- For
marketing on the Internet, the easiest way to sell your products if
through "affiliates", which are other businesses who will market your
product to their customers for a commission of each sale. This is the most
powerful way to sell on the Internet because you have thousands of other
people marketing your products for you and it does not cost you anything
except a commission when a sale is made. Therefore, you have zero
financial risk.
- Write
friendly personalized sales letters to your prospects.
- Place
big easy to read signs in front of your store or office. The sign needs to
have your company name, phone number and website address.
- Brochures.
Make sure to use strong sales text so you excite customers so they want to
buy.
- 8, 16,
or 24-page booklets/catalogs that show all your products and lots of
pictures. Another great thing about booklets is that you can sell
advertising space in them to other companies. By selling advertising space
in your booklet you will probably be able to cover your printing and
mailing fees.
- Postcards
- large postcards work best.
- Locate
your office at an easy to find, high traffic location. As they say,
location, location, location. If your store is located where nobody can
see it, getting customers will be hard.
- Display
advertising in newspapers. Make sure you have a big bold headline that
excites people to want to read your ad.
- Display
advertising in trade publications.
- Display
advertising in magazines.
- Display
advertising in your local Penny Saver or coupon book.
- Coupon
book direct mail packages.
- Display
advertising in the phone book.
- Include
sales text and your website address in your email signature.
- Email
advertising - advertise in your own ezine/newsletter and advertise in the
ezines/newsletters of other companies that market to your target audience.
- Start
your own paper newsletters and send it to your target market. Paper
newsletters are taken far more seriously than email newsletters/ezines.
- Advertise
in the newsletters (email and paper based) of other companies that market
to your target audience.
- Pay
per click advertising in search engines. See Google AdWords, Overture.com.
- Purchase
text ads (NOT banner ads) on websites that attract your target market.
- Implement
search engine optimization to get high rankings for search terms in the
search engines.
- Ask
for link exchanges with other websites that market to your target
audience.
- Radio
advertising.
- T.V.
advertising on network T.V.
- T.V.
advertising on Cable T.V. (Much more affordable than you think).
- Infomercials.
- Sell
your products on www.ebay.com, www.amazon.com and www.overstock.com.
- Look
for websites that sell products to your target market and call them to ask
if they will sell your product on their website. This is a very east way
to get distribution.
- Attend
Trade shows.
- Telemarketing,
particularly business to business telemarketing.
- Send
out press releases. Send out at least one press release every 2-3 months.
Send out more if you can.
- Billboard
Advertising. Keep these simple with 7 words or less and make them very
easy to read.
- Hand
out fliers.
- Hang
door hanger fliers.
- PowerPoint
presentations.
- Indoor
billboard advertising at the airport.
- Advertising
at your local movie theater in the advertising they offer before a movie
starts.
- Write
short "how to" articles and send them out as press releases and distribute
them using article distribution websites.
- Whenever
you talk to a new customer, ask "how did you hear about us" to know what
marketing strategy attracted them to contact you.
- Use
low price introductory offers to get a new customer to try a product. You
may lose money on the first sale but you are looking for repeat orders to
make your profit and you cannot get repeat orders if you cannot get a new
customer to buy in the first place.
- You
must position your product or service in the minds of customers. Are you
the safe company? Are you the company with the lowest prices? Do you have
the highest quality products? Why is your product special and how does
that benefit your customers? Your marketing materials and company slogan
should reflect your position and you MUST position yourself differently
than your competitors so you stand out as being special.
- Market
your company in job advertisements-include your company website URL.
- Find
distributors to sell your product. Conduct searches on google.com to find
distributors.
- Hire
independent sales reps to sell your product. To find independent sales
reps, try posting a job ad on a large job board such as www.monster.com or
www.hotjobs.com.
- Follow
up direct mail campaigns with a telephone call. By calling a prospect
after that prospect receives your direct mail sales letter, you can
increase your response rate by several times.
- What
is your competitive advantage and how does it benefit your customers?
Explain why a customer should do business with you instead of your
competitors in all of your marketing.
- Include
testimonials in all of your marketing. Nothing is more powerful in sales
and marketing than testimonials. If you don't have testimonials, ask for
them. If you have to, offer free sample products or services to several
customers in exchange for a testimonial.
- To
find out the real benefits of your product or service, ask your customers
why they choose to do business with us? What is the number one reason why
they do business with us? Is it our quality, technology, price, service,
delivery?
- The
more work you make a client do to buy from you, the greater the chances
are that you will NOT make a sale. You must make buying from your company
very easy. Therefore, don't make a client call you to start a sale. You
call them!
- You
must create a sales process-a series of steps that must take place to turn
a prospect into a customer. Create a flow chart that shows this sales
process and how it must be used for every prospect. The more precise you
can make your sales process, the easier it will be for your sales force to
make sales.
- Create
a referral system to get referrals from existing customers.
- Join a
local business networking club.
- Join a
business barter network. Why pay cash if you can trade?
- For
marketing to work you must have repetition and the marketing message must
be consistent. Most people do NOT buy until they see your marketing a
minimum of 7-times. Therefore, you must market continuously, day after
day, month after month, year after year.
- Give
free information/instructional seminars.
- Offer
free trials of your product/service to get people to try it.
- What
are the problems our customers are facing that keep them awake at night
and how can you solve those problems? How can we relieve their pain? Once
you figure how to solve their pain, describe it in all of your marketing.
- Focus
on only 1 or 2 major selling points in your marketing materials. By having
too many selling points, you will confuse the customer. Be the best at one
thing and customers will remember you for it. This is positioning. In
marketing, LESS is MORE.
- Offer
strong satisfaction guarantees. Take away the risk from the client. If
your competition has a guarantee, make yours stronger. Put the buying risk
on your shoulders, not your customer's shoulders. If you offer a quality
product or service, you have nothing to worry about as far as giving
refunds.
- The
most important part of an email marketing message is the subject line.
People scan email subject lines and if yours is boring or looks like spam
it will be deleted before it is ever read.
- The
best days to do email marketing is on Friday (the best day) and Tuesday.
- Consider
making a telesales call prior to sending out a letter. The phone call
should give a brief introduction stating how you can help the customer and
that a letter with more detailed information will be arriving shortly and
to please watch out for it. A few days later another phone call should be
made to see if the prospect has interest and if a meeting can be setup.
- A huge
part of marketing is to get the prospect to agree to an in-person meeting
so the salesperson can close the sale. If you are cold calling companies,
your first job is to first get an appointment, so focus only on getting
the appointment. Save your sales presentation for when you meet in person.
- If you
cannot get an in-person meeting, try to get a teleconference.
- Research
has shown that sales people who wear dark blue suits make the most sales.
So, make sure your sales force wears dark blue suits when making sales
calls.
- Use
the Internet to give presentations where you control their computer and
walk them through the presentation over a teleconference. Microsoft XP has
a feature for doing this.
- If
your company does not have its own telesales staff, consider outsourcing
the telesales/appointment setting to a telemarketing firm.
- After
a service has been completed, your client needs to be contacted to see if
they were pleased with the service and if they wish to order again to
renew the service.
- Bus
advertising.
- Taxi
cab advertising.
- Sidewalk
park bench advertising.
- Enter
all prospects into a database and a contact management program such as ACT
or salesforce.com so customers and your relationship with them is
constantly monitored.
- Offer
Free reports and free e-books on your website.
- Allow
other websites to publish your articles/reports if they give a link back
to your website.
- Write
"how to" articles and post them on your website.
- Use an
online article distribution service to distribute your article to
thousands of websites where it may be published. Services to use are
http://www.isnare.com,
- http://thephantomwriters.com,
and http://www.goarticles.com.
- Telling
a story is very powerful in marketing. Use stories whenever possible to
sell a product or service. Show in a story form how your product or
service solved a customer's problem.
- If you
are reselling another company's products or services, ask the parent
company for coop money for advertising.
- When
making an appointment, let your prospect know there is no obligation to
buy anything. This will put them more at ease and make the sales process
easier.
- Provide
objection scripts to sales staff so they instantly know the best way to
respond to any possible objection a prospect may have. Responses to
objections must be memorized!
- Teach
your staff how to up-sell and cross-sell other products and services.
- In
your direct mail use press release articles written about your company
(tear sheets) as a marketing tool to build credibility.
- Get
endorsements from experts in your industry.
- Many
people are more comfortable using email as an initial contact tool, so
include an email address in all of your marketing.
- To get
a better response to your direct mail, use a series of direct mail
letters, each sent out a week or two after the previous letter. Each
letter should have a slightly different message.
- You
need to have a quality sales force-people who love to sell and who are
excellent closers. If you have salespeople who are not good at selling,
get rid of them and find people who are great at selling. If you need to,
hire a headhunting firm to recruit the top salespeople from competitors.
- Don't
let your marketing look like everybody else's (your competition). You need
to make your company stand out.
- A
product's name should reflect what it does. "Weed Wacker" "Tummy Buster".
- Show
before and after pictures to demonstrate how a product solves a problem.
- Use
case studies to show how your product or service has helped customers.
- Provide
the appearance of exceptional value by offering free ad-on
products/services, two for the price of one, etc. Get $200 worth of "stuff"
for only $29.99!
- To
better market a product, show measurable results of how it has helped
clients and link these results with testimonials. Give hard facts to prove
why your product or service works, or your money back. "Over the past
6-months we helped our client save $7,455 on their telecom services."
- You
must stress the one thing that your company does better than anyone else,
and if you don't know what that one thing is, you need to find it or
create it.
- All
marketing must be created so that it can be reduced to a single sentence -
how your product or service can help (benefit) the customer better than
anyone else.
- Learn
what your customer's goals are and show how your product or service WILL
help them achieve their goals.
- One
single marketing tactic may not work very well by itself, but when you
combine it with other marketing tactics to create what is called,
"integrated marketing", all of the marketing tactics reinforce each other
creating better overall results. An example of integrated marketing is
advertising and doing PR in the same magazine and using both tactics to
market your website where customers can get a free report. And to get the
report, they will have to give you their contact information, for which
you build a database and market to these prospects with email, direct
mail, and maybe even telephone marketing.
- Putting
all of your eggs ($$$) in one marketing basket is a sure formula for
failure. To be successful in marketing, you must use multiple forms of
marketing that all work together.
- You
MUST put in place metrics to measure the success of every marketing tactic
to see if it is generating a return on investment. Expand marketing
tactics that are working and eliminate marketing tactics that are not
working.
- Ask
your customers why they did NOT buy to learn what the weaknesses are in
your product/service and/or in your approach to marketing it. When a
customer does not buy, ask why so you can improve your marketing. Finding
out why potential customers are not buying is at least as important as
finding out why customers do buy.
- Marketing
takes time and repetition to be effective. You need to keep a focused and
consistent message to be successful. You must relentlessly keep
communicating that same message over and over, year after year. This is
what builds brands and name recognition. This is what builds great
companies.
- You
should always have a strong call to action-Act now and get 20% off or a
free widget.
- When
trying to increase sales, always go to your existing customers first. They
are the easiest market to sell to because they already have a relationship
with you and they believe in your product or service. Most companies spend
all of their marketing dollars trying to acquire new customers instead of
trying to sell to their existing customer base, which is much cheaper and
much more effective. Pick the low hanging fruit. Market to your existing
customer base first.
- A
big mistake many companies make is not informing their customers of all of
the services they perform or products they sell.
- When
customers need a product on a continual basis, setup a subscription
service where they are automatically billed each month until they cancel
the service.
- Offer
gift certificates.
- Consider
hiring interns from your local colleges to help you market your business
such as making phone calls, putting together direct mail pieces, etc.
- Sponsor
a local sports team.
- Sponsor
local events-Charity, Fundraising, good causes.
- Offer
free seminars or workshops.
- Offer
a free sample of your work prior to making a customer buy.
- Advertise
on your car and all company vehicles.
- Give
free promo gifts that have your company name and phone number on them such
as pens, shirts, coffee cups, caps, etc.
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