access to your affiliate page by requesting the autoresponder. This way, you can have a list of people who are interested in becoming your affiliates.

A new client recently emailed us a brief here at Mano Design. It was very brief brief indeed. All it said was, “Can you write me some copy for a postcard?” Resisting the urge to write, “Dear Customers. Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. Love, The Client,” we asked him for a more detailed brief and explained why it was necessary.

Why Write a Brief?

Even with something as simple as a small piece of copy, a proper brief will save you time and money.

The agency will also have a better chance of getting the work right first time, so you get the quality of work you expect. Plus, it gives you something to measure the agency’s work against; i.e. how well they responded to and met the brief.

What is a Brief?

A brief (sometimes called a ‘creative brief) tells the agency what objective you are seeking to achieve. It answers the ‘where are we now’ and ‘where do we want to get to’ questions.

Ideally, the brief should be a written one. It focuses attention and provides the foundation for your marketing campaign. The brief should be agreed by both you and the agency before work begins and it can to some extent form a sort of contract. Read More »

This is a pretty tough global economy and it is critical for a company to leverage every bit of their marketing resources. So, if this is the case, why are so many companies shooting themselves in the proverbial foot by breaking some of the most fundamental rules of marketing? It’s a very simple question with complex answers, here are some of the pitfalls to avoid:

1) Believing a second rate web site communicates integrity: So many web sites are just plain funky looking (graphics, text, menus, etc.)  nice professional term, but it’s descriptive of some of the dreck that passes for web site design. A company should not forget that perception is reality on the web and people aren’t going to do business with a company that can’t field a decent web site, end of story!

2) Deploying a marketing strategy that’s all over the map: Is Yahoo a Search Engine, a Portal or a Hollywood Media company? They are the classic 3D hologram advertisement for a company that can’t figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. A company must pick a marketing strategy and then stay the course - changing direction every time the wind shifts is not a good business strategy and creates more motion than action.

3) Forgetting real brand development: Branding became the “.com” rallying cry for every newby wet behind the ears with an Internet dream to become a billionaire by selling dog food on the web (I’ll leave the sock puppet out of this)  we all know this didn’t work. But that does not mean a company should ignore brand development, it’s important to remember that a good brand is built one marketing process at a time; everything that a company publishes, develops or communicate is part of the brand building process, which in turn defines the company’s market position.

4) Ignoring distribution channels by selling direct via an ecommerce web site: A company should not build and launch an ecommerce site and start selling direct to customers and forget about a distribution channel. It’s imperative to give the customer the choice to buy direct from your company or locate a distribution channel partner via a look up capability on the site. And, if you really want to win the hearts and mind of a channel never sell below retail (SRP) and afford the channel the opportunity to discount your product so they can compete effectively with you.

5) Making competitive analysis a low priority: Too many companies forget about their competitors after the business plan has been written. They don’t take the time to review them on a periodic basis and try and figure out how to deliver goods and services differently, which in turn drives competitive advantage and a long-term sustainable business model.

6) Poorly thought out Investor Relations press release: Do companies actually think investors are just plain stupid and don’t really read an IR (Investor Relations) directed Press Release carefully? Investors are typically very bottom line oriented, they want to know about revenue growth and real strategic partnership developments that help the company grow and not much else. Just throwing fluff out in the market and hoping this will drive investors to invest is just plain shortsighted stupidity.

7) Thinking any/all consultants know your business better than you: Reporters and consultants (including this one) have driven just as many companies into the ground with bad advice as much as they have helped them - companies must realize a consultant is typically not down in the trenches and they can make some bad calls, it’s important to filter their advice.

Letting the inmates run the asylum, customers should help a company refine its product marketing strategy by working as partners. If engineering tells marketing “the customer doesn’t really know what they want but we do” the red lights should start flashing danger, the company may be in serious peril and at the very least need new focus and direction for product marketing.

Spam e-mail is no longer the mild irritant it once was, it’s clogging corporate networks and ISP mail servers and has become a real productivity drain, forcing corporate and consumer e-mail users to spend 20-30 minutes a day dealing with this deluge of junk! According to recent figures, unsolicited bulk e-mail now makes up to 36% of all e-mail, up from under 8% just over a year ago. And, what’s worse, more and more legitimate e-mail is not getting through to recipients due to Spam filtering taking place via ISPs and/or corporate networks.

Opt-in E-Mail Marketing 30K foot Picture

Opt-in e-mail marketing is clearly losing some of its effectiveness as a viable marketing tool much to the consternation of those of us who have been advocating its effectiveness for years! This is not to say opt-in e-mail isn’t a viable way to market goods and services, but ROI (read response rates) is heading south quickly and needs to be considered when assessing the viability of this marketing process, as response rates have dropped on average from 10-20% to 3-10%.

However, opt-in e-mail is not disappearing off the marketing horizons, Forrester forecasts spending on e-mail marketing will grow from $1.3B (USD) in 2001 to $6.8B in 2006 and Jupiter Media Metrix is even more optimistic, forecasting growth rates from $1B in 2001 to $9.4B in 2006. But, there is a dark undercurrent to these numbers that is fueling the market growth and driving down response rates some opt-in agencies, brokers and media representatives are “flogging” lists by overselling them

Five Offsetting Marketing Strategies

1) Deploy opt-in e-mail campaigns very selectively! buy opt-in e-mail lists from legitimate top-tier broker/list managers who are well established, are not “over-sending” messages to list subscribers and who are constantly refreshing their list quality by adding new subscribers. Critical questions to ask brokers include: how many messages (frequency” in ad speak) are sent to each list recipient per month, how are new subscribers added and what is the percentage of new members added per month, are they using “third party” (someone else’s list) lists to augment their own, are their lists “double opt in” (meaning, you sign up and then must reply to a signup confirmation to be added to a list) and last but not least, what is their privacy policy and how strictly do they adhere to published industry standards.

2) Utilize plain vanilla text link advertising, find web sites or portals that have traffic that is comprised of customers who are in your market segment. Then, add a text link (banner ad or graphic button if you will) to a page or pages and negotiate a media buy that is based upon a “cost per click” basis; i.e. paying only for traffic that clicks through to your web site.

3) Creating and deploying a “link strategy” campaign (i.e. getting a site listed via other web sites) is one of the best self-sustaining interactive marketing processes available to any company seeking to drive qualified traffic to a web site. This process is not based upon the more traditional “reciprocal links” procedure but incorporates some web-based competitive analysis. You start by analyzing the links that are pointing back to your top 3-5 competitors’ web sites and then establish relationships with these sites and also submit your site to top and second tier directories to augment the number of links.

4) Newsletter insert advertising used to be considered rather mundane and not very effective. But, if you contrast the effectiveness of this process versus the new opt-in e-mail response rates the heretofore-lowly newsletter advertising has new and vastly improved luster! Also, in the past it was difficult to track when and if people clicked on a text link ad in a newsletter, but new technology enables virtually any publisher to provide you with this information, enabling you to track your ROI for the media buy. Finally, the real beauty of newsletter text advertising is that it is very targeted and people want to receive the information so you can be confident your ad will at least be viewed by some finite number of prospects.

5) Search Engine Ranking has come of age in the last 12-24 months, you can now easily create and deploy a traditional (title, description, keywords inserts in content, submissions and optimization) search engine ranking process that is augmented with a pay per click process. Deploying both ensures you derive long term (traditional rankings) and short term (pay per click) results, with the latter being driven by the amount of funds you have in your marketing budget.

Media kits, virtual or print, include a combination of information whether created for electronic delivery or print. The number of components depends on the kit’s focus and intention. For instance, an author’s kit would include a different combination of information than a service business, or a multifaceted company or speaker.

Here is a list of component elements to pull from and tips to bring a media kit together. No single kit will need all components. Choose the components that match your or the receiver’s needs. Read More »

Is networking helping you bring in the new clients you want? If you are like most independent professionals and small business owners, you put hard work into getting your name out there and distribute your business card wherever you go. You may even attend a weekly or monthly networking group or occasional business conference where people share leads. And like most people, your time and effort isn’t generating a steady stream of new business.

The problem is that most people think that networking consists of telling as many people as possible what they do, and handing out as many business cards as they can. They waste the few precious moments they have with new and existing contacts by focusing on themselves.

It’s possible to meet someone in the airport, hand them your card after a brief conversation, and have them call you to request your services, but this random approach is like playing the lottery. You can’t count on it to produce results. It is a Push and Pray technique: you push your information out to others and pray that they respond.

It rarely works. Your contact loses your card or simply forgets about you, or the timing wasn’t right, or, in spite of the connection you thought you’d made, a single conversation usually isn’t enough to launch a client relationship. Read More »

It never ceases to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people set-up a website, without any type of plan or clue about how to promote it, how to write a sales letter, how to write an ad nothing! Fact is, nowadays, anyone can have a website. But once you get one, then what? How are you going to make money with it?

If you don’t know what you’re doing, then do the smart thing and hire an Internet marketing expert.

What? You say you can’t afford to hire an Internet marketing expert. Well, believe it or not, there are other ways to hire an Internet marketing expert, besides paying an expensive flat rate or hourly fee.

You can hire an Internet marketing expert by simply buying his products. So, why should you buy his products?

Because Internet marketing experts are masters at marketing. They’ve already arrived at the place you want to get to. They also derive great pleasure from sharing their incredible knowledge. They have the answers to every single one of your questions. All you have to do is ask them.

However, you shouldn’t expect any Internet marketing expert to spend their valuable time mentoring you for free. Like I mentioned earlier, at the very least, you have to buy their products. I mean, let’s get real. You wouldn’t walk into a doctor’s or lawyer’s office and expect to get free help and advice.

Well, Internet marketing experts are highly trained professionals as well, and deserve to be compensated for their time. And some of them will offer you some sort of limited consultation, if you buy their products or use their service.

So, how do you go about finding an Internet marketing expert? It’s actually a lot easier than you think. Most of your top Internet marketing experts are very high-profile.

You can find many of them by reading articles like this one. That’s right. Many Internet marketing experts write articles. Not all, but most do.

In fact, you should read lots of articles anyway. Not only will articles help you learn, but you may also find a writer you like. And by finding a writer you like, you just may find an Internet marketing expert you like.

When you find a writer you like, make sure you check out his website carefully. If he doesn’t have a website, don’t consider his services. Why? Because you can’t learn Internet marketing from someone whom doesn’t have any type of presence on the Internet.

A website is critical, because there are certain things you need to look for such as:

Does the website have a strong headline and sales letter? Even if you don’t have any experience in this area, you’ll be able to tell right away, if the headline and sales letter are effective.

How? Because if the headline is able to pull you into reading the sales letter, and the sales letter keeps you interested and makes you want to buy whatever’s being offered, chances are, both the headline and the sales letter are effective. Other important things to look for are:

Is their website design professional? Is it attractive and easy to navigate? Or is it busy and distracting?

Do they have their own domain name, or does it contain the names, “Geocities”, “Angelfire” or “Tripod”?

Can they back up their claims with cold, hard, indisputable and verifiable facts?

Do they have their name, telephone number and street address on their website?

Do they use authentic customer testimonials, complete with first and last names?

Do they make it easy for you to purchase their product or service?

Do they offer a fair and reasonable money-back guarantee?

If the answer is “Yes” to every single one of the above questions, congratulations! You may just found your Internet marketing expert!