My Own Business is a site designed to help you no matter what stage you’re at in your business.
They offer a free e-course that covers all the steps, from researching your market to projecting cashflows to expansion. Quizzes and business plan templates also included. Might be worth giving a whirl! I know I will be.
Five ways to make your advertising message more powerful–and more relevant–no matter what medium it’s in.
“I’m in the furniture business. Which media should I use?”
“I’d like to target people who are afraid of the dentist. Can you recommend a good mailing list company?”
“My uncle uses TV ads to attract new customers, and they work really well for him. What’s your opinion of TV?”
“No one in my town listens to the radio anymore. Everyone has satellite or an iPod.”
“I tried advertising. It doesn’t work for my kind of business.”
People say things like this and expect me to have an intelligent response. What usually happens is I stand there, dull eyed, with my mouth hanging open. These aren’t my favorite moments.
When my brain finally recovers, and I tell them the truth they need to hear, they act as though I’ve sidestepped their question. The following is the truth they needed to hear. If you’re asking similar questions, maybe you need to hear it, too. (more…)
One quick way to cut your marketing costs is to team up with other companies to cross-promote each others’ messages. This is sometimes called coop-marketing.
Surely each of you have a database of people you market to. By combining forces, you can get in front of many more faces. You can also combine the costs of printing, postage, and layout design.
Please note: There are no rules to follow when engaging in coop print ads or direct mail, or links on your website. Rules do apply in email marketing. Remember, your subscribers opted in to receive your newsletter, not items from every other business you give their names to. So, to stay on the right side of the law, it’s best to use your newsletter to include a blurb about the other business, and vice versa. Do not simply trade email lists.
Here’s a way to get more bang for your marketing buck. It might seem obvious to some of you, and others will wonder why they never thought of it before!
It’s actually starting to pick up a buzzword, called transpromo. I don’t know if it needs a fancy name, but here’s what it is:
Take every opportunity, with anything that leaves your office in any way, to cross-promote.
Examples:
If there’s white space, there’s a place to cross-promote!
Don’t limit your marketing merely to the media you’re using. Market it all over the place. Anything worth promoting is worth cross-promoting.
Guerrillas know that all the media work better if they’re supported by the other media. Put your web site onto your TV commercial. Mention your advertising in your direct mail. Refer to your direct mail in your telemarketing. Plants the seeds of your offering with some kinds of marketing and fertilize them with other kinds.
You’re not really promoting unless you’re cross-promoting. Your trade show booth will be far more valuable to you if you promote it in trade magazines and with fliers put under the doors of hotels near the trade show. Guerrillas try to market their marketing.
Your prospects, being humans, are eclectic people. They pay attention to a lot of media so you can’t depend on a mere one medium to motivate a purchase. You’re got to introduce a notion, remind people of it, say it again, then repeat it in different words somewhere else. That share of mind for which guerrilla strive? They get it with they combine several media. They say in their ads, “Call or write for our free brochure.”
They say in their Yellow Pages ad, “Get even more details at our website.” They enclose a copy of their magazine ad in their mailing. They blow up a copy to use as a sign. Their website features their print ads.
Guerrillas are quick to mention their use of one medium while using another because they realize that people equate broadscale marketing with quality and success. They know that people trust names they’ve heard of much more than strange and new names;, and guerrillas are realistic enough to know that people miss most marketing messages — often intentionally. The remote control is not only a way to save their steps but also a method of eliminating marketing messages.
No matter how glorious their newspaper campaign may be, guerrillas realize that not all of their prospects read the paper so they’ve got to get to these people in another way. No matter how dazzling their website, it’s like a grain of sand in a desert if it is not pointed out to an unknowing and basically uncaring public.
Cross-promoting in the media is another way to accomplish the all-important task of repetition. One way to repeat yourself and implant your message is to say it over and over again. Another way is to say it in several different places. Guerrillas try to do both. Nothing is left to chance. If you saw a yellow pages ad that made you an offer from a company you’ve never heard of and another with the same offer except that the ad said, “As advertised on television,” you’d probably opt for the second because of that added smidgen of credibility. I rest my case.
The psychology of marketing requires basic knowledge of human behavior. Human beings do not like making decisions in a hurry and are not quick to develop relationships. They certainly do want relationships, but they’ve been stung in the past and they don’t want to be stung again.
They have learned well to distrust much marketing because of its proclivity to exaggeration. All too many times they’ve read of sales at stores and learned that only a tiny selection of items were on sale. They’ve been bamboozled more times than you’d think by the notorious fine print on contracts. And they’ve been high pressured by more than one salesperson.
That’s why they process your marketing communications in their unconscious minds, eventually arriving at their decisions because of an emotional reason even though they may say they are deciding based on logic. They factor a lot about you into their final decision — how long they’ve heard of you, where your marketing appears, how it looks and feels to them, the quality of your offer, your convenience or lack of it, what others have said about you, and most of all, how your offering can be of benefit to their lives.
Although they state that they now want what you’re selling, and they do it in a very conscious manner, you can be sure they were guided by their unconscious minds. The consistent communicating of your benefits, your message and your name has penetrated their sacred unconscious mind. They’ve come to feel that they can trust you and so they decide to buy.
Any pothole in their road to purchasing at this point might dissuade them. They call to make an inquiry and they are treated shabbily on the phone? You’ve lost them. Do they access your website for more information and either find no website or find one littered with self-praise You’ve lost them. They visit you and feel pressured or misunderstood? They’re gone.
You’ve got to realize that the weakest point in your marketing can derail all the strong points. Excellence through and through, start to finish, is what people have come to expect from businesses, and these days, they won’t settle for less. The insight you must have is that marketing is a 360 degree process and you’ve got to do it right from all angles at all times. When it comes to marketing, people have built-in alarm systems, and any shady behavior on your part sets the bells to clanging, the sirens screaming.
It is very difficult to woo a person from the brand they use right now to your brand. Although they are loathe to change, they do change. And when they do, they patronize businesses that understand the psychology of human beings and the true nature of marketing.
source: Guerrilla Marketing
The new CAN-SPAM rules have come out, and here they are in plain English.
1) POSTAL ADDRESS – Valid Physical Address can include a PO box or Mail Stop, as long as the USPS recognizes it. This might be an obvious one but it used to be a gray area, now it’s not.
2) PERSON is now defined not just as a human, it can also be a corporation, non-profit, etc. This is who is responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance when sending a commercial email. So business entities, as well as regular folks are now responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance in regards to all commercial email they send.
3) DESIGNATED SENDER RULE - This applies to you if you include any advertising or partners in an email. If you don’t include your company name “in the email” with a link to access your site, your advertisers are responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance even if your name is in the From Label. This mainly applies to companies who send coupons or offers on behalf their partners.
For example: Company A sends an email to their list with a special offer from Company B. In the email, Company A must have some information that advertises their own service, and some way for the recipients to access their site.
If Company A does not include some kind of ad for their own company inside the email, then Company B being advertised within the email would be responsible for all CAN-SPAM compliance.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you’re advertising in another company’s email marketing campaign, make sure they put something about their services with a link to their site. You don’t want to be on the hook for their CAN-SPAM compliance.
Also, CAN SPAM states (again) that all commercial emails:
4) UNSUBSCRIBE – Unsubscribes must not be complicated, nor can it require some kind of purchase, or taking a survey. The only thing you are allowed to ask for in an unsubscribe is an email address and the user’s email preferences.
As usual we’ll keep you informed on most of the CAN SPAM updates, just be sure you follow the simple the rules above and you’ll be AOK.
Today I came across yet another request for free work. (Not from me) I see this all the time, unfortunately, and everyone who tries to score free work off of someone else is doing it wrong.
This particular sin was committed by a gal on a networking site. She wanted a web designer to punch up her page but not charge her anything. She was cash-strapped, see. But to sweeten the deal, she’d tell anyone who asked that he made the page and she’d even let him put his company name at the bottom of the site. Needless to say, she got flogged right off the board. People don’t take too kindly to being asked to perform “spec” (free) work. And the industry affected most by these requests is the marketing and advertising industry. (more…)
You’ll see that Duct Tape Marketing is on my blogroll. I love it. When you initially visit the site it may look like it’s just a bunch of programs for sale. It’s not–dig around, and you will find plenty of treasure.
Anyhoo, I’m passing on info on a free webinar that I have registered for, and you should check it out as well. The webinar is free, and so is the book, Duct Tape Marketing. Free knowledge–pass it on after the jump. (more…)
An interesting discussion I brought up at a networking lunch today. How do you turn down business you don’t want?
I don’t mean, “I’m too busy to take you on, here, let me refer you to someone else.”
I mean, “I don’t want to work with you–I don’t get along with you, I’ve heard too many bad things about you, I don’t like how you operate,” etc. (more…)
I won’t use this post to get into all the nuances of social networking. Today I’m just going to briefly cover the 101 aspects that, if followed, will definitely keep you out of trouble.
1. If you create any kind of personal site, such as a MySpace, remember that search engines crawl those pages, too. Meaning? Someone searching your company website out on Google may also come across a very personal MySpace, with information you may not want them seeing. The rules about personal sites always apply: if you don’t want it displayed at your funeral, don’t display it at all. (more…)
