A key step in a marketing campaign is to make sure that you test your marketing message with your target market before you commit to a full-scale campaign. Measuring and tracking the results against your business objective for your effort will allow you to manage and achieve Better Marketing Results.
Meeting new people, getting to know them, and exchanging business cards takes place everyday at conferences, business and networking meetings. Social networking is no different except that it happens online where the world is open to anyone with a computer. You can start by creating a business page on FaceBook or Twitter.
Make sure your web pages and eNewsletters can easily be shared with the social networks of your web visitors and readers. Adding this digital functionality will increase your promotional reach by allowing people to share your content with their own social networks.
During tough economic times customers need more reasons to make an acquisition. It is the worst time to slow down on your marketing. Be creative in reaching out to customers with a variety of cost effective communication mediums. Integrate cross-media marketing delivers a more consistent and persistent approach. Recent findings from Jupiter Research reports that integrated marketing tactics can boost responses nearly four times when used with direct response offers.
Understand that marketing generates business development opportunities. This is the end-objective of marketing to build qualified prospects that convert into sales revenue. You must make the time for marketing to grow your business. Marketing does not have to be complicated or time consuming. Every business must develop a marketing engine that can be managed and fine-tuned with a planned effort of a couple of hours per week.
Does your marketing copy resonant with your target market and get them to take action from your message? John Carlton is one of the highest paid and among the most successful marketing copy writers has an eight-point guide to powerful copy writing. Do you want to know what these eight-points are?
During tough economic times customers need more reasons to make an acquisition. It is the worst time to slow down on your marketing. Be creative in reaching out to customers with a variety of cost effective communication mediums. Integrate cross-media marketing delivers a more consistent and persistent approach. Recent findings from Jupiter Research reports that integrated marketing tactics can boost responses nearly four times when used with direct response offers.
Review your marketing expenditure and run with promotional campaigns that are working well and trim those that are not effective for your target markets. Ensure you put in place a system to test and fine-tune your marketing messages before committing your allocated budget. Measure results and track your campaigns to allow you to decide what to ramp-up and what to close down.
Understand that marketing generates business development opportunities. This is the end-objective of marketing to build qualified prospects that convert into sales revenue. You must make the time for marketing to grow your business. Marketing does not have to be complicated or time consuming. Every business must develop a marketing engine that can be managed and fine-tuned with a planned effort of a couple of hours per week.
For Better Marketing Results -
Does your marketing copy resonant with your target market and get them to take action from your message? John Carlton is one of the highest paid and among the most successful marketing copy writers has an eight-point guide to powerful copy writing. Do you want to know what these eight-points are?
This is Networking 101, but it bears repeating because no matter how well you know the importance of follow up, very few people actually do it.
Give them a reason to come back for more! Consider including a ‘thank-you’ coupon with every customer purchase and provide them with an incentive or discount that they can receive on a future purchase. You need to nurture the customer relationship by keeping in touch and offering value with every contact you make with your customers. The most cost effective manner to stay in touch with your customers and drive repeat business is with permission based email or e-newsletter marketing. Every business must have email marketing in today’s Internet connected world.
I have listed below a number of proven techniques that will make your direct marketing messages more powerful and profitable for your business:
• Headline > ensure that you develop a headline that instantly engages your readers and gets them excited about your offering
• Sub-Headline > consider using a testimonial to support your headline
• Bullet Points > highlight the customer benefits of your offer not the features
• Sentences > use short sentences of two to three lines per paragraph
• Johnson Box > create a box (bold coloured borders) with your compelling message and call to action
• Indent > your paragraph for emphasis and to highlight that section
• Whitespace > make sure your marketing copy has lots of white space
• Highlight > use larger size fonts, boldface, underline and italics
• Call to Action > this is an absolute must have to increase your response rate, make this clearly stand out for your prospective customer
PS: Use a P.S. (postscript) > reiterate the key benefit with your call to action.
Frequency is crucial for marketing your business. If you disappear off your target markets’ radar screens for any length of time they will forget about you. As your customers and prospects are spending more and more time on the Internet for work and product research, a consistent online presence on those web sites, directories, search engines they use and eNewsletters they read will help your business stay visible day in and day out.
A new fiscal year is upon us! What are you going to do to take your business forward and upward? Have you updated and prepared your marketing plan? How are you going to make a difference this coming year for your business? What do you plan to do to get a better marketing result?
Businesses that manage subscriptions can benefit from triggered emails by using date-based triggers to remind customers to renew. Automating this process saves time and money. Even more important, using triggered emails can significantly boost your response rates on renewals.
Utilise a clear ‘call to action’ strategy. The best method of doing this is by adding call-to-actions throughout your website. A call-to-action is simply a prompt asking the website visitor to take a desired action.
Prepare a clear plan and approach for your engagement marketing strategy. Your plan will have to include how you will reach out to your market and how you will be able to respond and interact with your interested and engaged participants online.
Put together a short description or profile of your ideal customer. Write it down and refine it, work with your team to identify the buying criteria used by your ideal customer. Once you have conceptualised your ideal customer it will help you prepare and personalise your marketing message to make it relevant and important to the intended recipients within your target markets.
One of the major reasons why websites fail to contribute to the business is because there is no clear objective to measure, track and manage the results expected. Think of your website as your online business development channel - what is the key objective for the existence of your website - make you measure and manage the improvement of the results expected.
A Retailer's Guide to social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) communication channels
12/11/2013
marketing, target markets, sales, marketing programs, marketing tips, business development, database segmentation, retail marketing