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Pull Up Your Marketing Socks
Written by Web Master   
Saturday, 12 June 2004

Slack marketing discipline makes you poorer and denies your potential customer base the opportunity to benefit from your products and services. You just have to get in there and take part in the competition with other businesses for the attention of potential buyers in the marketplace. You have to be sensitive and hardworking in todays marketing environment.

Remember there are just too many marketing messages out there, about 3000 a day per person by the latest estimations. Refine your marketing techniques so they are not disturbing and annoying. They should be targeted and welcome. You will have to work hard to prevent consumers from simply ignoring your message.

You might feel that your marketing efforts are wasted. This might well be the case if these efforts are not handled methodically and sensibly. Usually business owners in this predicament are forgetting the basics which are stashed somewhere there far in the back of their minds. Companies too often lack marketing discipline and making a few changes to their marketing habits and outlooks could make a huge difference to their bottom lines. The most common problem is that a company pulls in several different marketing directions at once. There is no centralized marketing strategy to draw the threads together.

Here is a list of areas you should attend to improve business marketing discipline:

1. Ensure uniformity when it comes to logo, taglines, colors, feel and design. Often within companies each department is doing its own thing when it comes to corporate identity. Rule this out by creating an easily followed corporate ID manual.

2. Do away with minimalist advertising campaigns. Too many business owners believe that a couple of print ads will lead to instant success. Forget about this technique. Create an overall, global marketing campaign employing a variety of marketing techniques.

3. Use professionals to do a professional job. It is no good getting amateurs and then expecting a professional job. Too many business owners fall into this trap. Use professionals

4. Make the most of your first impression. You have only one opportunity to make a first impression. Maybe it will be in the form of a business rep, your storefront or your website. Make it the best first impression you can.

5. Always understand, define and remember your target market. This is self explanatory but you would be surprised how many business owners do not do this. There is one way to ensure you stick to your target market. Write down who they are and keep referring to this core profile

6. Create a marketing plan and then implement it. It sounds so basic ? but thousands of business people fail to do this.

7. Keep track of your marketing expenditure and calculate your ROI. Again it sounds obvious. Make sure you do it.

8. Engage in effective and low cost networking and charitable giving. Do not get caught up in giving that will not promote your business. Keep a lid on it.

9. Sell solutions, benefits and good value to customers. Modern customers are way past wanting to see your spec sheets. Show them how their lives will change through using your product or service.

10. Do create an internet presence. As soon as you have finished this article go and reserve the domain name for your company. As soon as possible after that, create an online presence, no matter what business you are in.
Last Updated ( Monday, 24 March 2008 )
 
Article Marketing - Quality For Consumers
Written by Administrator   
Monday, 09 August 2004
Which do you think is the best way to article market? Quality for consumers or quantity for back links?

If you look around the Internet there are several recommended styles of article marketing so how do you decide which is the right way for you? On the one hand there are those who swear by writing several articles a day and submitting them to as many directories as they can. Then there are those who write one article and either use software to spin them into several articles or make small changes like title and first paragraph and submit the similar articles to the same sites. Then there are those who write one quality article daily, weekly or monthly and just submit to a few sites.

All of those ways of article marketing may work, but which works the best? Lets just go through the different ways.

1.Most of us do not have the time to write several articles a day and if they are about the same subject, intending to promote one particular site those articles can become repetitive and lose quality to quantity. Of course some people can write several good articles a day but I do not think that I am one of them.

2.Spinning articles might be a great time saver, but when you look at the results of spinning they can be laughable. The articles often do not make sense to the reader and can be difficult to understand in much the same way as badly translated articles. Many directories do not want those articles; I know that I do not want articles on my site that visitors may have difficulty in understanding.

3.Changing the first paragraph and or the title of an article and submitting it to different sites is great, that means there is not so much of a duplicate content issue. Submitting the altered versions of the same article to the same directories is not on. Last week a joker submitted the same article to my directory with slightly different titles 4 times using 4 different accounts. As if I was not going to notice the similarities when I looked at the list of articles waiting for approval!

4.Then there is quality and submitting to fewer sites. A quality article is a pleasure to approve. I enjoy reading the article, I know that the quality of my site is going to improve and I know that the quality articles are going to bring in more traffic to my site. I also know that a quality article does not need to be submitted to hundreds of sites or spun. A quality article will be picked up on by publishers and replicated pretty darn quick.

You can guess which article marketing style I prefer; its quality all the way. Looking at number 4 I sound like a proper know it all. I do not think that I know everything but I do know what my site stats tell me. The author articles that get the most hits are nearly always the articles that I have regarded as high quality, or have been interesting enough to read all the way through.

I have different ways of defining quality that may make me seem contrary, but I have always looked at things in different ways. A business colleague calls me a lateral thinker, I think he means a pain in the b**t!

Quality that is extremely well written, but on occasion no matter how well an article is written if the content is dry and boring the article is not going to fly for the majority of readers unless it contains specific information that they want and need. I do not claim to be an extremely good writer, I think that I am an adept writer who can occasionally pull off unexpected great results almost by accident. I have had enough of those accidents to be able to figure out why those articles are hitting the spot and why articles such as this one is unlikely to produce masses of hits.

One of my accidents was an article about where I live. I wrote it as an example because I wanted members of my travel site to write about where they live. It started out as an article about a regular town and without initially intending to I added paragraphs about places of interest and tourist spots within 10 miles. It dawned on me after writing the article that although I live in an industrial town that would not be considered on its own a tourist center, like most places there are tourist spots close enough by to include a mention in an article.

That article does better for hits than most articles of my own and those of authors on my sites that have been especially written for article marketing. I asked myself why and came up with 2 reasons. One was that I had added a good variety of keywords and phrases naturally and without thinking about it. The other reason I suspect is that the article is unique, very different to any other travel article that I have seen out there. It is also obvious that I know the place well whereas most article marketing travel articles do not give you a sense of the authors knowing the places that they write about and show little personality.

Another accident was an article written a month ago about my bad experience with a spyware fraud. I was so cheesed off that I turned to writing to make myself feel better. I have never known an article get so many hits in such a short time. It has been picked up by a lot of webmasters, bloggers and ezines and I am sure it still has plenty of scope. I have even seen it on some geek sites, now that?s something I never thought would happen to an article of mine!

I think that the article is doing well because it is offering information written from obvious personal experience that people want and need and those people have had the common sense to do a search before being scared into parting with their money.

The top 2 articles on my directory for months have been my own scam warnings. They are only on a couple of my sites so the hits are not spread between zillions of article directories. Again I am providing information that people want and need. Neither of the articles were written for the purpose of article marketing and a variety of keywords and phrases happened naturally.

So to me a quality article is reasonably well written, packed with information written from experience that people want or need, unique or as different to other articles as possible and showing some personality.

The fatal flaw in my accidents is that I have not used the articles to promote money making ventures, just my sites in general. I will have to get a grip and accidentally make some money from them!

I will end this far too long article by including a quote from a forum that made me think. ?Thats a major problem I see in article directories -- its so difficult to find good content in them that they are not nearly as useful to article consumers as they could be.?
Last Updated ( Monday, 24 March 2008 )
 
Are You Speaking The Language Of Marketing?
Written by Administrator   
Monday, 09 August 2004
Do you speak the Language of Marketing? Or the Language of Business?

This is one of the biggest missed opportunities I see talented people make that cost them sales revenues. Let's define each language so you begin to distinguish between the two, and know when to use the appropriate one.

When talking to prospects or new clients, I always ask the question, "Can you give me the three minute version of your business? That question can get someone talking for hours--literally--about their business, expertise and products.

No doubt your business is very exciting to you, or you wouldn't be doing it. However, when I pose this question, I am listening for whether they are speaking the language of marketing or the language of their business. 99% of the time people are speaking the language of their business.

This is one of the biggest "missed opportunities" I see talented people make that cost them sales revenues. Let's define each language so you begin to distinguish between the two, and know when to use the appropriate one. Think of one as speaking English, the other as speaking French.

The language of business speaks about what you do, how long you have been in business, what products and services you offer. Many times the more education, experience and expertise one has about their business, the tendency can be to "tell" people about their products and services.

For example, when I ask the question to speakers, authors, coaches and professionals, most start immediately telling me their expertise, education or teaching me their "content or products," rather than discussing how their expertise can help someone. People hate to be told or sold. You can always tell when someone is speaking the language of business, because your eyes tend to glaze over after a few minutes.

The language of marketing speaks to what people want and need; what problem they have that needs solving. It is the language of what they desire at the deepest level of their values.

The language of marketing ASKS questions to discover what is important to the prospect and what they really need and want. People LOVE to talk about what is really important to them.

The language of marketing speaks to the concerns that keep us awake at night or diminish our quality of life, as well as our deepest aspirations. The language of marketing is the language of passion, love and purpose; the language of emotion. As we all know, people make decisions to buy based on EMOTION, and then they justify their decision with reason and logic.

This week notice your language. Is it speaking to the wants, needs and desires of your customers and prospects? Do you know what is most important to them?

At my Best-Seller Business Bootcamp, we literally spend an entire day re-engineering these two languages in your business--so you can influence MORE people instantly. Nothing feels better than a prospect buying your service or product, saying, "This is exactly what I need."

Here's To Your Marketing Success!


As a business strategy expert and 20-years of extensive work for Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, John Gray, and Mark Victor Hansen, Carolyn now coaches ordinary people to extraordinary results. Explode your business! Get Carolyn?s FREE Marketing Nuggets here:
Last Updated ( Monday, 24 March 2008 )
 
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