Marketing

Your glowing red tie that everyone can see from across a busy city street, the gleaming white smile, the perfectly pressed suit or designer pumps, the fancy name badge you always wear to try and stand out, the robust strides you take when you enter a room that creates an air of confidence are just not enough to build your personal brand anymore. There will certainly always be a place for the Fuller Brush salesperson approach and some may be fooled by pomp and circumstance, but today’s buyers are savvier than ever and they want substance.

I remember buying my first business suit at Today’s Man when I was 21 and being so proud and confident that I could actually look the part of a successful person. I felt like a million bucks, but in reality I looked like $124.95 off the sale rack. No one was impressed. I quickly learned that playing the part was not nearly enough. I needed to be able to deliver for my prospects and clients to earn the respect and credibility I needed to grow my business and advance my own skills.

So I hit the streets.

Cold calling, telemarketing, and getting to every networking event and industry gathering I could humanly make it to. Within a remarkably short period of time I realized that more and more people knew who I was and they were recommending me to their friends, clients, and colleagues. Without much thought, in these early days I was building my personal brand of excellence and people were taking notice of my prowess in the heavily trafficked payroll services industry. It was nice to be in demand and even better to have folks calling me for a change.  (more…)

When you market your organization through email or social media, the goal is to get your audience to take an action — purchase something, register for an event, read something, engage with your content, or form an opinion of you. But if you make it difficult for your readers or followers to find your call to action, they might not follow through.

With the busy holiday season right around the corner, you’ll want to avoid these common call-to-action mistakes to ensure the success of your holiday promotions:

Don’t: Bury your call to action

Don’t make your audience scroll through a long, wordy email to get to the call to action. Keep it short and sweet. Focus on one call to action in your message so that your audience knows exactly what you want them to do next. If you give customers the right information and resources from the beginning, they’ll be armed with the knowledge and tools necessary to take the next step. (more…)

The truth is you don’t really need a public relations firm to publicize your business. I realize that as the owner of a boutique public relations firm that’s probably not my best sales pitch. And yet, it’s true.

A PR firm will have experience and connections. They’ll also spend significant funds on media databases, memberships to various organizations, and a ton of magazine subscriptions. But as an entrepreneur, you already have the skills and passion you need to handle your own press outreach. Whether you’ll want to or not, well, that’s a different story.

If you’re looking to cut costs and invest time, here are five completely free ways to get yourself and your business in the news.

Know the Players

Players? What players? The journalists. Create an email account just for alerts, e-newsletter subscriptions and blog feeds. Then go to: www.google.com/alerts and www.alerts.yahoo.comand set up alerts for terms related to your business, e.g. if you run a pizza shop, set up an alerts for your business name, pizza, Italian food, and alerts for your key competitors. Next, using your new email address, sign up for related content that can help your business grow, like relevant emails from business journals, marketing gurus, etc. At least once a week read through your inbox and compile names of writers who’ve written about a topic similar to yours – it’s best to do this in Excel, so you can create columns.  (more…)

For most companies, there are ways to turn marketing efforts into profit centers. Of course, every situation and every company is different. Creative marketing solutions do not apply across the board.

But in all cases, it pays to think outside the box. I like racking my brain to think of ways to turn marketing efforts into profit centers. And I have found that it is usually possible.

Here are some examples from the days when I owned an industrial equipment manufacturing company, building specialty machinery for the polymer industry. I have since used the same type of thinking in financial services, publishing, and other companies I have owned or consulted with.

The Demonstration Lab

As a cost center: Customers came to our factories to use demonstration equipment to see if it could handle their processing and new product development requirements. The hope was that if they had a successful experience then they would buy our equipment. Every trial session required our staff to be available. As our company’s reputation grew, demand for our lab services grew exponentially. It was a money-spending sinkhole that occasionally led to equipment sales. (more…)

“How and when will this generate sales?” That’s what entrepreneurs typically ask themselves when investing in marketing. “And that is the completely WRONG question to ask,” says marketing expert David Newman. In his new book, DO IT! MARKETING (AMACOM; June 20, 2013), Newman reveals the right questions to ask, right away, for marketing a small business with a big impact – both online and off. It all builds on these four fundamental insights:

Insight #1: You need to sell the same way that you buy. When was the last time you snapped up an offer from spam e-mail? When’s the last time you gave your credit card number over to a cold caller who interrupted your dinner? As a customer, you don’t buy from any company based on its spam, cold calls, postcards, or text pitches. So, why do you expect any customer—let alone, lots of eager customers—to buy based on yours? The right question to ask, in Newman’s book: What value have I added to my prospect’s world in order to earn the right to invite them to a conversation and offer my solution to their problems, headaches, heartaches, and challenges?

Insight #2: Referrals rock, but they’re not everything. “I don’t need to do any marketing because 99 percent of my business is repeat and referral business.” Maybe that’s what you tell yourself. Do you seriously think that referrals don’t check you out online before picking up the phone? What messages are you sending to valued referrals with an outdated website and abandoned Twitter account? The right questions to ask, in Newman’s book: Does my overall online presence reassure and reinforce the referrals I earn? Does it contain the most current, credible, and relevant positioning, content, and resources to make my advocates look better—not worse—for referring me? (more…)