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

What’s The One Basic Thing Most Small Businesses Are Missing?

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

Do you ever get distracted at work and neglect your marketing?

As a small business owner or marketing executive, you have a lot on your plate. Sometimes the daily fire-fighting can drive you crazy and get in the way of doing the essential marketing you need to attract new clients. What’s the solution, the one thing that can help you keep clients and profits flowing in?

In business, it’s having a marketing plan and sticking to it, that makes the difference.

Last week, my own plans almost got sidetracked. My wife and I had scheduled a week’s vacation before a nephew’s wedding in Denver. For years, we’ve wanted to hike and explore Utah’s “color country”, Zion and Bryce National Parks and the Grand Staircase Monument. The wedding gave us the perfect excuse to finally make the trip happen.

We were looking forward to the trip when our vacation plan was nearly thrown off by a tsunami of work and family matters. By the end of the week, my wife and I were wondering if taking 10 days off was such a good idea after all.

We tried to shorten the trip by a couple of days to catch up with missed days of work. But try as we might to rearrange our plans, the airlines wouldn’t cooperate. We were looking at higher fares and fees that just didn’t seem worth it. We stuck to the plan.

And we’re glad we did. We flew out of New York last Thursday and have spent the last 4 days hiking, relaxing and enjoying the incredible scenery of southern Utah for the first time.

Whether you’re planning a vacation or trying to grow your business, it pays to have a plan and follow it despite distractions.

Do you need a marketing plan? Do you need help sticking to it?

It’s rare that a business will take off on its own and grow by itself. Most need marketing to bring in prospects and turn them into buyers. Get the details >>

Is your marketing working as well as it could be?

Ask yourself the following questions:

– How many leads did you generate last week?

– How many leads did my ad generate relative to the cost and number of people who saw it?

– How many leads did my sales letter generate relative to the number of letters I sent out?

Then ask yourself:

– Given the number of leads generated, how many did I convert into sales?

– What was the dollar volume of sales generated from each lead?

It’s not a matter of time.

If your marketing materials aren’t pulling in clients within a few days, they’re not going to do much better after a few months.

Is it time to revise your marketing? Create a plan that you can live with, one that grows your business. If you’ve used the same plan for years and it’s not generating enough new business, then it’s time for a change. It’s time to use a marketing strategy that puts you on top. Discover a proven and reliable system for attracting clients and increasing your sales >>

Want to discover the fastest way to jump start your sales? With this simple strategy you can generate more leads and sales in one month than you did in the last twelve. Start generating more leads and sales>>

Is your web site generating a ton of leads and sales? It could be. You can use your web site to bring in dozens, if not hundreds, of leads each week with these proven web marketing techniques. Get results with your web site marketing efforts >>

Want a simple and reliable way to attract all the clients you can handle? Stop letting your marketing hold you back. Use this marketing system to get as many clients as you need. Double your business >>

Not born an expert marketer? Not a problem. Just use this step-by-step marketing system to pull in more business than you ever imagined. Discover how easy it is to successfully market your business >>

Want to know the secret to networking that will get you more work? The first thing to do is stop using the same networking approach as everyone else and start using a strategy that generates results. See your business network and your bank account grow >>

Don’t let your expertise and your services be buried in obscurity. Discover the easiest and least costly way to market yourself. Get known, get hired and be more successful >>

Is Your Small Business Marketing Strategy Killing Your Profits?

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

With the wrong small business marketing strategy you could be killing your profits and limiting your business. Your small business marketing strategy is like the driver in a car, with marketing tactics being the engine. If you know where you want to go and how to get there, your small business marketing tactics will help you attract many more clients, if not you could crash.

Every business uses one or more of the following tactics to attract clients; mailings, advertisements, phone calls, networking, promotional events, a web site and sending email. If you use any of these and aren’t attracting as many new clients as you want or making as much money as you’d like, the problem may not be the tactics. It’s your marketing strategy that needs attention.

Without an effective offline and online marketing strategy you won’t achieve the results you want, no matter how much time and money you spend. A high profile radio ad campaign won’t help you grow your business unless it includes a message that attracts your prospects. An article about your firm in a newspaper can bring in business or just be a conversation piece. Email messages you send can end up in your prospects’ delete bin or prompt them to contact you.

Mailings, radio advertisements or web sites are only delivery vehicles for your marketing message. They are the tactics you use to implement your strategy. Are you using the right offline and internet strategy to market your business?

Ready to stop wasting time and start making more money? Discover how to attract more clients with a comprehensive small business marketing strategy >>

What are the fundamental principles of your marketing strategy? If you can answer this question, you’re among one percent of business owners who can. Most people think only about their marketing tactics or vehicles and wonder why their profits aren’t growing as quickly as they would like.

Business-Building Marketing Strategy
To grow your business you need to:

Define Your Goals
Identify where you want to take your business and what you want to achieve. Other than making more money than you are now, have you written down a vision of what you want your business to be two years from now? Five years from now?

Target Your Marketing
Most small business owners waste their time and money pitching too broadly. Do you have an effective method for identifying the people who want your products and services?

Use a Problem Solving Approach
Over 95 percent of small business owners focus their marketing on the reasons people should buy their products and services, not on their clients. Is your small business marketing focused on client’s concerns and problems or on yours?

Demonstrate Value
Getting your name in front of people is a first step in marketing, but if your prospects don’t know what you do or how you can help them, you haven’t achieved your goal. Past clients and prospects may have only a limited idea of how you can help them. Do your prospects understand the range of problems you solve and the solutions you provide?

Build Relationships
Every past client and prospect who has shown an interest can help you grow your business. Most service professionals know this but waste this resource through lapsed or infrequent communication. Do you have a method for staying in touch on a monthly basis with every person who could help you grow you business? Do you have a strategy for growing the number of qualified prospects on this list each week?

Many people find that defining their marketing strategy is the hardest part of their job. So hard that many small business owners use a tactical approach instead. Don’t make this mistake!

Once you have clear business marketing goals and a well-defined strategy, your marketing will be more focused and you can make more effective use of appropriate marketing tactics to grow your business. Shift to strategic small business marketing and you’ll turbo charge your marketing and your business.

Start attracting more clients with your small business marketing plan that gets results. Discover how to Increase Sales with Less Selling.

Small Business Ideas: How to Play the Marketing Game

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

Marketing a small business is like any game. If you know the rules you are much more likely to win. All to often small businesses spend their limited time and money on advertising, networking, making calls, mailings, meeting with prospects, yet only achieve middling results. The problem isn’t that they don’t know their business or provide high quality products and services, its that they don’t know the rules of the marketing game.

Marketing To Win
To win the small business marketing game, you need to know the rules. The key rules to getting the clients you want are:

1. Market Solutions
2. Target Your Market
3. Demonstrate Value
4. Build Your Network
5. Stay in Touch

1. Market Solutions
Most service professionals focus their marketing on their approach and the products and services they offer. While competence is a key to doing the work, most clients’ primary concern is getting problems solved and having their spoken and unspoken needs met. Instead of marketing your credentials, your processes and methodology, focus on your prospects’ problems, and market your knowledge – the solutions you provide.

Small business marketing is about making connections, specifically between a client’s unmet need and the solutions you provide. The best way to impress clients is to show them you understand the problems they are experiencing. If you want to leverage your credentials, mention past clients when you provide examples of how you solved similar problems.

Discover these small business ideas to learn how to play by the marketing rules and attract more clients >>

2. Target Your Market
Are you getting a positive response to your small business marketing efforts? If not, then you may not have targeted your market and their specific needs and interests precisely enough. Independent professionals or small business owners often try to do the impossible and be everything to everybody. Instead the idea is to target your niche market and get the attention of this group.

3. Demonstrate Value
Actions speak louder than words. If you want clients to be aware of the value of your products or services, you will need to give them a test drive. Open the door with your newsletters, workshops, a free session or a business idea found on your web site. Over time demonstrating the value you provide will convince prospective clients of your ability to solve their problems and help position you as a trusted adviser.

4. Build Your Network
The objective is to know who is interested in your products and services. Networking is a good idea because people like to buy products from people they know and trust. If they’ve met you or been referred to you they are more likely to trust you.

Depending on the business you are in, you can build your network of prospects through conventional networking or through your web site and email. Either way the more qualified prospects you have in your network the better.

5. Stay in Touch
Memories are short. Once we hit middle age most of us can’t remember what we had for dinner two days ago, much less the host of services various firms provide. In most cases its safe to assume your target market has forgotten about the range of solutions you offer, if they remember you at all.

Stay in touch with your target market on a monthly or, at a minimum quarterly basis. When you contact people be clear about the action you want prospective, existing and past clients to take.

Win the Marketing Game With These Small Business Ideas
Once you know the rules to marketing you can apply them to map out your small business marketing strategy, and to select marketing tactics that will leave your competition in the dust.

How To Achieve A Breakthrough With Your Small Business Marketing

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

Have you ever found a new strategy or idea that really boosts your performance – a true breakthrough?

This January after skiing for over 40 years, I decided it was time for a tune up. Even with occasional lessons and a conscious effort to improve, I just wasn’t getting any better. I was working too hard and falling too often on the challenging terrain that I enjoy skiing with my son.

I signed up for two days of ski coaching with master skier John Clendenin who has reduced the complexities of skiing to four movements. Despite having skied for decades, over the years I had developed numerous bad habits. The crux of it was I wasn’t using the skis the right way to get where I wanted to go. Working with John and his staff, we focused on mastering the four fundamental movements that enable skiers to turn with ease.

The results of Clendenin’s coaching were astounding. After just two days my skiing had jumped several levels. The friends I was with, whose skills ranged from intermediate to expert, experienced the same leap in performance. With the benefit of some additional days to practice, I now can ski with much less effort and manage far more difficult slopes than I ever imagined I could handle.

We all have to be reminded again and again: to improve performance, you need to get the basics right. Even if you’ve been at it for years a coach can help you focus on the fundamentals and show you how to eliminate what’s holding you back.

Are you getting the results you want from your small business marketing?
Are you focused on the marketing principles that work for small business?

Discover how to grow your online and offline business >>

Whether you are a beginner or consider yourself an expert at marketing you can make dramatic gains with the assistance of a coach. According to one small business marketing coach I worked with, “No matter how good of a marketer you might be, having outside assistance in formulating business building strategies truly was key to my success.”

For another client, focusing her marketing on the problems she solves was the key. Now her advertising leads with a focus on client’s concerns and attracts many more clients.

Whether you are just starting out or have been in business for years, a small business marketing coach can help you be far more successful. Apply the marketing principles that work for small businesses and you’ll attract many more clients with less effort.

My teen aged son still skis better than I do but now I can keep up with ease and I’m having a lot more fun. I made a breakthrough in my performance with the help of a coach you can too.

Million Dollar Sales & Marketing Ideas on a Shoestring Budget

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

You want to market your small business but you don’t want to spend a lot of money? You may be just starting out and have precious little capital or you may have a successful business but want to spend as little as possible for the greatest results. Or, you may just be cheap. How can you create a small business marketing strategy that results in a steady stream of new clients on a shoestring budget?

The key is having the KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, SYSTEMS and TOOLS to create and implement your sales & marketing plans.

Is your sales and marketing strategy helping you earn as much as you’d like? Does your small business 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 the marketing strategies and tactics that can help you grow you online and offline business >>

KNOWLEDGE
While service professionals and small business owners are experts in their business, they often don’t have the knowledge they need to grow their businesses. If you aren’t attracting dozens of new prospects each week and converting at least one of them to client status, you need to learn what to do to market your business.

Depending on your budget, you can:
1. Visit your local library and read a dozen books on marketing, sales.
2. Spend one or two hundred dollars on a couple of manuals from the marketing masters on the web.
3. Hire a coach or consultant to help you learn what to do and how to do it.
4. Pay an expert to do your marketing for you.

SKILLS
Once you have a marketing plan you’ll need to develop some skills, no matter what your role is in your organization. The three most important skills are:

1. Asking the Right Questions
Open-ended questions are the best way to direct prospects to engage prospects, direct their thinking and learn what they want. Do you know:
– What your prospects care about?
– The problems your prospects want to solve?
– What information your prospects want?

Use questions to get the answers. Put together 5-10 questions to ask your prospects.

2. Listening
Listen carefully to understand, provide a synthesis of their responses and use a problem-solving approach to provide the link between symptoms and causes.

3. Writing Compelling Copy
The copy in your marketing materials and the copy you use for your “elevator speech” will make the difference between attracting or boring prospects. Demonstrate to prospects, that you understand their concerns and their business context, and that you are the expert they need. Start by regularly giving them an idea they can use.

SYSTEMS
Establish systems to support your small business marketing plans. Setting up the systems to market your business costs little and make an unmanageable task a clerical function you or your assistant can do. You’ll need to set a schedule for marketing activities, define responsibilities and use your computer to automate tasks.

The most important systems to develop and implement are a way to collect leads and stay in touch with prospects and clients. You’ll need a centralized database and a schedule for staying in touch with prospects and clients in order to do this.

Automate functions where possible so you can focus your time on delivering products and services. There is simple and easy to use software that can help you manage contacts, add prospects to your database and send out broadcast emails to the people who are interested in getting your ideas. Once you’ve put these marketing systems in place, you can focus on handling the growing number of inquires you will receive.

TOOLS
The tools you need to market your business will vary depending on your target market and the products and services you offer. The basics include:

1. Your marketing message and elevator speech. The verbiage you use to tell people why they need you and why they should contact you.

2.Marketing materials, the finished copy you use on everything from your business card, to your brochures, or online.

3. Questions, the questions you use when people call about your services, or when you meet with clients, or to find out what
information they want so you can write the perfect proposal.

4. Communication tools, such as a phone, email and web site.

Take a look at your marketing and determine if you have the Knowledge, Skills, Systems and Tools to attract a steady stream of new clients. Identify the gaps and fill them. You may need to invest a few dollars to make many, but with these small business marketing strategies you can limit marketing expenditures and maximize profits.

Learn how to get attention with your elevator speech and marketing message.

Use this link to discover how to increase sales with a better small business marketing plan.

Small Business Sales Ideas & Tips

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

Small Business Marketing Strategy & Tips

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

How to Create Fireworks With Strategic Marketing

Where to Focus Your Strategic Marketing?

Tune Up Your Strategic Marketing Strategy and Stop Wasting Time

Is Your Strategic Marketing Killing Your Profits?

Avoid the Strategic Marketing Blues with Your Offers

Is Your Strategic Marketing Full of Holes?

Strategic Marketing Idea: Use Product Research to Position Yourself as the Expert

Getting Lucky With Strategic Marketing

Strategic Marketing to Build Your Business

Cleaning Up Your Strategic Marketing for Increased Profits

Are You Using Chicken or Egg Strategic Marketing?

How to Get Your Boss to Spend Money on Your Strategic Marketing Plan

Strategic Marketing – Creating Marketing Breakthroughs to Grow Your Business

Growing Your Business by Setting Your Strategic Marketing Priorities

Winning at Business with Your Small Business Strategic Marketing Game Plan

How Important Is Your Small Business Strategic Marketing Message?

Making More for Your Small Business With Existing Clients

What Are You Really Marketing? It’s Not What You Think

What’s Your Web Site Strategic Marketing Missing?

How Do You Know When To Change Your Small Business Strategic Marketing?

Pain Free Small Business Strategic Marketing

Which Numbers Matter in Strategic Marketing?

How to Shorten the Sales Cycle with 3 Strategic Marketing Tips

Small Business Marketing Plans

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

Are You Using The Right Marketing Strategy To Market Your Business?

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

With the wrong marketing strategy you could be killing your profits and limiting your business. Your small business marketing strategy is like the driver in a car, with marketing tactics being the engine. If you know where you want to go and how to get there, your marketing tactics will help you attract many more clients, if not you could crash.

Every business uses one or more of the following tactics to attract clients; mailings, advertisements, phone calls, networking, promotional events, a web site and sending email. If you use any of these and aren’t attracting as many new clients as you want or making as much money as you’d like, the problem may not be the tactics. It’s your strategic marketing that needs attention.

Without an effective marketing strategy you won’t achieve the results you want, no matter how much time and money you spend. A high profile radio ad campaign won’t help you grow your business unless it includes a message that attracts your prospects. An article about your firm in a newspaper can bring in business or just be a conversation piece. Email messages you send can end up in your prospects’ delete bin or prompt them to contact you.

Mailings, radio advertisements or web sites are only delivery vehicles for your marketing message. They are the tactics you use to implement your strategy. Are you using the right strategy to market your business?

What are the fundamental principles of your marketing strategy? If you can answer this question, you’re among one percent of business owners who can. Most people think only about their marketing tactics or vehicles and wonder why their profits aren’t growing as quickly as they would like.

Wouldn’t you like to generate more leads and have more clients?
How much more could you be making if you could improve the response to your marketing?

Discover how you can use these proven small business marketing strategies and tactics to attract more clients >>

Business-Building Marketing Strategy
To grow your business you need to:

– Define Your Goals
Identify where you want to take your business and what you want to achieve. Other than making more money than you are now, have you written down a vision of what you want your business to be two years from now? Five years from now?

– Target Your Small Business Marketing
Most small business owners waste their time and money pitching too broadly. Do you have an effective method for identifying the people who want your products and services?

– Use a Problem Solving Approach
Over 95 percent of small business owners focus their marketing on the reasons people should buy their products and services, not on their clients. Is your business marketing focused on client’s concerns and problems or on yours?

– Demonstrate Value
Getting your name in front of people is a first step in marketing, but if your prospects don’t know what you do or how you can help them, you haven’t achieved your goal.

Past clients and prospects may have only a limited idea of how you can help them. Do your prospects understand the range of problems you solve and the solutions you provide?

– Build Relationships
Every past client and prospect who has shown an interest can help you grow your business. Most service professionals know this but waste this resource through lapsed or infrequent communication. Do you have a method for staying in touch on a monthly basis with every person who could help you grow you business? Do you have a strategy for growing the number of qualified prospects on this list each week?

Many people find that defining their marketing strategy is the hardest part of their job. So hard that many small business owners use a tactical approach instead. Don’t make this mistake!

Once you have clear marketing goals and a well-defined strategy, your marketing will be more focused and you can make more effective use of appropriate marketing tactics to grow your business. Shift to strategic marketing and you’ll turbo charge your marketing and your business.

The 5 Fundamental Principles of Small Business Marketing

By Charlie   |   March 16th, 2010

In marketing as in science there are basic principles that govern the movement of bodies in space, or prospects and clients. Just as people instinctively know the law of gravity, they are aware of the fundamental principles of small business marketing. Unlike the law of gravity which is hard to deny, many small business owners often neglect to apply core marketing principles to attract clients.

Even if you’ve never been hit on the head by an apple, you wouldn’t argue that objects fall down instead of up. Of course Isaac Newton’s true genius in describing the law of gravity was in realizing that the same force that attracts apples to the earth is responsible for keeping objects in orbit around other planets and moons.

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 the marketing strategies and tactics that can help you grow you online and offline business >>

Use the following marketing principles to pull in prospects the same way gravity pulls planets into orbit around the sun. (Imagine yourself as the sun, the driving force of the solar system.)

1. START WITH YOUR CLIENTS
Client goals and concerns are the reason you are in business. Clients buy your products and services to meet their needs. You know this, but are you applying it to your marketing?

Many service providers marketing materials are little more than a laundry list of services. To attract prospects and clients, start with client problems as the catalyst for writing your marketing “meme” and materials. If you are a massage therapist you may provide “hot stone” or “deep tissue” massage but to get your prospects’ attention you’ll need to talk about relieving back pain or eliminating muscle spasms.

2. TARGET YOUR MARKET
There are a finite number of people who want and are willing to buy any given product and service. Marketing to people who don’t want what you provide is a waste of time and money. You know this, but are you targeting your marketing to those people who are most likely to buy your
services and products?

Learn (if you don’t already know) who buys your products and services and why. Develop a picture of your ideal buyer, their demographics, concerns and motivates. Use this information to identify marketing tactics that will attract them to you.

3. DEMONSTRATE VALUE
Before a prospect becomes a client and a client becomes a repeat client, they need to be convinced of the value of your products and services. They need to feel confident that your products and services will do what they are supposed to do. You know this, but is your marketing built around demonstrating the value you provide?

Many independent professionals sell information and ideas. If you are a web designer, you could provide a tutorial on how to plan a web site. If you provide tangible services, you need to show people examples of your work and provide testimonials from former clients.

4. GROW YOUR NETWORK
Lead generation is the lifeblood of any small business. The more qualified prospects contact, the more clients you’ll have. Even if you don’t want a thousand clients, if you have lots of prospects you can have the option of having just a few high paying clients. You knew this too, but do you have a small business marketing strategy which helps you grow the number of qualified prospects you market to each month?

One of your marketing goals should be to improve your lead generation and motivate qualified prospects to give you their contact information so you can market to them. If you sell information, publishing articles with a free teaser at the end is one way to do this. If you sell products or tangible services, a raffle can attract prospects.

Want to generate more leads and increase sales?

Disover how to use your web site to improve your lead generation and profits with this link >>

5.BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
People like to buy from others they know and trust. And attracting new clients takes ten times as much effort as selling to a repeat client. You know this too, but do you have a marketing strategy which helps prospects get to know and trust you?

You can assume that your prospects receive more information everyday than they can remember. Even if they need and want what you have to offer, there is a good chance they will forget an occasional radio ad or an
annual newsletter. To grow your business, find ways to regularly stay in touch, educate them, and explain the ways you can help solve their problems.

You already know the law of gravity and these five core marketing principles. Become a true genius like Isaac Newton, and apply them to pull prospects and clients into your orbit and grow your business.

Ready to start growing your business? Discover how to grow your online and offline business >>

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