Top-Five Marketing Strategies

Strategy 1. Think big and audit your time. No matter the size of your business, place a mental image in your mind as if you are the largest and most successful person in your industry. How much time is consumed by routine office work someone else should be doing? Spend more time with more important tasks such as marketing strategies, improving customer relations, and implementing new strategies to expand your services.

Strategy 2. Be different and stand out from the competition. Jordan Furniture sells more furniture per square foot than any other furniture store in the nation. They transformed their family-owned business into a multi-million dollar corporation by following a principle called “shoppertainment.” To surprise employees and customers, Barry and Eliot Tatleman dressed up like the Lone Ranger and Tonto and rode horses in their parking lot. They built an IMax theater inside one store to entertain children while their parents shopped. When you drive around the back to pick up your furniture they provide you free hotdogs and wash your car windows.

Strategy 3. Build relationships with your customers. For each month that goes by, customers lose 10% of their buying power. Create a customer database and contact them on a regular basis. Mail them a postcard, birthday card, sales flyer, newsletter etc. to keep your name, phone number, and service on their mind.

Strategy 4. Collect E-Mail Addresses. As part of your customer relationship process get permission from your customers to use their E-mail address. Periodically send updates and notices to your client list. As long as you have their permission and avoid overuse, E-mail can be a powerful and inexpensive marketing tool. Consider the Fox’s Pizza Den in Punxsutawney, PA, they ran an anniversary promotion offering a medium cheese pizza for the 1970s price of $1.40. To get this special price, customers had to go to their web site and register their email address to have the special coupon emailed to them. An amazing 500 email addresses were collected in two days.

Strategy 5. Avoid poisonous personalities. Unfriendly and negative employees cost you money by chasing your customers away. Spend more time and money interviewing and hiring people who enjoy helping people. Use behavior based interviewing and screening assessments to improve your chances for hiring success.

Marketing Communications

* Publish a newsletter for customers and prospects (it doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive). Develop a brochure of services.
* Include a postage-paid survey card with your brochures and other company literature. Include check-off boxes or other items that will involve the reader and provide valuable feedback to you.
* Remember, business cards aren’t working for you if they’re in the box. Pass them out! Give prospects two business cards and brochures – one to keep and one to pass along.
* Produce separate business cards/sales literature for each of your target market segments (e.g. government and commercial and/or business and consumer).
* Create a poster or calendar to give away to customers and prospects.
* Print a slogan and/or one-sentence description of your business on letterhead, fax cover sheets, and invoices. Develop a site on the World Wide Web.
* Create a signature file to be used for all your e-mail messages. It should contain contact details, including your Web site address and key information about your company that will make the reader want to contact you.
* Include testimonials from customers in your literature.
* Test a new mailing list. If it produces results, add it to your current direct mail lists or consider replacing a list that’s not performing up to expectations.
* Rather than sending direct mail in plain white envelopes, use colored or oversized envelopes to pique recipients’ curiosity.
* Announce free or special offers in your direct response pieces. (Direct responses may be direct mail, broadcast faxes, or e-mail messages.) Include the offer in the beginning of the message as well as on the outside of the envelope for direct mail.

Customer Service and Customer Relations

* Ask your clients to come back again.
* Return phone calls promptly.
* Set up a fax-on-demand or email system to easily respond to customer inquiries.
* Use an answering machine or voice mail system to catch after-hours phone calls. Include basic information in your outgoing messages such a business hours, location, etc.
* Record a memorable message or tip of the day on your outgoing answering machine or voice mail message.
* Ask clients what you can do the help them.
* Take clients out to a ball game, show, or another special event – just send them two tickets with a note. Hold a seminar at your office for clients and prospects.
* Send handwritten thank you notes.
* Send birthday cards and appropriate seasonal greetings.
* Photocopy interesting articles and send them to clients and prospects with a hand-written FYI note and your business card.
* Send a book of interest or other appropriate business gift to a client with a handwritten note.
* Create an area on your Web site specifically for your customers.
* Redecorate your office or location where you meet with your clients.

6 Tips for Small Business Marketing Success

I met some great people and attended some awesome sessions at SES San Jose, but the highlight for me was keynote speaker Dan Heath. His concepts and thought processes were the perfect mesh for my quest to find a glimmer of small business marketing in a sea of corporate suits.

In many cases, keynote speakers don’t talk about anything I can apply to my life as a search engine marketer. I’m not looking to sell a company for $23 million. My clients aren’t on the Fortune 500 list. I work with small clients and small budgets.

That’s why Heath was much different. He and his brother, Chip, wrote a book called “Made to Stick.” I scored a free copy in my conference bag and I’m in the process of devouring it. The full video of the keynote is available in the SEW members section, while the audio version is at WebmasterRadio.fm. Give it a watch or listen.

Although “Made to Stick” wasn’t written for the SEM industry, the main tenets can be translated — and scaled — for use in campaigns that run from $100 to $1 million a month. The best part of the book: it’s entertaining, which alone makes the book “stick.” But how can the success of the sticky idea be analyzed, and repeated? For my small-business brain, the real inspiration came in Heath’s explanation of S.U.C.C.E.S.

Basically, there are six components of a sticky idea. They use a handy acronym to describe those components:

S: Simple
U: Unexpected
C: Concrete
C: Credible
E: Emotional
S: Stories

1. Simple

If you’re looking for a way to sell products that people will relate to, keep your Web site ideas (or content) simple. Crowding pages with text links, image links, Flash item photos, a zillion items, different colors, and animation can lead to “decision paralysis,” which means that the more choices a user is given, the less likely it is they’ll make a decision at all.

The natural tendency of a small business Web site owner is to cram every speck of information into every nook and cranny. However, this causes information overload, and you’re much less likely to achieve “conversion.”

2. Unexpected

Make your Web site visitors pay attention. Draw attention to your content by offering it in an unexpected fashion. What can you do with your site to make it unique from every other site that sells or offers the same thing? If you’re a brick and mortar, use your Web site to show how unique your product, service, and location are.

The Heaths’ solution for keeping people engaged over a period of time is to plant ideas that form questions, and then answer those questions. Does your shopper really need that product? Well, if you suggest they need the product to do “x” and “y” because no other product will do both “x” and “y,” then they know they need to buy that product from you. You’ve shown them the problem, and offered them a solution in one easy step.

3. Concrete

Use concrete images to describe your products. Avoid abstract descriptions, inane descriptions, and “buzzwords.” Instead, describe your services and products using concrete words. For example:

* Good: “Red, round apple”
* Bad: “Circular-shaped nutritionally significant food product”

4. Credibility

Add credibility to your content by appealing to what your visitors relate to. The Heaths contend that using numbers and statistics to lend credibility is the wrong approach. Sure, you’ll look smart, but you might alienate people who don’t relate to numbers. Instead, let your online guests decide for themselves: “Would I rather pay more for this product and higher shipping costs at a competitor’s Web site?”

5. Emotional

Most shoppers are emotional creatures. Once they need or want something, your Web site must fulfill that need better than the competition. Think about showing a cute little girl wearing the Easter bonnet you made for her, happy and smiling as she fills her little basket. This visual is much more effective than a picture of a hat sitting on a table.

6. Stories

Telling a story about your product, or using your product to tell a story, will endear the “idea” of buying from you. Using Web site content to tell a story is one of the most effective forms of selling online. Sell an experience, not just an item.

This is only a quick overview of the book. You’ll get so much more from reading it. Buy a copy, read it, and share it with everyone in your office, shop, or store. It will inspire you to think more deeply about how you sell to your visitors, and how you use your Web site as a tool to make your brand “stick” with them to encourage repeat business.