Schlagwort-Archive: business

Marketing

Building Customer Relations Through Simple Marketing Strategies

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Every business owner wants to sell more of their products and services. Before this can happen, it is important to understand a few simple but powerful marketing strategies for building trust and desire among your prospects

This article gives three important strategies for understanding your customers and building their trust and confidence.

Strategy #1: Define Your Buyer Personas

Buyer Personas are simple customer biographies based on real-life data. They help you understand the wants and needs of your specific customer types.

Two very popular personas are the NASCAR Dad and the Soccer Mom. These personas were actually created and used by both the Democratic and Republican parties in past elections.

The first step in defining a particular persona is to look at your current customer database and find similar buying patterns. This might seem a difficult proposition at first, but you’ll be surprised by how very simple patterns can emerge once you’re looking for them.

Buyer persona profiles can contain age, gender, income level, occupation, education level, hobbies, and anything else that is meaningful to your business.

Strategy #2: The UVP

Before you can successfully sell to prospects and customers, it is important to first define your UVP – otherwise known as your Unique Value Proposition. Defining and offering something unique will also help you stand apart from your competition.

Don’t have anything that makes you unique? Then it’s time to create something from scratch. Take your time and be prepared to alter some of your services in order to support your unique way of standing out from the crowd.

Take a look at your competitors. What do they excel at? Can you find a way to improve upon what they are offering or to include a compelling guarantee that instantly sets you apart from what everyone else is doing?

Here are some ideas for better understanding your competitors.

1. Buy from them. This is one of the best ways to determine how well your competition performs from start to finish.

2. Register for their online newsletter. Is the newsletter helpful? Does it provide helpful information or does it simply try to sell?

3. Register for competitor brochures, fliers and catalogs. This will give you a good idea of how often they mail as well as the offers and unique selling points they are communicating to potential customers.

Defining your Unique Value Proposition helps set you apart from the competition and communicates your compelling value to prospects and customers.

Strategy #3: The MarCom Folder

When someone contacts you for information, what do you give them?

Hopefully, you give them a complete marketing communications folder that further helps educate them as to your capabilities. A simple two-pocket folder is all you need to begin!

Here’s what I recommend you include in your folder.

1. The Compelling Story: Every small business owner should be able to tell a compelling story about their passions and why they started their business. A great story about why you started your business can create instant trust. Try and craft your story so that it appeals to the emotions, is fun to read, and provides a sense of passion.

2. Your Company Advantage Why should anyone do business with you? Write up a few paragraphs to convince new prospects why they need to work with you or purchase your products. You must convince them of your ability to solve their unique problems.

3. Solving Customer Problems: This insert should explain how you have solved past customer problems. Try and summarize 3-4 different customer issues.

4. The Product Summary Page: On this page, list out the many benefits of your products and/or services. Bullet point the benefits so that it is easy for prospects to skim.

5. The Testimonial Page: This is the page that summarizes your best customer testimonials. A testimonial is proof that you have a track record of delivering what you promise. Make sure each testimonial focuses on the specific result that was achieved to help the customer with their problem.

Feel free to add other things into your marketing communications folder, but the above items are mandatory.

These strategies will go a long way to helping you convert prospects into customers. Make sure sure you spend quality time with them.

Corte Swearingen has been helping business owners grow their profits for almost twenty years and is the founder of the SmallBiz Marketing Tips website. For more information on attracting and converting new prospects, read Creating an Effective Marketing Communication Strategy.

Marketing

How Printing Posters And Flyers Can Help Your Company

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Other than the old and time-tested means of publicity like TV, web ads and newspapers, a company can improve its visibility by printing poster and flyers for marketing purposes.

This way of communicating with potential customers is quite effective due to its direct and personalised nature. Following are some of the advantages of publicising your business using flyers and posters.

High visibility – While print ads may be viewed by a big audience, this may not translate into actual visits to your shop. However, distributing flyers or putting up posters in the area in which your firm is located will increase sales noticeably as your exposure in the area grows.

Fast impact – Unlike the conventional marketing methods, flyers and posters can be created and printed in just a few days‘ time and their impact is very quick, which can also be monitored easily. You will observe that there is a significant rise in the number of people who are coming to your store because of a poster that they saw or a flyer that was given to them.

Lesser costs – It is cheaper to print poster and flyers and their design and formatting is quite simple too. All that is required is that the final result is attractive and contains important bits of information for prospective buyers. Besides, any good printing company will be able to accommodate your suggestions for poster and flyer printing, and you will not have to engage an expensive agency to do the task. Besides, it is simpler and less costly to abandon such a campaign if it fails, as compared to other kinds of promotional campaigns.

Flexibility – Promotional campaigns utilizing flyers and posters can be tailored to meet your requirements. For example, if you want to run a guerrilla advertising campaign, putting up big and thought-provoking posters at unexpected sites is a good decision. Similarly, short-term promotional schemes can be advertised easily by handing out flyers which can also act as rebate coupons. In addition to this, you can print many types of posters and flyers for the same campaign that is generally difficult to do in other media.

Hence, by selecting poster and flyer printing, it is possible to achieve quick growth in the business without incurring too much expenditure. Availing these services is simple as well, and any good printing company in your area will be able to provide a wide range of services and design choices.

Find out more about Flyer Printing and discover more about the basic principles on how to Print Poster at 2BPrinting Singapore.

Marketing

Plano Internet Marketing Experts – Help Grow Your Business Online

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It wasnt until recent time that Money Magazine claimed Plano, Texas to be the best place to live in the entire United States of America for various reasons. Plano has known to be home to some of the biggest business tycoons known to man today. These include names such as Dr. Pepper, Perot Systems, Frito-Lay and many more. In general Plano has been described as a great place to live both financially and socially with amazing benefits for the residents.

The reasons behind why one should use internet marketing in Plano seem quite obvious. Seeing that it is one of the largest business empires in the world, you have a great chance of becoming successful. After all selling a product or service is no easy task. It takes a lot of thought and a lot of money. The last thing you want is spending so much money on the product or service it self to find out that due to a lack of marketing skills you werent able to do it justice.

You wont be the first to make use of the internet in an effective way. Already so many people are known to be using the internet as a great way in boosting their sales. Even though the internet is a great place to prosper, one must realize that it is important for one to know what they are actually doing. For this reason it is advised and ideal that one refers to a well known internet marketing company in the Plano area.

For this reason your need to make sure that what ever provider you go with are up to date with all the latest techniques in internet marketing. This point can not be stressed enough. After all you do not want to end up with a company that is using techniques that are out of date. It is a good idea to do a bit of research on the company you are going to go ahead with seeing that it will make all the difference. It is a good idea to read a few customer reviews of previous business men that have used their service.

Internet Marketing in Plano means you can target your audience. No more money wasted reaching clients and customers who arent interested in your product or service. Plus, Plano, Texas is just minutes north of the Dallas metropolitan area. And Dallas itself is a thriving economic force in the nation. Visitors come year round to take advantage of the many fine restaurants, museums and attractions.

The Dallas and Plano areas boast some of the finest shopping malls in the entire state of Texas. Tourists visit each year specifically for the shopping alone. And we all know that when tourists come to vacation, they spend money. Maybe your company manufactures pottery. By utilizing the amazing power of Internet Marketing, you can reach a customer in another state who is planning an upcoming trip to the Dallas area.

Imagine that customer browsing through the products on your website and planning an entire day of their vacation around a visit to your eclectic Shoppe. This is a customer who will rave about your store or service to all their friends back home. You can count on a few more purchases even after they return home.

Internet Marketing in Plano, Texas could be just that one little jump-start to your lagging sales numbers; that one small, but powerful piece of strategy your company needs. Why not check it out today and at least get a little more information to see if this is the right direction for your company. You might be surprised at how easy it is to get your sales flourishing again.

Best prices ever on Plano Internet Marketing Blog, grab your Free Quote now at email Marketing Plano Better hurry and claim your keywords to dominate your market.

Marketing

Setting Up RSS Feeds & Analytics

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RSS – What is it?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to allow your blog’s visitors to automatically receive your posts, by their chosen method, without having to manually go to your website day-in, day-out to check for any new updates. This is a great tool for someone who follows multiple blogs as it means that they can use the RSS reader to view all the blogs in just the one place.

The RSS feed is a unique URL published by the blog, this is what is needed for your visitors to subscribe to your blog with RSS. You’ll be glad to hear that there is very little to do, as all the blog platforms have the RSS technology already built in, including WordPress. In fact, chances are you won’t have to do anything if you have already chosen your theme.

What you need to look out for is that the RSS icon is displayed prominently in the upper section of your blog theme. If your visitor has to scroll down to find it, use a different one. Ensure that the icon is relatively big and stands out. Basically, you need to make sure that it will draw the visitor’s eye straight to it. If it’s out of sight, it’s unlikely that it will be used.

Choosing Full or Partial Feeds

RSS has a feature that allows just a snippet of your post to be published to your RSS feed and if a reader wants to read the full entry then they must click through to your website to continue reading. By default, WordPress is setup to publish full feeds which means that your entire post is published to the feed. To check what setting you are on, from your WordPress Dashboard click on ‚Settings‘ and then ‚Reading‘.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. If you provide a full text feed it means that your reader doesn’t ever need to visit your website again – they can get all of your material directly through their feed reader. Some webmasters don’t like this because it means that those people won’t see their ads that they have on their site. However, all that has changed now as Google has setup a system to allow ads to be embedded directly in your feed.

The thing to realise about RSS users, is that these people understand the internet. They know all about RSS, have already chosen their RSS reader and they chose to subscribe to your feed as they want to read what you have to say. There is much less chance of these people clicking on an ad than someone who came to your website via a search engine. These are people who are hungry for information, that is why they use RSS in the first place.

Using their RSS reader means that they can read all the blogs that they have subscribed to swiftly without having to visit lots of different websites. This creates the down side to only publishing a partial feed as these people are much less likely to bother to follow the link to your website to read the whole post. A lot of these readers will probably even unsubscribe and so your posts will not get viewed at all.

My recommendation is that if you are growing a social blog where you want to build up an audience of loyal readers who read every word you say then make the feed full. If you are creating a commercial blog which is heavily monetized and you are not so bothered about readership then make it a partial feed.

On-page ads, however, are not the only revenue that can be generated by your blog. When you have learned how to utilise your blog to create much greater revenue streams, it will not matter whether your readers follow your posts on your website or via an RSS feeder. With this in mind, a full feed would be my recommendation.

Utilization of a Feedburner

If you use the WordPress theme unchanged then there is nothing you need to do in order to allow people to subscribe to your feed but you have no way of knowing how many people have subscribed. If you care about your subscriber number and want to be able to track it then the Feedburner service is for you.

The Feedburner service is run by Google is incredibly easy to set up and best of all is totally free. Once signed up, all you have to do is give the URL of your original blog feed to Feedburner and that will create a new Feedburner URL to use. Then just edit your WordPress theme using the new Feedburner URL instead.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a great piece of software that will let you track all sorts of statistics about your website. This can include information on the amount of traffic you are getting, the keywords people are using to find you, links elsewhere that point to your site, where your visitors are located and so on. It’s absolutely fantastic software and again is entirely free!

You will have to insert a website profile for your blog once you are all signed up. This just requires you to put in the URL of your blog and possibly your time zone, if you wish, then it will provide you with some code that you should display on your pages. Just click and copy the code on to the clipboard.

You can manually add the code on to your WordPress blog but this will involve editing your theme files, but if you change themes, you will then have to do it again. Alternatively, I would recommend Semiologic as this will manage your Analytics for you. The download page shows complete instructions about how to use the plugin, so it need not be repeated here.

Caroline Middlebrook has written a popular blog since 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She teaches how to make money blogging and offers free downloads of her free guides & courses.