Does your business need to turn on the high beams when it comes to marketing and advertising?
There are tons of perks to owning and running your own business. Usually, being in charge of the marketing isn't considered one of them.
When your marketing budget is small and most of your day is spent running your business, creating marketing and advertising for your business it can feel like you’re driving through a forest at night in the middle of a thunderstorm. The occasional flash of lighting helps to let you know if you're still on the road... but what you really need are some high powered headlights to illuminate your way.
Fortunately, there is a simple, intuitive formula to uncover what your customers are REALLY looking for when they enter your store or click on your website.
This website's blog entries can help you to shine a flashlight into the darkness. However, for a simple, step by step approach... pick up a copy of the book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results . The exercises contained within will really help to illuminate your way.
Beyond the Niche is written in a friendly, informative tone and reveals proven strategies that have been used to create measurable results even when constrained by a shoestring budget.
Recent Posts
- Small Business Marketing Success Online
- Customer Service in the World of Web 2.0
- Have Google Adwords Let You Down?
- Watch That Message You’re Sending…
- Getting To Know Your Customers…
- Developing powerful marketing strategies
- Branding Myth: Branding is All about YOU!
- Marketing Tactics vs Marketing Strategy
Advertising and the Major Sale
The same principles that are successful in advertising office are fundamentally the same principles that will help you find success marketing your consulting services, right?
It may surprise you, but fifty years ago, the answer in marketing and advertising was a resounding "YES" to the statement above. Back then, marketing is marketing and advertising is just a form of paid public relations.
Some people will tell you nothing has changed in the past fifty years... and maybe they haven't. Maybe human behavior hasn't changed... but maybe... just maybe... there's a new way to look at how advertising messages function as part of the sales process. Advertising is merely another sales professional working for your business... and maybe there's another way to look at the way this sales tool does it's job.
Late in the 20th century, the Huthwaite institute released the findings of a 12 year study which pulled back the curtain and revealed that a sale is NOT always "just a sale". According to the Huthwaite institute, sometimes, a sale marks the beginning of a relationship. When that's the case, your advertising has a different type of job to perform.
Read more about Advertising and the Major Sale.
Why the best marketing tactics sometimes fail
When I begin working with individual clients, one of the first things we discuss are the various marketing tactics that the business owner has used in the past.
Many of my clients are in the business of making Major Sales. Often, these clients have attended many free teleclasses with various marketing experts. They listen, they takes notes and they faithfully set out to implement the marketing tactics offered by these classes as a way to promote their business.
One of the first topics for discussion is to help these business understand why they can do all the "right" things laid out in these teleclasses and resource when it came to marketing their practice, without seeing results.
The overwhelming reason these marketing tactics have failed for my clients is that these tactics were designed to be successful for a business making the MINOR SALE. Since these business owners were making a MAJOR SALE, it was possible for them to do everything "right" and still not achieve success.
Creating a marketing strategy is essential to marketing success.
Read more about Marketing Strategy.
Niche Marketing Defined
Niche marketing is literally concentrating all of your marketing efforts upon a well defined segment of the population. A niche market may be quite small or quite large, depending upon how many people fall into your tightly targeted niche market.
A niche market is not something to be discovered, but rather a niche market is something you define and create.
To create your own niche market, you must first successfully identify a need or a want which is NOT being met in the market. Then, begin developing and delivering goods or services to satisfy the want or need you've identified. Follow that by creating tightly targeted marketing messages which let the world know about your products or services.
Because the internet presents such a "big pond" in which to "fish" for customers, many business owners (especially those competing online) are embracing the marketing strategy of tightly targeting a well defined "niche" audience.
However, even if you're taking your marketing messages to a geographically confined market, you still need to focus upon a target audience for your message.
Learn more about Niche Marketing.
