Tips to Marketing Success

Marketing is serious business. Marketing should be consistent. It should be long term. It requires several continuous exposures to stay top of mind awareness.

Those who are not serious (which means they haven’t taken the proper steps to run a business) will lose a lot of time and money and will ultimately go out of business. Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. Serious marketers use Marketing as a tool to get clients.

But serious marketers know it takes really knowing your target market. More often than not the person doing the marketing thinks they know the potential buyer, when in reality, enough thought has not been placed on exactly who they are trying to sell to.

Some important questions to consider are Why does this person buy? What need or problem are they trying to solve? What is the income level, education of this person, etc,.

Does your potential customer see value in your product offering?

If you are a new business, this requires some research. Whether new or established this should be written down in a profile. If there are smaller segments then write those down as well. Established businesses can pay attention to their customers as they come to make purchases. Who are the really?

Really show you understand your customer.

Really show you care about your customer.

Always offer your customers a Guarantee. It takes the risk out of their buying.

Be nice to your customers. I read something recently “Are you treating your customers like a one time customer or a lifetime client”? This is important. If we realize potentially how much a customer is really worth to us we would treat them so much better.

Know Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) for each product or service.

According to Philip Kotler “Marketing takes a day to learn: Unfortunately, it takes a lifetime to master.”

Before you do anymore Marketing make sure:

you have a written plan with written goals. Ideally a year is ideal if not start with 3 months then 6 months then 9 months until you can build up to a year.

A way to test and measure what works vs. what doesn’t

Realize that 20% of your customers account for 80% of your income

Use more than 1 vehicle to advertise or get the word out to your prospects. Marketing works better when you use multiple channels. So you might use radio and newspaper with Public relations with article marketing and social media (Facebook and Twitter). Or you might use PR, networking, television, newspaper and speaking.

Whatever you do make sure to test and measure and eliminate what doesn’t work. After all who wants to waste their time and money on something that doesn’t work.

Include a call to Action. Tell prospects what they should do next. Most people leave you hanging in an ad. Potential Customers need to know what to do next. I have been to so many websites and clicked on different ads and then I was confused on how to proceed. Make it easy for clients to buy.

ROI (Return on investment) is very important here. How much or how many customers did you get from newspaper advertising or radio advertising? Did I make a profit?

How many were we able to convert to customers?

# of leads

# of sales

Amount of sales

What action do we expect from our marketing? Do we want them to call us or visit our website? Do we want them to register for an event or subscribe to our newsletter, get whitepaper etc,. Whatever we want from the advertisement, we should be focused on that.

Take the time to make sure you have put the proper Marketing Strategy/Marketing Plan in place to increase your business. If you don’t, be prepared to suffer the consequences.