Joel Sussman, who is the President of Optimal Marketing Communications, shares some marketing strategies in an excellent blog posting (below) outlining 8 important tips for marketing directors, business owners and entrepreneurs.

Here are Joel’s thoughts on marketing communications:

How do you grab people’s attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you’ve identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your business or profession. To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and evolving marketing strategies and trends in our culture.

While not all inclusive, the following list of marketing strategies, marketing tools, and small business marketing tips can help establish a marketing framework that can put your small business on a faster track to growth.

#1:  Gain Customer Confidence. Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It’s up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or added value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence and overcome sales objections. If you haven’t clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they’ll be hesitant to commit and the sale will go to your competitor.

#2:  Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using an integrated marketing strategy, which in many cases would include a well-planned website marketing strategy. Stated simply: the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing strategy is partly the result of exposing your target audience to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible (frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.

#3:  Sincere enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious (and I’m not talking about using multiple exclamation points after sentences!!! That detracts from your credibility and perceived professionalism.) If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you. Your words are important, but your nonverbal communication — your tone of voice, inflection, rate of speech, volume, facial expressions, your listening skills, eye contact, and overall responsiveness — can have an even greater impact on how you influence and persuade your prospective customers, clients, or members.

#4:  Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales and marketing process as focusing attention on product features and benefits.

#5:  Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction whenever possible, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations.

#6:  Impose a deadline. Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendency to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it’s often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Marketing Tip: Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.

#7:  Create a small business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your marketing strategies should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, target market analysis (know your customers), and readily available marketing tools, as well as marketing strategies and tools that you need to research or acquire.

#8:  Embrace Web marketing, because it’s powerful, it can be very effective, and it’s here to stay! If you already have a web site, make sure it’s “optimized” for keywords that your prospects are actually looking for. You can find out what keywords your customers are searching for and how much competition you’re up against for those particular keywords by subscribing to a service, such as Wordtracker . Another vital aspect of raising your visibility on Google (and your sales potential) is to get other sites to link to your site. It’s generally referred to as getting backlinks or incoming links. This technique will bring you the optimal benefit when the sites linking to you are well-established, have a similar theme to your site, or are considered an “authority site”. (The ultimate authority sites from which to get links are government sites (dot-gov), educational institutions (dot-edu), and organizations (dot-org). Web sites that have gained quality incoming links from other sites tend to be ranked much higher by Google than those that don’t. All things being equal, more traffic usually translates into more sales and profits — and, of course, that’s the reason most people go into business.

Monday, June 29th, 2009, 8:12 am   |   Marketing Techniques  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback