Can you imagine having a phone conversation where you couldn’t hear what the person at the other end was saying? You would have difficulty getting much done and you certainly couldn’t tailor your response to their needs and interests. Yet this is the way many people market their products and services.

Most people make the mistake of thinking that marketing is one-way communication. The tendency is to create business marketing materials and push them out to your target market and hope for a response. Marketing monologues, whether in person, in a brochure or on a web site are a sure way to scare prospects and clients away. Any hope for lead generation is lost.

If you want to grow your business your objective should be to create a dialogue with prospects and help them become clients. Starting your marketing efforts by creating a two-way conversation with prospects can help you target your business marketing efforts and open the door to future business.

Learn how to find the right words to explain exactly how you help prospects. With a brilliant elevator speech and marketing message you’ll attract more clients right away. Use the ’15 Second Marketing’ guide to create more business opportunities.

•Is your marketing communication two-way?
•How often do you ask your prospects to identify their biggest problem, relative to the service or product you offer?
•How often do you survey your target market to find out what they are worried about?
•Can you list their most pressing concerns?
•Do you use this information to regularly improve your marketing strategy and materials?

Large corporations provide annual job performance reviews and conduct annual customer satisfaction surveys. While annual feedback like this may be useful to you and is better than nothing, your goal is to create an ongoing dialogue with your prospects and clients so that you can regularly improve how you market your services.

You won’t want to rush back to the office after every client meeting to revise your marketing strategy, but the more often you ask questions to understand client and prospect concerns and then shape your marketing to match, the more new clients you’ll attract.

Learn how to position yourself and your business for success, learn where to start and how to focus your marketing to attract more clients and increase sales >>

Use your articles to establish yourself as an expert and increase credibility. Learn how to write your articles and where to distribute them with ‘Opening Doors with Your Articles’

Improve your marketing by listening to prospects and clients.
Get them talking by asking the right questions and then hear what they have to say. Fortune 500 companies use marketing firms, charging tens of thousands of dollars to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. If you’re an independent professional or small business owner, you can do it on your own provided you are a good listener.

Good general questions to ask include:
•What’s the biggest obstacle to growing your company?
•What problems are your biggest concerns?
•What are your three most important objectives for the next month?
•What’s the decision making process in your organization?

The specific questions you use will depend on the problems you solve for clients. If you install phone systems, you’ll want to know what your prospects’ biggest concern is about their phone system and its installation. If you’re an accountant your questions will be about financial objectives. If you provide conflict management you’ll want to find out the most common sources of discord.

Start using your web site to generate more leads and sales.

The objective is to understand your prospects needs and then you can use this information to position your products and services. Let your target market tell you what they want to see and read. Good times to fine tune your marketing include; before you develop your business marketing materials, when you talk with prospects and in your conversations with clients.

•List 3-5 questions you could ask a prospect or client to identify their biggest concerns relative to your service or products.

If you want to attract more clients, find ways to ensure your communication is two-way. Frequent surveys, in-person conversations and even watching how your clients use your products are all good ways to get feedback. When your communication is two-way you’ll know what prospects and clients are concerned about and you can target your marketing to increase your lead generation and thus, business.

Many small business owners struggle to grow their businesses only to find themselves stuck in a morass of marketing, management and delivery tasks. As your business becomes more complex and time consuming, the original vision of the business usually changes or gets lost, and it can become increasingly difficult to define and implement a small business marketing strategy that helps you achieve your small business potential.

As a small business marketing coach I have many small business clients whose marketing is going nowhere because they haven’t clearly identified where they want to take their business/what they want their business to be/ and what role they want to play in it.

Whether you want to take your business to the next level or are just starting out, to be more successful at marketing you need to regularly clarify what you want your business to be and what your role in it is or should be. In order to develop a small business marketing strategy and plan that works for you, you need to first clarify:

•What are your business passions and strengths?
•How do you want to spend your time?
•What work tasks you enjoy?
•What type of business you want to create?

Is your marketing strategy helping you earn as much as you’d like? Does your marketing plan help you generate hundreds of prospects a week and help you convert them to paying clients? Are you getting the results you want from your marketing?

Discover how to define the blueprint for a profitable web site, learn the strategies, tactics and small business ideas that can help you grow you online and offline profits >>

Define Your Business Passions and Strengths
The energy, determination and persistence it takes to build a small business only makes sense if you are doing something you love – or that at least gives you great satisfaction. What do you enjoy doing the most? What are you happy doing day in and day out?

What are your Strengths?
Identify your business passion, and then examine your strengths within that passion. How can you leverage your interest and knowledge to become a sought after expert in your field?

Say you love skiing and want to make a living in that industry, which you know well. Are you going to run a ski shop, be a ski instructor, or become a skiing guru, sought after by thousands, with your simple and innovate teaching techniques?

•Which aspects of your passion suit your expertise and experience?
•How can you build a business around them?

Set Goals For How You Want to Spend Your Time
Personality and interests vary. Some small business owners have a passion for hands on delivery, others enjoy focusing on growing their business and coordinating the delivery of products and services.

Some can’t stand being stuck in an office all day; others would prefer never to talk to a client or customer. What aspects of your business are you good at and which do you want to develop further? Use the following questions to help you clarify how you want to spend your week.

•Do you like being in charge of marketing, operations or service delivery?
•Are you an educator, do you love sharing ideas about what you know or do you like inventing new products people can use without your involvement? Or both?
•Do you prefer managing the business and delegating daily tasks to others?
•Do you like to travel or prefer to work from an office or at home?
•How important is flexibility in scheduling and work location?
•Do you want to work less and earn the same?
•Do you want to work part time or do you love your work so much that you could do it seven days a week?
•Do you want to structure your work so it is more satisfying?

Clarify the Tasks You Enjoy
We all like and dislike specific activities, excel at some and are better off delegating certain tasks to others. Clarifying what you like and dislike is essential to then defining the strategies and structures you need to create a more satisfying work environment.

•Do you enjoy coming up with new products?
•Do you enjoy selling your services and products?
•Do you like to write or prefer public speaking?
•Or both?
•Is the phone your communication tool of preference?
•Do you prefer to use email for most of your communication?
•Do you enjoy public speaking and sharing your ideas?
•Do you enjoy following up with employees to make sure
they’ve done agreed on tasks?

Is your marketing plan helping you earn as much as you’d like? Does your marketing plan help you generate hundreds of prospects a week and help you convert them to paying clients? Are you getting the results you want from your marketing?

Specify the Type of Business You Want to Create
What have the answers to the questions above told you about your business and your role in it? Depending on the services and products you provide, does your business need additional staff, facilities, technology, geographic presence, or capital?

Would you prefer to be a successful one person business/sole proprietor? Would you like to grow your business to include five to fifty employees? Will profit or passion be the driving force? Or both? Are your markets local, regional, national or international?

Answer these questions to define your small business goals and your role in your business’ growth. Once you have a clear and current idea of where you are going, you can define a marketing strategy to get there, to achieve your business potential.

At times, no matter what you do your marketing is stuck and you’re not attracting new clients quickly enough. It doesn’t seem to make a difference how much time or money you put into it, its like you are driving in slow motion. You just seem to be spinning your wheels and not getting any traction to move your business forward as quickly as you’d like.

What is it that’s keeping you from growing your business and your revenue?

Is the economy limiting your business? Possibly but unlike many large corporations that get hammered by economic trends, independent professionals and small business owners don’t need mass movements of clients to be successful. Most small businesses need a few hundred or few thousand clients to do very well. You just have to do a better job of marketing than your competitors to bring them in.

Is the lack of money to spend on business marketing limiting your business? The most successful independent professionals spend very little on marketing relative to profits. They utilize email, referrals, and other small business marketing tactics to get attention, build trust and attract clients.

Is the lack of time the problem with your marketing? If you
run your own business, there is never enough time in the day to accomplish everything you need to do. But the people who make the time for marketing see their businesses grow.

Let’s face it; your biggest marketing obstacle is you: your perceptions/ attitudes, behavior and organization.

Learn how to find the right words to explain exactly how you help prospects. With a brilliant marketing message you’ll attract more clients right away. Use the ’15 Second Marketing’ guide to create more business opportunities.

Common problems that may be holding your marketing back:

•Not enjoying marketing yourself and your business.
•Not having a small business marketing strategy or plan
•Not integrating marketing into your daily schedule.
•Taking over two minutes to describe how you solve clients problems.
•Spending too much on promotional campaigns without testing your copy or inexpensive tactics first.
•Talking too much and not listening to prospects.
•Not giving away helpful ideas to prospects in order to build trust and establish yourself as the expert who can solve their problems.
•Not regularly contacting prospects.
•Forgetting to provide prospects with offers they can’t refuse.

Are you stuck by your own thinking, your behaviors or your perceptions about your marketing and what is or isn’t possible?

Learn how to position yourself and your business for success, where to start and how to focus your marketing to attract more clients and increase sales >>

Give your small business marketing a chance
The good news is that if you are your biggest marketing obstacle you can easily become your biggest marketing asset. Take the following steps to change your marketing behaviors and perceptions and give your marketing a chance.

Goals – Write down goals for your business and for your marketing. Studies show that people who commit to written goals are more successful, often making ten times as much money as those who don’t.

Knowledge – Leverage all you know about your business to provide prospects and clients with a steady stream of ideas they can use. In this way you demonstrate your expertise and stand out from the competition.

Money – Spend as little as possible on marketing, but do expect to spend money relative to the returns you anticipate. For example if you are an independent consultant and want to grow your business to two hundred or three hundred thousand dollars in revenue per year you will need to spend some money on your marketing effort.

Time – Schedule a meeting with yourself every week to review your marketing strategy, look at what is and isn’t working and write your next ad or article. Your most important job is to market your business and then to deliver the services and products. Make sure the way you spend your time reflects this.

Get out of your own way to improve your marketing and attract more clients. Change your marketing actions and perceptions. If you don’t have it, get the marketing knowledge you need and make good use of the time and money you do have. When you remove the obstacles to your marketing you’ll find your business gaining traction and clients.

Have you ever sent out a sales letter and received little or no response, or put up a web site and found hardly anyone visiting it. Have you worked hard on an article only to find that few people read it and even fewer contacted you as a result?

Let’s be honest; everyone makes mistakes. The difference between the winners and the losers in business is that winners recognize their mistakes and avoid making the same blunder again. Each time you can recognize a marketing mistake and correct it your marketing will be that much better.

Small business marketing experts got that way by working full time at making more marketing mistakes than you can imagine and then learning from them.

Is your small business marketing strategy helping you earn as much as you’d like? Do your marketing plans help you generate hundreds of prospects a week and help you convert them to paying clients? Are you getting the results you want from your marketing?

Define the blueprint for a profitable web site and the small business marketing strategies and tactics that can help you grow you online and offline business >>

Common small business marketing missteps include:

• Starting your marketing with a focus on your credentials, products and services instead of on client problems.

• Using a label to describe what you do instead of a “meme” or value positioning statement that tells prospects which problems you solve in a sentence or less.

• Developing a tagline, article title or web page title without taking the time to discover which words will attract your clients.

• Wasting time on pushing information about yourself out to prospects instead of pulling them in with ideas they are interested in.

• Not providing prospects with a free offer to get their contact information.

• Forgetting to regularly follow up with prospects.

• Building a web site without a clear step-by-step map of how you will attract visitors to the site, and what you want them do once they visit your site.

• Not having offers and strategies to turn prospects into clients and clients into repeat clients and sources of referrals.

If you’ve made any of the above marketing mistakes, you’re not alone. But if you want to grow your business, don’t repeat these blunders again and again. If you’re not getting the results you want, look for a new strategy, modify your tactics and change your marketing plans.

Strategy – Base your small business marketing on a clear set of principles. Have a clearly defined strategy and marketing plan. Use approaches that work for independent professionals and small business.

Tactics – Plan your small business marketing so its organized and individual efforts are additive and contribute to building your business.

Materials – Make sure individual marketing pieces resonate with your target market, get their attention and move them to the action you want them to take.

Fix your marketing plans and materials by testing ideas, keeping the ones that work and throwing out the ones that don’t. If you self published a book, but its not flying off the shelves, identify the variables that could be affecting sales.

It may be the book’s title, the sales letter, or the price and bonus offers. Pick one of these and make some changes. Test a different title, rewrite your sales letter, or the price and bonus offers and see what happens.

Depending on your time line and goals, you may want to avoid making all the marketing mistakes on your own, and get expert advice from someone who has made or seen most of the mistakes before.

In the process of growing your business you’re bound to make marketing missteps. The more you make, identify and learn from the faster your marketing will improve and the more clients you will attract.

Are your marketing plans helping you generate hundreds of prospects a week and increase your sales?

Chris wrote from Arizona to ask, “How do I market a business when the owner doesn’t want to spend any money on marketing or advertising?” I get similar questions daily from people who are their own bosses, asking, “How can I get more attention for my business and more clients with my small business strategic marketing plans? I don’t have any money for marketing.”

Trying to grow a business without allocating funds for your sales & marketing or advertising is like owning a car and not budgeting funds to buy gas. People could stop by and sit in your car with you, but you wouldn’t be able to drive it anywhere. You’d feel silly and frustrated. What can you do other than look for a new job with a more enlightened boss?

How can you get your boss to part with his or her hard-earned dollars to help you and the business be even more successful?

Discover how to grow your business using a proven sales, small business marketing strategy and effective business small business marketing plan >>

1. Define Revenue Objectives
The first step is to clarify revenue goals. Don’t ask your boss for money for marketing right off the bat; you’ll face a lot of resistance. Instead, ask your boss (or yourself, if you’re the owner):

• How much did the business make last year?

• What percentage of our target market is using our services?

• How many more clients and customers would you like to attract this year?

• How much would you like to see the business grow this year?

• What areas of the business do you think have the greatest potential for growth?

Help the boss to define the dollar amount you’d like to see added to last year’s revenue. Once the revenue goal has been defined, you’ll have much greater success in finding the resources to reach it.

2. Affirm the Impact of Sticking with the Status Quo
The next step is to clarify what would happen if you maintained your existing levels of marketing. Ask questions like:

If we continue to do the same kind and amount of marketing (which may be zero):
• Will sales increase or decline?

• What will the impact on revenue be?

3. Overcome Resistance to Spending
In your conversation with your boss, be prepared to respond to predictable objections. Most successful business owners got that way by being cautious about spending. Fewer expenses mean greater profitability. When your boss says, “advertising doesn’t work” or “I’ve tried marketing in the past and it didn’t make a difference,” be ready to follow up.

The best way to handle these objections isn’t to counter them, but to agree with your boss and ask the next question to help him or her understand why they didn’t work. For example, you might say:

You’re right; prospects didn’t respond to our ads.
• Do you think we were reaching the right audience?

• Were we advertising in the right places at the right times?

• If our marketing message or elevator speech didn’t prompt a response, what about testing some alternative marketing messages?

• Use questions to help your boss understand what worked and what didn’t and why.

Discover how to get attention for your business with your sales / marketing message and your advertising >>

4. Define the Investment Needed to Achieve Objectives
When business marketing is done well, it generates a return far greater than the expense. Start-up companies can expect to spend anywhere from 25% to 50% of net revenue on marketing; established companies from 5 to 15%.

The result is an ROI of two-to-one to twenty-to-one. What you want to do is help your boss determine the amount to spend on marketing in relationship to your company’s growth objectives. Ask him or her questions like:

• How much money have you invested in growing the business?

• What percent of revenue do similar businesses annually spend on marketing?

• If we could increase business by 50% this year, how much more would the company make?

• If we could double or triple each dollar we invest in marketing, would you be interested?

How much would you be willing to invest in marketing to increase revenue by another hundred thousand dollars this year?

5. Have a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business
Your boss will want to have confidence in a solid marketing plan before allocating funds. It is easy to throw money at marketing and advertising, but you need a proven business marketing strategy to generate a positive return. Questions to ask yourself include:

If I could get the boss to allocate more funds for marketing:

• What are the most effective ways to get attention for our business?

•Could we improve our marketing messages the elevator speech we use to describe our business?

• How can I generate more leads?

• How can I increase our conversion rate of prospects to clients?

• How can I increase the dollar amount of sales per client?

People are reluctant to spend money on marketing if they’ve had bad experiences in the past or don’t clearly see its benefits. Help your boss understand what went wrong with previous marketing plans and present the financial case for making the investment in marketing. You’ll have less trouble getting the funds allocated for marketing, and you’ll be on your way to growing your business.

The key to growing your business could be in your answer to the following question. Are you the captain or the crew or both?

Your business is like a ship. Whether you’re a physician, a lawyer, a realtor, a web entrepreneur or own a handful of physical therapy clinics the purpose of your business is to take you where you want to go, whether you’re headed for riches, want to have fun doing what you love, or both.

Are you at the helm setting a steady course, or are you trying to be the crew, the cook and the captain of your business all at once?

Whether you sell products or services you need to know how to create a small business marketing plan that works and how to implement it. You need to know how to make use of advertising and PR and how to follow up on all these activities to increase the number of prospects that become clients and repeat clients. And then there are all the activities involved in actually providing services, billing for them, keep your accounts up to date, etc.

Marketing, managing and delivering your products and services is way beyond multi-tasking.

For your marketing alone to succeed, you’d need to be expert at developing marketing strategy; writing compelling marketing copy; designing ads, brochures and your web site; collecting testimonials; search engine optimization and managing pay-per-click advertising campaigns, and writing and distributing articles and press releases.

Are you trying to do all of this on your own or with a very small staff? Are you leaving out critical activities because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get it all done?

The sooner you get the expertise you need to run your marketing effectively, the sooner you can get back to being the captain and plot a course for greater profitability.

You may be saying to yourself, “I’ll hire a marketing consultant/ copywriter/Virtual Assistant when I reach my sales target for the month and start bringing in more money.”

Aren’t you already working at 100% or more of your capacity?

With the existing time in the day and your existing expertise you’ll achieve the same results you have in the past. If you want to take your business to the next level, you’re going to need help, whether it is with your small business marketing strategy, search engine marketing, copywriting or simply making follow-up calls to prospects.

Mary from California understands this well. When she called to order my book, “Opening Doors with Your Articles“, she had two follow-up questions. First, she wanted to know if I would recommend someone to write articles for her. Second, she wanted a recommendation of someone to distribute the articles online.

Mary’s objective was to pin down her strategy, understand how to apply it and then get the help she needed to implement it. That way she could stay focused on delivering her services and making a profit.

Take a Good Look At Where To Get Help
Are you ready to improve your marketing and grow your business? Start by doing a quick analysis of your marketing tasks. Make a list or a spreadsheet with three columns.

List the marketing tasks that only you can do in the first column. In the second, list tasks that you can delegate to a qualified employee. In the third, list tasks that you or your employees need expert assistance with.

Expert Marketing Resources to Get You Started
In order of importance, I’ve listed resources you can use to get help and take your business to the next level.

Marketing Strategies – Discover the 5 marketing principles you can apply that will generate a steady stream of clients. Click Here >

Web Site Marketing – Use this roadmap to increase your online sales by 1000% or more. Click Here >

Marketing Messages – Find out the fastest way to get attention and business. Click Here >

Marketing Copywriting – Find the words that will prompt prospects to contact you. Click Here >

Using Articles to Grow Your Business – Discover how and where to distribute your articles to get free publicity. Click Here >

Distribute Your Press Releases – PRweb is easy to use, inexpensive and a great way to get your press releases found and picked up by the media. My most recent PR release generated over twenty thousand reads the first day! Click Here >

How to Create and Promote Your Small Business Blog – Get attention and traffic for your site with your blog. Click Here >

Gain Credibility – Use Audiogenerator to collect testimonials like the compelling ones at MarketingForSuccess. Click Here >

Automate Your Online Business – This is the system I use to manage my opt-in newsletter, email broadcasts and online sales.

Virtual Assistance – Hire a VA to do your mailings, make follow-up calls, collect testimonials etc. Hire help when you need it for the particular tasks you need done, so you can focus on work that is profitable – and enjoyable! Here’s a collection of directories to use to find a VA.

Search Engine Optimization – Pay an expert to put your site at the top of the search engines. Contact me to be referred to a reputable firm.

Many small business owners dread marketing their business as much as going to the dentist for root canal work. They put off even going to the dentist until its absolutely necessary, and then the expense is as painful as the procedure. Are you one of those who wish you could avoid marketing your business altogether?

You’re not alone. If you enjoy serving your clients but find marketing painful, it’s probably for one or both of the following two reasons:

1. You associate marketing with pushy, if not obnoxious, selling. We’re all constantly bombarded by ads on TV, on the radio, in newspapers and magazines, online, in the mail and even in restaurant restrooms. Most just seem to yell, “Buy Me!”, and you’d like to avoid being associated with this type of annoying marketing.

2. You spent money on advertising or mailings or a web site that cost you more than you made from the leads generated.

Ouch!

How to Avoid Obnoxious and Painful Marketing
Too much of the marketing you see is about the company and not the customer. You’ve seen too many examples of marketing that shouts, “My Company Name, My Products, I’m the Best, I’ve Been Around the Longest, Now Buy ME!!!” It’s all about me, not you. I g.uarantee that if you use this type of ME, ME, ME marketing you’ll get dismal results.

How many responses did you get with your last ad? How many are you getting from your web site? If you’re not getting the attention of your prospects, shouting at them louder or longer isn’t going to work any better. Marketing this way is painful for you and your prospects.

Stop shouting about yourself and your products and services. That’s not what prospects want to hear. Discover how to get your prospects’ attention and their business with pain-free marketing.

Getting a Better Response with Your Small Business Marketing
What’s the best way to get your prospects’ attention and their business without it being painful or pushy?

Imagine you sold cars. You could keep using marketing that shouts at your prospects about the number of years you’ve been in business or the number of cars on your lot. Do this and you’ll only end up with a sore throat. The alternative is to focus your strategic marketing on the information your prospects want.

For example, a recent survey by BIGresearch found 14 reasons people like you buy a new car, including:

– Your old car has high mileage
– Your old car always needs repairs
– You’re tired of their old car and want something new, including the latest technology
– You want a car that gets better gas mileage
– You like the styling
– The new car has better safety features
– The new car has more room
– The new car is offered at a good price (only 14% of respondents listed price as a factor in their purchase)

If you were a car dealer, you could use the reasons above to keep your marketing focused on what your prospects want. For example, an ad might read something along the lines of:

“Is your car ready to be replaced? Does it have over 80,000 miles on it? Is it in for repairs so often you’re making monthly visits to your mechanic? Discover which cars can provide you with better mileage, the latest in technology and a safer ride. Visit Miller Motors at …”

Want to double or triple the response to your ads, your web site, and your sales letters? Stop using marketing that is painful for you to deliver and for your prospects to read and hear. Discover the fastest way to get attention and increase your sales.

Are you shouting ME, ME, ME at your prospects? Start talking about what they need and want instead. It’s a highly effective marketing strategy that will ease your marketing pains. When you get a tremendous positive response you’ll discover that marketing is actually fun.

Ready to get the help you need to make your marketing pain free? Discover how to get your prospects’ attention in just 15 seconds or less.

You could be generating 50% to 100% more sales with your marketing. How? By working with basic human nature to convert more of your prospects to customers.

Each week 100 or 1000 people visit your web site or read your marketing materials but only a handful of those are contacting you and buying from you. You can double the number of people who buy your products and services and double your pr0fits.

The biggest mistake made by small business owners is that they treat marketing as if it didn’t need to follow basic rules of human nature. It’s like trying to force feed broccoli to someone who hates vegetables or trying to get a vegetarian to eat roast beef. Similarly, it just doesn’t make sense to try and force your prospects to do something they don’t want to do.

I’m amazed at how many people throw away huge sums of money on a small business marketing strategy that continually frustrates them and doesn’t bring in the sales they need to grow their business.

Here’s the simple truth about marketing. If you want to sell to people you need to take into account basic characteristics of human nature. You can’t just get your name out there or get the name of your product out there and expect clients to flock to your door. This strategy doesn’t work for small business owners and it won’t work for you.

Discover how to turn your business into a sales magnet simply by giving your prospects the information they want >>

The good news is that it’s not complicated or confusing to market your business successfully and close twice as many sales. All you need to do is understand a couple of obvious things about human nature and apply them to marketing your business.

Effective Marketing Is Based On These 3 Rules of Human Nature
—————————————————————————–

First Rule Of Human Nature:
People are attracted by solutions to their problems

Your prospects want to know what your product or service will do for them. They want to know if it will help them solve a particular problem.

Your marketing should lead with the product benefit and then go on to explain more about how your products or services help them and you’ll capture their interest. Lead with pricing, obscure product names or too much technical detail and you’ll lose your prospects. Their overriding concern is how your products or services will help them.

The Second Rule Of Human Nature:
People forget

Think about your own purchasing behavior. What do you do when you’re looking for a new computer, a new lawyer, a new investment, or a new graphic designer? You may have seen an ad that attracted you or visited a web site that looked helpful, but can you remember where?

Most people take some time to make their decision, often weeks or even months. Even if they’ve read your marketing materials and even if you’ve got the perfect product or service for them, your prospects are most likely going to forget you exist.

80% of potential new business is lost because small business owners don’t have a strategy for following up with prospects. Each time your prospects hear or read about another similar service or product your information gets pushed further down into the recesses of their brain. Eventually it just gets forgotten and you’ve lost the sale unless you have a strategy that helps them remember your products and services.

Discover The Insider Secrets to Eliminating Obstacles to Sales >>

Third Rule of Human Nature:
People want to be confident they are making the right decision

Whether you’re buying a new car, a new computer or legal or financial services, you want to know that when you make your purchase you’ll be satisfied with the products or services you buy. Your prospects are the same. So how do you help them trust you and your products and services?

Give them proof!

Prospects want to know if your products or services worked for others and if they’ll work for them. When you use referrals, testimonials and ‘test drives’ you provide proof that helps them feel confident in making their purchase.

Common Sense Marketing
It’s common sense to base your marketing on these three rules of human nature. If you want to increase your sales, you need to give people the information they want and need to buy from you.

A week ago, a friend of the family, Allen arrived at our home, here in Connecticut, with all his worldly possessions; his laptop, a few law books, and a couple of changes of clothes. He’d just completed his first week at Tulane Law School before being forced to leave his home in New Orleans in advance of Hurricane Katrina.

With the university closed, he’s trying to turn the disruption in his life into an opportunity to get more job experience. He was lucky, I know; so many have suffered and lost so much more. But helping him make a fresh start made me think about rebuilding careers and businesses.

If a storm or a fire ruined your business, what would it take to start attracting clients and generating a positive cash flow? You would want the following three essential elements of your marketing to get your business up and running and making money quickly.

1. Goals
You’d want a clear idea of which of your products or services you wanted to focus on. To get your business up and running as quickly as possible, you would focus your efforts on your most profitable ventures first. You’d want to set goals for the first three months and the next twelve months.

One of the biggest mistakes that business owners make is in not setting sales goals, even when they’re not faced with a disaster. Without a clear idea of the target you’re aiming at I can promise you you won’t reach it. If you set specific goals for your business and write them down you’ll be twenty times more likely to hit your revenue targets.

One of my clients doubled her sales simply by writing down her goals. Why does this make so much of a difference? Because each time you write down a goal, whether it’s for lead generation, web site traffic, response rates to mailings or monthly s.les, you have set yourself a target or a destination. Knowing where you want to go gets you halfway there.

Imagine if you had a road map for your business that told you how to get attention, get clients and increase your profits. Find your route to success.

2. Your Business Network
After a disaster you’d be short of cash and would need to ramp up sales quickly. You wouldn’t have time to spend months building your brand name. You’d want to tap your database of existing clients and prospects. Assuming you’d managed to bring your computer or at least your backup hard drive with you, you could be back in contact with your client base and prospects almost overnight.

One management consulting firm I worked with had dozens of satisfied clients and couldn’t understand why they were having such a hard time growing their business. They’d done work for hundreds of clients and been in touch with thousands of prospects over the years, but they lacked a centralized database and a way to stay in touch with these people on a regular basis. And in most cases, they’d lost touch with past clients and prospects.

Once I showed them how to organize their marketing communication, they started bringing in as much new business as they could handle. People buy from providers they know and trust. If you have a large database of people who know how you can help them, it’s easy to tap it to generate pr0fits.

Set up a lead generation system that builds a database of people who want to hear from you. When you want to jump start your sales, you’ll have qualified prospects that want to buy from you.

Discover how to create a small business marketing system that will generate the leads and sales you need to grow your business >>

3. A Reason For Your Prospects to Buy
Whether you’re restarting after a hurricane or you just want to get people lining up at your door for your products and services, they won’t buy from you unless they have a reason.

Sounds obvious. But many small business owners forget this basic marketing fact. Everyday I talk to entrepreneurs and even marketing professionals who are making the same mistake; despite having a great product or service, they are marketing their company name or a generic name for their services instead of the unique solution they provide.

You see this everywhere, from yellow page ads to web sites., Companies lead with information about themselves instead of zeroing in on the reason prospects should pay attention and buy from them. Which company would you choose, the one that is focused on their name and long-winded descriptions of their credentials, or the one that is focused on how they can help you get what you want?

Your prospects make decisions the same way. To attract lots of customers quickly, give your prospects a reason to buy.

If these three are the things you’d focus on after a disaster, aren’t they important now?

Discover how to build a network of prospects and how to give them a reason to buy so they become clients >>

Every day we make decisions based on hard information and numbers, but when it comes to marketing, most people ignore the research and go with their ‘gut’ or personal preferences. Are you making this small business marketing mistake?

I was on a conference call with a client and his brand new marketing coordinator reviewing their web site. Over the last few months I’d worked with this client to remove the Flash from their site and eliminate extraneous links. The result? Their lead generation went up by a factor of 6. Recently, I wrote new copy for the site, and they’d seen qualified leads increase even more, from 60 to 150 per week.

The success of the improvements I’d suggested were quantifiable. Even so, the first thing the new marketing coordinator said in our conference call was that the copy on the page was too long, and the words and phrases in bold type looked messy. He wanted shorter copy because it gave a cleaner look. Can he afford to dictate these changes and ignore the sales results?

What’s the best way to make decisions about your small business marketing?

You look at the numbers to make all kinds of purchasing decisions. You drive to the gas station that has the lowest prices or you pick a mutual fund that has the best track record. You use hard data to make important decisions. Shouldn’t you being do the same in marketing?

Want a tested and proven strategy for increasing web lead generation and sales? Discover how to create a web site that your best prospects will find nearly impossible to resist. Find out how to get a better response and more clients with your web site.

While I want my clients’ marketing materials to look nice my first priority is that their marketing message, ads or web site generate more leads and more sales. I regularly am asked to review marketing messages, brochure and web sites. Clients ask me, “How do you like them?”

My response is to ask is how many visitors they are getting to their site and how many leads and sales they are generating. My advice to clients is based not on what I personally like, but on what gets the best results.

If you’re serious about increasing your sales and growing your business don’t reinvent the wheel. For years marketing and advertising professionals have been accumulating data about what works and what doesn’t. This is research that you can use to guide your planning, writing and design of your marketing materials. Then you can test your specific ideas on the web to further improve the response you get.

For example, I don’t use an opening page with Flash on my web site because research shows that Flash openers send 80% or more of site visitors away. Testing and experience on the web have shown that effective web copy has more in common with direct mail than capabilities brochures, and that it should be personal and conversational. Other tests have shown that putting key sentences of web site copy in bold type helps the reader skim and scan quickly.

Find out which web site marketing strategies and techniques work to generate leads and sales and which techniques to avoid. You could be making ten times as much with your web site with these proven ideas. Find out how to improve your online profits

What do I mean by testing your ideas?

Before I settle on the wording of a marketing message for a client, for example, I give it a test run. I place Google Ads using the different options I’m considering. Then I watch the results for a few days to see which versions get the best response. Once I see a pattern, I tweak the most successful version of the marketing message to see if another word combination will get an even better response.

By the time I’m done, I know what prospects respond to. I have a clear winner; a marketing message that typically gets two to ten times the response of the one my client had started with.

You can test ad headlines, Flash elements, length of your copy, and even your use of bold type. Every element should be included or not based on whether it contributes to increasing response rates and profits.

You can improve the response you get to your marketing, increase your sales and grow your business. Test each element of your marketing, use that information to make your marketing decisions, and you’ll generate many more leads and sales.

If you’re ready to ‘really’ attract more clients and increase your sales, then do yourself a favor and find out more about ‘Creating Web Sites that Sell’. It’s packed full of reliable web site marketing ideas you can implement immediately to generate more profits. Get the 3 bonus chapters and sell more online.