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Network Your NetworksNetwork with friends who then network with their friends. There’s power in numbers. Don’t spam of course, but utilize your network to get the word out to your people who know people who know people. Someone ultimately knows someone that can help you out…and believe it or not…will want to. When networking, do NOT focus on getting a referral or lead. Instead, focus on helping others. If you help them first (by adding value to their life/business), they’ll help you later.
Maintain Relationships With ClientsThe difference between a successful company and a mediocre one often boils down to an owner’s commitment to building (and sustaining) relationships with clients and prospects. While it’s important to keep up traditional communication and PR, business owners should also be extending their relationships through online forums – website, blogs, and social networks. Conversations are happening all around you – are you listening, are you participating? Are you a thought leader? Be visible!
Listen. Tweet. Listen. Listen Again.Identify your ideal clients and find them on Twitter. Then start following them! Spend weeks listening to them; you’ll be amazed what they will tell you about their concerns, their ideal products, their current frustrations with their vendors. It’s a great way to get open honest market research.
Inspire Customers To Call YouDo something really different. Send a monthly postcard instead of a hard copy newsletter. Self-printed cost is $0.46 ea. including the stamp. Make it fun and colorful with a strong “Call to Action” title, like: “100 reasons to call us. List10-to-20 reasons, including your skills, talents, and tasks. Give customers a coupon for a discount, or a free doughnut, or something fun to inspire them to call.
HARO Gift BagsEach Friday in the second edition of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) there are Gift Bag Requests. Look for decision makers with events that are a match for your product or service. Good fits mean quality networking opportunities. Make sure your gift bag offering has your website address, business card and additional offers that inspire recipients to follow up or at least check you out. For instance, if you’re giving away t-shirts, include a list of celebrities who also wear the shirt they’re getting.
Be GenerousTo keep customers loyal to you, instead of a frequent buyer program, send your customers small “surprise” gifts. Customers come to expect rewards when they are members of a program. Surprises always work to instill loyalty and retention.Don’t make the mistake of thinking that promotional items are only for conferences and tradeshows. When given out with (or in place of) a business card at a lunch, a meeting or in passing, small promotional items become a gift. People expect free stuff at conferences, they don’t expect gifts. Keep a small, branded (and useful) item with you. You can be sure they’ll remember you. They don’t have to be expensive. Tip calculator cards, tea bags, pens and pads, small flashlights or things very target specific to your industry, like small packets of flower seeds for a gardener or landscaper with their contact information on it.
Donate several of your products or services to a non-profit organization that is sponsoring a live auction and the proceeds will be donated to the charity. Your store name will be displayed on the products for the duration of the event and the donation is tax deductible. Plus, you’ll be helping others.
creating products and services which increase customer convenience ,reduce human drudgery and generate customer delight - follow Thomas Alva edison
The first decision in any marketing strategy is to define your target customer. “Who do you serve?” always needs to be answered clearly before you can execute any tactic effectively. This means you have to say “no” to other potential customers who might buy from you but who are clearly bad fits for your narrow focus. This takes time to develop the discipline, but you can’t do effective marketing without it.
Focusing on a well-defined target may make you uncomfortable at first, but stay the course and follow through. An accountant friend of mine changed his business from “doing taxes for anyone in Phoenix” to “a CPA who does taxes and investments only for physicians” – his best customers who have special needs. He made this change over a period of two years and tripled his business, narrowed his service offerings and strengthened his pitch.
If you are spending time and money on marketing but your efforts are not driving enough sales, the problem is almost always that you haven’t narrowed your target market definition enough to be effective. The narrower you define your market so you can focus on those that you can best serve and those that can best service you, the more effective your entire business will be.
Your category is simply the short description of what business you are in. What few words would someone say to describe your business? Starbucks is “high-quality coffee” Chipotle is “fresh Mexican burritos.” My friend’s tax business is simply “tax accounting for physicians in Phoenix.”
Most business owners can’t resist over-complicating their company descriptions. This leaves people unsure of what you actually do, which weakens your marketing effectiveness. Here’s a simple rule: If someone can’t clearly remember your category description a month after you meet them, they were never clear about what you do in the first place.
Clearly defining your category helps amplify your marketing and sales efforts. Think of what it would take to be the best – the leader – in your category. You’re not the leader? Then narrow your category definition (or your target market focus) until you are the leader. A focused laser can melt steel at a distance, but the same light undirected has no effect. Be laser-like in your focus.
Your unique benefit should highlight the one (or two) main things your product or service actually delivers (benefits) that your target customer really wants, not a long list of all the things your product does (features).
At Infusionsoft, we know our customers don’t just want our software: They want to grow sales and save time. We don’t describe everything our software does or the hundreds of benefits, we keep our focus on those three key benefits in everything we do. And the simpler we describe it, the better our marketing works.
When someone is looking to buy a solution to a problem, they will quickly make sense of the alternatives to compare against – your competition. However, most entrepreneurs haven’t specifically defined who their real competition is and don’t focus their messages to create clear differentiation for their buyers. This frustrates the buying decision process and makes your marketing efforts weaker.
You need to be clear in your own mind about what your biggest competition is. If you are a tax accountant, is your competition really the other tax accountants in town? Other CPAs or financial planners? DIY tax software? Doing taxes manually? National tax accounting chains? Each competitor type would create different comparisons, so you need to narrow it down to one or two main competitor types.
Once you have defined your competition, make a list of all the things you do differently and better. Then rank each of them by how important these factors are to your target customer. Pick the top one or two and put them on your homepage and include them in your elevator pitch.
Don’t overcomplicate this. People just want to know one or two things to move their decision along. Is it cheaper? Do you have faster delivery? Best personalized service? Are you the only accountant who exclusively serves physicians in Phoenix?
When you put the five key decisions of marketing strategy in a sentence form, it looks like this fill-in-the-blank statement:
Your company name is the leading category for target customers that provides unique benefit. Unlike competitors, your company does unique differentiator.
Our growth rate doubled when we focused and committed to this clear and simple marketing strategy.
Try it for yourself: Fill in the blanks to create the marketing strategy statement for your own business. Get some perspective from employees, friends and best customers. List all the possibilities and then make some decisions. Say it out loud a few times. You should feel clarity and power coming through. It will also show you a few things you could stop doing in your business that would create more focus.
Can you see why it makes no sense to Tweet, to send a broadcast email or build a new website if you are not clear about your marketing strategy that has laser-like focus? Doing these tactics without a road map – your marketing strategy – will not deliver the right customers and will give you fewer sales than if you had invested the time to implement a focused marketing strategy.
Here’s the real secret that successful companies practice with extreme discipline: Creating a clear marketing strategy is not what companies do after they get big, it’s what small companies do to grow and get bigger in the first place.
Thank you for the invitation, but unfortunately I cannot answer your question, as I believe there is no good or bad marketing strategy. It all depends on many factors such as your product, your market, your objectives and many other. So I may prefer a marketing strategy now, but few months choose another due to change of circumstances.
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