Archive for the ‘Business Tips’ Category

Guidelines for Interviewing Influencers and Stakeholders: Part II

Monday, September 6th, 2010

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Gelada baboon
Creative Commons License photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

While web analytics can certainly lead to lucrative results, your stakeholders may still be hung up on the cost of integrating web analytics within the company. The best way to combat this doubt is to highlight projections of lost potential gains by not streamlining and tracking your site’s activity. It’s your responsibility to emphasize that the cost of Web analytics will be dwarfed by the loss of potential sales. Accentuate that analysis costs will be recovered and profited upon once these Web metrics are implemented. You need to show how this process will inevitably illuminate performance indicators. And for added clout, employing the services of an analytics consultant is a way to develop custom measures that can be applied throughout your organization. Entrench Web metrics within the company’s system.

Be sure to show due diligence to the bottom line. For example, heavily romancing your Google PageRank can be a red herring in your metrics, causing your business to concentrate on numbers that flatter the image of the company, but don’t actually help drive its conversion rates. So, you’ll want to make sure that you discuss how these analytics are measured against your company’s bottom line. Because Web analytics is still evolving, you have to empathize with your stakeholders and be prepared to address skepticism of its concrete usability and its ability to be indicative of market and consumer trends. A full-bodied Web metrics approach will prove that you have a comprehensive, trust-worthy strategy that considers all aspects of your specific type of website and intended market; not just page visits and log files.

Lucrative and Direct Research Tool

You need to stress that Web analytics is a direct research tool. Client-based surveys are essential for gathering opinions and can lead to productive insights. However, the statistics gathered from these surveys can be skewed by any number of outliers. Most importantly, a survey is only answered by those who choose to, which automatically infers some degree of polarized subjectivity; void of universal trends that can be accurately and repeatedly applied to your market plan. The beauty of Web analytics is that the consumer is unaware that as they surf your site, they’re actually creating unbiased metrics; a blind study. Your site is a testing ground for analyzing visitor paths, effectiveness of copy, accessibility of information and promotions, poignancy of new advertisements and products, and gauging visitor reactions.

Present the ability to make informed decisions. Through discovery of referral forces, you’ll understand how and why your prospects are being driven to your site. With this knowledge, you can implement a campaign with stronger focus. Concentrating on a spectrum of metrics as well as the energy behind them allows you to apply a disciplined budgetary plan. In regards to fundamental business, retention of customers is more budget-friendly than obtaining new customers. Qualify metrics that are specific to your site and industry, and learn what trends succeed in higher rates of retention. The company’s bottom line should be at the top of your interview topics. When you express the ability to fatten the bottom line, present the need to improve the site little by little, constantly adjusting according to visitor behavior. Don’t wait until your site is grossly out of date and inefficient. Continue to tweak so that it is riding the crest of the market wave, and not getting trounced upon in the trough of the wave.

Be a Teacher

You need to teach the higher ups. They are far removed from website management and the integral importance of Web analytic technology and benefits. The importance of Web metrics’ ability to generate revenue can not be stressed enough. Maintain your analytic goals but present them so they directly align with executive goals; discuss much more than click-thru rates. Who wouldn’t agree to a goal they’ve already agreed to? It’s necessary not only to study the trends of your customers, but also of your stakeholders. Make yourself aware of what internal objectives they’re harboring. What makes the management manage a smile? But you’ll need to do more than point out a trends in your own company and website. Give your argument added credibility by pointing out specific case studies of other businesses’ successes; especially if it’s a competitor. Once more, your data shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Create an entire microcosm of Web metrics, so the executives will be hard pressed to ignore the positive implications of proper Web management. Who doesn’t love a good success story?

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, SEO and SEM, Technology | No Comments »

Guidelines for Interviewing Influencers and Stakeholders

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Allioson's Birthday
Creative Commons License photo credit: Iversonic

That aint no filet mignon.

The trends and information you garner from your website should not only be considered a valuable measurement for internal business, but should also be used as a convincing tool for presenting to influencers and stakeholders. As we all know, going beyond unfounded claims and collecting data that can actually be pointed to will always achieve a degree of authority and persuasion. Don’t tell me why I should invest with you, show me why.

Make sure your Web information is distributed equally within your company. The more teams you involve, the stronger your attack will be. This serves to root the necessity of Web metrics further into your company. Demonstrating the benefits of Web analytics is obviously what we’re striving for here. But if you can prove that it’s actually an integral part, if other teams outside the Web management branch can also attest to the integrity of your tactics, then you’ve attained an undeniable presence. Forming a cooperative approach between your analytics and e-commerce systems incubates your forecast egg, proving to be an additional dimension to your accounting and accountability.

Remove the guess work from your numbers and you’re sure to impress your audience. Take care to avoid becoming confident with hollow numbers. It’s most necessary to completely understand what your numbers signify. Telling a stakeholder exactly how many times the promotional page was and is foreseen to be visited is fine and well. But leave no shadow of a doubt. Include ramifications, theories, and projections that bolster these page visit statistics. Streamline your analysis so that it’s completely clear, causing decision making to be a process built on concrete; not wetlands. Those who are far removed from the Web management side often perceive the online aspect as lacking solidarity. They’re locked into the classical school of thought, perceiving revenue as produced only through core business. Thus, ensure to base your presentation on precise, detailed goals and correlations.

Vacuums Are for Cleaning

Apply your findings to trends in the market place, global happenings, or the results to Monday night’s football game. The point is, your Web analysis shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Form a regular course of action where your data is studied and given depth. Depth is an essential ingredient here. Remove your data from the two-dimensional world of the spreadsheet, understand its behavior, and give it a personality. Surely, this palpable form will be much more appealing to those involved in the interview process. This degree of organization grants exponential levels of confidence for your influencers and stakeholders. Harnessing the activity of your website will inevitably lead to hard evidence of how your company is generating wealth, and more importantly, how it can improve.

Clearly define your objectives and activities. A stakeholder should be presented with exact goals that the website is to achieve. With these goals in mind, you can clearly illustrate the significance of your Web analysis, tying together click-thru rates, and forming a prospective customer’s path to and through your site. When such a path is demonstrated, the stakeholder understands exactly how their investments will be applied; with measurable projections. This way, the overall analysis dataset can be deconstructed, so that individual data packets can be applied to varying levels of strategy and planning.

Always Keep the Consumer in Mind

Let’s not forget that all your demonstrated data is consumer-driven. Yes, there are real people behind those clicks. Setting up a customer forum where marketing communications can be carried out is vital. This enables an understanding of your numbers. Again, we want to provide our stakeholders with reasons. Explain how your Web metrics are leading to a greater understanding of prospective customer behavior, thus conquering one of e-commerce’s inherent evils, shopping-cart abandonment. Direct consumer communication can answer these abandonment questions. From this, you can develop ways to reconnect your lost prospect to your site. In basic psychology terms, remembering something is always easier than learning it for the first time, using the synapse formed from the initial point of discovery. You’ll want to capitalize on this and demonstrate that you are dedicated to recapturing these lost targets.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Offline Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO and SEM, Technology, marketing | No Comments »

Powerfully Promote Your Offer for an Outrageous ROI

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Creative Commons License photo credit: Lori Greig

Don’t leave your new product or service high and dry after an initial introduction. You must promote it like there’s no tomorrow in order to achieve the sales you’ve always dreamed of. Of course, we’d like to think that our business offer is attractive enough on its own and can magically magnetize paying prospects to our virtual front door. But you have to remember that without actively promoting your business offer it’s like a ghost ship in the vast ocean, it’s not coming up on anyone’s radar. However, actively and consistently promote your business offer and you’ll create lucrative pings on everyone’s radars and make your offer extremely real.

Serious Money in Series Marketing

One of the biggest causes of failure for any size business is inconsistency in their marketing efforts. Fortunately, the flip side of the equation can be very lucrative. Market your business offer with consistency and you will significantly increase exposure and vastly improve your chances of your product or service showing up in front of your prospects.

First, we’ll clarify that just because you regularly market your business does not necessarily mean that you are being consistent. It is important to note that you will need to consistently market each individual product or service! If you are trying to sell any product or service that requires more than a $100 for the prospect to purchase it then there is a good chance that you will be battling at least some degree of procrastination or doubt; regardless of the state of the current economy. A prospect who’s not ready to buy after the first offer doesn’t mean that they’ll never be ready to buy—you may simply need to continuously market to them until you’ve built up enough value and sound logic to bring them from their point of procrastination to a point where there’s no doubt in their mind that their lives will be better with the help of your product or service.

Marketing each of your offerings only occasionally is like firing a buckshot at a target 10 yards away—sure, you may spray the entire target, but you won’t cause much damage. But if you fire that buckshot at pointblank range then you’re sure to get the sales-kill. Make sure that you prevent your marketing efforts from getting too spread out.

Some of the absolute best marketing tools for series marketing are e-mail campaigns, article marketing, and blogging. These tools are all very easy to manipulate in a manner that allows you to schedule out marketing messages on a regular (very regular) basis. Simply create an introduction/overview piece to send out first, and then consistently follow that intro piece up with a series of feature/benefit pieces, making sure to build off of each preceding piece. Make sure to never leave features stranded on their own as this will hurt the overall value and integrity of your product or service.

Chinese Marketing Water Torture

Sometimes businesses feel afraid that they’ll annoy their prospects if they market to them too much. While quality business owners will of course want to avoid sending out spam-like materials to their prospects, if you offer a product or service that can truly improve other people’s lives, then you should market boldly and with full confidence, without worrying that you’re going to annoy people.

Countless businesses have been able to achieve record-breaking sales through drip campaigns. These campaigns are usually marketed to people who have opted in and requested additional information regarding a particular product or service but can also include general leads you have collected through your website.

These drip campaigns often feature an automated series of emails, which do not require any ongoing maintenance once they’re launched and are highly effective at building an unbreakable case regarding your product or service. Not only do you continue to build value with each drip, a highly targeted marketing message that features a portioned segment of the product’s overall features, you also keep your business offer in the front of your prospects’ minds so that they think of you first before all the competing offers.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Article Marketing, Article Marketing Automation, Blogs, Business Tips, Email Marketing, Offline Marketing, Online Marketing, Publishing Articles, marketing | No Comments »

Learn How to Tame a Guerrilla and Make More Money

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Zoo Guerilla Marketing
We’ve referenced a few times just how important it is to make it blatantly obvious as to how your business is different from all the others out there when we discussed the need to develop a proper unique selling proposition (USP). And while this is indeed one of the best ways you can illustrate how your business is an orange among apples, since there is such an overwhelming amount of competition present in the marketplace you also need to actually SHOW your prospects how you’re different.

What’s one of the most effective ways of doing so? Be OUTRAGEOUS. Get in their face. Hit them over the head with your marketing! Tame the wild beast that is guerrilla marketing and you are sure to turn heads and capture attention for your business like never before.

Cut through the Clutter

One of the leading reasons as to why guerrilla marketing is so effective is that it slices and dices right through all the clutter out there. What’s clutter in the business world? The thousands, yes thousands, of advertisements and marketing messages that bombard us on a daily basis. The interesting part is that you probably don’t readily perceive this bombardment and that’s because our brains have become programmed to rule out much of this clutter and completely ignore it. Otherwise, we’d all be dancing around the streets as crazy as Ophelia due to sensory overload.

So, it’s your task to reengage the human mind and grab people’s attention through outrageous guerrilla marketing. Take the above picture for example. This was a campaign for the Calgary zoo announcing the arrival of a new baby giraffe! You simply have no choice but to stare at this marketing piece with complete curiosity and learn more about it—brilliant! Find ways to make your marketing messages utterly impossible to ignore.

Mental Permanence

Ever wonder how the number of digits was decided on for phone numbers? Reference the work of the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller and you’ll see that the average human can maintain about seven objects in working memory (plus or minus two); Miller’s Law. While a beautifully crafted sales letter is still highly effective at converting prospects to paying customers, there’s a good chance that your prospects aren’t going to remember all of it. But part of the brilliance of guerrilla marketing is that it’s based on simplicity…it’s like a very friendly slap in the face. It commands their attention through a wild theme and plants itself in people’s minds by conveying a very simple and highly targeted message.

Plus, anytime something sticks out as much as guerrilla marketing pieces do then that subject or material features a much higher likeliness of enjoying easier, quicker recall in someone’s mind. Getting your business to be the first one that comes to mind over all the others is a surefire way to increase sales!

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Offline Marketing, Online Marketing, marketing | No Comments »

Affinity Marketing Doubles Your Effectiveness for a Fraction of the Effort

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
Selfmade Burger ... da kann MC´s abstinken
Creative Commons License photo credit: lambda_X

You don’t have to be in competition with everyone! Instead, build a stronger business by seeking out companies that share a meaningful connection. Essentially, you’ll gain the power of another marketing team, increase your business exposure and broaden your audience.

The key is to search online for businesses that offer a complementary product or service that in no way competes with your own. It’s like selling a hamburger and then offering lettuce, tomato and cheese through your affiliates.

Those with the Most Allies Always Win the War

You significantly increase your chances of bringing in new business when your name pops in more places on the Internet. Affinity marketing promotes lucrative exposure at no cost—if you do it right. You should approach your affinity marketing with the confidence that your business has something amazing to offer. This will help you feel completely comfortable asking other online businesses if they’d like to enter into this form of reciprocal marketing with you. If you present your affinity marketing offer tentatively then you might run into some fat-headed businesses that will feel as though they have the right to ask you to pay for posting a link on their site. Present your offer with full confidence and your prospective affinity business will think they’re getting an exceptional deal by not having to pay to post a link on your site! (Hint: It will help if you can point to Web analytics and prove that you consistently bring in a significant amount of website traffic.)

Your Name Is on the Line

Since the integrity of your business is on the line when it comes to products or services that you offer it’s a good idea to actually get someone on the phone. You can learn a lot more about the business owner when you take the time to actively speak with them. Have some questions ready that will help you qualify the way they do business. You should also conduct some basic background checks online to see if any negative comments or testimonials surface in forums or product review sites. Beware of any red flags during your discovery process as linking to a dishonest company could bring yours down with it.

Boost Your Search Engine Ranking

Affinity marketing also provides an excellent opportunity to execute effective link building. Search engines boost websites that feature a significant number of inbound links. (Hint: Beware of posting too many outbound links on a single website as search engines may determine that your site is a link farm and will penalize you for it.) You’ll also naturally come up more often in search engine results if you have more active links on the Web.

You will add a great deal of power to your link if you search for businesses that feature a PageRank (PR) of at least 2. This ranking system goes up to 10, with 10 indicating a kick-ass website. You’ll want to avoid linking to those rated at 0 as this could actually harm your ranking. You can either download a quick and simple PR tool bar for your Internet browser or insert the business in question in a dedicated PR checker.

Comprehensive Offers Bring in Bigger Fish

Another reason why affinity marketing has been so successful is because it allows even the smallest shops to offer a comprehensive suite of products and services. You have a much greater chance of bringing in new clients if you have the means of filling gaps in your business offer. For example, even if you offer the best copywriting service on the Web, a prospect may be turned off by the fact that you can’t help them with their video content needs. Since video content is becoming more and more popular on the Web, and more businesses are recognizing how effective this type of online marketing is, you would do well to incorporate video content in your business plan. How do you do this?

First, as always, think of your friends and business associates—are any of them online video experts? If not, you can easily do a local search for “online video business specialists/services/professionals.” If no one you know has this ability then it’s good to conduct a local search so you can meet face to face and hammer out clear details as to how you’ll market each other’s business.

Once you post a link to their video content services complemented with a brief description of their offer, you’ll now be able to offer a comprehensive suite of content services, making you a much more convenient option for businesses looking for both video and copywriting help.

Finally, maintain a database of all your affinity activity so you can check once a month to see that your links are still live on the sites you’ve traded with.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Business Tips, Online Marketing | No Comments »

Go Offline to Get More Business Online

Monday, July 12th, 2010
the fisherman
Creative Commons License photo credit: raggio(ALL4HIM)productions

There certainly is an excellent variety of online marketing tools that can effectively drive traffic to your website and generate impressive sales. However, the offline world of marketing has almost been completely forgotten about by some companies. Even companies that conduct 100 percent of their business online can still greatly profit from incorporating offline methods in their business marketing campaign. Remember when we told you how putting more marketing lines in the water will help you catch a whale of a client? Employing the power of both offline and online marketing methods will sweeten your arsenal, giving you the fire power you need to blow the competition out of the water.

Build a Sales-boosting Bunker

Combining offline and online marketing will establish a lucrative symbiosis within your marketing—where all your marketing pieces strengthen each other (as opposed to marketing parasitism where one marketing piece simply feeds off the results created by your other marketing pieces).

You will create the most solid marketing campaign if you continuously execute a campaign that ties all of your marketing together. For example, if you’ve created a landing page for a specific product promotion, you can complement this by sending out mailers to your target audience, directing them to visit the landing page online. This combination of marketing can actually be really fun as it adopts the aura of a chess game, putting multiple elements into play through strategic maneuvers.

Sales-generating Seminars

Go public for increased exposure: Informational seminars put another marketing line in the water to attract big fish to your online efforts. Offer a free seminar that will help prospects build their businesses, live healthier lives, have more fun—the possibilities are endless. Just make sure to maintain an information-based approach and keep the sales speak out of it. Presenting a helpful seminar is sure to set you up as an authority!

This is also one of the best ways to simultaneously generate a large group of leads. Presenting a free seminar will make it obvious that your business is the real deal, so you won’t even have to actively pitch your actual business here. Make it very clear as to how they can get more information about your product or service (post your website URL everywhere throughout the room), and then let them come to you. And even if they don’t contact you, you now have their contact information from the seminar and can start email marketing to them or put them into your drip campaign. An easy way to get their contact information is to explain that you need it in order to send them the details about the seminar, such as time and place. Multiply the number in attendance by offering a free gift to anyone who brings 10 friends with them. (Use a simple three-step form: 1) Name, 2) e-mail and 3) Referred By.)

As if these reasons weren’t solid enough, you may also consider hosting a seminar in a vacation destination and writing it off as business expense…did we just write that?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Your Marketing

While it’s always a good idea to be as efficient as possible with your budget, reusing your marketing pieces in the wrong places could end up doing more harm than good. For example, many companies are unfamiliar with the issue of duplicate content on the Web (also referred to as dupe content by extra cool Web techies). Repeatedly posting the same content within your website or across platforms such as on your blogs could end up penalizing you in the search engines. Search engines pick this up as either a form of keyword stuffing or a fraudulent business plagiarizing other people’s content. (Use a professional article distribution service to submit mass articles in a search-engine-friendly manner.)

The good news is that you can reuse your current online articles as much as you would like offline. For example, you can print your online articles and send them out in direct response mailers to your leads. Providing helpful information in your mailers adds a great deal of value and helps establish why your business is the clear choice. Plus, adding an information-based piece in any marketing you do helps soften your sales approach, making it much more attractive than a standalone promotion. Due to a daily bombardment of advertising, people are naturally skeptical about these standalone promotions. When you provide something for free that people can use to make their lives better they’re much likelier to let their guard down and actively consider your offer.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Article Distribution Service, Article Marketing, Business Tips, Distribute Your Articles, Offline Marketing, Online Marketing, Publishing Articles, Quality Article Distribution Service, Submit Articles | No Comments »

Focus Groups for Sound Financial Decisions

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Magnified Dollar
Creative Commons License photo credit: Brooks Elliott

Every business owner should be absolutely in love with their product or service. If you don’t have a passion for what you do you’ll surely wind up in an insane asylum from unhappily grinding through all of your work. However, passion for your product can also blind you. A budget-draining pitfall occurs when businesses simply assume their offer is superior and fail to diligently gauge their audience’s response.

Even if you know that your product or service can truly help others live better lives, you must make a strong effort to keep a pulse on the public. That massively beneficial offer of yours could simply be suffering from the wrong marketing angle. Incorporating focus groups in your business plan will help you understand exactly how the public views your offer, and how you can best present it to them in the future as well as how you can improve specific parts about your business or service.

Improve Focus for Targeted Marketing

Focus groups support the most efficient and targeted use of your budget and marketing energy. Polling a focus group could tell you that you’re wasting a huge amount of money on marketing and advertising that simply isn’t reaching the right people. Getting direct feedback will let you know what marketing tools are making their way into people’s lives, what direct response mailers get opened at home and which got tossed without hesitation, which emails are clicked on, whether they pay attention to radio or TV ads regarding your industry, and much more. It’s similar to an army campaign: War never goes as planned, and sometimes you’ll need to reposition your troops to win the battle.

Plus, the valuable feedback you’ll garner will help you best tailor your offer to the public. Perhaps the public actually loves the idea of your product or service but thinks your marketing message is too spammy, sketchy, cheap, snooty, or detached. There may be six reasons why people love your product, but a dozen more reasons why they simply don’t like the way you’re talking about it. Get focused feedback to correct these issues.

Achieve Focus on what to Fix

Focus groups will also clue you in on specific, potential problems, helping you foresee them instead of jumping right into a budget-draining catastrophe. These groups also help you maintain a positive public image instead of cleaning up a massive, public faux-pas. The effort you put into focus groups now will be much less than the effort required to put out major fires caused by not keeping a pulse on the public.

How to Select Your Focus Group

Here’s where some simple statistics come into play. You must be sure to use a random selection for your focus group for the most accurate results. Select from a very specific pool of participants and your feedback will be highly biased, which could easily steer your business in the wrong direction.

You must also choose your demographic wisely to get accurate results. For example, if you’re selling high-end TV’s and you do a focus group in the projects, you’re probably not going to get the feedback you were looking for. Yes, that was an extreme example, but it’s definitely worth noting since many businesses test the wrong market or target audience.

While your friends and family may provide a good place to start for some immediate feedback, this will surely produce some naturally biased results. Instead, you can use online polls, customer and prospect newsletters that feature a quick questionnaire, or a link to a quick and simple form on your website. You can even publish a notice in your local newspaper, promising free breakfast for an hour of their time. (Offering something for free always increases participation.)

And what do you do after you’ve conducted a successful round of focus groups? Magnify that focus and test again a few months later. Even Donald Trump is still finding ways that he can improve his business—test, test and test again to continuously increase your sales.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Online Marketing, Public Relations, marketing | No Comments »

Boost Your Net Worth with Networking

Monday, July 5th, 2010
Frosty Morning Web
Creative Commons License photo credit: foxypar4

Whether you are a brick-and-mortar store or work solely on the wonderful world wide web, if you’re not networking then your business is slowly dying. Networking helps keep the blood flowing through your business. Here are a few networking tips for on and off the Internet to generate leads and improve sales—put them into action today!

Who do you already know?

Whether it’s personal or business, those you already know always form your best resource. Talk to your friends, family members, and business associates about your business. Those are the people who truly want you to do well and will surely have the most open ears.

Even if they’re not interested in your offer, if you deliver your pitch well enough there’s a good chance that they may know someone else who could benefit from your offer. And don’t hesitate to straight up ask them if they would tell others about your business. The simple act of asking them for a referral dramatically improves your chances of successful word-of-mouth marketing.

It’s understandable that many people don’t like to talk about their business with friends and family because they feel as though they’re pressuring them, guilting them into the purchase. But you can easily prevent any discomfort by delivering your business message in the softest of selling voices. Maintain a genuine excitement (excitement is contagious) and discuss specific examples of how your product or service has helped others. People want to hear about how they can be helped with their needs, not the features of your business.

This is also an excellent opportunity to use testimonials from your customers. Bring a printout along that features both written testimonials and pictures of you and your customers. You can top this by bringing your laptop and showing them video testimonials.

Offer Something for Free to Get Everything You Need

One of the best ways to initiate a new networking contact is to offer them something for free. Doors will swing freely open if you initiate contact by offering something instead of asking for something. You automatically build a degree of trust, introduce them to your business, and get them to try your product or service; all at the same time.

The presentation is key here. First, you must fully believe yourself when you say that you want to help others. Come at this from the angle that you don’t even care if you get the sale—just as long as you made the effort to help someone today. This will help you avoid too hard of a sell in your networking efforts. What will probably take you less than 30 minutes could earn you 30 years of loyal clientele.

Two Ways to Play

You can take a super soft, yet highly effective sales approach: Help them for free and then simply walk away—they’ll come to you.

You can take a slightly harder, still highly effective sales approach and offer something for free in the same message.

Here are a few examples you can incorporate in your business today:

Consulting:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, I think your approach is a bit scattered. I’m sorry to be a bit brutal there, but I’ve seen all too many businesses fail because they lacked focus in their approach. So I’d like to offer you a free 30-minute consultation to see how we can help you make more money.

Copywriting:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, I’d like you to take a look at some of the errors in your copy that I highlighted in the attached document. I also added some copy that will help you convert more readers to active buyers.

Web Design:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, when I tried to click through to your virtual shopping cart your site navigation got a bit confusing. You could be losing dozens of customers every day just because they’re getting lost within your site.

You can significantly improve your sales by improving your website’s navigation and ease-of-use. I can also give you a free crash course on how Web analytics can help you catch these leaks and plug them before you lose any more potential customers.

Online Social Networking

And one of the other most popular ways to network today is done online, using highly effective tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Profiles, Twitter, and Google Buzz. First, these social networking tools will help you establish more touch points for the search engines. Second, you can use social media tools to remind people of what you can do for them. Third, by getting your profile, name or business on someone else’s social media account or linked to their profile, you automatically multiply your exposure. Think of it this way: Connect with just one person on LinkedIn and you will then be connected with all the people they are connected to. Potentially 100 more contacts through just one extra networking contact—now that’s using the power of leverage.

Fortune Is in the Follow-up

Every lead you generate for your business should be considered a gold nugget. Generating leads can easily be considered one of the most challenging tasks for any business. But the potential return far out ways the difficulty of the challenge. Follow up with every single person that has ever had anything to do with your business.

Maintain Meaning with Your Marketing Messages

And with all of the networking you do, it should all lead back to your website or main point of sale. Sad but true, many people go through all the motions of networking without having a purposeful message behind it all. Always make it very clear as to what your prospect’s next action step should be.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Content Crooner, Email Marketing, Online Marketing, Public Relations, Social Marketing, marketing | No Comments »

Follow-up is a Key to Financial Freedom

Friday, July 2nd, 2010
A Matter of the Heart
Creative Commons License photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Maintain consistent follow-up with your prospects and never let another lead slip through the cracks again. The most challenging part of marketing is to generate the initial lead. You’ll improve efficiency and sales while getting the most out of your budget when you use the power of follow-up to capitalize on your leads. Fortune is in the follow-up!

Before we dig in, it’s worth clarifying that follow-up comes in countless forms. Any time you make some type of connection with a prospect, current client or past client after initial contact it can be considered following up. Common methods of following up include: call, e-mail, newsletter, postcard, and text message.

Last Bird Gets the Worm

Follow-up repositions you and helps you return to the front of your prospects’ minds instead of the dark, cobwebbed recesses. It’s actually a fairly simple theory. That which the mind learns or processes last is also the same thing that it recalls the quickest. If you’re dead even with another company in terms of price and quality of product or service, then your business will almost always be chosen over your competitor simply because you were the most recent contact.

Plus, you know how crazy things can get with your business—sometimes people just lose your contact information and will appreciate you getting in touch with them.

Natural Procrastination Breaks Businesses

Unless you’re Paris Hilton, people are natural procrastinators when it comes to buying products or services. It’s your responsibility to move them from procrastinator to proactive consumer. Often enough, what many of those fence-sitters, looky-loos, tire kickers and generally unassertive people need is a simple follow-up.

If someone doesn’t buy your product right away, then the chances of them motivating themselves to once again visit your offer rapidly decline. But if you get your offer right back in front of them then you will significantly increase the probability of getting their business. Following up creates a spark that reignites their interest and motivation.

Another way to look at it is this: Aside from Vegas, most people don’t get married the same day they meet. Especially for higher end products and services, you will need to court your prospects.

Friends Follow Up with Each Other

For any prospects who might be a tad reluctant to move forward due to doubt or skepticism, a friendly follow-up could be all that they needed to feel confident in buying your product or service. It shows you care about their needs. People buy from those they believe genuinely care about them over others any day of the week.

Follow-up also serves as an additional touch point. You promote customer loyalty with each and every communication and touch point you establish.

Plug Money Losing Leaks

You can also take this opportunity to be very candid with your prospect and ask them what prevented them from making the purchase. You’d be surprised at how much helpful feedback you can get just by doing this, and catch a lot of sales-killing errors you might be making. Few things fuel a person’s desire to write more than anger or frustration. Let them vent and you’ll pick up some key areas where you can improve your sales process, and keep your prospects moving smoothly through your sales funnel.

As part of this, you must pay special attention to your sales funnel at all times. Study your website analytics to find potential points where your prospects might be slipping through the cracks. For example, if a website visitor clicked all the way through to your shopping cart page and then just disappeared, testing a different website layout may be the answer. By incorporating follow-up tools and actively collecting feedback, and pairing that with your Web analytics, you will be able to plug all the leaks and maintain the fastest boat in the fleet.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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