For many of service-based businesses out there, it's not that you don't know you should be marketing or don't want to get better at it. It's just that you don't.
For some, it might be that you don't really know what to do, so you're doing nothing. And that includes not taking any action to learn more and find out what to do. If you were a car, you'd be stuck in PARK.
For some, it's not that you don't know what to do, you just don't. Other things always seem to take precedence. You have to call those prospects back that never returned your call from twelve weeks ago. Maybe you have to re-index your collection of business cards. If you were a car, you'd be stuck in NEUTRAL.
Still for others, you're doing as much as you can to market your services, but you're just not getting the results you'd like to have. It gets frustrating, because each of your ideas cost time and money, but you're not seeing the payoff. If you were a car, you'd be stuck in the MUD!
If you want to get GROWING with your service business, then you must get GOING with your marketing. You need to have a plan and a system in place that will...
...get you unstuck,
...make yourself accountable for getting it done, and
...give you something actionable to follow so that you can be as productive as possible with your non-client time.
Above all, you must GET GOING to GET GROWING!
Here are five identifiable and essential steps for you to get going with your marketing.
1. Begin with Laser Focus. If you haven't established clarity and focus about where you are going with your business, then you might as well be driving around in the dark, blindfolded and without headlights.
Just by spending some time to clarify and write down what you are trying to do with your business, your vision for where you want to take the business, and five to ten specific and measurable goals you'd like to accomplish for the coming months and year -- you'll be ahead of most of the service businesses out there.
Spend some additional time to define a very specific target market you'd like to penetrate and what it is that uniquely differentiates you from other alternatives. The focus on a niche allows you to create greater connection to prospects in the target audience than if you market to everyone.
The half day to a day or so you spend thinking through and actually writing these things down will give you more clarity, focus and motivation to keep you moving forward than you can imagine.
2. Position your business for great success. There are a number of key components that once developed can and should exist throughout your marketing.
Start by developing an attention getting message that focuses on your target clients and the challenges you want to help them overcome. Don't try to get too fancy. What you need is a concise, powerful statement that says who you work with and what problems, issues or challenges you want to help them overcome.
Additional key components:
* Articulate specific results and benefits of your services.
* Compile evidences of success including case studies and testimonials.
* Determine what you can offer to lower your prospects risk of doing business with you.
With all these client-focused elements in hand, you'll position your business for success that others simply don't have.
3. Create better marketing materials. If you've completed steps one and two, then you've done most of the groundwork for your marketing materials. Notice how everything is about your clients and prospects, and not about you or your company.
Whether you work on a web site, special report, tip sheet, newsletter, etc., keep the focus on your clients and prospects and what you can do for them. Most of the material out there just goes on and on about whom you are and what you do. That just does not work. People want to know what's in it for them and how you can help them solve their problems.
Also, try to make it clear what action you want your audience to take - call, email, order, etc. Ever read through someone's material and then you have no clue what you should do next? I see it all the time. Your audience will appreciate it if you guide them a bit as to what action they should take.
4. Get known in your marketplace. This is where a majority of service businesses start. They immediately start joining networking groups and trying to spread the word that they're in business. But look at how much work we just did before now.
I'm not suggesting you need to complete all of steps one, two, and three before you start trying to get visibility for yourself, but just think of how well prepared you will be to make an impression and follow-up if you've spent time on each of these previous steps.
Now you can get actively involved in networking, set up one-on-one meetings with networking contacts to deepen relationships, and start looking for places to share your valuable information through speaking and writing opportunities.
You'll create visibility for yourself so people can start to feel like they know you, like you, trust you and want to do business with you.
5. Deploy marketing initiatives and begin a cycle of continuous improvement. Marketing is not a one time event. There is no end destination where you're finished, sit back and let the marketing start working for you.
You must continuously monitor what's working and what's not working. Test your messages, offers, target lists, etc. Think about what it could mean to your business if you could increase the effectiveness of one of your marketing tools by 2, 5, 10, or 20 times the response. That's the power of testing.
Consider scheduling regular time and begin working through these essential steps as best you can. I guarantee you won't be stuck in park, stuck in neutral, or stuck in the mud for long. Remember, you must get going to get growing and I just gave you a five step plan to do it.
(c) - Kevin Dervin, KPD Marketing.
About the Author:
Kevin Dervin is the owner of KPD Marketing and creator of the ABCD Growth System. If you find this article useful, you'd probably enjoy Kevin's FREE monthly eZine called ABCD Grow. To subscribe, just go to http://www.ABCDgrowth.com and follow one of the links to the FREE Stuff page!
Source: www.isnare.com
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Your Customers Are Your Best Asset
There is one thing that every Internet entrepreneur must focus upon, and that is their customers. That's the bottom line. The customer is what will determine the overall success of your business. If you treat your customers like royalty, then they'll come back for more. However, treat your customers like dirt, and watch your traffic and your profits dwendle down to nothing. Most all Internet marketers know this, but very few of them really use the strategies and techniques that are necessary to insure that their customers become lifetime customers.
Instead, they focus too much on the profits. That's not going to help any business whether it is online, or offline. If you really want to make your business work for you, then you need to focus on the customer, and what they want and need from you.
One sure fire way to insure that you get traffic to your site is to provide people with freebies. Yes that's right! People love free stuff, and it works! Just offer them a freebie that is really worth something of real value, such as an e-book worth $20.00, or more. If you offer that for free as a bonus for purchasing your paid product, then what you've effectively done is to increase the overall value of the paid product. Your customers will love you for it because they got something else other than the paid product.
You see, your customers are in fact, the backbone of your business. They are what will make your business successful, or not successful, depending upon how you go about treating them. Customer relations in your business is extremely crutial. You must be willing to not only sell to them, but you must also be able to communicate with them about your products and services that you offer. Communications is vital to any business structure, and without it, your business would not be able to survive.
One of the best ways to not only keep customers, but to also attract them is in how you treat them to begin with. If you start treating your customers with the utmost respect, and deal with them on a professional level that doesn't involve greed, then you have the chance of keeping that customer for life, and thus being able to gain new ones as well. Here's how this would work for you. Let's suppose that you have a customer who is thrilled about a product that they've just purchased from your site, and yo have also given them a free bonus gift worth about $50.00. Now that same customer will start talking about you, and your products, as well as about the fantastic free bonus gift that they've recieved from you.
The other person that the customer was talking to starts to think about what they may recieve from the product, and how they can use that product in their life, or business. Soon the individual tells the customer that purchased the product, "Hey what's the web address of that product?" At that point, the customer has become an instant spokesperson for you and your business, thus providing you with free advertisement, and publicity through word of mouth advertising.
The more that you provide to your customers, the more customers and profits you'll have in your business. Now let's look at another important factor in your business that has to deal with the customers.
If you provide quality technical support on your products through friendly, courteous staff, then your customers will rave about that too. You see, a company that has really great technical support, and answers the questions that you ask with enthusiasm, then you have a winning technical support team that provides your business with quality services to its customers.
One other thing that you must always do, is to be totally honest in everything that you do in your business. Never appear shady, or make shady deals, or anything of the nature. Always be up front with your customers and always treat them like royalty. Make sure that you keep in contact with them through e-mail, and let them know about special offers and insentives that you may have. Let them know that you really care about them and their needs. Make your customers the reason why you are in business in the first place. Don't focus on the money. That's a huge mistake. Focus instead; on the customers and what you can do for them, and how you can make them happy. If you do this, then you'll have a very successful business on the Internet.
Speaking of contacting the customers, you may want to add a form on your site that collects their name and their e-mail address. The form should be very simple, and not ask for personal information, unless it is necessary to ask for that bit of information on the form. this is known as permission based e-mail, and it works only if you ask for the name and the e-mail address of your customers.
Never ever use e-mail address harvesting software, or scripts on your site that captures the site visitor's e-mail addresses to build your list. This is extremely unprofessional. You should also never purchase e-mail lists either, especially when those lists aren't targeted lists to begin with.
The whole purpose of collecting the name and the e-mail address of your site visitors is to help to build your own highly targeted list that is unique to your business. Once you have those names and e-mail addresses, then you have permission to contact them because they have opted in to submitting their name and their e-mail address to you . This is what will help to build customer loyalty, and trust in you as a business owner.
Another thing is the site itself. The site must be easy to navigate and easy to understand. There is no need for all that complex technical stuff that most other sites have. All that your site needs is to be simple, and to the point. Links should be text based, and if you have any graphics, then they should be labled for accessibility issues. Don't use image map links, or graphical links, unless they are labled.
Your sales copy, or ad copy should be as professional as possible. Make it worth the reading, and don't sound too pushy, or too good to be true. Mention the facts, and provide the benefits inside the copy so that the site visitors can see just what's in it for them. If you do all of this, then you will keep your customers, and those customers you keep will tell others and so on. Pretty soon you'll have a flood of traffic and profits on your site, and all of this is because you treated your customers with the utmost respect and you have treated them like pure gold.
If you want free Internet marketing information, then please visit the following address here below.
http://www.freewebs.com/dbrwn/goldmine.html
You'll be glad that you did, and if you download the marketing piece on that page, you'll get even more great stuff.
Also please feel free to bookmark the site because new things are being added all of the time.
About The Author
Donald Brown
You may use this article inside your ezine, web site, or any publication that you see fit, so as long as none of the content is changed.
To contact the author, please use the e-mail address here below.
dbrwn@aol.com
You may also visit the web site by clicking on the link provided here below.
http://www.freewebs.com/dbrwn/goldmine.html
Instead, they focus too much on the profits. That's not going to help any business whether it is online, or offline. If you really want to make your business work for you, then you need to focus on the customer, and what they want and need from you.
One sure fire way to insure that you get traffic to your site is to provide people with freebies. Yes that's right! People love free stuff, and it works! Just offer them a freebie that is really worth something of real value, such as an e-book worth $20.00, or more. If you offer that for free as a bonus for purchasing your paid product, then what you've effectively done is to increase the overall value of the paid product. Your customers will love you for it because they got something else other than the paid product.
You see, your customers are in fact, the backbone of your business. They are what will make your business successful, or not successful, depending upon how you go about treating them. Customer relations in your business is extremely crutial. You must be willing to not only sell to them, but you must also be able to communicate with them about your products and services that you offer. Communications is vital to any business structure, and without it, your business would not be able to survive.
One of the best ways to not only keep customers, but to also attract them is in how you treat them to begin with. If you start treating your customers with the utmost respect, and deal with them on a professional level that doesn't involve greed, then you have the chance of keeping that customer for life, and thus being able to gain new ones as well. Here's how this would work for you. Let's suppose that you have a customer who is thrilled about a product that they've just purchased from your site, and yo have also given them a free bonus gift worth about $50.00. Now that same customer will start talking about you, and your products, as well as about the fantastic free bonus gift that they've recieved from you.
The other person that the customer was talking to starts to think about what they may recieve from the product, and how they can use that product in their life, or business. Soon the individual tells the customer that purchased the product, "Hey what's the web address of that product?" At that point, the customer has become an instant spokesperson for you and your business, thus providing you with free advertisement, and publicity through word of mouth advertising.
The more that you provide to your customers, the more customers and profits you'll have in your business. Now let's look at another important factor in your business that has to deal with the customers.
If you provide quality technical support on your products through friendly, courteous staff, then your customers will rave about that too. You see, a company that has really great technical support, and answers the questions that you ask with enthusiasm, then you have a winning technical support team that provides your business with quality services to its customers.
One other thing that you must always do, is to be totally honest in everything that you do in your business. Never appear shady, or make shady deals, or anything of the nature. Always be up front with your customers and always treat them like royalty. Make sure that you keep in contact with them through e-mail, and let them know about special offers and insentives that you may have. Let them know that you really care about them and their needs. Make your customers the reason why you are in business in the first place. Don't focus on the money. That's a huge mistake. Focus instead; on the customers and what you can do for them, and how you can make them happy. If you do this, then you'll have a very successful business on the Internet.
Speaking of contacting the customers, you may want to add a form on your site that collects their name and their e-mail address. The form should be very simple, and not ask for personal information, unless it is necessary to ask for that bit of information on the form. this is known as permission based e-mail, and it works only if you ask for the name and the e-mail address of your customers.
Never ever use e-mail address harvesting software, or scripts on your site that captures the site visitor's e-mail addresses to build your list. This is extremely unprofessional. You should also never purchase e-mail lists either, especially when those lists aren't targeted lists to begin with.
The whole purpose of collecting the name and the e-mail address of your site visitors is to help to build your own highly targeted list that is unique to your business. Once you have those names and e-mail addresses, then you have permission to contact them because they have opted in to submitting their name and their e-mail address to you . This is what will help to build customer loyalty, and trust in you as a business owner.
Another thing is the site itself. The site must be easy to navigate and easy to understand. There is no need for all that complex technical stuff that most other sites have. All that your site needs is to be simple, and to the point. Links should be text based, and if you have any graphics, then they should be labled for accessibility issues. Don't use image map links, or graphical links, unless they are labled.
Your sales copy, or ad copy should be as professional as possible. Make it worth the reading, and don't sound too pushy, or too good to be true. Mention the facts, and provide the benefits inside the copy so that the site visitors can see just what's in it for them. If you do all of this, then you will keep your customers, and those customers you keep will tell others and so on. Pretty soon you'll have a flood of traffic and profits on your site, and all of this is because you treated your customers with the utmost respect and you have treated them like pure gold.
If you want free Internet marketing information, then please visit the following address here below.
http://www.freewebs.com/dbrwn/goldmine.html
You'll be glad that you did, and if you download the marketing piece on that page, you'll get even more great stuff.
Also please feel free to bookmark the site because new things are being added all of the time.
About The Author
Donald Brown
You may use this article inside your ezine, web site, or any publication that you see fit, so as long as none of the content is changed.
To contact the author, please use the e-mail address here below.
dbrwn@aol.com
You may also visit the web site by clicking on the link provided here below.
http://www.freewebs.com/dbrwn/goldmine.html
Your guide to downloads
Oh, we all know that we can download a load of free stuff from the Internet easily. But the best downloads are the ones that DON'T come with 'extra' features like viruses, worms, adwares, spywares, whathaveyounots. It's the truth. When you download something free on the Internet, they sometimes come with some kind of a program that will either give you a headache or give your computer a sickness.
You see, downloads are free on the surface. But whenever you download something from the Internet, they want something in return, such as our personal information which is sometimes harmless.
The better way to download things online is to get a download program to help you download things off the Internet. For instance, http://www.amazesoft.com provides FlashGet which is a program that can help you download large files like mp3, programs, songs, videos off the Internet in an organized way.
And another wonderfully amazing software for downloads is the GetRight download manager which can be downloaded at http://www.getright.com. This software not only speeds up the download process but it also allows you to download different files from different servers easily and organize it in such a way that you will be able to find the files that you have downloaded very easily. You can download multiple files at the same time without slowing down the speed of download. If the download is interrupted or connection is severed, you can continue the download process from where you left off without having to start the download all over again. GetRight also works with many different types of Internet browsers, i.e., Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, AOL, MSN, etc. Whenever you download stuff from the Internet using this software, you can get the download without downloading the spywares and adwares that comes with some of these downloads.
Not to be left behind, SpeedBit also provides the same kind of service that GetRight and FlashGet provides, with the speedbit software that is downloadable at http://www.speedbit.com, you can download files from the Internet at 500% faster than the usual speed, broadband or not. The focus on SpeedBit is to make the technology of Download Accelarator Plis (DAP) more accessible to anyone in the world. There are tens of millions of people who are currently using SpeedBit to download stuff from the Internet. SpeedBit also helps you sift out the adwares and spywares that comes with most downloadable stuff on the Internet.
Of course, the faster your Internet connection, the faster you will be able to download programs and files from the Internet. Hence, it will make a significant difference whether you're using a Broadband internet connection or a dial-up. Dial-ups are definitely much slower than Broadband. If you're using Broadband and downloading real media files, it may take anywhere between 15 minutes to 45 minutes. However, if you're downloading files from the Internet using dial-up connection, you may have to wait around 30 minutes to 180 minutes to download one single media file.
Therefore, if you're using Broadband and combine with one of these downloading softwares, you'll have a far more pleasant experience than those without such privileges.
Dakota Caudilla, journalist, and website builder Dakota Caudilla lives in Texas. He is the owner and co-editor of http://your-free-downloads.com on which you will find a longer, more detailed version of this article.
You see, downloads are free on the surface. But whenever you download something from the Internet, they want something in return, such as our personal information which is sometimes harmless.
The better way to download things online is to get a download program to help you download things off the Internet. For instance, http://www.amazesoft.com provides FlashGet which is a program that can help you download large files like mp3, programs, songs, videos off the Internet in an organized way.
And another wonderfully amazing software for downloads is the GetRight download manager which can be downloaded at http://www.getright.com. This software not only speeds up the download process but it also allows you to download different files from different servers easily and organize it in such a way that you will be able to find the files that you have downloaded very easily. You can download multiple files at the same time without slowing down the speed of download. If the download is interrupted or connection is severed, you can continue the download process from where you left off without having to start the download all over again. GetRight also works with many different types of Internet browsers, i.e., Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, AOL, MSN, etc. Whenever you download stuff from the Internet using this software, you can get the download without downloading the spywares and adwares that comes with some of these downloads.
Not to be left behind, SpeedBit also provides the same kind of service that GetRight and FlashGet provides, with the speedbit software that is downloadable at http://www.speedbit.com, you can download files from the Internet at 500% faster than the usual speed, broadband or not. The focus on SpeedBit is to make the technology of Download Accelarator Plis (DAP) more accessible to anyone in the world. There are tens of millions of people who are currently using SpeedBit to download stuff from the Internet. SpeedBit also helps you sift out the adwares and spywares that comes with most downloadable stuff on the Internet.
Of course, the faster your Internet connection, the faster you will be able to download programs and files from the Internet. Hence, it will make a significant difference whether you're using a Broadband internet connection or a dial-up. Dial-ups are definitely much slower than Broadband. If you're using Broadband and downloading real media files, it may take anywhere between 15 minutes to 45 minutes. However, if you're downloading files from the Internet using dial-up connection, you may have to wait around 30 minutes to 180 minutes to download one single media file.
Therefore, if you're using Broadband and combine with one of these downloading softwares, you'll have a far more pleasant experience than those without such privileges.
Dakota Caudilla, journalist, and website builder Dakota Caudilla lives in Texas. He is the owner and co-editor of http://your-free-downloads.com on which you will find a longer, more detailed version of this article.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
