Kreative Group, Inc.

3 Easy Steps to Start a Blog

2011-02-01T14:31:00.001-05:00

Blogging is a great way to reach your audience, share your thoughts, and even help you with your Internet marketing. I’ve been blogging for nearly 3 years and continue to enjoy the benefits of not only communicating with an audience, but engaging in meaningful dialog. Starting a blog is easy to do and pays huge dividends.

There are a number of free services available that offer free blog services. Sites like Blogger and WordPress only require a brief registration and set up. Once you determine a theme for your blog and a template, you’re ready to begin posting. Posts are entries you make on your blog that are published instantly.

Some bloggers post comments to their blog each and every day, others once a week. Regardless of how frequently you post to your blog, content can be focused on a specific theme or random topics. The most popular blogs focus on a specific niche and provide valuable information, content, and commentary that encourage interaction with blog followers.

Sign up for a blog service. Begin development of your blog by signing up for Blogger or WordPress. Once you have an account, you can quickly set up your blog. Consider the goal of your blog and what type of commitment you are willing to make. Start small and be consistent.

Determine how you will monetize your blog. If you want to use your blog to generate revenue, there are a few techniques you can apply depending on which platform you’re using. One of the most popular methods of monetizing your blog is with the help of Google Adsense. This is a popular option and very easy to add to your blog. Not only does it generate a small amount of revenue for you on a weekly basis, but it also provides relevant links based on your posts.

Another great way to monetize your blog is through paid links. The concept of offering paid links is pretty straight forward. You create a section of you blog that lists recommended sites. In this list, you only place links that people have paid you to post. There are some tools you can use to automate this process. I simply add a link to a post that says, “How to post your link” with directions and a pass through to a PayPal page. You can set up a single time payment or subscription, allowing would be advertisers the opportunity to purchase a link on your blog monthly or for a longer period of time.

Many individuals are monetizing their blogs by using pay per post or other blogging network. Essentially, advertisers search for bloggers who are willing to write a post to promote their product and services or brand. You can sign up for one of these networks quite easily and be contacted when advertisers feel that your blog would be ideal for distributing a message. You write a blog post and get paid for doing so.

One thing to keep in mind is that the success of you blog is based on a number of factors. I believe that having a targeted blog that offers original content is ideal. You will build a large following. This is essential because most of the monetization methods are based on having enough traffic to make your blog appealing to advertisers as well as blog readers.

Identifying The Key Features of a Company’s Corporate Culture

2011-01-24T16:31:00.000-05:00

A company's culture and overall brand is imperative to the sustainability of any business. The corporate's culture is mirrored in the character or "personality" of its work environment - the factors that underlie how the company tries to conduct its business and the behaviors that are held in high esteem. The chief things to look for include the following:

1. The values, business principles, and ethical standards that management preaches and practices. Actions does speak louder than words here.

2. The company's approach to people management and the official policies, procedures, and operating practices that paint the white lines for the behavior of company personnel.

3. The spirit and character that pervade the work climate. Is the workplace vibrant and fun, all-business, tense and harried, or is it highly competitive? The people you work with excited about their work and emotionally connected to the company's business or are they just wanting to receive a paycheck? What are you doing to empower them?

4. The company's revered traditions and oft-repeated stories. Do you or your team talk about "acts" or "how we do things around here?

5. How do you relate to your team and clients is important. Your personality suits you well for the business you are in and if it doesn't then you may be in the wrong business. How you relate to others does set you apart from your competition based on people do business with people that they like so are you likable?

6. The manner in which your business interacts with your vendors, external stakeholders
and your local communities are as well very important to your brand and company.

Include your social and cultural position as your branding because it will be how they perceive you as well. The overall actions and behaviors of you the boss, your employees and the experience will either enable you to promote your business or it will suffer. There has to be a commitment to the corporate culture because company's continuously evolve and there has to remain some consistency and loyalty to the branded culture.

If you are going to change the culture, always change for the betterment of the company and those who work for and with you.

B2B Marketing In a Recession

2010-12-21T11:34:00.001-05:00

The world has just experienced the worst global economic recession during the last years. With the start of 2010 every body is willing to see a positive change in the economy through out the world. Some major economists have claimed that the recession period is over. Moreover, some major economies of the world showed positive trend in their quarterly GDP. It looks like everything is going to run smoothly very soon.

B2B is one of the sectors that suffer whenever recession hits an economy. The purchasing power of the power tightens and eventually the demand of businesses for purchasing different products and services also goes down. It is always considered difficult by the b2b marketers to attract visitors and make them loyal customers. During the recession period when people do not possess purchasing power it gets even more difficult to do that. In such conditions some b2b marketers stop marketing and advertising of their products, cutting down the marketing budget or reducing head counts to balance the profit and loss. All these acts by the b2b marketers create problem for them when the recession period ends. A lot of b2b marketers after implementing such strategies during the recession period lose customers as they did not market their products timely and then they have to put an extra budget on marketing to attract more customers. Moreover, reducing the head counts also creates difficulty for them in retaining the employees.

Ideally, they should bring a change in the marketing and advertising strategies during recession period but those strategies should be profitable in the long run. One of the most important strategies during the recession period is to retain the old customers. More focus should be on old customers as they are an important asset to the business. Keeping up with them and bringing them what they want during the recession period will lead them towards being loyal. Another way of marketing and advertising during the recession period is to bring the best value to the consumers. Marketing is the only tool through which a number of customers can be attracted by any business. Therefore, any changes in the marketing and advertising strategy should be made carefully. Besides, with the start of 2010 the global economic recession is headed towards improvement and the economies are recovering, still these things should be kept in mind. 2010 should be viewed as the best time for B2B marketer as the major economies are recovering from crisis and a game plan could be set in advance to avail this opportunity.

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Embarrassed to Discuss Your Prices...How To Overcome

2010-12-06T13:05:00.002-05:00

Last week, a wonderfully-skilled computer technician fixed my computer which I have had some trouble with. She was competent, courteous and efficient. She answered all our questions simply, with skill and eloquence. I was amazed, as how might imagine, when I asked her how much we owed her, her embarrassed reply was, "Gee, is $50 okay?"

With the quality of work she'd done and the amount of time she put into it, I would have expected to pay double that amount. Her resistance to naming her price reminded me of my own business clients who have the same problem.

All entrepreneurs feel fear at some point, including attorneys, consultants, coaches and writers.It's a natural part of starting or growing your business. It can be uncomfortable to take risks, to name your price and tell a prospective customer that you want to work with them.

Roberto Goizueta, the late chairman of Coca-Cola, said, "If you take risks, you may still fail; but if you do not take risks, you will surely fail. The greatest risk of all is to nothing." Put this mantra into your head: Risk equals reward.

So, what's the problem?

Do you feel your fees are too high?
Do you think you are not qualified or experienced enough to charge that rate?
Are you afraid of rejection? (Or, possibly, afraid of acceptance, which will mean you will have to perform?)
Are you afraid the prospect will raise an objection to the fee, and you won't know how to reply?
Are you shy and uncomfortable talking with strangers?
Are you afraid to take risks?
Are you generally uncomfortable talking about money?
Where do these thoughts and beliefs arise? Is it part of your personality or is this a behavior you learned from your past experiences or culture?

In many families and cultures, it's taboo to talk about money or to ask to be paid. While it might be personally beneficial to look inside yourself for the reasons why you act this way, it's also important to get unstuck by using techniques which help you move forward, such as:

Have a good pricing strategy. Research the average fees for your type of business so that you know your prices are in line with expectation. If you can't get competitor pricing information, try Brenner Books. If your experience warrants it, increase your pricing to reflect your higher skills, knowledge and experience. If your're not sure how to create a pricing strategy, research it online to talk with a small business consultant or mentor.

Before discussing prices with a prospective customer, establish that the prospective customer needs your services or products. You'll feel more comfortable discussing your fees if you know the prospective customer really wants what you offer. Ask a lot of questions to see if their problem and your solutions are a good match.

Here are some more tips:

Put your fees on your website and brochure. In this way, prospects will know your fees before the sales conversation begins.

Be honest. Tell the prospect what the options are for your services or products, any quantity discounts you offer, and how payment is delivered. Practice saying this over and over again until the words and phrases slip comfortably from your mouth.

Act confidently when delivering your fees. Don't downplay your fees. State your fees, then shut up. Don't make excuses for your fees or ramble on about them. Look directly at the prospect while delivering tour fees.

Don't automatically offer discounts. This tells the prospect that your fees are soft and that they're negotiable. Instead, state your fees and options, then ask them which package is right for them.

Act "as if". How would an experienced person in your industry act, when discussing her fees? Act as if you are that person and you'll find your confidence increasing with each conversation. Practice, practice, practice.

Get Training. I you're uncomfortable with the whole sales process, get sales training. By attending a class, you'll learn different ways of saying the same thing, and you're bound to find a way that's right for you.

Refer Out. If the prospect really can't afford your fees and you can't afford to offer a discount, refer that prospect to someplace where they can find an alternative. Say, "If you can't afford my fees, you can try these online referral services where you might find someone in your price range."

Talking about your prices can be uncomfortable. But with practice and persistence, and a willingness to overcome your fears, you can begin to have comfortable conversations with your prospective customers.

How to Manage Your Brand Online

2010-11-02T14:57:00.001-04:00

Reputation Management: How to Manage Your Reputation Online
If you've ever Googled your name, you know how important managing your reputation online can be. Each day, thousands of individuals are searching online for information about others simply by searching on Google or other leading search engines. With information being so readily available, managing your reputation is more important than ever.

Fortunately, managing your reputation online isn't all that difficult, but it does take work. Here are 7 basic steps you can take to ensure that your reputation doesn't become negatively impacted by what's being said about you online.

1. See where you stand. Start your reputation management initiative by Googling your name. Try it with quotes and with out (first and last name together). Look through each of your results on page one and page two of Google. Are there any there are are negative or you wish to remove?

2. Set up a Google alert. Visit Google and set up an alert for your name. After setting up the alert Google will send you and email to confirm that you wish to receive the updates. Accept the alert and each time your name is published to the Web, you'll know about it.

3. Contact website owners for name removal. If there are sites that include your name and commentary that is less than desirable, contact the appropriate websites requesting that the information be removed. More often than not, website owners will agree to remove your name and/or inappropriate information.

4. Purchase a domain with your name. Add sites and webpages associated with your name and watch negative search results get pushed lower on Google rankings. Visit GoDaddy or another provider of website URLs and hosting, and purchase a domain that contains your name. Even if your name is rather common, experiment with variations until your name can be established in the form of a dot com. Once you own a domain, publish a webpage with your personal profile.

5. Start a blog under your name. Blogger is a great tool for setting up your own blog which can be used to publish information about yourself. Popular blog sites are often picked up by Google and you can control the content. Be sure to sign up for Technorati after your blog has been published. Submit your blog for review and its popularity will increase, improving search rankings and continuing to push down negative search results.

6. Free press release. Use free-press-release.com or a similar free press release site to publish favorable information about your and your reputation. This form of reputation management is easy and costs nothing. Be sure to use your name throughout the release and in the release title.

7. Author articles in your field. Publish article relative to a particular topic or area in which you've done some work or have experience. Use article distribution serivces to build online references to your content. Make sure your articles contain an about the author section that links back to your main website.

There are a variety of strategies you can use to manage online references about you, your family, or others that need to manage their reputation online. Other online sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and Squidoo, offer ample opportunity to deliver favorable search results that can push unfavorable results down in search engine rankings. The key is to start today - proactively manage your reputation and put yourself in a favorable light.

The Most Important Aspect of Marketing: TEST, TEST, TEST

2010-10-07T16:00:00.001-04:00

One of my colleagues recently asked me, out of all the aspects of marketing including online marketing, marketing strategy, Web 2.0, market research, etc., what was the most important? Without hesitation I replied, "Testing".

Many of my marketing friends might argue and profess that if you don't have the right message, reach the right audience, the right timing, or the right offer, you won't succeed. And to that I say ABSOLUTELY! In fact, those are the very elements of a successful campaign that can be identified through proper testing. So how do you know that your messaging is optimized or that you're reaching your target audience in the most effective way possible? Only proper testing can give you that information.

When someone on my team says that a particular campaign was a success I ask, "how do you know?" The answer often has something to do with metrics around campaign performance. But this information is merely releative. If your click through rate was 20% and your conversion rate was 0.35% for an online campaign, it may have generated a positive return, but is 0.35% the best we could have done? Did we test the campaign to set expectations before full launch?

By testing multiple landing pages, post cards, direct mail packages, keyword campaigns, and other marketing campaigns, you can find what resonates best with your audience and set proper expectations for performance. Once you've established a baseline, continue to test and experiment with different messaging, timing, and offers and compare your results against your baseline. Then, when someone asks you how well your campaign performed, you can say good, bad, or indifferent based on real data.

A great example of this was a recent email marketing campaign completed by my team. They tested 3 subject lines - everything else remainded the same (the list, the email creative, the price, the timing, etc.). During our test, one subject line outperformed the others 3 to 1. Wow! What a difference this made in our overall campaign performance when we sent the email to tens of thousands of potential customers.

Ongoing measurement and testing is essential for marketing success. If you're not testing your marketing campaigns on a continuous basis, you're missing out. Of course, once you establish a solid control (baseline), you'll have a hard time out performing it. In general, you'll only improve your success rate about 10% of the time. But continue to test, test, and test some more and you'll see your knowledge and results increase.

7 Lean Marketing Laws For The Business Owner

2010-09-17T15:34:00.003-04:00

The following laws will provide guidance on how to act,think and work in a lean way. You can apply these laws to all areas of your life, work and business to get bigger results from the time you invest.

1. Multiple Rewards
Aim to be rewarded multiple times for a single effort. Money can be recovered but time cannot. Time gets spent. You can't put it in a bank and you can't earn more of it.

Wherever possible, you should look for ways to get paid/rewarded multiple times for each hour you invest. You will never be truly independent if your income comes from your own time and labor so package your knowledge as a product. Once you have a product you can sell your packaged time again and again.

2. Mistakes Are Gifts
Mistakes are nothing more than "Learning Opportunities". The best way to learn more and grow more is to make more mistakes. Mistakes are unavoidable when you're learning so adopt a ready, fire, aim approach to decisions and learn as you take action. If it doesn't work you can easily make another decision to put things right again.

3. Know When To Stop
Be prepared to stop what you're doing. Take stock and try something different. Don't let pride, fear of ridicule or ego get in the way of good judgement. When a mission is over, learn from it and move on.

4. Use Your Levers
Do the little things that make the biggest difference. Aim for maximum impact with minimum effort. Focus will help but there are other forms of leverage too. Here are just two.

OPT - Other People's Time. Don't be afraid to ask for help. You don't have to do it all yourself. Use your network. Ask and you shall receive. Give and you shall get.

Recycle - Learn to recognize value in everything you do. Turn your ezine into a book and sell it. Write your words of wisdom down and share them.

5. Don't Be Busy - Be Effective
Don't waste your hours simply being "busy". Being busy does not cause you to be wealthy. So don't be busy - be effective. Remember the 80:20 rule.

Typically 20 per cent of the things you do will be responsible for 80 per cent of the results you get. So focus on the 20 per cent that gets the result.

6. Always Look For The Easy Route
If there's an easy way to do something and a hard way - take the easy way first. I call this "inspired laziness".

7. Measure Progress By What You Reap
The only truth is the result. Doing lots of things is not the same as achieving lots of things. Measure progress by your outcomes not your inputs.

Contribution of: Mr. Joe Dager

Marketing Challenges

2010-08-19T01:29:00.002-04:00

Business owners often get frustrated with marketers because there’s so much misinformation in the discipline. Most marketers want to run campaigns in their areas of expertise, regardless of whether it’s the most effective choice for the business.

It’s only natural, right?

There are so many challenges in marketing. The first pertains to the term “marketing” itself. What activities does marketing include? Is marketing the same thing as advertising? How does marketing tie into sales and strategy?

For SMEs, the core challenge for marketers and business leaders is to:

Understand what they need to do to accomplish their revenue goals
Find the resources to execute SMEs are stretched thin on time and resources. They need answers and results—fast. Kreative Marketing Group delivers. Marketing teams and individual marketers can use Kreative Marketing Group to centralize marketing activities and execution:

Determine marketing and business growth strategies
Decide what marketing campaigns to run
Download tools for marketing execution
Manage marketing tasks
Expand resources and expertise
Train the team
Measure results

Marketing Structure for Better Results
Even managing a single campaign can be challenging: You have your list, your message, your offer, your creative, and your copy; you have fulfillment, tracking, follow-up and metrics.

Then you have to execute.

Then you have to get sales people on board to turn the leads into sales.

It’s not easy for SMEs to understand what the best marketing programs are for their company. Where should they spend their budget? The options are overwhelming:

Advertising
Direct mail
Telemarketing
Search Marketing
Traditional Media
PR
Tradeshows
And now “social media” is all the rage!

Few marketers have marketing expertise in all areas. Most focus on doing a great job in one area, whether it’s creative, branding, advertising, direct response, PR, Internet marketing, or social media.

The reality is most SMEs need marketing activities in many of these areas, but they aren’t able to add headcount to address each specialty.

Organize your activities with Kreative Marketing Group so your marketing team understands your goals, their assignments and expected results. Marketing structure delivers better results.

This “left-brain” structure appeals to most business leaders--those non-marketing types that usually control the budget. Tie your decisions and activities to their business goals and earn their support.

The New Game Plan For those Starting a Business The Lean Way

2010-08-11T15:00:00.002-04:00

In a recent survey reported by the Financial Post, one in three Canadians said they were interested in starting their own business in the next two years. Of those, 35 per cent said they're going to follow through.

If even half of those do follow up on their dreams, that will be quite astonishing.

What will also be astonishing, however, is if those thousands of would-be Canadian entrepreneurs proceed as 21st-century entrepreneurs instead of blindly imitating the entrepreneurship methodology of 30 years ago. Anyone who takes up the challenge of business start-up today would do well to examine how entrepreneurship has changed in this century.

The biggest change is that today, less is best. Starting a business now is all about less -as in less elaborate business planning; less imitation and more innovation; less step-by-step execution and more going with the flow; less one-way delivery and marketing and more conversation with customers.

This less-is-best concept generally goes against traditional business training. Business plans, for example, are about execution of known factors, so if you're building a factory that is going to be around for 10 or 20 years, you'll need a business plan. But in today's world of continuing change, any plan that details steps further out than quarterly or semi-annually is unsuited for anyone starting a small business.

The top entrepreneurship method now is the lean startup, an application of Lean thinking, an organizational method of operation derived from the Toyota production system. In Lean thinking, an organization attempts to eliminate wasteful effort and cost.

Lean thinking means new start-ups rarely use formal business plans because in a rapidly changing world they cannot obtain the information they need to plan several years in the future.

The lean start-up applies the Lean thinking approach at the crucial period when new companies often have a concept but really don't know how their businesses are going -evolve. Since most new businesses -even those in traditional areas such as retail or services -now primarily operate online, this learning process is much easier.

Generally, a Lean start-up features three characteristics:

- It keeps costs low by using open source and free software. -those aren't available, it uses low-cost cloud computing (renting software and other services online) instead of initially buying expensive systems and so ftware. They also try to "rent" as many business needs, such as personnel, as possible;

- It applies agile development when creating products or services. -this methodology, product development borrows from new software-creation models. Agile development is perfect for startups in which the problem (the genesis for all business concepts) and the solution (the business's answer to the problem) are still fuzzy;

- It constantly talks with customers, existing or potential, to see how they can improve. It usually begins with a simple product or service and then changes or expands it to answer customer concerns. Its main business process is continual customer research and development.

A good example of this form of small business development is Stewart Butterfield of Vancouver, who cofounded with his then-wife Caterina Fake a company that had developed a multi-player online game. The game went nowhere, so they dumped it and began working on an instant messaging application that had features such as game-like experience and the ability to handle photos. That soon evolved into a photosharing application that, in 2004, became Flickr, now the most dominant photosharing site on the Internet.

Fake said the pair couldn't write a business plan because they couldn't do any research on where the company might go. "We weren't planning on building a photosharing site," she said. "If we had done our research, we would have said we shouldn't bother because it's all been sewn up (by competitors)."

The biggest lesson is that in the early years businesses often change as they attempt to find a market niche in which their concept meshes with customer needs.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Improving Your Marketing Through Social Bookmarks

2010-07-07T14:33:00.001-04:00

Generate word of mouth with powerful social marketing tools.
As an Internet marketing professional, I try to keep on top of new marketing avenues and opportunities for leveraging word-of-mouth. In recent years, the method by which individuals get their information has evolved and so have the tools for sharing information from one individual to another. Social bookmarking is now a popular method of communicating among younger audiences and is proving to be an effective marketing tool for increased exposure of products, services, and brands.

Imagine telling your friend about a recent story you just heard. That story could be newsworthy, provide information about a given topic of interest, or perhaps an online video you watched that had you rolling around in laughter. Once you communicated that to your friend, he went ahead and sent an email out to 4 of his friends who then forwarded that email to dozens more – and so the story goes.

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful forms of marketing. With the help of the Internet, this type of marketing has grown in importance and has been accelerated with the advent of social bookmarks.

Popular bookmarking sites allow users to identify, with just the click of a mouse, online content that they deem worthy of sharing. As more and more individuals identify the same content, it receives a higher priority on social bookmarking sites and continues to grow in importance. Social bookmarking sites are like a multi-level marketer’s dream!

The most popular social bookmarking site is Digg.com which has an Alexa ranking of 98 and boasts more than 8 million monthly visitors. Other popular sites like Technorati (1.4M monthly visitors), and Del.icio.us (1.3M montly visitors) illustrate just how big social bookmarking has become. Taken collectively, these sites are continuing to garner more supporters and changing the way consumers share information they deem valuable.

From a marketing perspective, this creates an opportunity for improving the effectiveness of our marketing practices. Word of mouth has always been an effective means of marketing but has been difficult to initiate and manage. Today, with the help of social bookmarks there is now an easier way to encourage and promote the sharing of your information.

Recently, I added a footer on my blog to encourage users to “share” information they deem valuable. This has created an opportunity for users to interact with content and start the viral marketing effect all online marketers seek. When considering the merits of social bookmarking, there are a few guidelines to consider.

Your content needs to provide value or be unique. Social bookmarking doesn’t happen on its own. You need to provide content that’s worth sharing. Whether that content is helpful to someone seeking guidance, unique, funny, or just plain novel, it needs to provide value in order to be shared.

Make bookmarking easy. Have you placed the appropriate social bookmark icons on your webpage in a place that’s closely aligned with the content you wish to share? Are the bookmarks easy to identify? Make sure your customers and prospects don’t need to work all that hard in order to share your information.

Encourage communication. Don’t just paste some social bookmarking icons on your website, ask for support. Common phrases like, “Share this” or “Bookmark us” are a great way to get the wheels of social media moving.
If you’re not leveraging social bookmarking tools then you’re word-of-mouth campaigns aren’t being optimized. Reach more people, more quickly, by leveraging your website’s visitors, prospect, and customers. Ask them to share your information and create valuable content that encourages viral marketing. Utilizing social bookmarking as a preferred marketing medium can help improve awareness of your products and develop a preference for your brand.

7 Strategies to Convert Contacts into Sales

2010-06-15T12:00:00.001-04:00

MISGUIDED MARKETERS ARE trying to use "old-school" marketing tactics in a new, consumer-driven business landscape. But being the best, the cheapest or the most convenient is no longer going to get you the results you're after; so don't promote these virtues on social networks.

We've all seen how kindness, honesty and generosity online are rewarded. And yet internet conversations are getting heavier with sales pitching and self promotion by the minute. This sales pitching is not only turning consumers off, it's giving internet marketing a bad rap and making it more challenging for business to convert contacts into sales.

There are a few marketing strategies you should add to your daily practice to set yourself apart and turn your online communities into profitable business transactions. What's more, these activities will increase the ROI for your online efforts without looking or sounding sales pitchy.

Here are seven strategies for successfully converting online contacts into sales.

1. Focus on generosity: Share your knowledge and expertise willingly online. Avoid the attitude that people are out to get you, instead think of it as people are out to do business with you. The more you are generous with your expertise and resources, the faster people will connect with you online and want to do business with you (because they've already had a sneak peek at what you offer).

2. Use the 3/3 Rule: The opposite side of the generosity coin is this; you have to set some boundaries online so as not to give too much away. When you are directly e-mailed or approached for advice, offer your services no more and no less than three times to that contact before you ask for the business. Don't spend more than three minutes responding or chatting per person or group. After the third such activity (on the same network, of course), just ask. This is the one thing that separates the broke from the prosperous--asking.

3. Don't act desperate: There is a big difference between desperate and sincere. Make sure that you really want the relationship and their business specifically and that you're not just asking for the sake of getting another deal (or because it's the third action and you're "supposed" to). Consumers are smart, they can tell the difference between the two.

4. Do aSPAM check: Before you even ask for the business when you're beginning to build a relationship you need to do a SPAM check. Whether it be online or off, make sure that your conversation does not involve constant:

Sales
Pitching
After
Meeting

If you start a sales pitch before you've even established a rapport then you are spamming, something that consumers do not tolerate very well. This can instantly shut down a relationship. Make the conversation about the consumer, not you. [link to Green]. Start by listening and end conversations by asking what you can do to help them with a goal or problem. By doing this, your services and offerings will become a natural part of the conversation, rather than a forced sales pitch.

5. Have a communication plan in place: Once you start to engage with people make sure that you have an ongoing plan to stay in touch. A great way to do that is to get their e-mail address and send them periodic updates, resources and tips.

6. Build your social proof: Do you have testimonials or recommendations on your social sites and your main website or blog? Social proof is basically proving to your target market and community that you are worth doing business with. Testimonials show potentials how great you are, you don't have to say a thing. LinkedIn is a great place to house some of those testimonials.

7. Just be yourself: Do not try to be someone that you are not because you think that you will get more contacts, leads and business. Consumers want to feel like they are doing business with someone real, not someone that's insincere.

Above all, don't hold yourself back from reaching out to new people, groups or industries. The internet is full of millions of new contacts for you, just engage with them sincerely and leave out the sales pitching. You never know if that invite or accepted request will be your next big customer.

How to Get Free Publicity For Your Product Or Service

2010-06-09T13:20:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wondered how some companies always seem to obtain good placement in print publications, online, and even on TV? What’s even more impressive is that many of these companies don’t even spend a single cent on advertising. Why would they? They’re getting all of the media coverage they need simply by following a few basic public relations principles.

Position yourself as an expert. The media relies on experts for their information. The news that gets printed is only as credible as the source from which it comes. Begin by selecting a news related story to comment on. It should be a story that you are qualified to speak about, aligned with your area of expertise.

If your background is in engineering, and a building falls down, you are qualified to speak about the structure and answer possible engineering related questions. Being an expert simply means that you have a background in a specific area and can lend your expertise.

Do your homework. To get coverage, find the reporter who is covering the news you wish to comment on. For example, if the news is about a specific current event, then Google the current event name followed by the name of a popular newspaper like the Wall Street Journal or USA Today. You’ll quickly find the reporters who have written on the subject. Call the newspaper (contact information available on their website) and ask for the reporter by name. If the operation asks what your call is in reference to, simply state that you have information related to a specific news item.

Compliment the reporter. When you locate the reporter, and contact him, start with a compliment. Reporters take great pride in their work. Be sure to compliment their position on a given topic or their previous work. After complimenting them, you’re ready for the pitch.

Talk to them about your position on the given news story and what you have to offer. Again, referring back to our earlier example of the building, mention that you have an engineering background and have a position on the story. For example, you might be able to comment on why buildings collapse and the structural aspects that could be the cause. Let the reporter ask questions but have a point of view. After the dialogue, the reporter will verify your information such as name and company.

Leave a compelling yet non-descript message. If you’re unable to get in touch with the reporter directly, leave a message – but be discreet. You don’t want to show all of your cards before speaking to him directly. However, if you leave enough information to get them to return your call, they will call you. Reporters follow up with any leads they consider opportunistic.

When leaving a message, simple say, “I have something you need to hear about (fill in name of story here).” Be specific with regard to the story the reporter is covering. You want them to consider your possible information valuable.

State your expertise. After complimenting the reporter about their coverage on a specific article or issue, let them know your position on a given topic and why you are qualified to comment on it. Give them your pitch and be confident that your opinion matters base on the experience you have to offer.

In today’s environment, it’s difficult to attract the media’s attention. The best way to get PR for your product or service is by commenting on current stories being covered by the media. The process is simple. When you hear a news story that you can comment on, find the reporter using Google and the name of a major publication.

Top 10 Marketing Tips

2010-04-13T11:12:00.001-04:00

With more than a decade of experience in marketing, ranking from pay-per-click to direct mail, I’ve seen a lot of failures and far more successes when it comes to marketing.

Today, the art of marketing is far more complex than it once was. However, many of the same basic principles still apply. Too often, professional marketers and small business owners overlook the basic techniques that have separated successful campaigns from those that never turn a profit. Here is my all time list of effective marketing tips.

Know your audience. Successful campaigns get that way because marketers know their audience. They fully understand their needs, how to help meet those needs and how to create demand. Knowing and understanding your audience through proper market segmentation means a well targeted campaign that generates a profitable return.

Focus on the offer. A marketing offer is the driving force of marketing promotions that drive results. In fact, market testing has proven that the offer is the most significant criterion for conversion. Focus on your offer if you want to be successful.

Split test. Never ever run a campaign without testing something. One of the most common is a split test which allows you to simultaneously test two versions of something. It can be a web page, post card, or email. Split testing is essential for improving performance.

Never work alone. The most creative ideas come from working with other creative people. Don’t feel like you need to have all the answers or great ideas. You may start with an idea, but an open dialog with creative individuals will make it better.

Don’t sell on price. I’ve seen so many marketers fail because they sell on price alone. This leads to a discounting war, lower profitability, and often bankruptcy. Rather, focus on creating so much value that the perception of price becomes insignificant.

Consistent messaging. Consider the entire user experience before you launch a campaign. From email to website to offer, is the prospect having a consistent user experience? If they are, your campaigns stand above 98% of others.

Create value after the sale. As marketers, it’s our job to understand our market segment and build relationships, not dump people off at the front door of our store and walk away. Focus as much of your energy on building relationships with customers as you do prospects.

Test. Test. Test. In addition to split testing, you should consider multiple forms of testing in each marketing discipline. For direct mail, test headlines, offers, copy, time of direct mail drop, etc. Consider testing a life long mission.

Integrated Marketing Works Best. You can’t rely on one form of marketing to carry you to success. It’s okay to generate most of your leads or sales through PPC marketing if you will but what happens when that dries out? Use multiple media sources to meet your goals.

Nothing can replace experience. You can run out and hire all of the best consultants in the world, but you still have to do the work. Nothing can replace actual experience. It will make you a stronger marketer and more successful in the long term.

Apply these helpful marketing tips if you want to be truly successful. These techniques and tips are applied by successful marketers on a daily basis. The result is an ever growing success rate of marketing success.

6 Easy Ways To Write & Sell an eBook

2010-03-30T10:33:00.001-04:00

1. The idea. The Vision. We need a good idea for our readers and prospective clients. You notice, I didn’t say a good idea that I like—instead my idea must be something of value to my reader. It must be something that will motivate them to click on the link to buy and download my e-book.

2. Organize Your Thoughts. We must come up with at least 10 topics to include in our e-book. Or if you just want to write a short e-book of less than 10 pages then come up with a shorter number of titles. Start writing your topic ideas then organize them in the most logical manner. For example, if you are writing about ’10 Easy Tips To Keep Your Car Running Smoothly At All times,” your e-book will include 10 tips (10 topics).

3. Start Writing Freely. Begin writing your e-book based on your outline you created in #2. Since you are the expert in this field it should be easy to write down your ideas. Don’t worry about format, structure or grammar. Just get your thoughts down in writing. Write freely.

4. Finalize Your e-Book. Now it’s time to put some structure in your e-book. Ask yourself, “What is the easiest way to organize this so that my readers will understand it and follow it?” Always write from your reader’s point of view. Make it easy for your reader to find information and understand your concepts and thoughts.

5. Create Final Product. Now you decide how to produce your product to make it easy for your reader to purchase it. The most inexpensive and easiest way is to produce a PDF file. All computers now usually come with the PDF format available to use from Adobe. On my computer I press the ‘PRINT’ button and I can choose PDF from a choice of printing options. It then will produce a PDF file for me that go to my Desktop.

I like PDF files because they look professional. Can someone copy your PDF file? Yes, if they have the Adobe software. However, unless you are creating a “Harry Potter” bestseller book, it is a good way to get started producing e-books. Most of the e-books you order are produced this way. There are other software products that state they make your ebook harder to copy, but they are cumbersome to read because they usually separate every chapter and you can’t print them out easily. They are not available for a Mac computer. I still like to read long articles on the printed page instead of online.

6. Sell your e-Book.

Website. If you have a website set up then you will want to sell the e-book on your website. If you don’t know how to do this, hire a savvy Internet student to help you set it up on your site. You need a way to collect your money. I would start out with a Paypal account because it covers International countries that might want to buy your e-book. Later when you are financially successful you can add a commercial credit card service, but Paypal let’s everyone use their credit cards now so it is easy to get started.

Digital Products Retailer. If you do not have a website then start with a digital product retailer such as Clickbank, Payloadz, and others. You store your e-book on their site and they take a small profit for every e-book that’s sold on their site. Get the word out. What you have to do is send out e-mail messages to your list announcing your e-book and the great benefits your reader will get by buying it. You can also ask your friends if they would send a message to their list of friends and colleagues announcing your e-book.

This is a great rainy day project: Write and sell an e-book in 6 easy steps. Now is the time to start writing and who knows by the time the rain stops you may be finished!

As An Entrepreneur: Give Away Your Expertise!

2010-03-25T01:10:00.001-04:00

One of the best ways to generate more income is to stop selling your expertise by the hour. Your expertise -- knowledge, skills, methods -- are your most valuable assets. By taking your expertise and packaging it in various forms, you can sell your expertise 24/7/365.

So if your knowledge, skills and methods are your most valuable assets, why in the world would I suggest that you give it away as a marketing strategy?? Because giving away your expertise lays the foundation for multiple streams of income. Why this works:

Access to lots of free information is already available and potential customers expect to find it. Making your expertise available enables your *ideal* customers to find you -- among all the free information available, they need to hear it the way *you* say it. Having information that tells them what they need to do isn't the problem for most customers -- implementation is where they need help.

Once potential customers have found your free information, make it easy and enticing to sign up for your email list. Now you've laid the foundation to build a trust relationship, and can start offering them the help with implementation they so desperately need -- and will pay for.

Giving it away effectively and profitably

Use multiple channels and formats. For instance, give away information on your blog, in articles posted on other sites, in free giveaway ebooks, in audio teleclasses and excerpts. Get something in return when possible. Encourage blog visitors to sign up for blog updates via email. Put a subscription box to your newsletter on every page of your website (particularly where you post your newsletters, etc.) For bigger "chunks" of information like ebooks and audios, require that they sign up for your newsletter to get these freebies. In ebooks, make a link to your website prominent at the bottom of each page. Make the give-away process hands-free. Use an autoresponder to handle signups and instant download delivery for your giveaways. Once it's set up, it costs you no more to give away a thousand than it does the first ten.

Plus, potential customers get instant gratification. Leverage from one format to others. Write a blog post. Add more details and turn it into an article (to post on your site, use in your newsletter, and submit to other sites). Take a series of articles and turn them into an ebook. Engage someone to interview you about the content of your ebook and record it. Get help where possible and practical. You can hire a ghostwriter to write articles for you. Your VA can take existing articles and put them into an ebook format and set up the autoresponder and download capabilities. Recordings of classes and interviews don't need to be professionally done when given away for free; many bridge services offer recording capability.

Fear Of Public Speaking: 10 Steps To Know

2010-03-18T12:11:00.002-04:00

There's an often-quoted statistic that the fear of public speaking is right up there with the fear of death as the two events people most fear in their lives. However, as a business owner, I can guarantee you that public speaking is a phenomenal way to grow your business, so if it's an activity that scares you, you need to take the bull by the horns and start working past that fear. As somewhat an introvert, public speaking isn't something that comes naturally to me, although I'm told I'm good at it. It's been quite a learning process, and I've had as many failures as successes. My best learning experiences have come through the process of finding the courage to just do it and learn along the way.

If you're a self-employed service professional, you work in a time-based economy. You have only so many hours in the day to work directly with your clients. Speaking to groups gives you the opportunity to reach out and touch and impact others who might otherwise never cross your path and for you to get them into your marketing funnel so that they can begin to get to know, like and respect you. Once they're in your marketing funnel, and if you provide a solution that solves a problem that they have, they'll ultimately hire you.

Here are ten steps I recommend to get you into action to use public speaking to fill your professional practice:

1. Pick 3 topics on which you can present a 20 minute - 60 minute speech. These should be topics on which you love to speak and will readily showcase your expertise to your audience. The topics also need to be ones that speak to your target market's pain and provides a solution for a problem that they're having.

2. For each presentation, write a 2 - 3 sentence description of that provides a brief overview of your content. To add some meat to the description, create a benefits statement for each presentation and what they'll learn or get out of your talk. Remember, your audience will always be asking the same question, "WIIFM", or "What's In It For Me?", so make your description so compelling that they think, "Hey, I've got to hear that!"

3. Have a professional photo made, and create a 3-6 sentence introductory bio of yourself. Many bios sound the same and are pretty boring, so on my website, I decided to tell something of a story about myself to make my bio a bit different. Let your personality shine in your bio.

4. With your topics, bio, and photo in hand, you can now put together in MS Word a simple speaker one-sheet that tells a prospective association program chair everything s/he would need to know about you. If you have a list of audiences to whom you've spoken previously, you will want to list some of those under the heading "Satisfied Clients", and spread 2 - 3 testimonials from other speaking gigs throughout the sheet. In order to get ideas for layouts of the one sheet, visit the National Speakers Association, www.nsapseaker.org, and view the speaker one sheets of other speakers to jumpstart your creativity.

5. Create a speaking link on your website and have the presentations you've outlined available on your site, as well as your speaker one sheet, and a separate link with your photo and bio. Many association program chairs will want to "check you out" online, even though you're offering to speak to them free of charge, so give them the opportunity to read all about your speaking topics on your website.

6. Now you need to find audiences filled with your target market. To start locally, approach the program chairs of professional associations to which you already belong and see if you can get on their speaking schedule. Your local library or Chamber of Commerce may have a current list of professional associations in your area which you can also approach. Other sources for finding speaking gigs include the American Society of Association Executives. On the website, click Directories on the left hand links column, and then Associations, and then select Gateway to Associations. Once you're in the Gateway, you can look up associations by keyword or by location. A second place to locate associations is Gale's Encyclopedia of Associations. This multi-volume encyclopedia is present in the reference section of all major libraries.

7. You (or your Virtual Assistant) will then need to call these associations and get the name and contact info of the program chair. Some program chairs will want to talk to you right away regarding your speaking topics, so be prepared to have that conversation on the fly. Being able to send them to your website to read more about the topics is also helpful. Others will want you to send information, so you'll need to draft an introductory letter that you can snail mail or email along with your speaker one-sheet.

8. Once you've got a speaking engagement, ask the program chair some questions about the audience so that you can better tailor the speech to fit their needs. I learn best through hearing stories, so as I'm asking questions about the audience, I'm going through my own list of illustrative stories I've told to see which ones might best match my audience's needs. Remember that your audience wants a full experience of you as well as the information that you're providing, so be sure and inject alot of your personality and wit and humor into your speech.

9. Before your speech, determine how you want to get audience members into your marketing funnel. Do you want them to sign up for a complimentary consultation on the spot? If so, bring your calendar or a sign-up sheet. Do you want to get them on your mailing list? Give away something at the end of your presentation that is compelling enough for them to part with a business card or to write down their contact info to enter the drawing. If your goal is to get them on your email newsletter list, be sure and get their email address. If you use direct mail, you'll want to get their physical mailing address.

10. The day of your presentation, just relax and have fun! This may be the hardest of any of the steps outlined here, but being authentic and being yourself will get you in the good graces of most of your audience, despite what you might say (or forget to say!). Think of your presentation as the beginning of a great relationship that you're establishing, and leave your audience feeling good about themselves and about you.

Try and book 2-3 speaking engagements per month, and soon you'll become the "go-to" expert in your industry!

Steps To Successful Relationship Marketing!

2010-02-24T11:12:00.002-05:00

Take a close look at some of your neighborhood service firms to see how well they're prospering. Doubtless everyone has cut back in the last year or two --- that's just common sense. But there might be another reason why some companies are surviving while others shrink.

In good times and bad, savvy business people have but one focus --- the customer. They know it's much more cost-effective to sell more services to an existing client than to fund new customer acquisition. Their client list is their most valuable asset, but more than that, they develop long-lasting relationships by keeping in touch -- in good times and bad.

Relationship marketing delivers many benefits to a design firm, big or small. Slowly but surely, as you build your client and prospect list, you'll be able to reduce marketing expenses, build referrals, and grow your business in step with your clients' needs.

1. Change your Perspective from "Here's what I do" to "What do you need?"
The cornerstone of successful relationships is to discover precisely what your clients need and want.

Your clients say they need a Website. But what they mean is they need to increase sales revenue. You can develop the right kind of site to do that, but only if you understand your client's basic needs. You find those out by asking questions: lots and lots of questions!

2. Recognize your Vulnerability
In the midst of a project, you might be in touch with your client several times a week. But it's the time between projects that is crucial to relationship-building. Once the work is done, you drop out of that enviable top-of-mind awareness position. Over time, your client isn't as likely to think of you as their first port of call for a solution to their problem. This is when you're most vulnerable to replacement by a competitor.

Fortunately, an affordable solution can help you retain those clients you worked so hard to acquire.

3. Keep in touch
It's such a simple concept, but keeping in touch often sinks to the bottom of the 'to do' list. The single easiest way to keep in touch is to publish an email newsletter. Ask clients to subscribe and insert a subscription box on your site to capture email addresses of prospects who like the look of what you're doing.

The secret to a good newsletter is to avoid blatant self-promotion, and instead offer valuable information to your subscribers. With their permission, you have the opportunity to drop into their email boxes every month with news, tips, case-studies, FAQs, and other relevant info that subtly promotes your services, reinforces your brand, educates your clients, and builds trust.

4. Position Yourself as an Expert
So many Web designer sites are elegant portfolios, and while they look great, they don't say anything.

Words matter. Prospective clients are looking for more than thumbnail images of sites you've built. Your job is to tell them how you can meet their needs. Your Website is the perfect place to start, but the focus must be on the client, not on you.

Include white papers on design issues, special reports, case-studies, and links to other resources that will educate your clients on the inner workings of design. Be careful to avoid jargon, overly technical concepts and acronyms. If you're publishing an email newsletter, use it to introduce this new content and bring subscribers back to your site.

When you are perceived as an expert, you become attractive to prospects who use the Web to research. They see you as someone who has answers to their questions, and who can help solve their problems. Not only that, the added site content should also improve your search engine rankings.

5. Grow to Meet Client Needs
Websites are hardly stand-alone entities that need an occasional tweak. For most businesses, they're but one tool amidst many that are used to build brand, inease revenues or minimize costs. And by offering more tools that help your clients reach their goals, you become more valuable. Build affiliations or strategic relationships with copywriters, photographers, search engine marketers, and other specialists whose talents will benefit your clients.

The Payoff
The benefits of a relationship marketing approach go both ways. Your client views you as a valuable consultant, rather than a cost center. Your potential for increased revenues and a long-lasting relationship is real.

There's payoff for you, too, including reduced marketing expenses measured in both time and money. If you can retain more clients for longer periods, you'll trim costly space advertising and other marketing costs.

If you ask, you'll get more referrals from your clients. Priceless word-of-mouth endorsements from satisfied customers will result in new business which magically walks in the door.

You won't even have to request client testimonials. You do include several on your Website... right? Start by recognizing when you receive a spontaneous testimonial, whether it's in an email, thank-you letter, or a conversation. Ask your client if you may use his words and name in your brochure and on your site, with a link to his business. Most often, the answer is yes. Testimonials are a critical piece of successful service marketing and worth their weight in whatever precious metal you value.

Case-studies will be a breeze and add a powerful marketing tool - perfect for your Website or for inclusion in printed marketing materials. Follow a 'situation -- problem -- solution -- benefits' flow to highlight how you solved the client's problem, stressing the benefits the client now enjoys as a result of your work. Use a handful of client case studies in industries you're targeting for new business development. Examples of "just like me" situations help prospective clients understand exactly how useful your services are.

Relationship-focused marketing isn't something that will happen overnight. It requires a change in thinking and some discipline along the way. Your email newsletter won't do much good unless you publish it regularly and the content is valued by your subscribers. But the rewards can be significant. And the truth is that no matter how wonderful you are, clients go away. Their businesses close down, change focus, or are sold.

But if your objective is to build relationships instead of Websites, you'll be one of the designers in business for the long run.

Brand-Based Marketing

2010-01-26T13:53:00.003-05:00

At its core, brand-based marketing emphasizes the value of a specific brand, branded product or service. Brand marketing includes a range of terms and concepts, including brand awareness, brand recognition, brand image, brand equity, name awareness, name recognition, etc.

In the past, the primary goal of brand marketing was to create awareness and recall for the brand. The difference between awareness and recall can be best understood as awareness being the desired customer's ability to remember having heard of the brand if the brand is identified, whereas recall is the ability of a desired customer to name your brand when the brand category (industry, niche, product, service) is identified generically.

Over recent decades, brand advertisers have increasingly realized that brand awareness and recall does not necessarily translate into sales and true brand equity. For that value to be established in the information age of the 21st Century, a brand must go beyond and deeper than awareness or recall. Today's successful brands must resonate with their audiences. Brand resonance is the relationship and level of identification of the customer with a brand.

Healthcare practices tend to prefer this method of marketing because it focuses on the positive image and qualities of the practice and the practitioners. While brand-based marketing has obvious benefit and appeal, it also presents some limitations and challenges for most private practices.

Brand-based marketing challenges for private practices
Brand-based marketing requires massive amounts of exposure and repetition to establish and maintain awareness, recall and resonance with the desired audience. Those massive amounts of exposure and repetition usually translate into equally massive and consistent volume of marketing dollars in the practice marketing budgets.

Most private practices (like other small businesses) have limited budget resources for marketing - particularly by comparison to the large corporations that commonly use this method of marketing. This limitation represents a significant challenge to success in utilizing exclusively brand-based marketing methods.

The other major challenge is time required to develop brand equity through increased recognition, recall and resonance.

Consumers today are besieged and inundated with literally thousands of marketing and advertising messages every single day. In order to have any chance to break through the "clutter" of informational and promotional "noise" to achieve awareness, recall and resonance, the marketing effort must be consistent and constant. Even so, it takes time (and money) to achieve results, and it is difficult (if not impossible) to predict how much time it will take to get measurable results with exclusively brand-building strategies and tactics.

Key Marketing Tips For 2010

2010-01-05T18:55:00.007-05:00

Now that it’s a new year and decade, it’s time to wean the marketing group away from their delusions of strategic grandeur. Here’s a simple, six-step program to ensure that your company’s marketing is successful and productive in 2010:

STEP #1: Know What Marketing Means To Your Business. If your company’s marketers think that they’re doing something “strategic”, they’re wasting money. Marketing is a relational function now whose sole purpose is to build and enhance relationships with potential and current clients. In a thriving marketing group, all activities serve the goal of building business and profit share.

STEP #2: Create A Strong Marketing Strategy. In most companies, there isn't a strong strategic marketing campaign that can be implemented with a systematic approach. This is very much needed in order to generate revenue within your company. Marketing has to be faced head on in order to survice in this economy, because there are so many businesses that have folded, your clients have to know that you are still in business.

STEP #3: Know Who Is Your Target Client. A sales lead should identify a decision-maker inside a company that’s part of your target market and provide enough information about the decision-maker, and the decision-maker’s philosophy and techniques on how they run their business. Know your client inside and out!

STEP #4. Create Systems. Systems creation should never be an ad-hoc improvisation based on whatever product you want to sell today. Systems creation must be part of an integrated process that constantly creates leads and has a measurable effect on sales effectiveness.

STEP #5: Responsible Sales Force. Once the sales team has agreed that a lead is qualified, they MUST be made 100 percent accountable for closing that lead through strategies that your specific target audience will be engaged. Know how your client would like to receive your marketing messages and how you can consistently create loyalty though them.

STEP #6: Marketing ROI. Monitor your strategic activities, find out which ones result in leads that close, and then tune the demand creation process in order to constantly improve the quality of the leads. Make sales and marketing jointly accountable for closing deals.

Highly Effective Marketers Do...

2009-12-31T16:16:00.001-05:00

The 8 Habits of Highly Effective Marketers enable the kind of transformational marketing that changes brand trajectories, career paths, sometimes entire companies and even industries. The six habits of highly effective marketers include:

1. Making Marketing Dollars Work Harder.
Highly effective marketers know that like any other investment activity, marketing decisions can be carefully evaluated based on return-on-investment criteria. To download more about this habit.

2. Challenging Conventional Approaches to Targeting.
Highly effective marketers recognize that no one—NO ONE—can possibly know a priori the best way to segment the market or which target will be most profitable. To download more about this habit.

3. Taking a Position—Make Your Brand Stand for Something
Highly effective marketers know that without a strong positioning, their brands will falter. To download more about this habit.

4. Selecting the Most Profitable Product, Not the Most Appealing.
Highly effective marketers know that managers cannot, flying by instinct and gut feel, simply pick the most profitable product or service from among all the possible design combinations. To download more about this habit.

5. Connecting Inputs to Outputs in Marketing Plans and Compulsively Implement Them.Highly effective marketers don't rely on divine intervention and good luck to develop and execute the marketing plan. To download more about this habit.

6. Building a Great Brand While Your Competitors Commoditize
Highly effective marketers recognize that a brand's equity is comprised of different components, which can and should be studied separately. To download more about this habit.

Relationship Marketing...What Are The Benefits?

2009-12-12T11:10:00.004-05:00

Relationship Marketing (RM) has really become the forefront of marketing for any business because you cannot afford not to implement this is your marketing business model. Relationship Marketing opens the door for you to engage and communicate with your clients. Especially now with the explosion on social media-marketing and the technology available, you should be creating various streams of revenue for your business.

Relationship Marketing takes on forms such as: (1) Creating Customer Satisfaction, (2) Building Brand Equity, and (3) Creating and Maintaining Relationships; which of all provides some success with any other marketing communication strategies. In other ways, you are trying to achieve a strong brand loyalty for your business through building meaningful relationships with your clients. Your brand equity consists of mass media advertising, public events, sponsorships, marketing collateral and communications strategies that all play a part of the engagement process.

If working with small improvements and implementing small steps in your marketing would afford you by costing you less to serve long-term customers and understand that loyal customers will pay a price premium and they also generate word-of-mouth referrals to other prospective customers.

RM is all about making your loyal client base both more loyal and more profitable. So what are you doing to create a stronger Relationship Marketing campaign for 2010? You cannot afford not to implement this process in your marketing model, because it will only increase your MROI.

A Few Of Ways To Save Money in Marketing

2009-12-02T16:25:00.004-05:00

Because businesses are struggling in this economy, saving money has become a "must do" in business in order to make a little profit. There are some things to think about when looking at cutting back on marketing; although, you cannot cut out marketing totally and still be successful in business, because no one would know that you exist. So here are a few things to ponder over.

Eliminate Waste

Over the years I've looked at hundreds of marketing programs, and I can tell you honestly that nearly all of them have some kind of hole that either drains money directly or allows leads to be lost.

Before you cut anything, take a good hard look at what you're doing. Are there programs that aren't delivering the results you anticipated? Fix them or get rid of them.

Is there anything that can't be traced to increasing sales opportunities? Unless you have a pile of extra money, now is not the time to be spending money on marketing efforts that don't generate more leads or develop the ones you have.

Make Fewer Mistakes

Another way to say this is: turn to people who know what they're doing.

Marketing - which has never been exactly simple - has changed a lot in the past few years. Customers and prospects are in charge now, and they're looking for you online. If you're not on the internet, you're not in the game.

While I admire business owners who try to figure marketing out for themselves, it wastes a lot of time and it leads to mistakes that could be avoided with some experience.

You may not need a proven marketing pro on staff, but if you don't have one somewhere on your team you're probably wasting money.

Consider Outsourcing

To have a successful marketing program today requires skills in multiple disciplines - some of which didn't even exist a decade or so ago. For example, you need website strategy and development, search engine optimization, paid search marketing, prospect conversion optimization, lead nurturing and web marketing - just to name a few.

Staffing an in-house team with all of this expertise would cost more than most small to mid-sized businesses are willing or able to invest. Yet you can easily - and cost effectively - get this expertise from an outside firm or group of individuals.

Relationship Marketing

2009-11-17T16:30:00.003-05:00

Relationship Marketing is a based on the creation of a mutually beneficial exchange between business partners, business to business or business to customer. This relationship requires personal communication and interpersonal skills that could be built upon as the relationship grows. Relationship marketing is not the "Free for all" missing piece when it comes to a marketing strategy but it plays a major role in the process. There are many examples as to why marketing strategies don't work and that is because some of the applications are not conducive to client's background, capabilities, and their business model.

Relationship marketing is only to recall enhance the existing marketing business model that is already in place; therefore, making the campaign more capturing and innovative. The basis for relationship marketing is that it builds a commitment to customer loyalty of the interdependence and interactive communication between partners and clients.

In building marketing strategies that are based on customer satisfaction, building brand equity, and creating and maintaining relationships that would provide a greater sense of customer commitment and satisfaction. With the growth of marketing databases and the Internet, the ability to reach customers individually became a viable strategy for a wide range of firms including consumer products companies.

It has been concluded in some instances that relationship building contributes to the costing of less to serve long-term customers, loyal customers will pay a price premium, and that loyal customers will generate word-of-mouth referrals to other prospective customers.

Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies

2009-11-03T13:25:00.000-05:00

Internet Marketing has become the new-age of marketing, please don't waste your marketing and advertising dollars on traditional marketing with your magazines, newspapers, television and radio. Internet Marketing has attracted twice as much more people than the traditional marketing. It attracts more people to your website, increase customers for your business and it really enhances the branding of any company. Here are a few strategies to keep in mind when preparing your Internet Marketing Strategies:

1. Learn how to blog and become interacting with your clients and even your potential clients.
2. Learn how to use the best email Marketing tools for your company, because all of them may not fit into your marketing mix.
3. Dominate your marketing niche with reseller, associate programs, and affiliate programs.
4. Build a creative and responsive "Opt-In" email list by offering something for free (ex. newsletter, white paper) that will entice your potential clients.
5. Publish articles and get them noticed.
6. Write and publish online press releases to your particular industry leader websites and associations.
7. Create and facilitate a contest or a giveaway on your website.
8. Get noticed and ranked in your industry and search engines.
9. Start by planning an Internet Marketing strategy that is within your budget.
10. Market your business and Test, Test, Test!!!

Watch how you market your business and see it grow by leaps and bounds through Intenet Marketing.

Questions For Finding a Marketing Consultant

2009-10-27T14:01:00.002-04:00

Questions for Finding a B2B Marketing Consultant

When looking for a B2B Marketing Consultant the most important objective is to find what the possible MROI is and how that outsourcing would fit into the overall piece of the marketing budget. There are essential tools that the B2B Marketing Consultant must have that would ensure quality and a fit for business.

10 Possible Questions Include:
1. Who will I be working with on a day to day basis? Who will be supporting that person?
2. Could you share examples of your work that communicate your track record?
3. Do you see special issues around marketing products and services to businesses?
4. How would you get to know our niche and target audience?
5. Could you help us compare different ways of marketing?
6. Could you help is use social media like blogging, Twitter, and LinkedIn for business?
7. Could you help us get emails to clients and prospects and prospects opened and read more often?
8. How should you gauge success in this engagement with your firm?
9. Do you have an inbound marketing approach, or more of an outbound approach?
10. Could you help us rank higher than our competitor in search engine results?

When hiring a B2B Marketing Consultant, they should perhaps be a trainer and show their proof of performance and capacity to create a working relationship that will ensure success for both parties. To engage B2B decision makers, companies need to prove their value through a strong business case, build sites and other communications vehicles in a way that fosters trust, and pull in prospects. Helping companies get that done requires that special marketing skill.

In addition, when looking at B2B marketing consultants, the qualities considered should include their methodologies, marketing disciplines, Internet marketing concepts, and how they test the results. There should be test, test, and test to steadily improve a company’s marketing ROI.

Move Your Company Forward With An Outside CMO

2009-09-16T15:56:00.004-04:00

Many companies are finding that they get more bang for their buck by consulting with outside experts instead of hiring new staff people. Here’s the logic:

Executive Level Talent without a long-term commitment. Most companies avoid hiring the senior level talent they need due to the long-term overhead commitment. Bring in an executive to set a new course and when they hand over the new plan you existing staff can execute. If you are expecting your existing staff to get you any farther than they already have, you are likely expecting too much.

Ability to insert an entire team. Many organizations have an area of their business that is behind the competition. People on your team are already too busy to fix this, but you can easily insert an outside to completely revamp an area of your organization. We have found many companies have failed to keep pace with web / online marketing. Good news is help can be on the inside of your organization in about a week.

Ability to scale up or down at will. Having contractors on staff is much more like dating, as opposed to marrying a full-time employee. If your needs change, so can the people you have working for you.

Fresh Ideas. The new team comes from a variety of experience and backgrounds. All companies suffer from group think and limitations based on what they see. Outsiders avail you to an entirely new set of thoughts and ideas. They will provide a unique perspective that will increase the productivity of your existing workforce.

Peace of mind. Would you like a chance to try before you buy? The risk of hiring someone into your organization is significant. The reality is you can try before you buy at most any level of the organization. Hiring an employee into your organization means you have made at least a short-term commitment. If you hired your CMO or web designer on a contract / consulting basis and they are not a culture fit, making a change is fast and easy.

The concept of outsourcing your CMO is new, while outsourcing your CFO or CIO is more common. Ultimately outsourcing the CMO function makes more sense. Companies with more than $ 1B in revenue must have a CMO, about half of smaller companies are better off with a strong VP and they bring in an interim CMO for 3 months a year to set strategy. The quality of your marketing will increase and the cost saving is tremendous.

Performance of Emails and Company Sales

2009-08-25T11:59:00.001-04:00

Email metrics fall into two general categories: "process" metrics that measure your email program's performance currently and over time, and "output" metrics, which measure how your email program contributes to your company's strategic marketing and business goals.

You employ both kinds of metrics in four basic measurement approaches:

*Analyze performance of a single message or campaign and diagnose problems.
*Gain insights into customer/subscriber behavior that can help you deliver more relevant messages.
*Benchmark your program against your peers or your own past performance.
*Measure your email program's performance against specific marketing or company goals.

Most of these uses of metrics measure email processes, such as deliverability rate, open or click rate, or list churn. Unfortunately, this seems to be where most email marketers focus their measurement efforts.

Instead, spend more time measuring your email program against company goals. When you can show how email helps solve some of your company's most pressing concerns, you speak the language your executives understand. Your reward is increased management mindshare and resources.

Jumpstart Your Marketing In a Recession

2009-07-27T14:36:00.002-04:00

Jumpstart Your Marketing For The 3rd & 4th Quarters

Is your business profiting in this recession or are you barely staying a float? Is your marketing strategy strong for 2010 to increase your sales by 15 percent or more? Are your marketing concepts consistent with your business vision? Or the better question should be “Have you written your marketing and business strategy out?” It’s the beginning of the year and it is traditional to make New Year’s resolutions, but you should have your strategies in place for building your business. According to the market researcher Dr. Steven Kraus, author of “Psychological Foundations of Success,” only 15% of the people who have made New Year’s resolutions manage to keep them, but have you? So what are you planning to do the rest of the year to assure that your business is on pace for success?

Planning and strategizing consists of clear defining priorities, considering in advance the resources available, monitoring performance, breaking the strategies down into clear measurable objectives based on a timetable that are easier to achieve along with fostering a well organized team around you. All of these of which are to create an environment of success for your organization. It is always excellent business practices to have strategies in place for business growth because without these commitments, businesses will fail. A lot of businesses are failing because of choosing goals and strategies that are not in relation to the business vision and some are not measurable or realistic. Without these strategies in place, it is hard to convert annual declarations into your daily action plans which then convert to business slipping away in light of other responsibilities and conflicting demands of your time. If this happens the business will go throughout the year without having completed any of the goals set and having to revamp for business failure.

Some of the top business strategies to increase success that are suggested for 2009-10 are that of the following:

1. Commit to your business success by making a decision to pursue your goals consistently.

With each passing day, your business success should be your number one priority. You should have a commitment to work on your business daily with specific goals in mind of what you want to achieve that day, whether it is working on the administration on Monday, marketing on Tuesday, business development on Wednesday, client work on Thursday and finances on Friday. As long as you have a plan that you are working on daily basis you are measuring your success daily with small wins. It makes you more excited that you have accomplished something daily and you look forward to working towards your dream.

The reality is that no one is looking over your shoulder as an entrepreneur or business owner and you are the one that is making things happen. So prioritizing will assist you in making it more enjoyable. For instance, if you have a huge proposal to get done and you have a deadline of three weeks out, would you work on it daily or would you wait to the last minute? Which one will give you the most enjoyable satisfaction, or course, the daily option would be better as opposed to procrastination. Your intentions have to be deliberate in order to be successful.

2. Know exactly what you want, what it will take to get there and how long.

When you are building or operating your business, it is easy to get caught up in the “shoulds” of business such as, “You should be looking at specific territories,” says the sales representative. “You should be going after the big accounts,” says the industry veteran. “You should be advertising your business,” says the advertising agent. All of these which are somewhat necessary, but you knowing what your business needs to succeed is the key. You may not need all of those things at that particular time, but know what is needed to build your business to the specificity of proven strategies for that particular industry.

By being self-employed, you can make your own agenda and do what you need to perform and operate. As a business owner, you cannot operate your business and do the marketing, finances, business development, administration and all that it entails without being overwhelmed. A good suggestion for an entrepreneur is to surround themselves with professionals that have the expertise that you don’t have or don’t have time to do, so that the business can prosper. In other words, know your strengths, weaknesses and limits. You have to make decisions that are best for the business, but with trusted support.

3. Keep your strategic plan reasonable, yet stretch the business for success.

Normally, the straightforward and simple the plan, it will be easier to execute. If you have too many people involved in the assisting with the plan, it will be a challenge and perhaps slow your progress down. Understand that if you have a simple plan you can stay focused on the tasks on a smaller scale as opposed to a complex plan that will perhaps never get done. Strategic plans need to be:

• S-I-M-P-L-E. It doesn’t need to be elaborate.
• But it needs to be where you or your employees can execute within a reasonable amount of time and with excitement.
• The results need to be seen as tangible measurements that can be completed within 30 to 90 days. Make sure that the measurements are noted and celebrated even for the smaller tasks.

7 Steps To Direct Mail Targets

2009-05-19T12:30:00.003-04:00

7 Steps To Direct Mail Targets

Increase Your ROI?

The new age of the technology has taken over, but it is still the style of marketing communications to provide your clients and customers with printed materials. Direct mail is still the main communications tool to get in front of your clients and customers. It brings about brand loyalty and also you can have complete control of the marketing. Print, radio and television advertising, along with online-mail and your website are uncontrollable, whereas you cannot direct who is going to receive it, but going out to the masses, where it is not controlled.

For anyone who is in business knows that most of their clients will come from marketing and sales leads where they are depending on customer contact information, they have to be able to located those meaningful prospects that will bring in the business. The marketing collateral can target the prospects by flyers, postcards, letters, personalized notes and catalogs of your products by getting them directly in form of them. If the marketing collateral is well put together, eye-catching, and has the message that you would like to say, then it is more cost-effective to target those clients. Yet that is not all. It must have the right presentation, offering something and has a call-to-action, you can close a sale faster than it reaching the masses.

With the right tools, time and great execution, your direct mail efforts will result in great payoffs.

The main key is to know who your target audience because getting in front of them is not wasting our time, it is increasing their awareness of your product of service, so you cannot go wrong with direct mail marketing. Yet, the information technology is good to drive people to your website and boost sales, but it is not as effective as getting directly in front of your client. The prospect’s eye is who you should be focusing on. A great sale is getting the right message, product or service in front of the right prospect at the right time. Some experts say that 40 percent of the direct mail success is depending on our own lists of prospects.

If you are looking to increase sales, for example, look at the marketing consultant who is sending out postcards in his campaign to get prospects to come out to a seminar on marketing your business – to clients who needs marketing but doesn’t have time. Or think of the real estate agent who would send out an invitation to an open house or a home buying seminar - those are directed towards special targets that can be captured not to the masses of people on an electronic tools.

1. Know Your Expectations
We know that when you send out targeted mail to a potential client that you are running a risk o them opening your mail that doesn’t guarantee that it will result in a sale, yet if they see your information long enough and when that need comes available, your company would be one of the ones that they would call. It takes at least seven times for you to get your company brand in front of a client before they can recall your business. So your expectations would need to be realistic as you grow your lists. Having a well-targeted list will increase your odds of success.

Knowing that the average response rats varies with seasons, holidays, and other many factors that could increase or decrease your mail response; therefore, being strategic in your mailings is key. The average response rate depends on the package’s overall appeal, the offer, what the product or service is and the quality if your mailing list.

The expectations should be realistic because statistics show that the average response rate on a mailing is .1 percent to 5 percent and a 2 to 3 percent response is great. All responses near a 5 is considered excellent. Therefore, when mailing to your top 10 percent of prospects, you should expect returns to be 30 percent and higher.

Your mailing should be based on clear cut and defined goals to specific target audiences to yield the best results.

2. Know Your Target Audience & Clients
Who is most likely going to purchase your product of service? Who is going to get the most from your company? Will they be repeat customers? Am I reaching my target audience? Is how I’m reaching my audience effective for my business? All of these questions should be answered before sending out a direct mail. Because you don’t want to waste money nor time going after those prospects who don’t have an interest in what you offer.

So know who your clients and prospects look like, how much money they make and what location are they in. You must be specific in who you are targeting so that you will not fall into the trap of reaching the masses if the masses is not who will purchase from you.

Create your own lists of prospects whether you place them in an electronic database or a manual written list, which ever works best for you. Your list should grow as you meet others by networking and referrals. You can get lists from trade groups, list broker, professional organizations or your own personal referrals. Segment them by your needs such as age, geography, income, education, occupation or gender; whatever you need to assist you in your business. Then set a goal on how many you are going to target each day, week and month and reward yourself on accomplishing those goals.

Learn not to sell to everyone, because everyone is not your client.

3. Set Clear Defined Goals
You must have a strategy that will bring about a win-win for everyone. “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is really the truth. Know who you are targeting and understand who they are and your goals. If you do your homework and understand what you are trying to accomplish, you will have excellent results. By choosing direct mail as a marketing tool you can:

• Acquire new customers or referrals
• Expand your market to a wider audience
• Act as a warm-up for later cold calls
• Stimulate higher purchases from your existing clients
• Generate sales
• Build brand recognition and awareness
• Upgrade customer service
• Test the appeal of new products and services
• Respond to competitors
• Support other marketing initiatives, like radio and newspapers
• Deliver company news such as a upcoming sale or new employee

Surveys show that the top three reasons for direct mail is business growth, expansion, a change in strategy and an introduction of a new product or service. Therefore, set goals that are obtainable and that will result in success.

4. Know What You Are Offering
The 3 S’s for your offering should be Keep It Simple, Specific, and Showcase

Simple. Keep it to the point and tell what your benefits and features are of your product or service. Don’t try and cram everything in about your company, it is not the time.

Specific. Be specific in what you are going to offer what they will receive. Don’t make it complicated for them to find. Keep it to the point and be clear about the offer so there won’t be any misunderstandings.

Showcase. Offer items that will draw attention to your business or to get them to purchase. Make sure that what you are offering is tamper-free because people can and will find loopholes. Offer gift certificates, coupons, discounts or free samples; these are always easy to control. If you are in the service businesses offer discounts, white papers, or seminars, but don’t forget the call to action. The more options you give clients to respond to you, the better the response. Options include: e-mail, pre-paid postage, fax-back, and toll free numbers, long-term payment plans and more. Be creative.

5. Your Direct Mail Marketing ROI (Return on Investment)
How much are you looking to make on your direct mail campaign? How much profit did you receive from your last direct mail? You must be strategic in what you want to yield in profits and set a goal to achieve it.

Figure out what you should earn from your direct mail efforts, not the total number of sales. It would always be advantageous to test a small population of a select group, (which is referred to as a nth mailing, because the goal is to get a fraction of the list used). This small test group will give you an idea on what should be done in refining the packaging and the budget. Be clear on what you are trying to accomplish.

6. Acknowledge Your Clients
When a client brings in one of your mailings, coupons, gift certificates, always try and recognize them by offering something extra to them for using your call to action. You are rewarding them for doing what you called them to do, so rewards should be in place.

The coupons, gift certificates and flyers should be attractive and easily identified when the client brings it in to be redeemed. It would be good to include an increase in your budget campaign for bonuses and extra giveaways for clients who bring in referrals. However, you would want to acknowledge your clients for your call to action.

7. Have a Variety
Don’t just send the same letter to the same clients. You would want to have a variety in what your prospects would receive, such as a postcard with a teaser, letter with a call to action, or sign up for a free seminar, something that would engage them into your business yet not looking uniformed. You would still want to include your brand on everything that your prospects and clients see, but it doesn’t have to be the same. Be creative in setting up expectations and recognition of your business. If you know your audience, the cost of your mailings and what your budget says you will be successful in giving a variety to your clients.

Make sure that you are measuring your results because direct mail you can control and it can be measurable. Always be proactive in gathering information when your clients and prospects use your service. Ask where did they hear of you so that you can keep track of what is working for you and what is not. Every marketing tool doesn’t work for everyone, but direct mail works for most and you have to give it time to work for you. You can’t just send out a direct mail piece for one month and not do it again and says that it doesn’t work, you much consistently try it for a minimum of six months to see if it is worth it for you.

Continue to have great success in your marketing.

Engangement Marketing: Increase Your Profits Without Increasing Budget!

2009-04-03T11:12:00.002-04:00

If I could show you how to increase your sales by 40% without increasing your marketing budget, would you be interested? Of course you would, what marketing professional or business owner wouldn't be interested? By the time you have finished this article you will have figured out how to do just that.

Take a few moments and think of all the inactive customer files you have in your file cabinet. Business owners often make the costly mistake of servicing a customer once then assuming "they'll stay" as a customer or client without maintaining and growing that relationship.

A year later that business owner is wondering what happened to that customer and where did they go. Why haven't they hear from them? Did they leave? If so, why?
There are many reasons a customer or client may leave you, but the ones you will hear most often are:
• They took a competitors offer.
• They had an unresolved complaint.
• They left because they felt you didn't care.
• They felt your pricing was too high or unfair.

When you consider that the last two make up the majority of why a client or customer will no longer use your service or buy your products - it can be a hard pill to swallow. After all it means they are an inactive client because they felt you didn't care about them and your competitor did.

This makes sense when you consider that customers often purchase your service or product because they have developed a relationship with you, they owned another product or yours, or they were referred to you by a friend or associate.
When faced with the above facts why is it businesses spend 80% of their marketing dollars going after new customers and clients rather than nurturing, retaining, and maintaining the customer relationships they already have?

Before you spend your time and money going after new customers and clients you do not currently have a relationship with consider the following statistics:

• Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
• Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
• It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer.

As you can see your marketing dollars will go further if you use it to build, nurture, and develop your customer relationships. This isn't as difficult as you think. Building these relationships just means treating your customers and clients as if they truly are your strategic partners and showing them that you truly care about them. It's important to try to satisfy them with the right products and services, supported by the right promotion and making it available at the right time and location. Customers can easily detect indifference and insincerity and they simply will not tolerate it. Long-term client and customer loyalty is a long-term challenge that you must strive for every day and with every transaction no matter how big or small.

While a growing business needs to constantly capture new customers, the focus and priority should be on pleasing your existing customer base. Companies that fail to nurture and retain their customer base ultimately fail. You will also spend twice as much to get new clients as you will in maintaining your existing customer base. You will also be limited in your ability to attract new clients if you can't hold onto and satisfy your existing customers and clients.

The bottom line is that one of the key components in marketing and business growth is to spend the majority of your time and effort nurturing customer relationships, so that you get business from existing clients and customers. This is a strategy that will move you forward in increasing your sales by 40% without increasing your budget.

Engagement Marketing

2009-03-26T18:13:00.002-04:00

What is Marketing Engagement? Well, overtime marketers have overused "engagement" and it has lost its meaning. “Engagement" is more than just an industry buzzword and has become a cornerstone for savvy marketing. It is a way of communicating relevant marketing messages for cultivating your brand and gaining legions of loyal customers that would ultimately increase your sales and profits.

Engagement is an approach that-more or less is in direct contrast to the traditional brand and direct marketing. It is allowing your customers and prospects to build your company's marketing. With so much new technology and people have the capability to connect in various ways, engaging prospects is the entire key; however, this allows potential customers to choose what messaging they will receive and through what channels.

With engagement marketing, it initially starts when someone begins dialogue, such as going to your website and signing up for your email, participating in a blog or reading about a new product review and then requesting information. So how are you engaging your customers and prospects? What are you doing to stay in front of your customer and keeping in contact with them?

Stay tuned to a series of "Powerful Strategies of Engagement Marketing" over the next few weeks that you are able to implement in your business so that you will increase profits and brand awareness.

Elyshia Carr, MBA
CEO/President
Kreative Group, Inc.

Keeping Marketing Consistent

2009-02-13T12:15:00.001-05:00

There is a point I continue to stress with every business person, entrepreneur, and sales person I speak with is to be consistent in marketing your business. Ad hoc marketing produces ad hoc results.

Just as you need consistent fuel for your health, your business needs consistent fuel for its health and future success. Fuel for your business is leads, prospects and clients. Without demand generation, your pipeline eventually dries up and your business falters. I realize that sounds logical but sometimes it just doesn’t seem to resonate with business owners. I continue to see them spend money on marketing tactics that are not well planned and result in a disappointing return on investment. This type of behavior leads business owners to believe that marketing is an expense that is easily cut in difficult times. Just the contrary.

Small businesses need to think seriously about making marketing a consistent, long-term activity for their business, develop a plan and budget and stay on course. It’s the only way you can continually stay ahead of your competition and build visibility for your products and services.

Turn your Company Into a Heavily Quoted Source

2009-01-15T13:08:00.001-05:00

Follow these steps for making your company a heavily quoted source.
Ever wonder why your competitors keep cropping up in coverage - whether it be national dailies, on big-time TV broadcasts or even in local business magazines - while your company's relegated to the back of the trades?

The fact is, a lot of media pickup isn't always driven by stellar press releases, according to Dan Forbush, president and founder of ProfNet, a PR Newswire service that puts journalists in touch with experts and sources for breaking stories. "There are two essential approaches to media placement. One is to persuade reporters that your organization has news worth reporting - this approach is deliberate and release driven. The other is to persuade reporters that there are individuals within your organization who - because of their industry perspective or some form of expertise - are worth interviewing. This approach is opportunistic and pitch driven."

His tips for effectively playing the expert game:

Play reporter. "Forget for a moment your own organization's objectives, and read the world as a reporter would," Forbush advises. "Given your beat and the readers you must satisfy, what topics are of interest? What angles do you find fresh and provocative? With which sources - with what expertise - do you want to be in touch with?"

Become a matchmaker. "Having performed that analysis, you can now lay the role of matchmaker," he continues. "Ask yourself, 'Which individuals within my organization or my clientele can satisfy these reporter needs? And what presentations will be most persuasive?'"

Identify ideas for the masses vs. tailored pitches. "When you write a news release, you're packaging ideas for reporters in masses," Forbush says, "but when you write a pitch, you're tailoring an idea for a single reporter. You're saying 'I think you'll be interested in this person because' - and you have a good reason for thinking so because you've done your homework. You've read the publication, or you've watched the show, and you know what works and what doesn't. Via Lexis-Nexis or Google, you've researched the reporter's work, and you're familiar with his or her recent reporting."

Adopt a long-term perspective. "In all of your relationships with reporters, adopt a long-term perspective," he cautions. "You should craft your pitch carefully in such a way that - even if the reporter doesn't take you up on your offer this time - you can be confident your next pitch will be read. This helps cultivate your standing as a reliable source."

Perform an Expert Audit. "You can be a reliable source only if you have a thorough knowledge of your organization and have identified everyone who can be helpful to reporters and how," Forbush says. "For this reason, when you join a new organization or take on a new client, you should always perform an 'expert audit.' Sit down with colleagues or clients and identify who can talk effectively about what."

Develop platforms for spokespeople. "By profiling your spokesperson(s) on your websites and expert resources for reporters, you provide easy accessibility to these experts," Forbush says. "If you have an expert who can speak on a 'hot topic' that is currently in the news, consider sending out a media advisory alerting reporters to the availability of your spokesperson, and his or her position on the topic," he suggests.

Follow these simple steps and soon you will find reporters seeking you - or one of your experts - out for a quote again and again.

Developing Your Internet Marketing Plan

2009-01-06T13:53:00.002-05:00

What is your goal for your website? When it comes to business websites, a return on investment expected. To get any kind of return, your site needs to have a goal to which all actions will be compared.

Do you want your website to inform, share news and information, communicate with different locations, entertain, or make a profit by selling information, services, or products? Imagine that you can have only one action on the website. What would it be? That's your website goal. Beyond this, only you can define what exactly you want other people to do on your website.

From this goal, you can research and develop your audience, keywords, site structure, site design, content, and promotion for your website. Ask yourself:

* What am I offering? . Who needs this? . Where are they online and offline?
* What action do I want them to take?
* What sets my site apart from others like it?
* How can I attract more attention?
* How much time can I invest in updating my site?
* How much money can I invest in Internet Marketing?
* How do you plan to reach that goal?
* The marketing goal is always to attract and convert your target market into customers. Internet marketing techniques are a little different than conventional marketing, but the general strategies still apply. People still buy based on their needs and you still want to make it obvious that your product or service will fulfill one or more of these needs.

People are also tired and annoyed by intrusive advertising, so you will need to be natural in your techniques. Instead of trying to break through barriers and blast your message through the clutter, try earning your target market's trust by building relationships.

Internet Marketing Strategies:

Provide Value To Your Market
On the web, people can leave you with one click if you do not provide them with what they want.

Communicate Respectfully - No one likes SPAM. No one wants to wait on hold when they call Customer Service. No one wants to wait a week for a response to an email.
Be Trustworthy - People buy from people they like and people they trust.
Be Personal - Websites are visited by individuals not organizations.
Build Relationships - Your customers will feel comfortable with you and talking about you to others.

Internet Marketing Techniques:
* Network - Online and Offline the best way to grow is through personal connections and interaction. Online social networks and communities can be a powerful resource for finding customers and creating relationships with them.
* Create An Email Marketing Database - Sending regular emails create and maintain relationships with your customers. It is very important to be trustworthy and honest in these emails. DO NOT SPAM! Do not sell your client's information, and do not send mass emails more than once a week. DO provide value, do allow people to opt-in and opt-out of every email, and be personal in your communications.
* Create A Network Of Links - Links are the key to the Internet. You want to make sure you only add outgoing links on your site if you are sure they are useful to your customer. Only link to helpful and trustworthy sites. The same goes for sites linking to yours. Every link to your site is an online referral for your business. While you can't stop anyone from linking to your site, you can seek out and develop relationships with your vendors, online communities, and other trustworthy and helpful sites that your customers visit.
* Create Attractive Content - Content has always been king. Write a blog, post articles, make a Top 5/10/50/100 List, create a photo gallery, or any other content that will attract your customers, links from other sites, and attention from the search engines.
* Organic and Paid Search Results - Search Engine Optimization techniques can only get you so high in the rankings. However, you can always jump to the front of the line with a little cash.
You can buy Pay-Per-Click ads on your core search terms; you can hire a good, trustworthy SEO expert, or buy links on popular websites and directories. When are you finished? Never! Unless you close up shop or sell your site to Google for millions of dollars, you are going to want to continually update your website, evaluate your marketing plan, add new techniques, expand your niche, and continue to grow.

The minute your site becomes stale your audience begins to move on. With the millions of websites available in the world, someone is posting new information or creating new techniques to reach your target market every day. Developing an effective online presence is becoming more and more similar to any brick and mortar store. If have to use the old elbow grease, network, and actively seek out new customers to grow your business.

Keeping Your Website Fresh:

* Share your news and press releases on your site. . Ask your customers and vendors to share information.
* Take part in blogs, forums, and social sites online.
* Post to your own blog on a regular schedule.
* Create a space for your customers to help you improve your site.
* Reward active participants on your site with gifts and gadgets.
* Watch your competitors and other experts in your field.

Attract Clients During a Recession

2008-12-17T15:13:00.002-05:00

Attract Clients During A Recession

Have your phones stopped ringing yet? The economy is lagging and dragging. We've felt the effects in the United States. Now we're seeing global implications. So, how do you tackle economic uncertainty? Cut advertising, travel, training, marketing, and discretionary expense line items? Cut purchasing? Ouch! The pipeline starts to dry up and the anxiety level goes through the roof.

Many people think that since there's nothing they can do, they should just do nothing. But "nothing" is futile thinking.

What If You Could Reach Your Market Without Incurring Any Hard Costs?
The only budget you need to worry about is simply your time. Your time to ask for referrals! You know about referrals. When a qualified prospect is referred the chances of that prospect becoming a client is between 70 and 90 percent. Additionally, we are pre-sold. Selling time decreases. Credibility increases. And, we ace out the competition.

Results are the only thing that matters. And, now you will be able to achieve results simply by implementing the following 8 "Killer" strategies.

8 "Killer Steps" to Attracting New Business in a Lagging Economy

1. Broaden Your Perspective - What business are you in? Redefine and reinvent yourself. Determine how you can create a leap in demand for your products and services. Build new alliances and consider alternate distribution channels. Don't go solo. It's important to assemble a group of advisors and get their input and creative ideas. Include people who have differing points of view from you. Not easy, but critical.

2. Be Nimble and Innovative -You'll never have all the facts. Make quick decisions. Be fearless and make tough choices. Create new uses for your products. Why not a new business model?

3. Dazzle Your Current Customers - Your current customers need care and feeding. Don't ignore them at the expense of new business, because they are your best source for new business.

4. Prioritize Wisely - The most important activity for any salesperson is to do what's "closest to cash" the first thing every single day-whether it's following up with a prospect, writing a proposal, or closing a deal.

5. Become an Expert Company - hire experts because they can't afford to make mistakes. Position your company as the expert with a specific product or in a specific market niche. Become an expert and people will be more likely to refer you.

6. Stay Connected - If you want to get more referrals you have to network like crazy. Attend a minimum of one event a week. You never know who you will meet and what you will learn. Never let your network go down. Networking is an essential referral marketing activity. So go make connections and build your business. Talk to people and find out how you can help them. How is their business doing? Are they impacted by the lagging economy? How? Don't email, call. You make connections by talking to people and by spending the time to have a robust conversation.

7. Don't Cut Prices, Increase Value - There's a lot of chatter about cutting prices in a lagging economy. Many small business owners think businesses are cutting back, so prospects don't have money for their projects. But, by cutting prices, you're cutting your profits even further. Instead, consider how to "get in and get started." Divide your offering into smaller chunks, get results, and create traction. Or, give more value. When you offer high-value products and services, people will refer you and you will get more sales, even in a recession economy.

8. Commit to Building Your Referral Business - Referrals are always terrific, but they mean even more in a lagging economy. Don't let the lagging economy trickle down on you. Take charge and make your phone ring again! Let your prospects know how much you care about them. Tell and show just how much you appreciate their business. Inform them that you'd like to help people just like them. And, don't forget to thank your prospects and clients for their referral.

Follow these tips and you will get more referrals. You will attract new business. You will get more clients. You will accelerate your sales. And, you will achieve higher results without increasing your cost of sales. In fact, there's a great chance that you will decrease your costs!

Strategies That Can Amplify Your Press Coverage

2008-12-02T14:00:00.002-05:00

Kreative Group, Inc. uses these straightforward strategies to amplify press coverage:

Photos and graphics. A good or interesting photograph (or video) can win you significantly more editorial space and you can bet most people will look at the picture before the read the text.
Offer a briefing or interview. Talk to the writer as she is writing the story. You can suggest interesting angles and provide information she did not get elsewhere.
Leverage your advertising dollars into editorial coverage — Yes it can be done, but your agency need to approach this in the right way.

Recycling PR wins

When you win a good piece of publicity, you can amplify your success using the following tactics:

A press release. If you won an award or some other kind of significant endorsement, put out your own press release to announce it. You don't necessarily have to put this release on a costly news wire. You can post it as an advisory on your web site and send it to your organization's mail list.
Go local. If a prominent national publication or broadcaster carries a story on you, send a short release about it to your local newspapers, trade publications and chamber of commerce newsletters. "Local boy does good" stories are quite popular.
Add to the story. Write a letter to the editor of the publication that just printed the story and elaborate on a few of the points that were made in the article.
Post it on your web site. Prominently quote the bits of the article that you like and provide a link to the actual article (most print publications, and even broadcasters, have the same stories online).
Distribute reprints and copies. Most publications (incl. broadcast media) offer a reprint service (for a fee). You can include reprints with your sales collateral and distribute them by mail, at events and speaking engagements. If you sell through a channel make sure the sales team of your channel partners also get copies. Laminated copies can be used as "shelf talkers" in retail outlets.Don't forget to include your press wins in your email newsletter. You can highlight a good quote and if appropriate, include a link.
Merchandising. If you won a significant endorsement (e.g. an award) you could let potential customers know by using the award icon on product packaging, price lists, employee t-shirts, etc.

Business Referrals: Great Marketing Start

2008-11-24T15:12:00.001-05:00

Referrals can be as important as any other customers. When people refer someone to you, there is a possibility that you can turn those referrals into customers straight away. Referral is seen as the back bone of marketing. Of course to get the referral system going smoothly for your business is rather difficult but not impossible. All you need is a network of people you can trust and try to get them to refer new customers to you.

Before you can request for referrals, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. First of all, make sure that your business is a reputable business, not some crappy company promising everything and delivers nothing. When you can deliver results as promised to your customers, then you can request for referrals. This is because to get someone to refer people to your business requires them to try out your services beforehand. Therefore quality is most important when you deliver your services.

Secondly, make sure that you have some incentive for the referrer. You don't expect them to refer people to you for nothing do you? There is no free lunch in this world, but that doesn't mean you have to pay them cash for every person they refer to you. What you can do is offer them gift vouchers, discounts whenever they use your services and maybe other freebies you can think of as a way of gratitude. This is a way of saying "thank you" for referring those people who have become your customers along the way.

When you request for referrals, be sure to request in a polite way or friendly way. Do not sound as if you are pressuring them into finding people to refer to you. Some people doesn't like to be a referrer but if you can keep their interest high, they might do it for you. Remember to keep a stack of business cards whenever you go so you can hand them to your potential referrer.

Having high quality referrals would be the best thing for your business. This is because you can expect more than half of the referrals to be your customers in the long run. Keep in touch with every one of them is definitely helpful too as networking is a need for marketing. You need to have audience for your marketing so start networking with people around you and those referrals.

Low Cost Marketing Strategies

2008-10-21T16:30:00.000-04:00

by: Elyshia Carr

Small businesses must be extra imaginative with their marketing efforts in order to attract customers and get them to open their wallets. Even more challenging is that most entrepreneurs have shallow pockets and shoppers are being more selective as a result of the sluggish economy and volatile stock market. The following are six proven low-cost marketing ideas that help small businesses increase sales and generate referrals, ultimately helping you build your cash cow, while spending very little.

Take A Walk
Next time you walk down a street with high foot-traffic, pay attention to storefront windows underutilized. Approach the store owner and offer to pay a small fee to advertise your business in their window. Imagine, you pay $50 per month for a location that costs someone else $2500 a month in rent. This idea also works in reverse. If you’re the store owner with great window visibility, approach other entrepreneurs and offer them an affordable advertising opportunity.

Special Deal Today Only
The next time business is slow, try sending out an email to your prospect list that reads, "Please call me. I have a special deal I can offer you if you call me today. You'll be glad you did! (978) 000-0000. Thanks, Sharron." This method really works. Prospects call because of the urgency you create using such a short deadline and to make sure they don’t miss out on a worthy opportunity. Be careful. You’ll lose credibility with your prospects if your offer isn’t aggressive enough, i.e., 10% off won’t cut it!

Right Under Your Nose
Are your vendors doing business with you? Why not? Here’s a short list of the prospects you should contact within 48 hours of reading this article, your: accountant, attorney, plumber, electrician, daycare provider, housekeeper, greens keeper, mechanic, realtor, friends, family, minister/priest/rabbi, etc., dentist, physician, gynecologist, nail technician, hairdresser, Mary Kay Consultant, marriage counselor, coach, personal trainer, financial advisor, etc. If you and your vendor are not a match, he or she probably knows someone who should be doing business with you. All you have to do is ask your vendor to provide some word-of-mouth about you. At minimum, ask to display your business cards and flyers at their office, or to mention your business in their customer newsletter. Take a moment and make sure people in your immediate circle understand what you’re selling.

Customers on the Fence
Before you send off your next proposal, call your prospect and tell her the proposal she requested is ready. Tell her you'd like to forward the proposal, but before you do, ask her what time tomorrow would be convenient to discuss the proposal. Remember, always set up your next appointment before releasing any information.

Charge at Least Five Bucks
Always charge a fee for all your event marketing efforts. Fee-paid seminars and workshops almost always generate more participants than free events. The fee does two things. First, when you charge for something, there’s an implied "value" built in. Your prospect will believe they "get more" when they pay, versus not paying. Second, when a prospect pays you, they’re showing a commitment and are now a more qualified prospect and more likely to show up. Don’t just take my word for it; test it. It’s true.

Stimulate Customer Senses
Do you think the smell of fresh baking bread flowing throughout the grocery store or music playing is by chance? Absolutely not. Retail businesses have been going out of their way for years to stimulate shoppers and keep them browsing. Stimulating the senses works outside of bricks and mortars too. For example, let’s say you're a business development expert and you're getting ready to mail your quarterly newsletter on white stock. Instead, try a red or pink-hued paper. Or, if you’d prefer to remain conservative, use a white textured stock. Another example: There's nothing worse than the smell of a disinfectant used in a doctor's office. Try burning vanilla candles in the waiting room, they’ll help sooth your customers while they wait. If your business is notorious for long waiting room times, fresh baked cookies work well.

Remember, the more comfortable we keep our customers, the longer they’ll stay, the more memorable experience they’ll have and the more they’ll spend, or pass on positive word-of-mouth. When you’re planning your next marketing activity, remember to stimulate your customers’ senses, including eyes, ears, nose and mouth.

Kreative Group, Inc.
www.TheKreativeGroup.com
info@thekreativegroup.com
704.966.6016

When Is Marketing Needed?

2008-10-15T10:59:00.000-04:00

The answer to that question is “all the time”.

I often notice that many small business owners treat marketing like something that can be turned on and off. I see this happen especially when the economy is soft. The key indicator is that I get unbelievably busy because businesses decide they probably should market to try and find new customers.

The good news is these businesses seek out help, looking for someone to guide them in their efforts so they achieve success. But for every one business that calls me or another marketing expert, there are many that try what I’ve called the “Chinese Menu” approach to marketing - trying to mix and match disparent marketing activities - and their business will get busy again. Some call it the “binge marketing” approach. In either case, all you get is a bad case of heartburn and not many additional clients.

Unfortunately, that belief is the demise of many small businesses.
Effective small business marketing is not an activity to be done only when things get quiet, but should be constantly and consistently happening in your business. Marketing needs to be a continuous activity whose activities feed off each other, ensuring your business stays top of mind to your current customers and new prospects.

In addition, stopping and starting marketing interrupts the process. Marketing takes time to take effect and when you shut something down, it is really hard to kick it back up. Plus stopping and starting marketing doesn’t give you enough data to know whether something is working or not. The key is to put a marketing effort in motion and let it run, evaluating the outcome and tweaking the tactics when need be. Starting and stopping marketing activities is guaranteed to give you less than stellar results.

Benefits of continuous marketing:
1. You build awareness and brand differentiation for your business by being visible to your prospects and clients;

2. You establish a solid reputation for your business by marketing your expertise through articles and blogging;

3. You distinguish your business from the “competition” by staying visible and promoting your expertise;

4. You can evaluate your marketing efforts by the results you are seeing in your business. If they work, keep doing them; if they don’t work try something else.

Marketing takes a little time each week, ensuring your business stays visible to your clients. Plan to network, blog, write an article, update your profiles on LInkedIn and Facebook, contribute to a Twitter conversation, add some additional Internet marketing activities, be active in social networks and ask a client for a reference or testimonial. All of these take a few minutes to a couple hours but the payoff can be substantial.

Business Goal Management

2008-09-24T18:38:00.000-04:00

Business Goal Management

There is a strong relationship between a successful company and an effective goal setting process. By setting goals, specifically SMART goals, busienss owners can engage their workforce and encourage employees across the company to focus and successfully achieve these goals together.

Strong goal alignment and goal visibility allows for quicker execution of company strategy by enabling management to allocate proper resources across various projects. Managers can focus their staff on the company’s most important goals and reduce task redundancy throughout their team while employees will have a greater understanding of how their efforts will serve the business goals.

Goal management also lets you establish a true pay-for-performance culture by communicating the company goals to employees, therefore providing the groundwork for linking reward systems with individual and / or team performance. Find out how you can put goal alignment to work at your organization with our assistance in business goal setting.
Email us and receive our "Business Goal Setting White Paper"
info@thekreativegroup.com
www.TheKreativeGroup.com

Designing Successful Sales Processes

2008-07-30T15:23:00.000-04:00

One of the keys to designing any successful business process is to carefully delineate what people can control and what they cannot. In selling, this is usually overlooked to the frustration of all. Yet, identifying these factors is critical to helping people learn how to sell effectively and to elevating the performance of the team.

One excellent way to do this is to work on clarifying people’s qualifying criteria. These criteria should be worked out in great detail, ideally in the form of questions salespeople can score on a five-point Likert scale. The idea is that each salesperson understands the ranges of observable facts in a variety of areas such as:

1. How do we know there is an opportunity?
2. What is the pain/value to the customer?
3. What is the value to us?
4. Can we win the business?

Completing these Likert scale questions helps salespeople (and their managers) focus on the facts rather than on what they or their boss wants the truth to be.

We have found in our work with clients that the effort to develop those qualification criteria systematically and to use them in every deal offers dramatic payback. It provides a more precise language for understanding their opportunities and account situations.

This enables salespeople to discern what they can and cannot control and to improve their chances of winning a deal by designing their strategies around what they can control.

Further, it standardizes the way the organization prioritizes its pursuit of opportunities, elevating thepredictability of the whole system. Furthermore, it becomes possible for deal quality scores to be used as feedback for the effectiveness of lead generation campaigns.

Finally, the data this type of approach provides can be priceless. This technique enables your company to avoid the blunt instrument approach, and instead elevates your sales team’s ability to perceive and adapt to facts in the customers’ environment. There are many other ways to improve the design of your sales process, but defining and clarifying your terms and qualifying criteria should be the cornerstone.

Who Are Your Clients?

2008-06-03T12:01:00.000-04:00

Have you defined your Business Model? What does your perfect client look like? What is the best way to reach them?

Your target audience needs to be so defined that you are not running after clients who don't need your product or services. I often hear clients say that they don't want to limit themselves, but everyone is not your customer. The truth is that having a target market doesn't limit your marketing, it aims it.

Why Target?
1. You get to know your client better and what they need.
2. It will cost you less in money and time.
3. Attraction Marketing - building your specific message to reach only your prospects.
4. Targeting allows you to position yourself in the marketplace.

Don't leave your target market open too broad because you will spread yourself to thin trying to reach everyone. Identify those prospects who you really care about and know that what you have to offer will benefit them. Also choose prospects who can afford your product or service.

All customers are not "one-size-fits-all."

Does Your Marketing Bring Results?

2008-05-27T02:55:00.000-04:00

Business owners spend so much time marketing without a strong strategic marketing plan and end up waisting their time and money because they are not familiar with who would do business with them.

Wouldn't you like to know that your marketing budget is working for you and increasing your MROI? Or would you like to continue to waste your money and don't get any results?

A Strong Marketing Action Plan is needed if your business is going to continue to grow.

Let's talk about how we can make that happen. Is there anyone having a hard time with their marketing campaign?

How can I help you grow?