Cleaning Up Your Marketing – Marketing
Cleaning Up Your Marketing
Charlie Cook
Has your once well-organized marketing plan come to resemble the jumble of stuff in your closet not to mention the garage and the attic If you are like most people, each time you come across a new marketing idea you try to adopt it and add it to your existing approach.
Strategies and tactics tend to accumulate and linger even when they may not be working as well as youd like. Like the ill-fitting clothes that accumulate in your closet or the broken tools still in the garage, they are hard to get rid of, whether because of habit, emotional attachment or just plain not getting around to cleaning them out.
To improve your marketing, youll need to clean out some old ways of working. While I dont want to get anywhere near your closet, and in fact I could use some help with mine, I can show you how to clean up your marketing plan so youre ready to take advantage of the New Year to grow your business.
Cleaning Up Your Marketing Plan
Every morning my friend Michael Angier of SuccessNet.org sits down at his desk and asks himself the following three questions about his business.
1. Whats working
2. Whats not working
3. What can I improve
You may not want to review your marketing plan five times a week, but it is a good idea to do it at least once a year. So take out your pencil or fire up your computer and assess your marketing plan:
Your Marketing Plan
1. Is your plan working
2. Do you have a well defined marketing strategy that helps you achieve the three phases of marketing: Getting Attention, Positioning, and Selling
3. Do you need to write or rewrite your marketing plan
4. Do you need additional information or coaching to complete your marketing plan
5. What are you going to do to improve your marketing plan
Getting Attention
6. Does your marketing message prompt prospects to contact you
7. Do your ads, letters, and web site motivate prospects to contact you
8. What are your conversion rates
9. What steps can you take to improve them
Positioning
10. What are you doing to establish your credibility with prospects, to help them know and trust you
11. Is it working as well as youd like
12. What could you improve
13. Is the value of your products and services clear to your prospects or do they question you about merits and price
14. Want to learn how to ensure that your prospects understand the value of your products and services
Selling
15. How successful are you in selling, that is, in getting commitments for everything from appointments to orders
16. Whats your conversion rate of prospects contacted to clients and customers
17. Do initial s/ales generate repeat s/ales and referrals for years to come
18. Want to learn how to generate more s/ales from each client
Evaluating Your Marketing Plan
Use Michaels three questions to summarize your comments
about your marketing plan and your success in getting
attention, positioning and selling.
1. Whats working
2. Whats not
3. What do you want to improve
The hardest part about cleaning out your closet, attic, garage or your marketing is getting started. It may be time to straighten up or throw out some of your old marketing strategies and tactics and replace them with new more effective ones. Start 2005 with a well organized marketing plan, one that helps you Get Attention, Position your products and services and Sell and youll find your business growing in leaps and bounds in the coming year.
About The Author
2004 © In Mind Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.
The author, Charlie Cook, helps service professionals and small business owners attract more clients and be more successful. Sign up for the Fr
Marketing Automation For Small Businesses And Web Entrepreneurs – Site
Marketing Automation For Small Businesses And Web Entrepreneurs
Abe Cherian
Many Internet marketers wonder how they spend less time marketing their website so they can focus on delighting their clients and developing better marketing strategies to improve sales.
They often ask:
How can I be efficient as possible so that I dont waste time and money
How can I spend less time on activities so that I dont like e.g. marketing and sales and more time on activities I love. e,g. delighting customers, improving sales materials and products
Every time I get busy with clients, marketing falls behind, so I end up with a "feast or famine" cycle. How can I avoid the frustration of being swamped with sales one month and famished the next
How can I get prospects, leads, customers, signups, and referrals come to me instead of having to chase them
How can I build a substantial "contact list", fast, and manage it effectively
How can I organize my contacts, in one palce and build lasting relationships with them
How can I turn visitors into qualified leads automatically -- instead of losing them to my competition
How can I follow-up with my prospects and turn them into paying customers, even if I am on holiday
How do I organize my ad-copies/sales materials all in one place, and use them whenever I need -- from any computer, anywhere in the world
How do I schedule an update/mailing for a future date, and have it delivered even if I am not in front of my computer
How do I know which advertising is pulling better results for me
How do I know the cost of getting a prospect, and the cost of getting a paying customer
How do I know what my time is exactly worth
One answer to the above questions is to develop "Automatic Marketing Systems" that do your marketing for you while you do other things.
Marketing automation and CRM customer relationship management is not just for big corporations -- it must be implemented to your marketing even if you run a home-based business or promote an affiliate program.
When your marketing is effective and runs on auto-pilot, you enjoy a number of benefits:
You spend more time on the tasks that you like to do, which usually are those that got you into the business in the first place.
Clients come to you, and already know about your products, services, or an opportunity, so you dont have to chase them.
While youre busy delighting current clients, youre still getting the word out about your services, so you can smooth out the "feast or famine" cycle that plagues so many Internet marketers.
You get leverage to grow your business faster.
Marketing is a science.
Everybody has a marketing system -- manual or automated. Yet, all results are not equal. Some marketers emerge as giants, and others, including those that started marketing at the same time as the giants, either give up and go out of business or struggle to stay afloat.
Why What are the variables that make a difference in the same thing
Ill tell you why...
The successful ones are better able to relate the needs of the marketplace by using the right automation tools and analytics -- which helps them save time and money and make good judgments.
Tools To Automate Your Web Business:
There are several affordable from $20/month to $149/month Marketing automation websites/services that can help small business owners automate parts of their marketing chores and save time and money and increase your return on investment ROI.
Some websites do part of the automation for you like follow-up auto-responders, and ad-tracking services -- but very few will satisfy all of the above concerns for a small business Internet marketer all in one place.
A service specifically targeted towards small businesses, home-based entrepreneurs, and affiliate marketers will be www.iMediatools.com.
iMediatools provides a solution to all of the above concerns that is affordable $39.99/ month and practical for Internet Marketers. You can even try the full version for a period of 15 days before you get the Enterprise version.
Having total control over your marketing, lists, databases, and leads pays off thousand times over.
About The Author
Abe Cherian is the owner of Multiple Stream Media and publisher of weeklytips.com newsletter, where you will find hundreds of Internet business building tips. Visit www.weeklytips.com to read more tips like this one.
submitnotify@weeklytips.com