9 Wild Ways to Promote Your Business

9 Wild Ways to Promote Your Business
© David Bell

A business, more often than not, has a very limited budget when it comes to advertising. The business owner needs to make the public aware of his or her product or service at the lowest possible cost.

There are many ways. A pet breeder in a large city was struggling for several years-until he came up with a novel idea. He started giving away customized “birth certificates” for the pets he sold. Almost immediately, his sales rose more than 10 percent.

The owner of a new home cleaning service was trying to attract clients. She couldn’t afford much advertising, so she began offering “home cleaning seminars” to civic groups. After two months of seminars, she was swamped with inquiries and clients.

Promotion often makes the crucial difference between business success and failure. Customers or clients must know about a business or product line before they’ll buy and they must have a reason to buy.

GIVEAWAYS. People love to receive “free” items, especially items they can use to gain knowledge or improve their lives. You can base an entire promotional campaign on this desire. If you’re running a furniture repair business, for instance, you could give away a furniture repair brochure, free furniture planning guides, or color swatches. Once you begin giving away authoritative information, customers will begin to perceive you as an expert in your field.

NEWS CREATION.Want to get your business in the local newspaper or TV? It may be easier than you think. If you don’t have any news to report to the local media, create some. One man hired a team of beautiful girls outfitted in skimpy bikinis and had them waving signs in a busy part of town announcing his new Web site address. Did it get attention by the media? You bet it did!

EVENTS.You may be able to attract the attention of the media or a crowd by staging a special promotional event. If you run a fitness classes, for instance, you could stage a celebrity instructor day. If you’re promoting a new real estate business, you can offer tours of a model home in the area. If you’re selling children’s products and it’s springtime, you can offer lunch with the Easter bunny. Get the idea?

CHARITY TIE-INS. Are you launching a new product? Trying to increase visibility among a particular segment of your community? Offer your product to one or more local charities as a raffle prize or for use at a fund raising event. You’ll receive lots of exposure among people who buy tickets or attend the event.

CONTESTS. Offer a desirable or unique item-or even several items-as contest prizes. First, find a contest theme that tiers into your business. A caterer might offer a quiche-eating contest. A photographer might offer a young model contest. A mail order craft firm might offer an “Early American” handicrafts contest. Invite contest submissions and offer prizes to the winners. Do contests attract attention? You bet. All it takes is a few signs, a small press announcement or two, and the word will spread throughout the community grapevine.

COMMUNITY SERVICE.Nothing brings you to the attention of the people faster-or more favorably-than community service. Ask yourself how your enterprise can be a “good neighbor” to your community. If you’re running a lawn care and gardening service, perhaps you can offer one season’s services at no charge to a needy charitable organization or nursing home in your area. Hundreds of people will hear about your work in the process. Volunteer for various community causes. If appropriate, you can step in during community emergency, offering products and services to help an organization or individuals in need.

COUPONS. Americans are very coupon-conscious. Test the market: at what level will coupons increase the volume of various product or service lines? When you get some tentative answers, start distributing coupons that offer a discount on your services. Distribute them to area newspapers, on store counters, in door-to-door- mail packets (which can often be quite inexpensive), at the public library, at laundromats, at any location where people congregate.

BADGES AND NOVELTIES.You can easily and inexpensively produce badges, bumper stickers, book covers, and other novelty items for distribution in your area. You can imprint your business name and the first names of the customers on many of these products at little cost and distribute them for free. Or you can tie your novelty program into a contest: once a month, you can offer a prize to any individual whose car happens to carry one of your bumper stickers or badges with peel-off coupons, redeemable at your place of business.

CELEBRITY VISITS.With a bit of persistence, you may be able to arrange to have a local media celebrity, public official, or entertainment personally-even a fictitious cartoon character or clown-visit your service. The celebrity can sign autographs, read stories to children, perform cooking demonstrations, or perform any one of a hundred other traffic-building activities.

By all means, advertise in the media if you can. But don’t neglect your greatest promotional asset-your mind. Ponder the products, services and events you can offer the community and devise a creative promotional strategy around them. You’ll have to invest a bit of time and energy in the project, but the payoff will be worth it. You’ll save hundreds-or even thousands-of advertising dollars and better yet, you’ll travel a well-worn shortcut to profit.

I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

About The Author

David Bell
http://www.wspromotion.com/
Advertising research and development center

Add commentNovember 22nd, 2005

What Your Car Audio Can Teach You About Marketing

What Your Car Audio Can Teach You About Marketing
© Mike Street

Stand next to any road, and every so often a young person will go by with the latest rap CD blaring. If it happens to be a cold day, he (it is always a he) may have the windows up. Then, all you will hear is the thud of the overworked bass speaker in the back. After he turns 30, the young driver probably won’t even be able to hear that, if he continues this unwarranted assault on his ears.

That big bass bin can’t handle the vocal sounds, and the front speakers would melt if they had all those thumps going through them. So the car audio separates out the various frequencies using filters, sending only the bass to the big bins in the back, and only the higher and more delicate sounds to the little speakers at the front. Both, and especially the bass, are then amplified so they are audible in the next county.

Marketers have borrowed the same terminology as a way of looking at how their business treats its customers. Marketing graduates will often talk about ‘Filters’ and ‘Amplifiers’ almost as if they actually understood them.

Filters

A filter in marketing speak is anything which prevents your customer from doing business with you. Some filters are ‘natural’ – if you provide personal training services for example all of your clients will need to be within easy reach. This natural, geographic filter means that you are unlikely to sell to someone in another country.

Others are contructed. Mercedes Benz dealers the world over have large, bright, glassy establishments. They tend to intimidate anyone who can’t afford the prices, acting as a natural, probably intentional, filter.

Filters can also be fairly subtle. If you send out a mailing by post, research shows many are discarded without even being opened. If you have a leaflet delivered, the ‘open an envelope’ filter is removed, so people can’t help reading it, even while they are trying to throw it away.

Amplifiers

An amplifier is anything which increases the ease of doing business with you. Any business which decides to take payment via credit cards, for example, will find the number of people who can do business with them is amplified compared to when only cash was acceptable.

Marketers probably won’t admit it, but filters and amplifiers are opposites of the same thing. Removing a filter has an amplifying effect, and vice versa.

I insured my car the other day over the Internet. The first few sites I tried only supported Internet Explorer. That, at least to me, is a filter and I went somewhere a little more Firefox friendly!

Many corporate web sites insist you provide a lot of information before they will send you that ‘free’ White Paper you are interested in. No doubt that information is required by someone in the business, but it filters out a lot of otherwise interested people who simply won’t take the time to fill out the form and inevitably receive all the sales calls afterwards. After all, they can’t be sure they’re even a prospect before they read the White Paper!

Apple has potentially filtered out a large portion of their target market for iTunes by only accepting credit cards. Most under 18s won’t have a credit card, and they are the major buyers of chart music. The ‘Music Store Card’ is an attempt to turn this filter into an amplifier.

What Filters and Amplifiers Mean to Your Marketing

Importantly, this way of thinking allows you to look at all of your marketing, online and offline, in a critical way to improve your response rates and your sales. Every time you look at any aspect of your business, ask yourself if this filters out customers you want to serve, or if you can amplify the target market by improving the process.

Perhaps you could send postcards or use leaflets instead of putting brochures in envelopes. Don’t insist on a customer’s life history before you will allow them to buy from you. Make your web site informative and easy to use, rather than slick, ‘cutting edge’ and hard to understand. If you are providing services, make it clear on your site where you are and the distance you will travel. Use local town and county names as keywords to filter out people who will never be able to buy from you, but to amplify the chance of attracting locals.

If you do this consistently, over time you will get your filters and amplifiers to attract profitable customers to you, not send them away to your competitors, never to return.

About The Author

After more than 30 years in the IT industry, Mike Street is a director of FastComm (http://www.fastcomm.net) which specialises in information and tools to help increase sales, including Airlook Mobile Email software, the Eye Catcher Video Phone and the online Contact Management system, FastCRM. He is also webmaster of his wife’s Health and Beauty site Zenergie ( http://www.zenergie.co.uk ). mike.street@fastcomm.co.uk

Add commentNovember 22nd, 2005

Internet Marketing Guide

Internet Marketing Guide
© Scott F. Geld

One of the tools that smart Internet marketers use to attract new business is a newsletter. A newsletter keeps clients and potential clients informed about products, events and services that relate to your business, and it always keeps your name front and center. It shows readers that you are a good source if information that they can count on.

If you think about it, you also probably subscribe to a number of newsletters on various subjects that interest you. When you are in the market for a product or service that relates to your interests, where do you think of going to get information? Yes, that’s right, you think about the newsletter that gives you all that great information.

Newsletter Formats

News letters can be produced in a number of different formats. Plain text emails, HTML emails and PDF formats are the most economical, and then there is always the hard copy print version. Plain text Email is the most economical and it’s easy to format. The size of the file means it’s manageable for readers to open. However, you are limited to using text only and you can’t add graphics or do any thing fancy.

HTML Email can only be viewed online, it’s economical to produce and you can get a little fancier with it. The reader can choose to read the either the plain text version or the HTML version. If your reader chooses to view the email as plain text, then your creativity won’t shine through.

HTML Web Pages allow for lots of graphics and text, and the design possibilities endless. As with HTML Email, the reader has to view the newsletter online. Another advantage is that an HTML Web Page doesn’t have to be sent as an Email attachment. Cost is low too; really it’s just your time to develop the newsletter.

PDF format allows for endless design possibilities with loads of space for content and graphics. You can get as fancy as you like. However, in order to produce a PDF, you need the full version of Adobe’s Acrobat software. Anyone who downloads Adobe’s Reader (it’s free from Adobe’s Web site) can view the newsletter. Readers can save the file on their computer and read it when they want to.

Printed newsletters allow for complete design and content creativity. However, print newsletters are costly to print and mail.

The format you settle on to produce your newsletter in may require you to do some experimenting. You may want to try several different formats and get feedback from your audience as to what suits their needs best. You’ll also need to factor in the time and costs involved.

If you want to produce a professional looking newsletter, try using a software application to create newsletters, for example, Microsoft Publisher. You can then convert it to a PDF. If you have the full version of Adobe’s Acrobat, you can choose to distill it or print to file. Distilling leaves the hyperlinks in place while printing it to file requires that you go into the newsletter in Adobe and re-insert the hyperlinks.

If you do not have the full version of Adobe to accomplish this, you can choose to use one of the many PDF printer drivers that are on the market today, such as EasyPDF, PDFZone, and Win2PDF.

About The Author

Scott F. Geld is the Director of Marketing for MarketingBlaster.com, a company providing targeted traffic and direct links starting at just $5. For more info: http://www.MarketingBlaster.com

Add commentNovember 22nd, 2005