Good Marketing Tips For All Times

The following marketing tips are excellent ways of expanding your customer base in these tough economic times. While this particular article was directed toward the consumer and small business B2C, Business to Consumer model, it is also well worth reading for B2B customers, Business to Business, in which the time from first contact to completing a sale is typically longer with B2B than in the B2C model.

7 Marketing Ideas to Expand Your Customer Base and Profits

How do you grab people's attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you've identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your chosen business or field. To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and marketing trends in our culture. While not all inclusive, the following list of priorities and small business marketing tips can help put your small business on a faster track to growth.

Marketing Tip #1: Gain Customer Confidence. Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It's up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence. If you haven't clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they'll be hesitant to commit, and the sale will go to your competitor.

Marketing Tip #2: Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using some form of integrated marketing. In other words, the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing is partly the result of exposing your target group to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible (frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.

Marketing Tip #3: Enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious (and I'm not talking about using multiple exclamation points after sentences!!! That detracts from your credibility.) If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you.

Marketing Tip #4: Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales process as focusing attention on product features and benefits.

Marketing Tip #5: Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations.

Marketing Tip #6: Impose a deadline. Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendency to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it's often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.

Marketing Tip #7: Create a business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your strategic plan should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, and target market analysis (know your customers).

Copyright © 2009 Joel Sussman

------------------------

Joel N. Sussman, an upstate New York business writer, newsletter publisher, and Internet marketer, has created an online small business resource, called "Marketing Survival Kit.com". Get access to hundreds of free and affordable business marketing ideas, strategies, and tools by visiting www.marketingsurvivalkit.com


-----------------------

Professional Web Services, an Internet marketing services firm specializing in marketing, SEO, online advertising, and web branding to help expand their clients' customer base and increase bottom line sales. Contact us today to get your business and website found online in more places for your products or services you sale.

Prepare for Successful Trade Shows and Conventions This Year

Sales Skills that Strike Gold at Trade Shows

For the self-employed, trade shows and conventions are a golden opportunity to gain exposure for your service or product offering. Unfortunately many hopeful entrepreneurs take on their first show with no idea of how to get the most new business for their trade-show dollars.

Trade show participation is typically one of the more costly marketing strategies, so it pays to have a solid plan for success before you set up your trade show booth. For maximum revenue impact, your trade show strategy should include these four elements:

1. Have your sales skills prepared and polished

Before you get anywhere near the trade show, know your sales process inside and out. You will only have a few short moments with each prospect, so you have to make that valuable time count. Here are some sales skills to count on:

• Be prepared with qualifying questions so you don’t waste valuable time with those who have no need for your product or service. Ask questions that will uncover your potential buyer’s needs.
• Listen carefully for buyer “hot buttons” that will reveal your prospect’s buying motivation. If you address their specific needs (instead of offering a canned presentation), they will be much more likely to buy from you.
• Anticipate objections, and be prepared with answers that will increase the buyer’s confidence. This will allow you to transform passive interest into qualified “hot” sales leads.

2. Have a prospect-gathering strategy

Lead generation for future sales is the number one goal of trade show participation. Most people do not intend to make purchasing decisions at trade shows. While many attend in order to gather product information, the majority of trade show attendees come for entertainment purposes—it’s just a nice way to get out of the office on a Friday afternoon. Simply put, without some way to gather information on prospect leads, your time and money are wasted.

There are several means for gathering prospect leads:

• Collect and make notes on business cards for business-to-business trade shows
• Have them sign up for your insider-information newsletter
• Set appointments for prospect follow up with in-office or in-home visits 
  

Be sure that your information-gathering tool collects all the information you need. You don’t want to find out at the last minute that your contact card should have had a line for “cell phone.”

When the show is over you will need to distinguish “hot” and “warm” leads from the mildly interested. This will help you set your follow up priority list and generate new business quickly.

3. Be proactive to initiate conversation

Once your booth is finally set up and the crowd begins to arrive, you must be ready to take the lead in starting up conversations with visitors. If you sit back and wait for people to ask about your product, you will be ignored.

It doesn’t take an extrovert to be a great conversation starter if you follow these few tips:

• Stand, rather than sit, so that you’ll be at eye level with your audience
• Seek out initial eye contact
• Be approachable with an inviting smile
• Don’t have a table between you and the crowd
• Be prepared with open ended questions that lead to conversation

4. Have a lead follow up strategy

Once the show is over, don’t sit too long on those precious leads. Have a follow up strategy in place to contact them before they forget all about you and your offering. For best results, contact all your leads within the first two weeks of the show.

Your follow up strategy will most likely involve a phone call to the prospect. This is where so many good intentions fail. Let’s face it, making phone calls feels an awful lot like telemarketing, and you didn’t start up your business so that you could be a telemarketer. Right?

Making the first call is the most difficult, but if you remember a few important distinctions, it will be a lot easier to get through your list of calls:

• You are calling people who gave you their contact information; therefore you are not making unsolicited phone calls.
• Since these people have already met you, you are not a stranger to them.
• You are calling people who have already shown interest in your product.

Contacting leads after the show requires your greatest selling skills. Much depends on how well you established rapport during your initial visit at the trade show. Did you leave them with something to remember you by or were you just another face in a long row of displays? In your post-show follow up you’ll need to take them from “Yeah, that looks like a cool product,” to “When can you deliver that, and do you take Visa or Master Card?”

As with all small business owners, your marketing budget has its limits; you want to make sure that your trade shows are paying off by generating new business. For the highest return on your trade show investment, prepare a solid strategy before you go. You’ll see a boost in sales that will have impact the whole year through.

---

Deborah Walker, Small Business Coach helps entrepreneurs build their bottom line with sales strategies and expert advice. Her revenue growth expertise can help keep your business in the black. Learn how Deborah can help your business at: http://www.RevenueQueen.com

---

Get your business off to a fast golden start with Professional Web Services internet marketing services today.

What is the Secret to Sales and Marketing Success?

The Real Secret of Sales and Marketing Success

Those in business ignore sales and marketing at their peril. These disciplines are the very lifeblood of any commercial enterprise, whether a single mother working from home or a massive multi-national corporate body. Every business has either a service or a product to bring to the market, but bringing it is not enough - it has to be sold as well. To put this another way - consumers, potential customers and clients have to be both made aware of the product or service and then coerced into purchasing it.

Without customer knowledge or awareness, there can be no purchase, and where no one is buying there can be no profit. Marketing is the science of bringing the right product to the market, at the right price, in the right way, at a Nett profit. It is the responsibility of the sales and marketing team to ensure this happens.

Individuals have their preferences. For some it is search engine marketing, for others it is email marketing, for many it is direct marketing. But whatever the preference, the marketing strategy and all it entails is a vital step. It is the very root of the success you desire for yourself and your employer.

Training seminars and events should be attended often by all those operating in the sales and marketing arena. Selling is a skill that comes naturally to some, but not to most. Yet it is possible to master these skills so they become more like drills. With the right training and strategies in place, the appropriate successful selling responses should kick in automatically. With marketing too, the responses should be creative and limitless.

There is such a choice of media now that for the marketers it can be overwhelming. The power of the internet and the universal ownership of televisions mean that a vast number of people and markets can be reached quickly - almost instantly. A quick review of what people enter into the search engines also helps paint a picture of the market psychology. It is amazing how people type words in an almost random order. For example, one of the most searched terms is engine marketing search. I find that amusing, but over one million people type that in every month. Why do they reverse the words? I don't know - but it is important to know that they do so marketing strategy can reflect these things where necessary.

Some managers will opt to delegate everything to a marketing agency. The problem here is that many are prima donnas and will take the opportunity to do what they have always wanted to do, and use your money to do it. They can be like architects who do the same. The point is that for an agency marketing campaign, there must be a tightly detailed and described brief and a contract that while not limiting the ideas or creative juices of the agents and their staff, keeps them firmly bound to what you require. All this of course should be underpinned by solid market research.

At its most basic level, both selling and marketing are about the art of communications and the best choice of media for the markets to be targeted. Not all potential customers require the same approach. For example, wholesale and retail markets will attract different methods of communication by the sales team. Again, if a product is to be sold in a store or shop, it is not the same approach as advertising an article to be sold at auction. The advertisements for each will appear in different magazines and other media, and the ads will vary too in design, presentation and language.

The real secret of success here is to start to do things differently. The old maxim about being surprised when there is no change in circumstances while you continue to do things in the same way stands as an eternal truth. I would encourage anyone to go and see, hear and / or read what Dan Kennedy has to say on this subject. A quick Google search will reveal a wealth of material. My best counsel is that you should note well what he has to say. Dan is one of the foremost sales and marketing consultants in America.

------------------------

John Campbell's aim is to help people succeed in their day to day jobs. Discover how to use specific advertising and marketing secrets to generate all the leads, customers, profits and business you could only dream about before - with practically no work on your part. See The Magnetic Marketing Tool Kit ( www.magneticmarketingtoolkit.com ) to learn more .......

------------------------

Professional Web Services helps businesses get their websites found online. Start gaining new customers from the Internet today. Learn how your website can become the key to your sales and marketing success online with the 24x7 sales and marketing business solution.

eCommerce Online Storefronts Effortless Commerce

Thanks to new online technologies, the Internet now affords everyone an opportunity for profits. One of the latest business trends on the Internet is something called Effortless Commerce, an integrated, turnkey managed eCommerce solution that enables even those customers who don't have their own websites to sell and deliver content to a worldwide audience.

Business eCommerce Trends: How Online Storefronts Provide another Option to do Business Online

Have you ever wondered how artists, musicians, or business people who do NOT have a website, can join in the world of ecommerce and make profits? Thanks to new online technologies, the Internet now affords everyone an opportunity for profits. One of the latest business trends on the Internet is something called Effortless Commerce, an integrated, turnkey managed eCommerce solution that enables even those folks who don't have their own websites to sell and deliver content to a worldwide audience. The technology enables people to profit from their content who otherwise could not easily do so. They can literally create a product, put it on a storefront for sale, and make profits.

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet.

Let's say you are a personal trainer who has a new DVD to sell, or a young aspired musician with the latest music that you would like to get out to the world. You don't make enough money yet to spend the money for a website. You have explored the route of getting a manager and sales team to sell your product into retail stores, but this cuts into the percent of profits that you could make. Where can you turn?

The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown dramatically since the wide introduction of the Internet. The Census Bureau of the US Department of Commerce estimated that U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the second quarter of 2007, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, was $33.6 billion, an increase of 6.4 percent (0.8%) from the first quarter of 2007.

Online storefront using Effortless Commerce requires no coding or technical expertise. People have the option to offer products in downloadable formats so that their customers can purchase physical disks, digital downloads, or both. Their online store will automatically display options in the local language and currency for visitors; provides automatic tax calculation, filing, and payment; has special pricing structure for content suppliers; editing, authoring and graphic design services; uses an On Demand Production Engine whereby CD/DVD products are manufactured upon purchase with zero inventory; offers automated order processing ... everything, from the time of purchase until shipping products, happens automatically and on time; multiple shipping methods and worldwide delivery; provides email notifications to customers with shipping confirmations and tracking numbers; and features automatic payment.

Another trend in online business is a new phenomenon called pretailing, which Garter says, "consists of the multi-channel shopping activities consumers do before they even visit a retailer's Web site or local store. Pretailing will increase in importance as consumers get access to more retail information and services on the Internet." (Source: Gartner Group, 28 February 2007)

And if you don't think that eCommerce is important enough to the global economy, according to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers' Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2006-2010, online advertising spend predictions will reach $26 billion by the year 2010.

---

Acutrack, Inc. enables customers to create, publish and deliver custom content for DVD and CD distribution worldwide. The company provides fast, high-quality CD and DVD production including video editing, DVD authoring, graphic design, photo realistic and silkscreen printing, and a variety of packaging, copy protection and fulfillment services.

---

Do you want more customers for your business? Internet marketing services by Professional Web Services today will help gain more sales and customers for tomorrow. Contact us for a free marketing evaluation of your business website.