1 Million Pages

You muted the commercials on the TV last night because you
were fed up with interruption marketing. Ditto if you went through your mail to find most of it is junk. Ditto again, if a stranger phoned you (usually at dinner time) asking you to answer a survey, or give to yet another worthy cause.

Interruption marketing does just that. It interrupts you,
and steals your time.

And it is the darling of mass marketing, which is the child of the mass media, which was born in the 19th century with large circulation newspapers, and thrived in the 20th with radio, TV, and the international media.

Now, it’s overkill. People ignore it (can you remember any of the TV ads you saw last night), or hate it, like that dinnertime phone call.

Before mass marketing, product information was rarely thrust at you. You chose it. You initiated the whole process. It was your idea that you wanted a particular thing. So you’d stroll down the street seeking the store that sold it. Then you’d go into the store to ask a clerk about the quality, price, size, colour, etc. of its assortment of the thing you had in mind. If none suited you, off to another store.

You had control of the whole process. Now, because we’re all becoming immune to interruption marketing, this old-style of marketing is back in favour.

But today it’s called ‘permission marketing’, and you call
all the shots. You permit a firm or individual to provide
you with information about a service or product they offer. And it’s done primarily through the Internet and e-mail.

Why am I telling you all this? Because you’re probably using both types. Your website exemplifies permission marketing, while your cold-canvassing interrupts.

Interestingly, the most favored practice-building techniques of top-earning advisors involve permission marketing. So it behooves you to increase your use of permission marketing, and reduce your use of interruption marketing.

Think about it. People hate interruption marketing, but like permission marketing. Why? Because they’re in control.

Interruption marketing is hit and run. One size fits all.
No distinction between individuals.

In contrast, permission marketing aims at building long-term relationships with individuals. Exactly what you want. But it takes time.

The ideal beginning of a permission-marketing process is for the prospect to phone to say she’s been referred to you, and would like to set up a meeting.

Let’s be honest. This rarely happens.

Next best is you get a referral from a good client. Now, do you phone or write? A letter is less intrusive than a phone call, so write.

A letter is also more impressive than a phone call, and it
tells the prospect much more about you. For example, that
you think she’s worth a lot more than a mere phone call,
that you have a letterhead, a business address, and possibly a degree or designation, or two.

And, as you don’t want your letter to look like a mass
mailing, write, don’t type, her name and address on the
envelope, and stick a real stamp on it.

But don’t pitch product, or your letter’s just another piece of junk mail.

Instead offer something. No, not a trip to Bermuda, but
something ongoing that will help build the recipient’s trust and confidence in you. Your newsletter, for example, thus:
“Your name was given to me by Mr. Paul Piper who felt you’d benefit, as he did, from utilizing my services.

“To introduce you to my areas of expertise I’ve included the current issue of my client newsletter, and will mail more monthly issues before contacting you directly.

“If you would prefer to meet me before that, please call, or write me.”

But I’ve run out of space. So if you want to know more about permission marketing visit http://www.eTIP.ca/ and subscribe to my newsletter as it’s also an example.

Strategically developing online content helps to ensure a small-business owner’s success in both the short and long term.

Article marketing is a smart, comprehensive way to broaden the online presence of your small business enterprise. By posting articles to ezines, directories and newsletters, you can reap benefits ranging from new clients and a solid reputation to increased website traffic and heightened visibility.

At the heart of most successful article marketing is a comprehensive strategy known as Search Engine Optimization, a process through which keyword rich documents are published online to help to improve website traffic. Online marketers using SEO techniques choose a keyword or phrase that people will likely search for when conducting research. They then create relevant, engaging articles throughout which the critical word or phrase is used. Once these documents are posted online, search engines add them to their immense cache of information which helps to strategically drive traffic to selected websites. In addition to keyword rich document publishing, though, a second critical component of an online marketing strategy must include the distribution of a given website’s URL. Publishing a website’s address at the end of SEO articles will allow interested readers to easily visit the site by clicking on the embedded link.

When executed with quality, a useful article that is correctly formatted and well written, can provide a free way to quickly strengthen your online presence. Seek out a few places to post your articles. There are many free article directories and e-zines that actively request informative articles on any number of given topics. These resources are important allies when developing successful article marketing strategies.

Online article marketing, however, does more than simply heighten your internet visibility. Unlike direct paid advertising, it actually presents an opportunity to educate and assist your customer base. By providing useful resources online, you can make a case that benefits your business while building a reputation as an authoritative and knowledgeable entity. Further, article marketing offers a longer lasting form of promoting your business than does standard advertising alone. Paid ads usually lose potency and relevance over time. But a well-written, useful article will acquire hits and encourage viral marketing for months at a time.

Additionally, article marketing is one of the few forms of promotion that have the potential to reach a large audience without considerable financial investment and it is unique because it empowers you to position a nuanced message prominently in the vast landscape of the web. You can reach customers who you would have no access to you otherwise and the cost is typically measured in time rather than dollars.

Article marketing offers significant numbers of benefits to retailers who choose to engage in the strategic method of search engine optimization. For many small business in particular, it is the best way to use the power of the internet to bring prospective clients to your door. Importantly, the most successful marketing campaigns understand that quality, content and keyword relevancy are critical components of good marketing. Therefore, investing the time to ensure you develop great ideas, witty content and informative articles will help you reap the greatest benefit of article marketing in both the short and long term.

These days an internet marketing strategy plays a vital part of small business marketing strategies (or any size business marketing strategies for that matter). Web site marketing is an important part of just about any business, small or large.
You can’t put up a beautiful (or any) web site and hope that people will just arrive. You have to let them know, IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, that your web site is there. This HAS to be part of any Internet marketing strategy you develop. This is actually a basic marketing principle. Customers are not going to look for you, you have to look for them.

Promoting your web site on-line and building traffic is the subject of thousands of web sites, e-zines, books, courses and seminars. Using the web to promote your site, however, assumes that your customers are surfers. But there is a large percentage of our population that is not as savvy with the internet as we would like them to be.

So, what about the large percentages of the population who are not? They will only find out about you through traditional marketing and public relations media. This is particularly true if you serve a fairly local market. Fortunately these are the easiest and cheapest prospects for you to reach off-line.

Key Off-Line Internet Marketing Strategies
Here are some of the ways to make your web site known (this list was taken directly from the Traffic Building Volume of Ken Evoy’s brilliant book, Make Your Site Sell! 2002:

• TV, print and other advertising

• Stationary and business cards

• Catalogs, fliers, billboards, blimps, etc.

• Direct mail (prominently on every document)

• Telemarketing (make it part of the script)

• News releases to targeted media.
The main principle, to which you can add all your imagination, is INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY INCLUDES ANY AND ALL MEANS OF GETTING YOUR WEB SITE KNOWN AND VISITED BY TARGETED PROSPECTS.

Unless you have a high budget, the TV, radio, classified ad route is not recommended but if you do run ads, be sure to mention your web site everywhere. Make it part of your Internet Marketing Strategy.

Another guiding principle is that your off-line internet marketing activities should make it easy for your prospect to go straight to your web site. One of the best ways to market your website off-line is direct mail postcards.

If your prospect sees your website on a billboard as she’s driving home, she probably won’t look you up when she gets to the office the next day.

This is not the only medium that has problems like this. Newspapers are bulky, radio has to spell it out and like before most people are driving at the time. On the other hand, if your prospect is sitting at her computer and a post card comes in the mail announcing your web site, she can just turn around and type in your URL and she’s at your web site.

Now if someone is in the office reading a trade journal and comes across an article about you in the magazine, it’s not difficult for him to copy your URL into his browser and pay your site a visit.
I don’t mean to say that those other avenues won’t drive traffic to your site, but it will take numerous impressions and repetition to get them to remember your address.

On the other hand, direct mail postcards are generally received at the home or office where a computer is present, and if received somewhere else they are small enough to keep with you until you can get to a computer. This way, your prospective customer will be able to take the take right over to their desk top computer, type in your address and go right to your site. Brilliant!

I have seen the greatest success in off-line web site promotion with direct mail, and specifically direct mail postcards.

What?!? Sabotage your own success? Who would do that? Well, you’d be surprised how many small business owners think they are effectively marketing their business, when in fact they are cutting their own throat.
Yes, they may be running ads that are pulling in leads or customers. And yes, they may be writing a regular column for their local newspaper so they are perceived as the expert in their industry. And yes, they may even be doing a pretty good job of marketing on a regular basis to their prospect list.

So if they are doing all of these things “right,” how are they sabotaging their success? Well there are lots of ways. Following are just a few of the ways small business owners unknowingly sabotage their own success.

(1) They have not taken the time to develop a marketing plan.

A plan focuses your efforts and allows you to make the most of your marketing budget. Unfortunately, you can market without a plan. Yes, you read that right. You can do it, and people do market without marketing plans everyday.

But that does not mean you should. To make the most of your marketing efforts and budget, make sure you take the time each year to create a plan.

(2) They don’t have written goals

Smart business owners have written goals and objectives for what they want to achieve with their business and for each of their marketing activities. I know this sounds b-o-r-i-n-g, but it’s a fact.

There is proof that people who put their goals into writing have a higher success rate than those who do not. Plus, how can you develop a plan if you don’t have concrete objectives? You need a clear vision and target to aim for. You can’t possibly determine what marketing or how much marketing you need if you don’t know what you are aiming for.

(3) They have a short-term attitude.

They are reactive in nature, and while on the surface it appears they are doing a lot of marketing, they are not doing anything consistently or long enough to make an impact. Running an ad or sending out your newsletter a few times and giving up when you don’t get immediate results is worse than doing nothing at all.

How so? Because at least when you do nothing it doesn’t cost you any money. Pulling the plug too soon costs you money. And statistics show it takes somewhere between three and 10 exposures to a message for the average consumer to notice it and take action. So it is quite possible your audience was just beginning to take notice right about the time you threw in the towel!

(4) They don’t know their USP.

Probably the worst way business owners sabotage their marketing efforts without even realizing it, is to NOT have a clear Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

The greatest marketing plan in the world will not be effective if you have not clearly defined why someone should buy your product or service instead of all the other products or services available to them.

If you have not figured out what is unique and better about your product or service, and found a compelling way to communicate this in everything you do, you can market ’til the cows come home and you will be wasting your time and your money

10 Tips to Banish Marketing Sabotage

(1) Develop a marketing plan. Make sure you make it your number one priority to develop a marketing plan every year.

(2) Write objectives. Write at least one objective that states what results you would like to achieve with your business over the next year. And, write at least one objective for every marketing activity you undertake, that states what results you would like to achieve from that activity over the next year.

(3) Stay the course. Check in on your progress toward your objectives every three to six months, but give your plan a good nine to 12 months to work.

(4) Determine your unique selling proposition and make sure it is represented clearly and in a compelling way in everything you do.

(5) Don’t try to be “everything to everyone.” Focus on a few specific benefits and a specific audience.

(6) Track all of your marketing activities so you know exactly what is working and what is not working.

(7) Don’t rely on one marketing activity. Employ a mix of several marketing activities to reach more people more times.

(8) Create a system to help you stay on track with your marketing activities every month and to help you plan ahead for future activities.

(9) Create a realistic budget based on a percentage of your projected revenue, or the dollars you have available for marketing and stick to it. Marketing is an investment in your business. You have to spend enough to make progress but not more than your business can financially support.

(10) Understand your environment. The economy, competition, the strength of your particular industry, your prospects’ situation. You have to understand them all so you can create an effective plan to either overcome obstacles or take advantage of opportunities.

Follow these guidelines and your business stands a much greater chance of succeeding. All of these activities are part of a good marketing plan. And no business that wants to succeed should be without one.

Sometimes the simplest data is the best. Marketing is not complex if you know the basics – that’s true with anything by the way. Here are some tools that are brilliantly simple and with them you really won’t have to sweat the small stuff.

Hot Dope #1) The more that your potential customers see your name in front of them, the more likely they are to call your number (and not someone else’s) when they need the services you offer.

Many marketing efforts go unrewarded, not because they were off target but simply because they weren’t given enough of an opportunity to work. Showing your TV commercial one time, running an ad in the newspaper once, or doing one mailing of postcards may not be enough to grab and keep the audience’s attention.

Get your name out there, do it on a regular basis and people will remember you when they need someone in your line of business. Actually, this particular “Hot Dope” cannot be stressed enough – and failure to adhere to it is the #1 reason new businesses fail.

You should also know that taking the time to really see which pieces will generate the response you want will pay off. Don’t just totally give up when a response is low – persistence is vital.

Hot dope # 2) Measure your Return On Investment (ROI) in terms of actual MONEY not response rate. An advertising vehicle is working when the MONEY that it brings in has more value than the MONEY and time that is spent on the marketing.

Don’t fall into the trap of becoming discouraged by a small number of callers responding to a large number of pieces. If you spend several hundred dollars to be in the view of a few thousand possible leads, it may only take a few customers responding for you to make enough of a profit for this type of marketing to be valuable. The usefulness of any vehicle can only be determined after the amount of income generated by the promotion has been calculated. If you spend 1/5 of what you generate or generate 5 times what you spend, your campaign was successful.

Hot dope #3) It is much easier to “sell” a prospect once you get them to call or come in to your store. In 2-Step Marketing, step 1 is to get them interested; step 2 is having them speak to a representative to get all the details – and get “closed” by that representative.

Your design must be eye catching and informative, but don’t try to close the sale by explaining all of the details in one piece of advertising. The details of a business transaction often take many more words to explain than the main concept of what is being sold. For example, if your company offers great prices depending on the quantity purchased, there is no need to list the prices for every quantity that you sell. Simply give examples of two or three different quantities and state somewhere in the advertisement that other discounts are available for other quantities. This will prompt them to call to get the rest of the details once you have gotten their interest.

Marketing can be as simple as 1-2-3 when you know the basics. By no means have I given you all the basics here, but by learning and implementing these 3 marketing fundamentals, you are already on your way to marketing success!