Of course there are many ways to advertise via the more popular websites; however, these are becoming increasingly more expensive the more popular they become. Banner and Pay-Per-Click advertising are amongst other successful methods too and can be successful with the correct strategy and budget.

Business directories have been around for years in the well-known form of Yellow Pages. However, businesses are becoming increasingly marketing savvy and they require more than a mere list of local suppliers and printed directories can be limited with regard to easily updating information regularly.

A well established online regional business directory is an excellent marketing tool for any business looking to capture more prospects searching locally for the products and services they’re selling. When coupled with even a modest internet marketing strategy such as a website or blog and perhaps a regular email marketing series, it will attract both new customers and keep existing clientele hot until they’re ready to buy from you.

Business directories aim to gather and promote all types of local businesses in one place on their website simply categorised and so increasing the number of potential customers finding you. Two type of listing are usually offered – regular listing and featured listing:

• Regular listing: is free and allows any business an entry level presence and should be the crucial first stage for any business.
• Featured listing: is an upgrade to the basic free listing allowing increased functionality for a modest cost.

There’s the obvious advantage for you listing your business in the top category of the business directory but the competition here can be quite strong too so careful time spend over content always pays bigger dividends and often you can be too close to your own business so outsourcing this crucial task can be cheap in relation to the benefits gained.

People will find your business from the search engines and the search facility on the business directories so thought is vital when choosing ‘key’ words and phrases describing your business and what your prospects will be searching for to find you.

You should consider the importance of the business directory to increase your business. Find the best directory for your region and place your listing into it. This will be really helpful to you and increase the number of your customers.

Use the leverage of your business directory even if it’s just a free listing; ensure whatever content is allowed in your profile is relevant and regularly up to date and search complimentary businesses in your area to see if you can partner with them or maybe some joint marketing sharing the cost and resources. How about a joint email newsletter or regular offers between customer databases, blog updates and swapping articles all of which can be inexpensive and benefit both parties.

If you would like to ‘brainstorm’ some online and offline low-cost ideas for generating more laser targeted traffic to your website, blog or into your door, contact us.

Email marketing campaigns are affordable, and can help small retailers to compete with the big boys during this essential sales period.

Retailers have to make certain that the programme will meet their defined objectives before launching any email marketing campaign.

It’s important to decide the key elements that will help their campaign stand out, what real value can be provided to their recipients – both prospects and customers. To be able to succeed in this, there needs to be combined features in evidence that cover both promotional and informational aspects of their marketing endeavour.

The programme needs to encourage a long a beneficial relationship as well as persuade the urgent purchase.

Hopefully these strategies will inspire an email campaign to engage your audience:

1. Don’t be too pushy: Loyalty is the name of the game so make sure your not pushing the ‘sale’ too hard. After all you want your customer to come back again not merely give you a quick sale. Gear your campaign to making sure your brand is kept in the audience’s awareness by creating a regular monthly or bi-monthly newsletter which has ideas and holiday offers that provide good value and not merely money off.
2. Ensure a well-rounded campaign: Make sure your promotions have all the relevant elements required to engage your prospects correctly. These are; describing your offer in the subject line, a powerful ‘call to action’, a clickable link or image that relates to your promotion and keep the text brief.
3. Extend your seasonal joy with your functioning messages: When informing your prospects and customers about operational happenings it’s in order to take the opportunity to softly promote yourself. Include mechanisms such as links to your website and/or blog or maybe a coupon or offer. Remember though, these messages aren’t principally marketing focused but a modest amount of branding is absolutely fine.
4. Choose the occasion not the day: There’s never a good or bad time to send email campaigns or best times either. So scheduling emails should relate to when your target audience are going to be more interested in their products and on the related special occasions. Your messages (and offers) need to relate to occasions like holidays, product launches even the seasonal climate or topical subjects and obviously sent in time to make sure they’re relevant.

If you need any help with ideas, planning and/or implementing your campaigns, why not contact us.

Because they are the search engines’ way of assessing how good your site is. And if they think your site is good they’ll send you lots of visitors.

The logic goes that if lots of sites (particularly good quality, high traffic sites) are linking to your site it must be good.

Also the number and quality of incoming links forms the major part of the off-site bit of search engine optimisation.

So how do you build lots of incoming links to your site? With a lot of work!

Seriously – off-site optimisation is a never ending process of generating and retaining as many high quality links to your site as possible.

here’s some ways to build high quality links:

1. Blog directories
2. Social sites
3. Coment on other blogs
4. Link from your blog to your own sites
5. Participate in forums
6. Good quality content

If there’s one thing that runs through method though, it’s the need for regular good quality information on your blog. Without that you’ll be dead in the water.

So here’s a good approach to follow:

• Make sure your site is set up properly for the search engines.
• Write good quality, well researched articles that answer questions, solve problems or provide entertainment. And keep doing it.
• Carry out the 6 link building steps set out in this article above – and keep doing it. It’s a continuous process.

It will take time to build links to your site, particularly if you’re writing in a highly competitive niche, so keep at it.

Persistence cannot be over-rated as a requirement for success. So if you need help with these strategies, contact us.

Traditional transactional marketing involved the organisation focusing all of its marketing efforts on attracting the customer for one off sales. However, customers who are loyal end up spending more in the long-term, so it makes sense to keep existing customers happy.

Attracting and retaining customers

Relationship marketing involves the organisation undertaking a number of important activities. First of all, the company must put into place tactics to attract customers. Methods used to attract customers may include promoting the product and brand, offering good quality products/services and competitive prices. Secondly customers that are attracted to the organisation have to be retained.

After all, what’s the point of all the hard work (and money) of attracting customers if you can’t retain them? Methods used to retain, may include, loyalty cards, a good customer service section, and an individual account manager if it is a large client, along with product variety and quality.

Methods of monitoring customer satisfaction

An organisation must continue to satisfy customers, but let’s be honest; it is very difficult to keep 100% of your customers satisfied all the time, one reason is because needs and wants of your customers change. So we have to monitor what is happening in our customer environment.

Methods used to monitor customer satisfaction may include:

• Focus groups
• General comments
• Online surveys
• Suggestion boxes
• Customer complaints
• Mystery Shoppers
• Questionnaires
• Personal interviews

In order to retain customers you must keep up to date with the needs of your customers.

Your customers needs don’t remain static either, they’re always changing. Adapting and changing along with these needs will help your organisation develop the relationship you want with your customers.

The benefits:

1. Increased profits
2. Increased market share
3. Increased brand awarenes

The more you focus on customers – their needs and desires – the more they’ll want to do business with you. Contact us to discuss some of the great cost-effective startegies we can introduce to grow your business.

”The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”

Oscar Wilde was the master of the snappy one-liner, but unbeknown to him his words of wisdom were to prove particularly relevant, in the early 21st century, to small businesses. Several recent surveys have shown that word of mouth advertising – a personal recommendation about your product or service – is the most effective way to get people to consider what you have to offer, especially if you are relatively small or just starting up.

Satisfied customers are beyond any doubt the best form of advertising any business can get. People will always talk about a business with which they’ve had a good experience. And with the dramatic growth of online media options, social networking sites, blogs and business / product review sites can play a big role in spreading both positive and negative feedback. These are all prime locations for people to endorse a company or let off steam.

Online vs Offline

Online media is both exhilarating and terrifying in how quickly it can get a message out there. It isn’t possible to manage what people are saying about your product online, but if you are confident in the service you provide, and know that the vast majority of your customers are satisfied with it, this shouldn’t matter, and you can enjoy the viral effect of these individual recommendations. But it is important to bear in mind that an online message only reaches people one at a time, when they are sitting at a computer surfing the web.

It’s also important to remember that if you are relatively small or just starting up, you are unlikely to have so many people talking about you, so the word of mouth effect will not be so pronounced. Couple this with the fact that, as we said, online media only reaches people individually, at a computer screen, and you’ll find a catch-22 conundrum that may not initially appear to have a simple answer.

As a small business, you need to find ways to generate word of mouth beyond that coming from existing customers. You also need to ensure that your product stands above the rest in your marketplace by achieving greater exposure than the majority, being talked about because you are putting your name in front of consumers in a relevant, targeted and impressive manner.

By improving your visibility in front of potential customers it is possible to create a profile that belies your size or the length of time you’ve been in business. The best way to do this is to find ways to make your business look bigger than it actually is by quickly building your brand and giving you an ‘extra shop window’ for what your business is offering.

‘Offline’ media, such as posters and press, can increase your exposure and get your business talked about because potential customers see your message all around them on a regular basis. Billboards and press can be booked solely for your target local area, making the message you communicate through them as relevant as possible. By turning to offline media to build your business profile, you enhance the size of your company by appearing ever-present. Potential customers have more than one opportunity to find out about you and remember you as they see your name in a number of different places. Offline media is a big, bold statement, helping to build trust by making an emphatic point, which is that you have something that you’re proud to talk about and that you want to share as widely as you can, so as many people as possible can take advantage of it.

As a small or relatively new business, the ‘extra shop window’ of offline media can make all the difference. By being clever with it, you can really gain cut-through in a difficult market. Poster advertising, for instance, has traditionally been considered the domain of big brands only, but through the online service offered by Signposter.com, any small business can book the local poster or posters most relevant to their potential customers, at a very low cost. This will elevate your business name above the competition into big brand league, and create exactly the talking point that was needed. If people see your billboard then they are more likely to remember your name above your competitors, therefore more likely to pass on your details if asked.

Top tips for successful ‘offline’ promotion

And finally, let’s not forget, it is all very well to choose a poster site or a newspaper to promote your brand, but you need to use it correctly to get the maximum impact – and therefore, talkability – from it. Some good tips are:

·    Make sure you know your customers and potential customers before you plan an offline media campaign – you will need to understand them to know what media they consume;
·    Ensure that your ad is in the right place at the right time, using what you know about your customer base to decide where and when will work;
·    Make sure the creative execution you use is right for your message and will appeal to your customers – perhaps ask some of them what they think while you are creating your ad?

Be brave – choose media that you may not previously have considered and that may not be the default choice for others in your field. Many local businesses use press so it could be a good idea to look for advertising opportunities beside this

Jenny Nguyen is Marketing Manager of Signposter.com, a revolutionary online business helping SMEs plan, buy and manage outdoor advertising campaigns. Jenny is an outdoor advertising expert with a depth of experience in advising businesses on how to use outdoor media in their marketing strategies. Previously, Jenny worked as a marketing specialist advising Fortune 500 companies on best practice marketing.

Knowing this, more and more sellers are asking for referrals as a primary approach to filling their pipelines.

But they aren’t getting the number of high quality referrals they’d like or need. The techniques we’re hearing aren’t working consistently. That’s because so often we leave it up to the client to guess who they should refer us to. If you really want to be successful building your pipeline with referrals, you need to take a step back and think about what types of introductions you really want.

Just any old referral won’t get you your next hot prospect. When you leave it up to your customer to figure out who they think would be a good referral, they won’t consider all the qualification points you do.

They might not recognize that they’re a great client because they’re:

• Focused on issues that fall within your offerings’ sweet spot
• Using your solutions exactly like you want other customers to
• In a specific industry or a certain size company
• Treating you as a trusted advisor

Suddenly you find yourself with a referral that’s less than ideal. It’s too small a company, has a completely different set of needs than you address, or is outside your industry expertise.
Because the referral came from one of your top clients, you either have to figure out how to say “thanks, but no thanks” or follow-up then explain to your customer why it wasn’t the best fit. It’s possible you could actually waste as much time following up on this unqualified introduction as you would cold calling!

A poor referral from a great client puts you in an awkward position – all because you were trying to shorten your new business development cycle through referrals. Mediocre connections won’t help you fill your pipeline.

No, you only want top quality referrals. Your desire is to get introduced to companies and contacts that really need your offerings and will want to talk with you. You’re looking for new connections with the characteristics of your best clients.

Don’t limit yourself to asking for referrals that are similar in size, industry, or region.
Broaden your expectations to seek introductions to people who’ll implement and appreciate your offerings like your best clients do. Ask for contacts who’ll want to work closely with you and welcome your expertise and recommendations.

To get referrals that fit such specific qualifications, you need to frame who is a great connection when you ask. Tell your customer what types of companies make the best match for your offerings.

There are two parts to framing your referral request:

• Say, “someone like you who…” – and fill in the blank with the profile of your ideal referral.
• Then add, “someone who needs …” – and include the classic challenges, issues or needs you address.

What you’re doing is creating a picture of your ideal referral for your client. Now as they mentally search through all their colleagues, they can easily determine which ones to recommend. You’ve taken the guesswork out of it.

Call me a referral snob if you will, but if we’re going to ask for referrals, spend precious time following up on them, and then work them with due diligence, don’t we deserve to get only the very best introductions? I sure think so!

Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert and author of the award winning book “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment.

Actually though, not such a tall order because there are certain things that these same clients are consistently not doing. Importantly these are generally not testing and/or measuring their promotional performances. This is a strategy that’s vital when a company doesn’t have a limitless budget.

It’s probably the most common failing with small businesses that they rush into using strategies for marketing and promoting their products and services without really knowing how successful they are being. It’s not an exacting science in terms of reallyknowing just which marketing method is going to work the best, therefore to limit the risk, it’s necessary to trial headlines, offers and action calls, so some patience is required because that means testing and measuring before the big push.

A good example of this came recently with a client who came to us when they had written their mail-shot and fulfilled it for 10,000 prospects and off it went only to get just 3 responses in total. A good rule of thumb is a 2-3% response rate (our latest general stats from the DMA are 2.61%) though certain industries and/or offers can vary dramatically.

Our strategy in this case is to trial three different service/product offers to three different market sectors each of 1000 prospects because your prospects will definitely let you know what they want and the offer that trials best will be sent to the main database.

By simply testing your offers you will reduce the risk of a poor response and feel much more confident with the main mailing also any follow up mailings will be based upon true research leaving you better prepared next time. This is a more cost-effective strategy giving you more bang for your bucks!

In closing, you really must ensure you ask for your responses too. Creating awareness is important but it’s lost if you don’t let your prospects know what is expected of them because this will be a crucial method of measuring how effective your final campaign is.

If you would like some help with your next direct mail campaigns or a critique of your sales letters, please feel free to contact us.

There can be few tools in your marketing kit that are as powerful as the Sales Letter.

That said, so many are written without sufficient regard to a persuasive call to action. It’s a shame because after all it’s how we motivate our reader to take the next step that’s the key to getting the response we required from our direct mail.

It’s crucial to keep in mind exactly what it is we want our reader to do. This is why it’s important to construct captivating offers that will trigger the prospect to move in the desired direction.

Wouldn’t it be great if a single unsolicited sales letter to a cold prospect galvanised them into picking up the phone and hiring you instantly? It happens but not to order.

Unfortunately, this is the biggest reason that people give for their sales letters not working; they often write one letter and give up. Only to be expected really!

What you need to realise is; it’s all about building relationships so we need to take things step by step. We need to build confidence in stages by and we do that by being less demanding in the beginning and by making a reasonable request that moves the relationship forward.

There’s always the possibility your sales letter will arrive at the desk of a prospect that’s in desperate need of your services but you can not build a firm marketing strategy around this kind of luck.

So what you’re aiming to begin with is a sales letter that intrigues your reader and to generate a level of curiosity that will be remembered when your follow-ups are received. Because in the early stages they will be wary of your sales pitch even despite being interested in your services.

At this stage of building your relationship the offer of Free Information is the perfect building block that generates confidence. So what they’re looking for here is some additional information, something interesting that supports your expertise such as your website, where your offer should be prominently displayed.

It’s at this stage you should be looking for opportunities to gain further contact points such as email addresses that can be fed into your system. This is key to your strategy because your services should be marketed within a system with each step of the process leading to sequential components that lead to an enquiry and ultimately to the meeting.

If you would like to discuss having this service working for you and put your products and services ahead of the competition, email us.