Gone is the dialing for dollars mentality. You can do better than that.

You can use these tools to do everything from identifying who your best-odds prospects are to deducing why they’d want to speak with you, writing a powerful email, and ultimately attracting them to you. Here are some of my favorites.

1.    Identify the who. Once you know the profile of the types of contacts and companies you want to approach, use Zoominfo.com, NetProspex.com, Insideview.com or Hoovers.com to search and get the names of the best contacts to talk to.

2.    Delve in. Go a step further and do some research for the contacts you’ve uncovered on those same sites. What have they written? Where have they been quoted? You can quickly get a feel for what’s top of mind with them and where their passions lie. Use this information to craft your grabber value proposition for phone calls and emails. Use it to write blogs or articles that’ll attract their attention and peak their interest. Comment about your ideas on social networks.

3.    Secure contact info. Start with these same sites to find the most current contact information for your target prospects. Jigsaw and NetProspex are maintained by people like you and me, so they’ve often got very current information. While you’re there, add a few contacts of your own and earn points for free contact information downloads. You can also use LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networks as a tool.

4.    Find elusive email addresses.  If you still can’t find an email address here’s a trick to try. From your search engine type “@their website domain” and it’ll pull up anywhere on the web where email addresses for that domain appear. Now you’ll have the email protocol for that company and can more effectively guess your contact’s email address.

5.    Watch your prospects. No, we aren’t talking stalking. Watch what your top prospects are doing using alert services like Google Alerts for free. Set up a daily alert and see all the tweets and comments they’ve made and where they’re mentioned. You’ll know what to talk about when you call and more importantly, when they need you to call.

6.    Make your emails stand out. Use Gobbledygook.grader.com to pick out trite or hype-filled words and phrases you don’t even know you’re using. It’s a great tool to increase the impact of your brochures and online copy, too.

7.    Know if they’re listening. One of the biggest challenges with email prospecting is knowing if anyone has read what you sent. Use ReadNotify.com to trace email opens and forwards, numbers of times read, and URL clicks. Use Bit.ly to shorten long links for social network comments and emails. You can track how many times the links are opened, forwarded and by whom.

8.    Increase your own productivity. If you’re a Microsoft Outlook user Xobni.com is a plugin that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy. You can even search social networks for information about your contacts.

Getting people to reply is the most difficult aspect of prospecting. These tools give you new levels of information and insight to increase your odds of success.

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. Ms. Lee is a frequent speaker at national sales meetings and association events. To find out more about the author, read her latest articles, or subscribe to her newsletter visit www.klagroup.com or call +1 303.773.1285.

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.

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.

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.