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.

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.