Massachusetts Senator-elect, Scott Brown and family

Photo from www.BrownForUSSenate.com

Yes, this is written with a dirty little secret as its motive.

It applies to all businesses. But it has nothing to do with the actual election!

… almost nothing …

This article has nothing to do with the historically staggering rebuke of President Obama’s policies, the agendas of the Pelosi House and Reid Senate, or the fact that Scott Brown, a Republican, has won Massachusetts Senator Teddy Kennedy’s Democratic seat yesterday. It as nothing to do with politics, either Democratic, Republican, or Independent. It has nothing to do with the fact that the most politically liberal state in the union has now sent a conservative senator to Washington.

OK, almost nothing.

This sea-change in national politics is historic; it will affect us all one way or another.

But none of these is my point!

The fact that, among many other headlines and articles, you chose this one to read should tell you something.

The headline is newsworthy AND enticing with information to be revealed–the dirty little secret.

When you connect your subject lines and headlines–emails, articles, ads–to something current that people are hearing and reading about, you have just struck marketing gold!

I know, you think I’ve been a little sneaky, don’t you?

Headlines, email subject lines, and ads that tie in with current events that your customers are reading and thinking about–that they have feelings about–will drive your readership and response rates through the roof!

Anything you send your customers that addresses those feelings and emotions is going to be a top-of-the-list, must read for them.

The next time you want to really boost your readership and response rate to something in your business, try to connect it in some way with what your prospects and customers are currently hearing and seeing in the headlines and on the TV and radio.

Do your research and make the connection of something in your business or product line with the current headlines your customers and prospects feel emotionally about. Remember to move quickly–timing is everything. The emotion can fade very quickly.
To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2010, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

The Shreveport Convention Center was the location for the ninth annual Ark-La-Tex Boat Sport and RV Show and Fishing Tournament this weekend. The event had a moderate attendance in spite of the very cold weather for this area. The weather certainly did not intimidate the vendors who filled the floor with boats, RVs, and other wheeled and water sport craft.

Two businesses at the show stood out in their marketing distinction. Each is a true “guerrilla marketer.”

1. One of the larger boat displays was staffed by ProGator Boats owner, Leroy Moore, and his nephew, Ted LeMay. Moore produces the double hull fiberglass boats in Benton, Louisiana. ProGator and Gator Bay are his two lines of for the fresh and saltwater fishing  and boating enthusiasts.

Here is a truly brilliant marketing move. Moore’s ProGator and Gator Bay hulls are so rugged he offers a 10 year stump guarantee. If one of his boats strikes a stump and sustains structural damage to the hull, Moore will fix it free of charge. How’s that for a guarantee!

Of course, with the ProGator and Gator Bay hull designs, Moore could have just as easily offered a 25-year guarantee, but he pointed out, “Nobody would believe me.” Yep, that is a hazard of producing too good a product!

2. Another exhibitor with a unique marketing twist was The Lakecaster of Jasper, Texas. The Lakecaster is celebrating twenty years as the #1 promotional magazine for lakes Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend. Their attractive print magazine is loaded with fishing news, tournament results and commentary, and other very interesting articles.

Managing Editor, Patty Lenderman (phone 409-384-3441), pointed out their unique twist in serving their advertisers. Lenderman offers any advertiser in the print edition of the monthly magazine a free online ad on the Lakecaster’s website at no additional charge. If the advertiser has a website, the ad links the viewer directly to that website. Could your business use exposure to the lake communities and visitors of these two popular lakes?

That is certainly what any organization with both a print edition with advertising and a website should be offering, but most haven’t figured it out yet. Email Patty Lenderman at editor@lakecaster.net.

If you have a small business catering to the outdoors recreation crowd, you may want to consider a booth at next year’s event. Here is another annual event that may be a fit for your business exhibit this year or next.

Check out other articles.

To your business success!

© 2010 by Paul Elliott. All rights reserved worldwide.

Many businesses are begun with a few ideas scribbled on a paper napkin. While this is all well and good, the truly successful business must have much more important planning and research to operate well. Furthermore, the plan should be in written form. Writing the plans down forces the owner to put the plan ideas into concrete, understandable form. That will be important as a definable benchmark to which to refer later.

Every business should have a business plan, a topic for another discussion. Within that should a carefully considered and researched marketing plan. Most business plan forms have the marketing plan forms or instructions included, though, surprisingly, some do not do a very effective job of this.

There are several reasons why a written plan is important. It is important to have the ideas written as a foundation to which to refer later. It will continue to grow as your business grows. If you exercise the discipline to rewrite it when you believe a slightly different direction is in order, or that you would like to pursue another product line or territory, you will proceed in a much more orderly and considered manner.

To Organize Your Thinking
Every business has many things going on at the outset and changes are inevitable. A clearly written marketing plan will serve as a reference for the question, “What were we thinking about when we started this business?”

A written marketing plan helps keep the founders on a single, well-defined path. It also helps avoid getting sidetracked onto unprofitable or unplanned, less important activities.

To Demonstrate Your Commitment to Your Business
A written marketing plan shows others that you are truly committed to your business and that you have carefully thought out the important elements of your marketplace.

Potential investors, suppliers, and employees will all feel more comfortable dealing with a business that has a clear analysis and understanding of the market, the customers, the competition, and direction to be pursued by the business in solving the problems successfully.

To Measure Your Progress
When you have a distinct market direction for your business, you can set up goals and a timeline against which to measure the progress of your business. Regularly checking your business marketing plan, you can make any adjustments necessary in the plan or in your projections to keep your business growing in a realistic and profitable manner.

This helps confirm that your idea was a good one. It also helps you understand where you may have missed something that needs to be revised in some manner.

To Guide Your Employees
Too often businesses make marketing decisions and plans without ever consulting or informing the employees. This is an avoidable mistake. An important use of the marketing plan is to be sure all employees know what the business owner is doing and hopes to accomplish. Furthermore, they will better understand how they fit in and how they can make the project more successful. Never forget that your employees have a “frontline” perspective that may be very important to consult before making additional plans.

The well-written business marketing plan is as essential as the blueprint is for a building. Certainly there will be adjustments and periodic corrections, but it provides the overall direction and path to success in the marketplace that no business should ever try to proceed without.

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

Yes, as we discussed in the last issue, the marketplace has undergone a rather radical change in the past thirty years. With the numerous options available to today’s consumer, he or she behaves differently than in years – and centuries – past. With the rapid changes in the marketplace a person in business can become wealthy or poor much more quickly than in generations past.

Using outdated business approaches can quickly sap a business’s resources with very little or even a negative return. Does your business use “push” marketing? If so, quickly changing may … I say “may” … save your investment! A failure to do so will most assuredly doom your business.

“Push” marketing means you are presenting your product or services to your potential customer, showing the features, handling objections, and asking for the sale. This old approach in essence was pushing your product or service on your customer. This leaves a lot of the burden of the customer’s decision up to him or her including how your product or service will solve the customer’s problems. Push marketing is a business-focused manner of doing business. Today’s customer no longer has to put up with such a “pressured” exchange, one pushed upon him or her by the business owner.

“Pull” marketing, on the other hand, is somewhat the reverse approach. It is a customer-focused manner of doing business. The idea is that you pull the customer to your business and the decision to purchase by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him or her to solve the problem. You educate the customer in the process. In other words, your customer is making the decision, not only entirely voluntarily, but eagerly – with your help, of course. It is never a confrontation, nor does the customer wonder whether he or she got a good deal.

You no longer present your product and depend on the customer being able to see how the product solves his or her problem. You begin the process by exploring for the problem or problems for which the customer needs solutions. Then you present the various solutions available and the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each from the customer’s perspective. In other words, you are engaging the customer sufficiently to join him or her in the solution as a helper rather than an adversary. Of course this will require several adaptations on the part of the business.

First, your attitude toward your customers must change from him or her representing a single “sale” to being a recurring customer. You must spend more time winning that customer’s trust. This is an investment which should be a part of your business’s strategic backbone, not something to be avoided or shortened as much as possible. This is all part of developing the affinity bond with your customers.

Think about it. Each of us prefers to do business with someone we know, like, and trust. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Trust is the most effective emotion for your customers to have regarding you and your business. However, trust is not easily obtained in business; yet it is clearly the most valuable asset your business can posses. The sequence is as follows: know, like, and trust. First a customer must get to know you. Then, he or she will come to like you, and finally, come to trust you.

Think of yourself. What things do you like in a business? What things do you not like? What irritates you in a business? Use these to begin restructuring your thinking about your own business. It is your responsibility to improve your customers’ experiences with your business. If you don’t those customers will not have any motivation to get to know you further, much less learn to like or trust you. Soon they may be in your competitor’s business instead of yours.

We will discuss building the affinity bond and the proper care and feeding of your customers in later posts.

The marketplace has undergone a rather radical change in the past thirty years. Today’s consumer has many more options than have previously existed. This has in turn changed the way the consumer behaves. I hasten to add that that we human beings have not fundamentally changed but our options have. Therefore, we have changed our behavior to do things the way we prefer rather than having to do things the way the businesses and sales people prefer we do as has been the case in generations past.

The first change that gave us consumers more options was the availability of easier travel. No longer did we have to walk or ride an animal to the store. We could drive. That meant we could select from a larger number of stores. Flying gave us even more options. With better, cheaper transportation, we no longer had to order from catalogues.

Once travel was more available stores could stock more merchandise since the market area now included more people. First there were department stores and now there are the mega stores sometimes called “category killers” such as Walmart, Target, Lowes, and Home Depot.

Along with the improvement in travel came great improvements in communications. First we could order from the catalogue by phone. Now we have the Internet that can be used for research as well as online ordering.

The cell phone now has many more features than simple voice communications. It allows us to do enhanced surfing and shopping via the Internet. In a very few years, cell phone advertising will become a predominant form of reaching the customer directly in a very targeted fashion for the business owner.

If you are a business owner or marketer, it should already be obvious that changes in consumer behavior require many alterations in product or service presentation to appeal to the consumers’ newly discovered options. Furthermore, your adaptation must be rapid. To fail to do so will put you in league with Montgomery Ward, Circuit City, and other dinosaurs that failed to adapt adequately. Sears is another example of a huge company that failed to adapt rapidly enough almost too long to survive. Whether it will ultimately survive remains to be seen.

Of course, the Internet has changed the scene more than any of us could have imagined twenty years ago. Various estimates are that 25% of online searches have “local intent.” Google tells us that that figure is often 50% depending on the material being searched for. Now add in the cell phone searches and that figure jumps to over 75% in some areas. Also there has been an increase of 68% in searches with local intent in 2008 alone among cell phone users.

Add to that the knowledge that the Bell Telephone System is desperately trying to get out of the printed Yellow Pages, and you recognize that we are seeing another massive change rapidly developing. Like it or not, cell phones with their ability to search the Internet will dominate the market place in the next few years.

What is the local business’s take away? The only businesses that will survive will be those who have a website to promote their products or services, and they will begin using the Internet and cellular services as some of their important advertising media.

We will discuss other marketing methods and tips in later posts.

During difficult economic times when business is down, the overwhelming temptation is to trim everything often by a set percentage across the board. This is a natural, yet misguided impulse. When a business owner or manager tells me, “We have no choice but to trim our marketing budget,” I ask what he or she considers “marketing.” Too frequently the reply is, “Advertising.” While advertising is a very important part of marketing, it is only a small portion of the marketing any business should be doing.

Simply on the surface I would suggest that if you need more business, you should be doing more advertising rather than less.  However, the proper answer is a little more involved than that.

Too often businesses have little idea what the actual amount or money or business a particular marketing effort, such as an advertising campaign, is generating. As small business people we should design into every marketing effort the ability to track precisely what the yield is for that effort. If we cannot do that, we should consider the money spent on it completely wasted. Such tracking is fairly easy and inexpensive but is essential to marketing analysis. How much revenue is generated? Did it make or lose money? Did it generate new customers? Did it contribute to the bond with the business’s customers? How do all the campaigns we have run compare with one another in these categories.

While businesses often succeed during good economic times without doing this, the ones that do apply these principles are much more likely to succeed — even grow — during poor economic times.

Closely allied with tracking one’s marketing is that of testing. However, only if a business has an effective tracking program can it implement an effective testing program. I suggest that a business test everything! I have seen the change of a single word in a headline produce a ten-fold improvement in sales! This seems phenomenal but illustrates what a good tracking and testing program can produce.

For example an ad run weekly in a local newspaper can tell you a great deal within four to six weeks. Test headlines, type size, text color, the offer, wording, ad size, border style, and ad position to start, but resist the temptation to test more than a single element at a time. Keep good records of your results. Of course, this demands that the other people in your business understand what you are doing so they can keep good records as well. Before long you will develop a much better sense of the more effective techniques. You can then refine them and make them even more effective by continuing the tracking and testing process.

So, should you be doing more advertising during poor economic times? I can’t tell you without the tracking and testing data, yet I can say you should be doing more marketing of which print advertising is merely a part. Tracking and testing data will allow you to modify your marketing mix based on scientific testing results. Though print advertising is essential to most businesses, do not limit your marketing thinking to print advertising.

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

Your List is . . . Everything?

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

I deal with a great many business in a variety of fields and find that a distressing number of the people consider many things and miss one of the most critical elements in that decision.

Businesses in trouble often run hither and thither trying solutions again ignoring this critical element.

That critical element?  Market Research!

Anyone, at the earliest contemplation of beginning a business, should start with a reasonably complex Business Plan. Any Business Plan that does not have a Marketing Section with a subsection addressing “marketing research” should be replaced with one that does.

Brad Sugars wrote an excellent article (reprinted below) which gives starting points to do basic market research for your business whether you are just starting out or have a business in need of a marketing makeover.

=================================

How to Research Your Market

Do your homework before opening your doors to avoid business-busting mistakes.

By Brad Sugars   |   March 02, 2007

Starting a business is a little like buying a car: You need to do some research before taking the plunge. First, figure out if there’s demand for your product or service. Do a competitive analysis. Find a place to set up shop. And create a plan to differentiate your offering.

Doing your due diligence can mean the difference between success and failure, and it doesn’t have to cost a penny. Networking, online research, informal focus groups and other do-it-yourself methods can often do the trick.

Consider the case of an event facility in the South. It started as a place to hold weddings. Located in a beautiful old house, it attracted wedding business, but wasn’t turning a profit because it usually sat empty on weekdays.

So the owners contacted members of a nationwide wedding planners’ association with similar estate-type settings in other geographic markets. They discovered that others in their situation filled the gap with corporate meetings and by offering bed-and-breakfast arrangements. Today, 40 percent of the facility’s business is corporate events, and the owners are building a lodging facility on the grounds to expand their offerings.  

Before you get the research ball rolling, you need to come up with a solid business concept. Once you have a concept, you need to determine if it’s viable. To figure out if you should go ahead with your business idea, you need to ask questions like these:

Once you’re sure of your business idea, dig in deeper. You need information that’ll help you develop a unique business proposition that’ll give you a competitive advantage. The best sources of information will vary depending on the type of business and circumstances, but options include the following:

• Trade information. In the wedding site example cited earlier, the trade association for wedding planners provided a direct pipeline to the information the event facility was seeking. Other trade information can also be found in print or online trade publications, or by walking the aisles of a trade show.
• Demographic and economic data. Try the U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFinder, State Data Centers or most recent Economic Census to find things like age range, income, number of businesses by type in a geographic area and total sales in your category. For even more information, a reference librarian can point you to other specialized databases.
• Business groups. Your local chamber of commerce may be able to help you find the information you need. Also try government-sponsored Small Business Development Centers, which assist entrepreneurs and small-business owners.
• Local universities. Sometimes professors at business schools are interested in having their graduate students do a market feasibility study for course credit.
• Local competitors. If you’re starting a local business, shop the competition and check their websites. Or find a similar business in a similar city and ask to talk to the owner. Also look for similar businesses for sale and contact the brokers for information like why they’re selling and what their financials are like. You may be interested in buying that business yourself.
• National competitors. Do an online search of businesses in your industry and evaluate what they offer to help fine-tune your idea.
• Potential customers. Run your idea up the flagpole with informal focus groups. Talk with friends of friends–but not your own friends or family, since they may not tell you the truth–and old customers or existing customers if you’re already in business. This is the acid test to see if your plan is ready for prime time or needs tweaking.

All this detective work will pay off, either by helping you validate your business plan, sending you back to the drawing board, or convincing you to shelve it altogether. And don’t worry if that happens–inspiration will strike again.

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

There is frequently a lot of discussion on the web about “duplicate content.”  Duplicate content is an issue since many web business owners would like their material published in many places.  Often they are trying to “fool” the search engines into believing that there is great interest in their material with many backlinks to their sites.

Something that has complicated the issue is the great availability of free PLR (Private Label Rights) articles.  Lazy web business owners love to publish this material in a “pushbutton” fashion rather than develop their own content.

In years past these techniques worked just like keyword stuffing did.  However, the landscape has changed.  The search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated.

These new analytical programs allow the search engines to exert a certain amount of “judgment” about content.  True unique content is quickly indexed and true duplicate content is ignored or even penalized in the indexing process.

Here is what Google has to say about its policy on duplicate content.

Innovative people who use article writing as a tool in the promotion of their businesses may use PLR material, but they add to it changing most if not all paragraphs.  How much change is necessary to have content judged to be unique?  Google won’t say, but savvy writers have reported success with changing no more than 25-30% of an article.

The fact of the matter is that lazy writers do not fare nearly as well in the long run as to conscientious writers.  Avoid being lazy and take your business seriously.

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

I’m sure most of us have one or more favorite blogs we like to read for business, politics, religion, or hobbies.  Some are good and easy to read and some are not.

One of my The 88 Marketing That Will Change Your Life is, “If it is difficult to read, it won’t be … read, that is.”  Any part of your information that is not easy to consume will simply be glossed over more superficially than you’d like or discarded.  You should take your business more seriously than that.

In his recent post, John Urban emphasizes the importance of blog design in getting your message across to your readers or customers clearly and efficiently.  Below are his topics, but you should click on the link to read his excellent discussion of each.

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Your blog’s design can be the distinguishing factor that separates
you from the vast sea of other weblogs out there. First impressions
count and making sure that you have all the elements of a great blog
design can ensure that readers will enjoy the content that you present.

In this article, you will read about the ten essential characteristics of a solid weblog design.

1. Good readability

2. A strong focus on the content

3. High findability

4. A great comment section design

5. Tight integration with social networking/media sites

7. The use of effective visuals in the content

8. A semantic HTML structure

9. Logically and coherently organized content

10. A good headline/post title design

————————————————-

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.