The Top Experts Reveal Small Business Marketing Strategies
That Get Results In This Economy

The Simple Secret To Getting People To Read Your Marketing Materials

By Charlie   |   March 5th, 2010

When your prospects see your marketing materials, your brochure, your web site or your ads you want them to read them. You want prospects to read not just the first sentence but the majority of your marketing copy. Once they’ve read it, you want them to decide that they need your product or service and either make a purchase or contact you for more information.

When prospective clients and customers see your web site, ads or brochures, you want them to be captivated and impressed. You hope they’ll read not just the headlines, but all the way through the marketing copy. And you want this scintillating copy to motivate them to take the next step, and make a purchase or contact you for more information.

Is it working?

Do prospects read your business marketing materials? Does the copy convince them that they need your products and services? Do they understand the value you provide?

Do they contact you?

What’s the key to writing marketing copy that grabs your prospects’ attention, overcomes common objections and leads to a sale or an inquiry?

Discover how to write compelling marketing copy now >>

When you finally call a plumber to fix that leak under the sink, does he spend ten or fifteen minutes talking about how long he has been in business, the wrenches he uses or the process he uses to solder a joint together? Of course not.

You have a problem and, in most cases, you need it solved immediately. You don’t necessarily care how he does it you just want your leaky plumbing fixed. Of course you want to spend as little as possible, but you see the plumber’s fees relative to the damage you’re incurring from the leak.

Prospects’ problems come first, then your solution. Problem; solution. Prospects want to see themselves and their concerns clearly identified in order to feel confident that you understand their needs. By addressing this, you create the context so that when you do describe your products and services, they are the obvious solution to your prospects’ needs.

Take a look at your marketing materials, including everything from your business card to your web site. Who and what are your small business marketing materials about; you or your prospects’ concerns?

Discover how to apply simple marketing copy strategies and tactics to build revenue for your business >>

Make a list of five to fifteen things that your prospects want. Turn these into questions or statements about your prospects’ problems. Asking questions is particularly effective in getting prospects to think about solving their problems.

If you’re a financial advisor you might ask, “Do you want to learn how to make more in both up and down markets?” If you help people with marketing their businesses you might ask, “Do you want to learn how to attract more clients and increase sales?” If you sell golf clubs you might ask, “Do you want to hit further and more accurately with less effort?”

To attract new clients you need to get their attention, demonstrate that you understand their concerns and clarify the value your products and services provide. Focus your marketing copy on your prospects’ problems, ask them questions and couch your solutions in terms of their objectives. You’ll start more conversations, sell more products and sign up more clients.


Got Meme? The Secret To Marketing Copy That Get’s Results

By Charlie   |   March 5th, 2010

No “meme” isn’t a typo and Got Milk, the more commonly know phrase, is actually a marketing meme. If you’ve opened up a magazine or watched TV in the last ten years you’ve seen either the Got Milk ad campaign or the fun and memorable milk ad campaign using celebrities with a milk mustache. Chances are they got your attention and you remember the phrase, “Got Milk”.

A good meme is simple, provocative and infectious. An effective meme rolls off your tongue and sticks in your mind. Others remember it and pass it along to their friends and colleagues. It’s the cultural equivalent of a gene. For those of you without a national advertising budget, helping prospects and clients quickly grasp what you do and having them spread the word about your services is a form of zero cost marketing that you can use.

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.

You may already have a tagline, slogan, or catch phrase you use in your marketing copy, but does it work as well as a meme? Like a gene, memes synthesize complex information, concepts and ideas and pass them along with little effort. They communicate what you do in a few words or in a short sentence. They enable you to get across the benefits of your products and services to prospects in a form they’ll remember and repeat to others.

Does your current title, tagline, or catch phrase:
– Tell people what you do?
– Create a perception of need?
– Start conversations?

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.

NOT MARKETING MEMES
– Labels such as “Trial Lawyer” or “Copy Editor” or ” Computer Specialist”. The problem with labels is that they don’t tell anyone how you can help them, or which problems you solve. In most cases they kill further conversation.

– Descriptions of work processes and methodologies. These usually start with “I …”. While at some point a prospect may want to know how you work, it is their problems and concerns which interest them the most and are the best place to begin.

– Offers such as “Buy this and get two free.” Your meme isn’t meant to convince someone to buy but rather to get his or her interest and start a conversation.

MEMES
Effective marketing memes focus on a specific clientele and a solution, or better yet a common client problem. For example, “I help independent professionals attract more clients”, identifies a market and a client problem. It also invites the follow up question “How?” FedEx grew their now billion dollar business with the meme, “When it absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight”.

Whether you use a meme in the elevator, on your business card or in your mailings, it should help your prospects know whether you are taking to them and define you as someone who can help them solve a problem, and prompt prospects to ask if your products and services could help them, too.

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

GET MEME
The “Got Milk” campaign used both words and images to get their message across. If you are only relying on words, you may need more than two, but limit it to less than ten. Use the following steps to write your meme.

– Identify your target market.

– Define problems you solve for clients.

– Clarify the benefits you provide.

– Determine what you would like people to do after they hear or see your meme. What question do you want them to ask or what action you want them to take?

– Use this information to write five conversation-starting phrases that summarize who you help and the problems you solve.

Once you have these draft memes, try them out. Some may elicit blank stares; others will prompt people to ask questions or start listing names of people they know who could use your products and services. A good meme can start a chain reaction in people’s minds and prompt them to move from prospect to client. When you hear people repeating your meme to others, you’ll know you’ve got one that works.

Coming up with an effective meme isn’t easy, but its the lowest cost and most valuable tool in your marketing tool kit.You may be pushing prospects away with your current tagline instead of helping people understand what you do and, more importantly, what you can do for them. So get meme, and get going with writing your marketing copy.

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.


Which Words Attract Clients and Sales

By Charlie   |   March 5th, 2010

Whether it’s your business card, tagline, article title, web site title and description or ad, just the difference of a few words can either pull in prospects and clients or push them away. Effective marketing copy can determine whether your phone is ringing off the hook or you are twiddling your thumbs hoping someone will call.

Just by changing a word or two or combining a couple of phrases, you can increase your response rate dramatically. Book publishers know that a book’s title can make the difference between it becoming a best seller or a loser. Wouldn’t you like your service and products to be best sellers?

In the past if you wanted to be sure you’d found the best name for your business or the right phrases to use in your small business marketing materials, you needed to hire a marketing research firm to get a reliable answer. Using phone surveys and focus groups, a market research firm can tell you which names turn prospects off and which make people want to buy your services and products.

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 SecondMarketing’ guide to create more business opportunities.

While business marketing research firms may still be the best answer for mid to large businesses, most independent professionals and small business owners, don’t budget tens of thousands of dollars for this type of in-depth analysis. So how do you find out which key words and phrases will attract clients to you?

You can research and test words and phrases to dramatically increase the response to your marketing. Thanks to the development of the internet and a couple of free and almost free online tools you can easily research which words pull in prospects and which push them away. Use the steps outlined below, to refine the words you use in your small businesss marketing strategy.

Start With A Focus On Client’s Problems
Don’t make the mistake of using marketing copy that focuses on your name, professional label, your credentials or processes. Your prospects are concerned about their own problems, issues and needs. For example, the phrase “back pain” is searched for on the internet one and a half times as often as “chiropractor”.

If you’re a chiropractor, your marketing materials should focus on the pain that your clients’ experience. Start with words that focus on prospects’ problems. If you can’t think of any, use words that describe the solution to their problems. What problems and solutions are your clients looking for?

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.

Use Attention Getting Words
Everyone knows that certain words like “sex” attract attention. The problem is “sex” won’t attract clients for 99.9% of small businesses. It’s not going to help a lawyer, cleaning service, caterer, etc. Other words that get attention are how to, secrets, and free. The title of this article contains at least two attention-getting words. Can you identify them?

Fish Where the Fish Are
Certain category phrases exist to describe most types of businesses or tasks. If you are a web designer, the phrase ” web design” is one. If you sell pyrotechnics, the more commonly used term is “fireworks”; by a factor of twenty-two. Improve the response to your marketing by using the common phrases people use to search online, the same ones
used commonly in association with the services and products you sell.

Overture and Wordtracker provide free online tools to help you find the words and phrases your prospects are interested in. Make a list of all the words and phrases you think people associate with your services whether or not have a web site. Then test each phrase to find out which words attract the most attention.

The easiest tool to test word or phrase popularity is Google’s at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type in possibilities from your list and look at how many times it was used in a search in the last month. Write the number down next to the word or phrase on your list and continue testing until you have a clear winner. Make sure the keywords you use to describe yourself, and the ones you use on your web pages to help the search engines find your site are ones your prospects use, too.

Almost Free Market Research
Once you know the category phrase that best describes your services and products, the next step is to develop your tagline, or the copy you use in your web site description or even yellow page advertising copy. If you are a lawyer you might have a listing in the yellow pages under attorneys, but what should you say to prompt people to call your office? Do you know which of the following phrases is most likely to pull in prospects?

– Free consultation for serious injuries
– Need legal help?
– Find the right attorney
– Maximum cash compensation

Without doing some market research you won’t know which phrase, if any of these, is the most effective. Thanks to www.Google.com/adwords it’s easy to test out your ideas. Depending on the popularity of your key words and how long you run your test, it will cost twenty to fifty dollars or more at Google. You can sign-up, put up as many variations of your ad as you want, and see which ones people respond to.

You may be surprised that changing a word or two can increase your response by factors of five or more. Once you see which phrases are working, try combining them to improve your response even more.

Even if you never run an ad, researching which phrases pull in prospects can help your business grow. Use the results on your business card, in your tagline, as the title to your web site or as the title to an article and pull in many more clients and customers.

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.


What Works Better Than Advertising in Small Business Marketing?

By Charlie   |   March 5th, 2010

Is advertising the best way to generate more leads and sales and grow your business?

You might be surprised to know that in most cases, the answer is NO. You could generate ten times the business you’d gain through advertising by using the three small business marketing strategies detailed below.

Yes, advertising should be part of your overall marketing strategy, but don’t make it the centerpiece of your strategy when there are more effective – and more cost effective – ways to generate leads and sales.

What are the limitations of advertising in small business marketing?

Advertising is expensive – The high cost of advertising can sink a new business before it has a chance take off. TV ads can cost millions, print ads in magazines with national reach like Fortune or Forbes cost tens of thousands, and radio spots can run you thousands of dollars. Even a micro, pay-per-click ad in Google can cost four to five dollars per click, depending on your keywords.

Advertising disappoints – Ever run an ad and get only a handful of leads and even fewer sales? Many small businesses spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on ads that don’t pay off in increased sales – or just barely do. Has this ever happened to you?

Advertising doesn’t get noticed – The average American is exposed to thousands of marketing messages every single day. Advertisers compete harder and harder to get our attention, with more ads in more places every year. The result of this increasing abundance of advertising is that it’s harder and harder to get people to pay attention and respond to your ad.

Advertising isn’t believable – Not only is your audience saturated with ads and information, they’re sophisticated and skeptical. Most people dismiss the claims made in ads. Even if your ad is completely factual, your prospects’ tendency is to not trust it.

Advertising is touted as the miracle pill for growing your business. You pull out your checkbook or max out your credit card and pay for your ad campaign. But for many small businesses, the results rarely justify the cost.

Don’t get me wrong, advertising can work, if you know when and how to use it but there are better ways to generate leads and sales that you should be focused on first, before you turn to advertising.

Discover exactly how to grow your business >>

What works better than advertising to grow your business? Here are three strategies you’d be nuts not to use:

1. Give Away Something For Free
People love getting something they want and need for free. I use a free 20 page marketing guide. Financial planners give away free seminars. Pfizer gives away free samples of drugs to doctors and some auto dealers give away travel certificates to motivate prospects to visit their showrooms.

Business Week ran an article on March 12th about Chipotle’s successful give-to-get marketing strategy. The fast food restaurant chain has handed out tens of thousands of free burritos and tacos as way of building a loyal clientele. In just one day Chipotle gave away 6,000 burritos when they opened a mid-town location in Manhattan.

This customer-satisfying strategy cost them $35,000, just about the same amount they would have spent for a half page black and white ad in the New York Times.

Let your prospects sample your ideas or your products. It’s the fastest way to help people understand the value of what you provide, to trust you and to want to do business with you. Chipotle has leveraged this strategy to become one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in the country. Imagine what this marketing strategy could do for you!

2. Get Free Publicity
When your prospects read an ad you wrote, they tend not believe it. When they read an article by you in a magazine or newsletter that is published and distributed by a third party, you have instant credibility. Write and distribute your articles widely and people will see you as the expert to turn to.

3. Use Email To Build Profitable Relationships
Once you have a lead, write and send series of emails that give your prospects information they can use. Demonstrate the value of your products and services. This simple strategy can convert a high percentage of prospects to new clients within one or two weeks.

I’m not suggesting that you stop advertising altogether. But use advertising as a supplement to the three small business marketing business strategies above, not as the mainstay of your marketing. Here’s why:

Spend $12,000 on advertising online, and if it works perfectly, you could generate up to 2,400 leads and convert those to 1,000 sales. Spend the same amount implementing the three strategies outlined above, and you could generate ten times the business; that’s 24,000 leads and 10,000 sales.

Discover what really works to generate leads and sales online? Get started now >>


The 8 Most Common Advertising and Small Business Marketing Mistakes

By Charlie   |   March 5th, 2010

Advertising can be one of the fastest ways to market and grow your business or it can be one of the quickest ways to go out of business. With the right ad you can attract clients to your business and increase your profits. With the wrong ad you can spend your way into bankruptcy.

To grow your business you need to attract the attention of your prospects, advertising can help you do so if used correctly. Unfortunately, many small businesses owners waste thousands of dollars on advertising efforts that only achieve minimal results.

If you want to get the most from the money you spend to promote your products and services, make sure to avoid these common mistakes.

Focusing on Your Products and Services
If you want to get the attention of your prospects, speak to their needs and wants. Your prospects’ primary concern isn’t that you’ve been in business for 25 years; it is do you know the problem they want to solve. Use your ad to identify at least one common problem of your prospects and the benefit of using your product or service.

Having a Weak Small Business Marketing Message
All to often you hear ads and it takes some thought to figure out what they are even promoting. Make sure your advertisement includes a 7-10 word description of whom you serve and the problems you solve so people who read or hear your ad know how you can help them.

Discover 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.

Using the Wrong Words
A word here, a phrase there can change your response rate by hundreds of percent. When you spend money on advertising, first test a number of versions of your copy to identify the one that works best. Just by revising her ad copy so it was client and problem centered, I helped one small business owner achieve her best month in sales ever.

Missing Motivation
Most ads miss the mark in moving prospects to action. If you want to prompt prospects to visit your web site or your store or to contact you, include an offer that motivates them to do so.

Lacking in Frequency
Some people make spur of the moment buying decisions, but most need to become familiar with your services and products, and this takes time. If you want your advertising to work, you need to ensure that your prospects see or hear it regularly.

Web Sites that Don’t Move Prospects to Action
Many small business owners direct prospects to a web site where they have more extensive content covering available services and products. I constantly get calls from people who have been successful at attracting prospects to their web site, but generate few sales.

Once prospects get to your web site make sure the content and visual organization moves them to take the action you want them to. Whether it is providing them with ample opportunities to fill in your service inquiry form, or including a subset of your product catalog in your web page navigation bars, help prospects move to client and customer status.

Lack of Follow Up
Sometimes making a sale requires sending a note or picking up the phone and calling your prospects. If you have an effective lead generation strategy, prospects will provide you with their contact information and the problem they want solved. Use the web, email, and the phone to follow up and close the sale.

Discover how to position yourself and your business for success >>

Discover how you can use your articles to establish yourself as an expert and increase credibility >>

Lack of Tracking
If you are making more from your advertising than you are spending, you’re ahead. Frequently small business owners can’t tell you which of their efforts helped bring in the business. Track each of your ad campaigns and you’ll know where to spend your money in the future, what to modify and what to eliminate.

– Do you know how many sales and how much money you made as a result of each of your advertising campaigns?

– Are you making any of the above common small business marketing mistakes?

– What elements of your small business marketing should you change?

Put your marketing house in order. Fix your strategy and your materials. If you don’t know what to change or how to change it, use experts to help you with strategy, copyrighting, design, PR, and media placement.

Avoid these common marketing mistakes and you’ll find more people contacting you about your products and services and that your making more than your spending on your advertising.

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


Small Business Advertising Ideas & Tips

By Charlie   |   March 5th, 2010


How To Transform Your Marketing Into A Finely Running Machine

By mfsadmin   |   January 27th, 2010

You want to improve your marketing strategy, attract more clients and grow your business, but don’t have the time to make these things happen. Every month or so I get a call from Carl who wants to learn how to improve his marketing. He knows he could do better, but between client meetings, phone calls, and managing his business, Carl just can’t find the time to focus on improving his marketing strategy.

Sound familiar?

Small business owners have a plethora of management and administrative tasks including product development. Who has time to tune up their small business marketing?

If you want your business to run like a fine machine, start treating it like one. Handle your time and your marketing the same way you’d treat a Mercedes. Don’t just give it gas and oil, give it a regular tune up. Here’s how.

WRITE DOWN YOUR GOALS
What are your personal and business goals? Owning a fancy car? Selling a successful business you started? Making three hundred thousand dollars a year? Donating a fortune to your favorite charity? Write them down.

For each goal you write down, identify the relevant subset of goals. If you want to improve your marketing, write down annual small business marketing goals and then each week and each day write down the specific goals you need to achieve in order to reach your larger goals.

If you want to reach your goals, you need to have them. Research shows that writing them increases the likelihood that you’ll remember them and achieve them.

STOP WASTING TIME
If your car was limping along on only a couple of cylinders, you’d take it to an auto mechanic and get it fixed. If you’re not attracting as many clients as you’d like, get expert advice. Don’t waste your time and money using marketing strategies and tactics that only bring in a trickle of clients.

If you want your marketing to run as well as a new Mercedes, invest in it, tune it up and do the required maintenance. It will get you where want to go in less time.

Discover how to tune up your small business marketing >>

PRIORITIZE YOUR TIME
Spend your business marketing time on the tasks that generate results. Generally, 20% of the marketing tasks that you do generates 80% of your new business. Each week I receive hundreds of emails and dozens of requests for assistance. If I responded to each one I’d be on the phone all day. By using a qualifying process, I’m able to make fewer calls and get more clients in less time.

Which small business marketing tasks should you spend the least amount of time working on?

SET ASIDE TIME FOR KEY MARKETING TASKS
My weekly newsletter is a vital part of my marketing. Writing requires discipline and hard work. It would be easy to come in to the office and spend my day answering phone calls, or responding to emails, instead of writing my weekly ezine. If I didn’t set aside each Wednesday morning to put the first draft together, it wouldn’t get done and my business wouldn’t grow.

Do you have a marketing strategy you are following?

Which are the most important marketing tasks you should be spending your time on?

Of course the most important task to schedule is the time to plan your week and your day. Turn off the computer and your phone for fifteen minutes to half an hour at the end of each day and take the time to plan your marketing goals and tasks for the next day. When I leave the office with a clear plan for the next day in mind, I can use my evening bike ride to come up with new marketing ideas to help me achieve my daily objectives.

When do you set your marketing goals and tasks for the week and the day?

Focus your marketing on the tasks that generate new clients and avoid wasting time on unproductive efforts and you’ll find you have more time. Use your new-found time to get even more clients, go home early, get some exercise, spend more time with your family and friends or start work on your next business.


What is a Small Business Marketing Plan Anyway?

By mfsadmin   |   January 11th, 2010

Building a small business that grows steadily in size and profits is like building your dream house. First, you identify what kind of home you want, then you and your architect plan and create blueprints for your house, then you’d build it, move in and enjoy it.

Now imagine that you didn’t have the time to plan your home but went ahead and hired a builder to get started. How would he know what to build? Without a plan, the result would be unlikely to meet your needs and you’d have wasted a lot of time and money.

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