Top Marketing Strategies – April 9, 2009

• First, ten

April 2, 2009
– This is so simple, it’s amazing!!

Top Marketing Strategies – April 2, 2009

• Is marketing evil?

March 26, 2009


• Timeless Marketing Tool: The Power Of Testimonials

March 26, 2009
– Testimonials will always be one of the best marketing strategies to use…

• What is attraction marketing?

March 26, 2009
– Many newcomers to the business arena find this type of marketing very refreshing. Gone are the pushy door to door or telemarketing…

• Tips for writing marketing material

March 26, 2009
– Fantastic ideas here on writing your own marketing stuff.

Customer Care – what?

When was the last time you received a card in the mail. no, not your email inbox, I mean by snail mail?

Well, I’ve decided to go back to the old ways of keeping in touch with my clients. By sending them cards. And, I’ve found the easiest way to do it. Right from my computer.

No more trips down to the post office  to buy stamps.

No more trips to the little red box by the side of the road…

No more $4.95 cards either! What a rip-off!! No wonder people stopped sending them.

Imagine if you got a card saying – “thanks for being such a valued client”. I mean, who does that these days?

No-one.

And that’s what is going to make you stand out from the rest of your competition.  Would you go back to that business if they took the time to value you? I know I would. Even if their prices were a little higher, for me, being valued is so important.

Check out this system that I’ve come across – it’s called Send Out Cards, and you can send a card from your computer, including a photo or business logo custom printed for under $1.20! Yes, that includes your postage!!! you can get a free gift account at http://www.sendoutcards.com/divapromotions

If you need a hand with it, just comment here, or send me an email…

Imagine how much value you can add to your business and keep your clients coming back, for as little as $1.20 per card!!!

Can you see now why I’m so excited by this system..?

oh, and by the way – the cards come from Melbourne, Aus or if you are o/s -they can come from there as well!

Check it out -so cool… http://www.sendoutcards.com/divapromotions

Small Business Marketing Strategies – Pricing your product

This is a post I have copied from Entrepreneur.com. It’s a fantastic way of describing how to price your product. I can also recommend Dan Kennedy – I have a fair bit of his stuff and have learnt quite a bit from it.

Cheers,

Emma
Diva Promotions

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Price Isn’t Tied to Your Product

When pricing your product, who you’re selling is more crucial than what you’re selling.

This excerpt has been taken from No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent by Dan Kennedy, available from Entrepreneur Press.

There was a time when coffee was coffee. Ice cream was ice cream. A phone was a phone. Even a pair of shoes was, well, just a pair of shoes.

At one level, at the lowest price/profit level, there are still merchants stuck in this time warp, continuing to conduct business as if people still bought products.

Today, that cup of coffee comes with more options than a Lexus. Would you care to add vanilla or caramel syrup? A double shot? Foam? Cinnamon sprinkles? Thus the $5 price for the 50-cent cup of coffee. But even that is only half the story. Ordinary products morphing into complex arrays of choices, options, add-ons, brands and luxury brands is one way prices have been inflated and margins inflated even more. The profit margin of the double-shot of extra something or other far exceeds the profit margin of the cup of coffee itself. The designer name bag selling for $11,000 doesn’t cost 100-times more to make than the similar appearing bag sold at Target for $110. This is a path to profit–and to greater acceptance by affluent consumers. But, as I said, it is only half the story.

Starbucks does not define itself as a coffee shop or even more elegantly as a coffee house. They describe themselves as being in the ‘third place business’–home, office, Starbucks in between. They are not merchants just of jazzed up coffee drinks. They are merchants of place, of feelings, of status, and maybe most of all, of experience. Their inspirations are more Disney than Denny’s. One of the many students of the Starbucks phenomenon, Ken Herbst, assistant professor of marketing at Wake Forest University’s Babcock Graduate School of Management makes the obvious point: “If you walked up to someone about to buy a pound of coffee at the grocery store (at about $4 a pound) and tried selling them just a cup for $5, they would tell you that is too expensive. But if you are at the coffeehouse, you are going to pay for the experience.”

This means that price is not tied to product. As soon as you disconnect those two things in your own mind about your own products and services, you are liberated to make a great deal more money and to have much greater success appealing to affluent customers or clients. To be redundant, for emphasis, most business owners are severely handicapped by keeping price and product linked in their own minds. What I call “The Price-Product Link” is as restrictive and antiquated as “The Work-Money Link” that I take apart in my book, No B.S. Wealth Attraction For Entrepreneurs. These links are imaginary. They exist only in your mind, not in the marketplace, yet they are ties that bind as if real, physical, 1,000-pound chains.

The Price-Product Link becomes ingrained religious belief in most business owners beginning with textbook formulas for setting price. Retailers are taught the doctrine of “keystone” pricing, meaning double their own cost. If you buy it for $1, it should be priced at $2, then, at times, discounted from there. In my line of work, direct marketing–what was once called mail-order–we’re also taught formulaic mark-up as doctrine, although ours is 8 times rather than 2 times. In businesses where raw materials are converted to finished products, like printing, there is a plethora of price calculating software to do the thinking for you, using standardized mark-up formulas. In every case, the price is chained to the product. There is the fundament that a particular product is worth only a certain multiple of its cost and not a penny more, period, end of story. Unfortunately, this widely and deeply held belief is completely and utterly stupid.

The two biggest “chain cutters” that de-link price from product are who is buying the product and the context in which the product is presented, priced and delivered.

Who you sell to you what matters. The simple act of selling whatever you sell to more affluent consumers may allow its price to rise, with no other modifications.

Price for the same product also varies by context. This is easy to see with commodity items like food, even though many restaurant owners still never grasp it. When is one-third pound of peanuts not one-third pound of peanuts? In a jar, on the shelf, that’s all they are, unless dusted with Starbucks mocha latte powder and packaged in a fancy tin. But when served hot, from a vendor’s cart in the park, scooped into the bag and sprinkled with cinnamon by a handlebar mustached man in red-white striped jacket and straw hat, with calliope music playing from the CD player in the cart–then they are not peanuts at all. They are an experience that evokes emotional feelings. Even as you read my words, your mind may have flashed to Mary Poppins in the park or a trip to the circus as a child. While it is not so easy for most to transfer this idea to other businesses, it does, in fact, transfer to any business. Context alters or liberates price. Move the exact same product from one context to another and its price can easily be altered.

Dan Kennedy has earned him the moniker “Millionaire Maker” through  his network of consultants, which help more than a million business owners succeed every year. He is the author of the bestselling No B.S. Series and co-author of Uncensored Sales Strategies, available from Entrepreneur Press.

Small business marketing ideas – Benefits of Joint Ventures

Let’s imagine a situation where we have two Internet marketers who know each other. One has a great product that will sell very well but he has no mailing list, no affiliates, nothing. The other is a great marketer with tens of thousands of subscribers in his mailing list, but the problem is he has nothing to sell to them. The very obvious solution here is to give the product to the great marketer with lots of contacts, and split the profits between them. This, my friend, is the very essence of Joint Ventures.

 

As more and more people start their own home based businesses online, the market is going to get more and more saturated and the competition will grow fiercer by the minute. The fastest, most effective and easiest way to build your own online business empire is through joint ventures. That is, join forces with other marketers to sell your product.

When you joint venture with another marketer, you can ask him (or her) to send an endorsement of your product to his existing mailing list, so you do not need to worry about collecting subscribers from scratch. You already have an easily accessible target market. The trick is to find the right marketer whose subscribers will be interested in your product. Once you achieve that, you won’t even have to worry about generating traffic to your salesletter or finding affiliates to promote your product. All of that is already done for you.

 

When you joint venture with a solid player in the field, your perceived value and reputation will instantly increase because if this well-known person in the field is willing to work with you as a team, you must have some substance! Hence, when you manage to hook up a joint venture with someone who’s a “regular player” in your niche market, your status will instantly change from “total newbie” to “guru status” overnight!

 

Last but definitely not least, you will get a chance to build a lasting relationship with a big figure in your niche market, and that alone will worth more than the profits you pull in over that single Joint Venture. When you have a dominant figure in the market as your friend, you will gain a lot of privileges and perks that no newbie like you could ever get their hands on – for example new insights into interesting product ideas and marketing strategies. You can’t even buy that for hard cash!

 

So, start looking up a potential Joint Venture partner and try your best to convince him or her to strike up a deal with you!

 

Small Business Marketing Ideas

Discover The 5 Most Effective Ways to Get More

Out of Your Advertising Dollar.

 

1) What do you want from your advertising? Why are you advertising in the first place? This step is crucial to get right before you undertake any type of advertising or marketing. Ask yourself the following questions. If you answer yes to more than one, then you need to do separate advertising campaigns. More on that later…

• Are you trying to raise awareness of your brand?
• Do you want more clients?
• Are you after more visitors to your website?
• Would you like to increase your database?

2) Know your target market. Who are they? And don’t just say the general public! You may have more than one particular market. Just ensure that you choose only one market per advert. The worst thing you can do is write one advert and try to get everyone in from it.

Your target market can be made up geographically- (i.e. a bakery may look for anyone within a 10klm radius of their shop) or it can be made up demographically (i.e. – new mums, business owners, women, football fanatics etc). You can then narrow that down even more to new mums with girls, or boys; AFL fans, or Rugby Union fans etc. The more you narrow it down, the more targeted your advertising will be.

3) Write your advert. Use the above steps to come up with the first few pieces of your advert. Your headline should capture the attention of your target market. You also need to utilize the headline to tell readers why they need to keep reading. This is called the ‘benefit’. Why should they read your advert? Try some of the following for examples:

• “Attention new Mums- Here’s how to get more sleep”
• “Recent research suggests new mothers are not getting enough sleep”.
• “Find out how to get more sleep now!”
• “Discover how to increase your profits in 1 day!”

4) Include Incredible Offers. Giving something away for free is one of the best offers. It doesn’t have to be a product of yours- try to build relationships with other business owners who share the same target market, but are not competitors. For example: An air conditioner installer may team up with the local air conditioning sales centre, and offer their services to the customers to install them. This way, the installer gets more work, plus the sales centre can offer a value packed bundle for their customer.

5) Include a Call to Action. Ensure you include a call to action and deadline in your offer. People always hate to feel they are missing out on something and the deadline will compel them to act. Utilise some of the following examples:

• ‘Hurry- competition closes next Friday! Email today to ensure you don’t miss out!”
• Visit us before 28th October to claim your Free Gift!
• Bookings close by 24th December- Call us today to ensure your placement!
• Come in to The Plaza on Friday between 8am- 1pm to receive your Free Photo