Marketing

Viral Marketing 101

There are many advantages to viral marketing. Viral marketing can be effective for either web-based and everyday "store-front" businesses. If done correctly, viral marketing campaigns can absolutely bring thousands, even millions of new people to your website and business. It will bring additional traffic to your site and build up your link popularity. Viral marketing campaigns are inexpensive and work well. The idea is to promote your website mainly through word-of-mouth. Every website can use these marketing strategies. It just take a few steps.

First of all, remember that any pushy marketing promo is often irritating and might detract from your intent. The key is offering original and practical content that audiences will eagerly share with those they know. It is a characteristic of people to want to communicate - for example by sharing a fabulous eatery or novel, it becomes an instant hit.

Set up an uncomplicated "tell a friend" section. Be sure it is easily accessible and insert it on every page, but DO NOT send emails to the friends after the first contact - if they later want to, you can add them to your mailing list; this way they will see you are not a spammer - and above all don't be pushy and don't be annoying.

Compose an online book, provide wallpaper or backgrounds for PCs, along with clever tools, such as online weather forecasts. Make certain that you brand these with links reminding people of your web site.

Put a clever brand name or logo on your site or product. This should be listed repeatedly on your site and on every item you sell.

For those whose website content changes or is updated frequently, be sure to implement RSS. Superior RSS feeds are registered and shown by a variety of sites online.

The campaign must target emotions and elicit the need for action. Be determined, and you have to be dogged with your persistence, but do not cross the line into being pushy.

Guerrilla Marketing Basics

There is not a pre-determined set of rules to follow when doing guerrilla marketing for your website. The trick is to be creative. It doesn't use expensive traditional methods such as ads on TV or the radio. The trick is to use cheap imaginative methods to deliver the message. Small businesses have been utilizing these techniques for years by using flyers, pens, t-shirts, and bumper stickers.

Guerrilla Marketing campaigns also use techniques that are more out of the ordinary, such as contests, PR stunts, and whatever type of innovative marketing strategy you can imagine. Podcasts are growing in their popularity. Be original with your ideas.

To begin your work as a guerrilla marketer, you first need to exercise your creativity. Find different methods to get the message about your merchandise or service to reach possible clients.

Examine what you sell from the perspective of the customer. Who is the target consumer for this item? How do their minds work? For example, if teens are your target demographic, you will try to steer away from boring campaigns and aim for something dynamic. However a trendy and cutting edge campaign is not liable to draw the elderly or conservative business types. For a demographic that is based on gender rather than age, naturally you should customize your campaign to appeal to either men or women.

Integrity and work ethic in business are required regardless of the kind of marketing methods that are employed (with guerrilla marketing, employ multiple campaigns; don't limit yourself to just a couple)

Regardless of what you are told; just as with every successful company, if you spread your message but you don't have a superior item to sell, your time and work will be misspent. Or worse. The ideal marketing technique is word of mouth; however, it is also the most damaging for those who perform poor work. A major tax firm where I used to work told the associates something to the effect that customers who are happy with the service you provide might let a few people know about you. However, if they are displeased, they'll tell everybody they meet. Food for thought.

Promotional Gifts-Plan to Succeed

It has been established beyond doubt that the distribution of promotional gifts is one of the ideal ways to reinforce your brand with your customers. These types of products which have good utility and durability have time and again proved to be great brand ambassadors. While there is no guarantee that all gifts that you distribute will last the distance, with some thought, effort and investment of time, you can reduce the chances of any gift malfunctioning and giving your brand a bad name.

The first step is to determine a budget which would be adequate and enough to take care of your purchases. It is futile to hope and aspire for some top end quality items without making the necessary budgetary allocation for them. There is utmost need to do some research and find out the comparative costs of the items you have in mind before deciding on something that you can afford.

Having set the budget, you now have to look at the types of products that are available within that budget. Their selection should also be such that they are fancied by your customers and hence knowing customer taste is of paramount importance. Your sales person should be able to give you a good idea about the individual preferences of your customers and that information will help you considerably in narrowing down the gifts you ultimately want to purchase.

The next part is the branding and this will go a long way in creating that impact and recognition that you aspire for. It is best to adopt simple printing processes to make sure that your logo is clearly visible and not obscured by lot of colour or graphics. Another point to note is the size and shape of the fonts that you use for the logo. Your logo must be visible even from a distance and you should not make that difficult with the use of complicated and convoluted fonts.

The last and probably the most important aspect is the timing of your gifts. While modern machines and printing technology can deliver fast and at short notice, it is always advisable to plan things such that you are not rushing your vendors. You need to allow time for proof reading of messages and the correct display of the logo, as these cannot be compromised at any cost and any last minute rush will only serve to spoil things.

You can see from the above that there are steps that need to be followed for the success of any brand promotion and as long as you can adhere to this discipline, you are sure to create the right impact and the use of promotional gifts will enhance your brand recognition.

Writing an Effective Marketing Message

Writing an Effective Marketing Message

When you market yourself well in your booklet printing, flyers printing, and even in your print custom booklets for example, first, you have to consider putting your best foot forward. Always. Write a copy, whether it is in your booklet printing or sales letter that shows your knowledge and expertise in your field. Make them want to get to know you so you can explain to them further how you can be relied on to produce solutions every time. Then consider giving them what they want as opposed to forcing on them what you assume to be the things they need.

Second, do write a tight message. This means getting rid of all the unnecessary words that only clutter rather than emphasize what you want to say to your target audience. Always make sure that you delete the words that will not change your meaning even if you take them out of your copy. The lesser words you have in your marketing copy, the easier it would be for your target clients to understand your print custom booklets for one.

Third, be specific. Do not be too general. If you can give them the solution to their needs and that you are the only who can do so, then show them how. Tell them how you get things done and show them how your attention-to-detail can get them the best customer service in this planet.

Lastly, proofread, proofread, and proofread. Make sure to read your copy and edit it before you get your provider to print custom booklets for example. Nothing makes your target clients to lose attention than having to read marketing copy that is full of grammatical errors and incorrect spellings.

If you want your target clients to read your message and eventually keep it, make sure that you write a very powerful and tight marketing message. When you are prospecting, it is expected that you give your target clients your best so they can be persuaded to give you what you are asking for.

A Savvy Marketing Idea for Businesses

A Savvy Marketing Idea for Businesses

You need to make sure to get as many possible prospects as you can. Hence, you need to be more resourceful when it comes to getting ahead in your industry, in every way possible. The bottom line is to have yourself an effective marketing campaign that can help you make a sale, which in turn earns money in spite of the stiff competition.

As a business owner and marketer, you know for a fact that practically everybody who is in the commercial industry is a competition. Add to that whatever you are offering, almost everybody have the same offer. If you are using custom catalogs for your collaterals, no doubt that your competition have used it one way or another. What you can do, your competition can also do it. So how will your target clients choose? More than the features, your clients and prospects will choose based on how you present your products and services.

That is right. Your target clients will choose you if you give them a good package. It is all in the packaging really. It is on how your target clients perceive your offer that would make them try out your product or service. The very essence of good marketing is making it possible for you to present your products and services in a way that would be irresistible to your target audience. Say, you are designing your catalog printing for your collateral. You can only be effective if you can present your custom catalogs in a way that your target clients would perceive that what you offer them is the best there is in the market.

Good packaging then is making your target clients see the benefits of dealing with you. Ensuring your target clients that you are the only one who can provide the solution to their problem is the best way to get them to consider your offer. If you find the very thing that would solve a particular issue or need of your target clients, you are more than likely to attract these people like bees to honey.

One final note: just make sure that you are able to deliver on your offer. Even with the best packaging and message, if you cannot walk the talk, you will be left with not only zero sales, but also your reputation will precede you wherever you go. Word-of-mouth can be your ally when promoting yourself, but it can also be your enemy when you do not deliver what you promised.

The Power Of Your Marketing Words

Whether we like it or not, our words in our marketing strategy, be it brochure printing, print flyers and custom brochures, can make or break our business. The right words can definitely help us to achieve the goals we have set out to do; but the wrong ones can bring us failure that we might not be able to escape from.

Our words are that potent. The words you say in your brochure printing for example can spell success or the end of your business. So it will do you well to understand the power you wield when you use the right words to convey your message.

However, you also need to realize that the success of your words depend on the abundance or lacking of it. This means that you also have to consider what can help you provide grace and skill when you write your words, or the excess of it can really hurt your chances of getting your target audience to take your offer. When done well, your descriptive words in your brochure printing for one can go a long way in helping you influence your target audience to include your products and services in their buying decision list.

Words such as quality, distinct, fresh, the best, your ultimate solution, comfortable – they can help you attract the right customers; customers that have a need for your offer, as well as those that have the capability to pay for it. These are examples of words that can help you set the mood so that they will be convinced that you are the business that can provide them the solution to their needs and wants.

But be careful too, that you do not sound off as a business with too much hype that you turn off every one of your target audience. Remember that customers can see, hear and smell a marketing propaganda from miles away. Hence, they do turn them off even before you can begin to say your full message, and they will definitely throw you out as quickly as possible.

You have to remember that for you to make your words work hard to accomplish your goals; you need to accompany your words in your custom brochures for example, with action. Follow your words with facts to prove your point. When you can do that, your words can be the most effective words in the industry and you can always generate leads for your business.

The bottom line is for you to not only describe your offer in as straight and clear words as you can to entice your target audience; you also have to complement your words with the action to deliver what you have promised. Do not make your words empty and without any value. If you give your promises and deliver on them, you will definitely get your target audience not only to consider your message; but also to have them hand you their hard earned money with no ifs and buts.

Affiliate Marketing other Income Streams

In this short guide, I am going to tell you a little about my experiences in affiliate marketing. I dont have the big house and sports car to show you, as I am not there yet. However I do make a comfortable living working the hours that suit me from my own home. It took a lot of time and dedication, but it was worth it.

After my first 10 days in clickbank's system, I had made $480. How was this achieved? You can see nothing happened for the first few days until I started marketing it. I made those results by selling similar products to which I already to the same target market I had captured (via an opt-in mailing list). You need to know your target market and their spending patterns, along with where they are in the product cycle. You need to go to your wealthy affiliate account to help you select the top product, as they have a better clickbank tool than clickbank itself. While the figures are nowhere near as impressive as many I have seen, they are my first week, and with a limited target audience! Getting the picture?

A key part of this is building newsletter lists from your existing sites. These are all opt-in and I highly recommend using aweber to manage all aspects of managing your newsletter, from creating the sign up form script, to providing follow up emails and email broadcast functionality. This list is really your key revenue creator. If you can get people into the site via SEO, you can create repeat sales opportunities. If I send a newsletter to 100 people and make $200, what would a list of 50,000 get me? $100,000! Does it seem fantastical? I assure you it is not.

With the wealthy affiliate site, free hosting is now available for 3 domains, along with a package called 'siterubix' which is a site building tool. It doesn't get much easier than this. Everything you need to know about what to build, the tools to build, and to host in one location.

Here is a twist on generating content that you probably don't know. You can have the site content automatically update itself, using self-growing-websites technology. This pulls relevant content from article directories and RSS Feeds, along with your own content, and gradually adds it to your site in an organic way, so it looks to the search engines that it was a human, not a script that created this.

Along with your site, build a useful service. Give people a good reason to visit. You can then have subscribers, paying you monthly. Maybe you can coach people at something, or create an alerts service. Focus on what you are good at and enjoy doing. then hire a programmer and make a good tool for it - a centerpiece for your site.

How Do You Niche Market Effectively?

This is where niche marketing can help you market effectively. Niche marketing allows you to get the most out for your hard-earned cash and lets you to achieve the results you expect for your business.
So what is niche marketing really? Niche marketing is not about appealing to everyone, although that would definitely be great to your profits. It is not also providing your target clients with the same things that your competitors are offering. In addition, it is definitely not about doing the same things to help you keep up with the Kardashians. It is exactly the opposite of all these. Niche marketing is about you being distinct and standing out from the rest. It is about pulling all your time, energy and resources together, and then putting all of them in one big pot – your own brand of business offering. In a nutshell, niche marketing is offering your target market with the best of what you have.
Be it catalog printing, custom flyers, color hang tags or cheap catalogs, the essence of niche marketing in your marketing campaign is to set you apart from the rest of your competition. It is conveying a message in your catalog printing for example that you offer the best there is in the market so that whenever your target clients have a need for your type of service, they turn to you without even batting an eyelash.
The next question now is how do you niche market effectively? Remember the three W’s – Who, Where and How.
Who –
Who are the group of customers that can bring you definite results when you market your products and services? Whom would you want to work with? Who would best benefit from your products and services? Who goes back to your company every time for repeat business? Who provides you with referrals and work as your word-of-mouth advertisers? The first thing you need to know is ‘who’ are the people that you can rely on to need your type of service or product, and who actually have the capability to purchase from you.
Where –Where do you look for the groups that you have identified? Where can you place them in terms of their common demographics? Where do you find your past clients and referrals? What about your loyal fans?
How –
How will you reach your target market? How will you spend your time, energy and resources to get these groups aware of your business?
Remember – to effectively market your business you have to find your niche. Do not be tempted to try to have everybody interested in what you have to offer because it just does not work that way. Instead, concentrate on who really are in needs your brand of service and you will more than likely catch as many customers to your business.

Create A Marketing Plan-Elements For Success

Intelligent marketing is marketing that is first and foremost focused on a core idea, a “brand.” All your marketing must be an extension of this idea. It isn’t enough to have a better idea—you must have a focused strategy!

A complete marketing plan includes the following sections:
• Marketing Plan: Identifies the market and your strategy
• Creative Plan: Similar to the marketing plan, but is limited to the content of your marketing materials
• Media Plan: Sets forth and details your selected media weapons and media calendar

Your marketing plan identifies the market and your overall position strategy. Its length is up to you and depends on your organizational culture and the audience who will read and use your plan.

You should start with a one-paragraph statement. A simple marketing plan may include the following points:
• Strategy purpose
• Techniques to achieve this purpose
• Target market
• ?Marketing weapons
• Positioning - What are your competitors up to?
• Business identity
• Budget - Express these figures as a percentage of projected gross revenues.

Develop a Creative Plan. Marketing is not creative unless it sells.
Your creativity, however, should never detract from your product message. A creative strategy is similar to a marketing plan, but limited to marketing materials and directed solely at that content.
You can write this plan very simply:
• Creative message purpose
• Techniques to achieve that purpose
• Advertising mood, tone or personality

Plan and select the Media and weapon that best suit your product or service. Then you’re ready to schedule your marketing calendar. This will tell you whether you can use your selected marketing methods properly. It forces you to come to terms with the costs and realities of the media you selected.

In some cases, you may need a more in-depth marketing plan.
If so, you can structure your plan in the following format:

• Executive Summary: Highlights the main points of your plan.
• Challenges: Includes a brief description of the product that will be marketed and associated goals.
• Situation Analysis: Examines your company’s goals, culture, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Market Segmentation: Describes the segments of the market you are targeting and presents a detailed analysis of each objective.
• Selected Marketing Strategy: Discusses the decisions you have made regarding product, price, place, and promotion.
• Short and Long-Term Projections: Forecasts production, ROI, and risks, detailing appropriate strategies to manage negative outcomes.
• Conclusion: Ends with a wrap-up summarizing the main points and calls for buy-in from your reader.
• Appendix: Includes related documentation and a detailed bibliography.

If you include an excellent, well-thought out marketing plan in your business plan, you will provide a roadmap for yourself, and let any investors or lenders know that you have taken the task of marketing your business seriously.