Diane Neill Jensen

Archive for July, 2010

Here are some great Marketing Tactics that you will find to be both cost effective, as well as, highly profitable for your business. Consider combining some of these into a synergistic Marketing Strategy. Implementing a Marketing Plan doesn’t have to be cost prohibitive. Think outside the box—this is what this article is all about!

Free Consultations:  Providing a free consultation for a half hour or an hour to your prospects, giving them valuable information and advice. Follow up with the prospect in a couple days and ask for the business. This strategy firmly establishes you are the expert. If the prospect does not contract to use your services, you have positioned that prospect to be an excellent referral source. Be sure to ask for referrals!

• Power your Consultation with visual aids and demonstrations.
• Turn your Free Consults into testimonials.

Write Articles:  Being published as an Expert will bring you targeted, continuous business.  Be sure to submit your articles online and back link to your Website.  Your web traffic will increase exponentially.  Then offer Free E-books on your Website to solidify the relationship.  When prospects understand your expert status, they will give you business, as well as, refer you to others. The viral marketing element of article marketing is huge- you never know where your articles will end up!

Seminars:  Depending on your business having a FREE or Paid Seminar can be a great way to mine prospects.  Again, this strategy works well as the Expert strategy and piggybacks well with Free Consultations, Articles and E-books.  Free Seminars can be irregular, but a token(a) fee Seminar can be enough to ensure success.  A nominal fee ensures the attendee will show, while providing a ton of value for the information provided.  Be sure to video all your seminars and sell them on your website.

• Lecture / instruct for half an hour to forty five minutes, then open it up for questions.  Wrap up the seminar at the hour mark.  Have an area with coffee and sweets set up so you can network before and after the seminar.
• The goal is to get as many business cards and contact information as you can from the prospects.  Follow with a mailed hand written note or a personal email within 24 hours.  Then call the prospect a day later.  Have the Seminar on a Tuesday and follow up Thursday or Friday via voice to set appointments for the next two weeks.
• Have two Seminars a month.  Make them a little different so you can attract the same prospects again!  Give your previous attendees a VIP Pass.  If you don’t sell them the first round you’ll have a much better chance after the second seminar.
• Write a Book and your Seminar attendance will increase three fold.  The more you can foster the Expert Status, the better your results will be.

Free Demonstrations:  I love Free Demonstrations!  I cut my teeth in Sales in my youth selling Electrolux Cleaning Systems (ok, so they were vacuums and dry cleaners).  Selling a premium product which had a ton of value built in required a Free Demonstration.  If I couldn’t sell the prospect in 45 minutes then I would leave the Cleaning System with them for two days and return at a prearranged time to pick it up.  With a good financing package backing me up, I closed 8 out of 10!

• A Free Demonstration can also be short in front of a crowd and take orders afterwards.  Depends on the product you are selling.

Note:  At Seminars and Mass Demonstrations, make sure you have plenty order takers and appointment setters on hand.  You can’t be signing up prospects and talking to them at the same time!

Open House Events:  Opening up your business to existing customers and prospects for a day every three months is an awesome way to solidify relationships and drum up more business.  Have refreshments and employees staged in different areas explaining how the business works.  You, the owner, mix and mingle and mine!  Make sure each employee is schooled prior, to get business cards and contact information.  Be sure to teach the employee to make notes on the prospects’ biz card or contact info so you have personalized means of future contact.  Make sure you have a demonstration room for the serious prospects!  Make sure you are fully staffed fro an Open House.  All hands on deck event!

• Send Press Releases to local / regional publications and look for creative ways to advertise your Open House.  There are loads of Free Online and Offline Event Directories.  Use Social Networking!
• Social Online Networks such as Linked In, Facebook and Twitter can be first-class forums to getting out information about your Open House or other Company Events and News.  Online Marketing is both cost effective and lucrative!

Trade Shows:  I am not a huge fan of Trade Shows because many shows will have absolutely no merit for the money and time you spend.  nevertheless, many businesses have been successful with Trade Shows because they figure out through research which ones really have qualified buyers and know little success secrets.  Some Trade Show Keys to keep in mind:

• Always attend and research a show prior to your engagement.
• Determine ways shows let you contact prospects before and after the show.
• Partner with a good Strategic Partner and partake in a large 20 foot booth together.  This attracts attention and offers prospects the best solutions.
• Have “roamers” walking the show continuously handing out circulars and flyers, which pictorially show prospects where your booth is.  Offer a Freebee or discount for the prospect to come to your booth.  Require the prospect to register to receive the Freebee or Discount.
• Have leaflets available at your booth for the motivated prospects.
• Be sure to mine each prospect’s information and product / service interests.  Don’t rely on them to contact you after the show. 
• Visually demonstrate your product or service.  Let prospects see the final solution. 
• Have plenty of staff on hand to sell, take information and greet prospects.
• Big Signs, Big Graphics, Large Font, Video, Audio – these are all key in helping the prospect visualize / own your solution.
• Take lots of pictures and video so you can post to the web during the show to create a viral buzz.
• Always get a prospects email address so you can send them an Opt In for your Newsletter, Company Alerts, RSS, etc.
• Make sure all of your Staff is instructed to take notes on the prospects’ business card so you can jog your memory on the prospects’ relevance and importance.
• Direct Mail response rates to Tradeshow Participants can be as high as 20%, as compared to the average 2% response rate for a first mailing.
• Trade Shows can be a good way to kick off your penetration into a new market.
• If you are going to the expense of going to a Trade Show, be sure to run some advertising prior (with an incentive to come see you).

Newsletters:  I think Newsletters (both offline and online) are an excellent information and sales tool.  This goes hand in hand with the Expert Role, providing interested prospects valuable information, while having information on how to contact you or a web page to visit.  Newsletters should be sent once per month with an expert article as the main focus.  I like to have the article in the center of the Newsletter with a narrow column to either side with supporting information and resources.  These side columns are great areas to partner with other businesses to offer more expert information and help.  Be sure to feature article your FREE half hour or hour consultation service on the Newsletter and any seminars, webinars or such coming up.  The more you get into and use your Newsletter, the more exponential the results.  And, please, write your own content!  You are the Expert!

Write a Book:  I’m not saying get in the book business.  A book sets you apart as a bonafide Expert and gives you instant credibleness.  It is one of the best sales generator tools you can use!  My Business Plan Book lends instant credibility to my experience as a Business Planner and Business Consultant.  You can use Print on Demand Publishing to print books and drop ship to customers as they are ordered separately for a price of $5 – $10 per book.  Get writing!

Speaking at Club Events:  Being a featured speaker at a private club event can drive great business for you.  Make sure to have a brochure and make sure to feature an easy to remember website address.  Feature a special promotion for just the club attendees.  Again, being a Club Speaker sets you up as the Expert and a fantastic way to advertise your articles, newsletters and books.

About the Writer

Frank Goley is a business consultant, business planner, and business turnaround consultant for ABC Business Consulting, and he has been helping companies to succeed for many years. He is an expert in developing business plans, marketing plans, funding plans, strategic plans, turnaround plans, web marketing strategies, and project particular business plans. Frank is also a business coach and a web development, web marketing and web seo consultant. Frank is author of the business plan book, The Comprehensive Business Plan Workbook – A Step by Step Guide to Effective Business Planning, and he has over 50 published articles on business success strategies. He also writes the Business Success Strategies Blog.

Here is some useful information about  Affiliate Marketing. So, do you know what exactly affiliate marketing is? Explained in the simplest terms, affiliate marketing is nothing but a way to promote someone else’s product for a fixed commission. This commission is payable in return for an action, per lead or per sale made. Many internet marketers have resorted to affiliate marketing to build large, million dollar businesses starting from zero. Whether it’s a large company like Amazon.com or a small business, everyone uses affiliate marketing in one way or another. In this article we will be talking about a few affiliate marketing tips that you can use yourself to boost your online income.

Here is some useful information about Affiliate Marketing Tips.One of the most important rules of affiliate marketing is to know who your target market is. The most effective way to make the most of all your affiliate marketing efforts is to understand what your prospective clients need and require. You must make sure to provide affiliate products that match the expectations of your visitors when you are running a site focused on a certain niche and those products need to solve their problems. For example if you have site that’s about sports, don’t promote affiliate products about dating just because they pay higher. Simply promote products that are relevant to your market and do not oppose it. When you join an affiliate program, you need to make sure that the product you’re looking out to promote has a decent conversion ratio. It has to have a website that converts a reasonable amount of visitors in customers. It doesn’t make sense to send traffic to their site if this condition isn’t met. Go for websites that have at least 1% conversion ratio, anything less than that is not recommended. You must check to make sure their site and sales page is convincing enough to convert visitors. It’s their job to convert visitors into buyers while your job is to send them the targeted traffic.

 Always make sure that you’re doing business with a reputable company that is known for paying commissions on time and for treating their affiliates nice. This is the most important tip of all that you shouldn’t overlook, even if it is the most obvious. There are lots of affiliates that have faced issues such as not being compensated for their work even after generating lots of sales and promoting a product for months. Therefore, it is critical that you do a background check on any company before you start working with them, preferably by speaking to people who work with them now or have done so in the past. You need to establish that they are a professional company before you start doing work for them.

Your affiliate business depends greatly on your approach to it and how you are working to grow it. Signing up with an affiliate program is simple, the hard part is generating the sales. After that, the sales you make depend greatly on the quality of your website and content, the methods you use to drive visitors to your site and more. Success in affiliate marketing is highly dependent on your degree of preparation and what you will do to see those conversions take place. It takes sometime before you see real results, but in the end, it’s all worth it. Check detailed information here at Affiliate Marketing.