7 Small Business Marketing Tips

Here are 7 low-cost but highly effective marketing tips to help any small business find customers and generate sales quickly.

1. Don’t Advertise Like a Big Business

Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can’t afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales …now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising - and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.

2. Offer a Cheaper Version

Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.

3. Offer a Premium Version

Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service …or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price.

4. Try Some Unusual Marketing Methods

Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.

5. Trim Your Ads

Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. You may even be surprised to find that some of your short ads generate a better response than their longer versions.

6. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses

Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost.

7. Take Advantage of Your Customers

Your customers already know and trust you. It’s easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers …and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market.

Also, convert your customers into publicity agents for your business. Develop an incentive for them to tell associates and friends about the value of your products or services. An endorsement from them is more effective than any amount of advertising - and it is much cheaper.

Each of these 7 marketing tips provides a simple, low-cost way for any small business to find customers and generate sales quickly.

Rising Postal Rates? Don

The United States Post Office in the past had some trouble with its finances and their solution was to raise the postal rates. Whether or not you agree with this approach to trying to stay in business, like the weather and government in general, it’s something you have to live with.

Many companies have used this as a reason to send out fewer or smaller mailings in an attempt to keep their costs down. Here’s a quote from an issue of Direct Marketing News:

“Despite a string of healthy annual increases, the growth of direct mail expenditures is expected to slow over the next four years. Direct mail continued to grow in 2001 but slowed because of the anthrax scare”, the study said.

The study also said, “Direct mail will continue to expand during the forecast period but at a slower pace than in the past because of the emergence of e-mail marketing and postal rate hikes, which will force marketers to limit mailings.”

The question is: should you agree with this and follow the trend, or should you turn it to your advantage? Just think, with fewer mailing pieces arriving in your customers’ or prospects’ mailboxes, your glossy, full-color postcards are going to stand out even more and have a greater chance of producing the desired response.

When you start looking at what you have to gain by increasing the amount of direct mail marketing you do and what you have to lose by cutting back, there really isn’t a question as to which way to go.

Of course you should be smart about your mailings. Make sure they are really well targeted and put a little more thought into the design and content so as to make sure they impinge. That just makes sense.

So while others are cutting their own throats by cutting back on direct mailing, you can benefit by increasing yours and sending your postcards into a less heavily glutted marketplace where they will receive more attention. Win-win.

More Marketing Dope

Direct marketing can make you very successful, but you’ve got to understand the basics. Here are some more gems of the industry that can take you from being a diamond in the rough to the luminous bling-bling.

When advertising your product or service, honesty is not only the legal and ethical path, but also the path to the highest amount of repeat business.

Many times companies fall into the trap of trying to “lure” customers in to their store. They make claims that are technically true but are worded in a way that make them sound better than they actually are. The company may not be consciously trying to deceive their customer, but none the less if exactly what is advertised is not delivered the customer will feel deceived. This customer is not likely to do business with this company no matter what their advertising offers in the future. List the benefits of your product factually and deliver what is promised and your customers will keep coming back.

When advertising, it is best to outline the benefits of your product or service. Simply naming the features that it has may not show what it can actually do for your customer.

Example: A car company releases a new model of car that features “new indestructible porcelain brakes”. This fact is touted in all of their commercials but the cars aren’t flying off the lot. It is very likely that the customers in their target market, mostly families that are concerned about safety, have no idea what difference these brakes make in the performance of the vehicle. If they had instead advertised the benefit that the car is “equipped with brakes that can stop your car three times faster” it would have given the customer a compelling reason to be interested.

Think about what the benefit of your product or service is and focus on that. If you are a computer maintenance company your product may be “server management and database maintenance” but you will be better off saying that you can help “increase office productivity by allowing easier access to client files”. Many times your customers don’t understand your business. That is why they have to hire you. Make sure to explain to them not only what you do, but how it can help them.

When a customer gives you their email address you have one more way to get your message to them.

One of the best ways to supplement Direct Mail Marketing is Direct Email Marketing. However, unlike direct mail marketing, unsolicited email marketing is illegal. You can’t just go out and buy a list of email addresses and start sending to them. There is one way to purchase lists for emailing called “opt in” lists but this method is not recommended because the rate of people on the list that actually “opt in” to receiving your promo is very low. This is why you should always collect customers’ email addresses as you are getting their physical addresses.

Also be sure not to slam your customers with too much email promotion. I recommend not sending more than one email per week to each client. Not only will this keep you from angering your customers, it will also keep up the interest level and keep your emails from getting deleted before they are even opened.

If your company is planning on emailing specials or a Monthly Email Newsletter you will need to have this list for them to be effective. If you are not planning on contacting customers and prospects via email, you should be!

Extracting Postcard

Postcards are still part of our modern system of communicating. That fact we cannot deny.

Postcard’s old charisma is preserved. It can still uplift the mood and brighten everybody’s day. No question about that, right? The effect is flagrant that even though there are already lots of communication channels that a person can choose, a lot stick to postcards.

Postcards these days come in two forms &ndash e-postcards and the printed postcards. The first one is the modern counterpart of the printed postcards. The former is fast and easy to process. With just a few clicks of the mouse, a beautiful e-postcard can already be had. With regards to the latter, it takes a few days or weeks depending on the printing job. Nonetheless, this type is more preferred by a lot of people. Why is that so? - Because nothing beats a postcard that is personally delivered. A postcard that can be touched and held. You do not simply save it in your computer but save it where you like it to be saved.

The ask now is &ndash how do you extract postcard’s potentials?

Well, there are a lot of considerations. I will give you few of the significant ones. Here we go..

1. Make a Mailing List. Be sure that those included in the list are interested in postcards. They may be your loved ones. Or if you are an entrepreneur, they must be interested in your offer &ndash be it a product or a service.

2. Create postcards in a ‘friendly manner’. What do I mean by this? The message, design must be friendly so as not to sound ‘puffing’. You can step in your recipients’ shoes or try to ask a third person so as to have an idea whether the tone is already friendly or not.

3. Use of Direct Sales Pitch is rubbish. Postcard services are not primarily used to do direct marketing. Here, it is made indirectly. Simple information like phone numbers, addresses and the likes are given in order to guide recipients in regard to their future queries.

4. Do not beat around the bush. Little space cannot accommodate everything you want to say. Be sure that your message is ‘ready to read’. Therefore, brief and easy to read.

Postcards must appear pleasant top the senses. They are not made to annoy or piss anybody.

They are there to comfort, care, advice, or impliedly tap another’s shoulder or whisper words of inspiration. Good luck in your postcard preferences!

Postcards I like!

Ever since I was a kid, I am fascinated by eye-popping photographs and images. Every time I see a beautiful picture I keep it. At first it was only a fetish, a habit but later on became an obsession. If you have a chance to go to my home, you will discover that compilations made it look like a giant shelf of pictures.

Photographs of places, people and events amuse me. This is the very reason why collecting postcard is on the top of my list when it comes to hobbies, pastime and the likes. With postcards, I can travel from one point in the globe to another significant point without extra cost. I can meet unique people of different races and join them in their festivities, eccentricities and celebrations. Go feisty, vivacious and wild &ndash that’s what postcards can bring you.

Postcard captures reality. It has its own way of captivating your senses. It can create an air of confidence that can make you strive towards your goal. The motivation factor uplifts your mind and spirit. It encourages your to do better and give more. It enlightens and redirects you to the truth behind all lies and clouds of confusion. Postcards never fail to make up my day. A piece or two can very well brighten my otherwise dull and plain day of the week.

I love to treasure memories. It is as if you are reliving an ecstatic moment again and again. That is why I still keep my old photographs with me. I don’t want them out of my fallible system so I have to find a way to keep them well. As much as possible, I want them to be enduring so I find ways to let them be. I save them in my computer. I post them in my blogs but the most recent thing that I discover is to print them on postcards through the latest postcard printing services.

Indeed, it was a brilliant idea and my family and friends loved it as well. You get to go back to the past and cherish the very moment. Go back to childhood during the happy times of your life &ndash your achievements, circles of friends, school days and good old days. What other means can bring you all of these other than mind and pictures. So I maximized and imprint them in postcards. This is called personalization where you can share a part of you!

The Humble Postcard Is Making A Comeback

If you were a contestant on Jeopardy and the answer was “Postcards,” what would the question be?

How about:

“What is one of the most incredibly effective, yet under-utilized methods for driving qualified buyers to your business or website?”

Many businesses think postcards are a little old-fashioned for this era of Internet Marketing, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Online marketers are discovering that using email lists as an effective form of marketing is fading fast due to the unfortunate avalanche of SPAM (unsolicited commercial email)!

Internet Service Providers and individual consumers are now trying to filter out the ever growing glut of SPAM. But, unfortunately the software developed to assist in SPAM control is not terribly accurate and a very large amount of legitimate communications between a business and its customer base is being unintentionally blocked by these filters.

And even if the email does get through, it is often lost among the other 200 or so emails in the receiver’s inbox and simply gets bulk deleted. As a result, email is no longer a reliable method of maintaining contact and building a relationship with customers.

Yet, most small businesses do not have large budgets to conduct full fledged direct marketing campaigns. The humble postcard comes to the rescue! The humble postcard can serve both online and offline businesses well, driving traffic to both brick-and-mortar stores as well as commercial websites.

Famous copywriter Gary Halbert says most people sort their mail over a waste basket. As they mentally separate the mail into two categories, junk and personal, the junk mail drops directly into the wastebasket unopened. But the postcard is already open. It is small and easily read at a glance so the likelihood of the message getting through is increased greatly. And at the same time the production and mailing cost remain economical.

Postcard advertising and postcard marketing are back in vogue. Marketing postcards can be sent to customers as personalized postcards for any number of occasions, including holidays, birthdays, special events, or special offers.

The simple postcard economically helps keep businesses in touch with their customer base and develop that all important relationship between the business and the customer. Promotional postcards should be in every marketer’s bag of tricks!

Are they in yours?

Make Your Mailing a Home Run, Not a Strike Out!

You can use great design and copy to get a better response.

When you send a mailing to your customers or prospective customers you are counting on making considerably more money in new business than you spend on the mailing, right? It is obvious that if you were not going to profit from the mailing, you wouldn’t send it out.

A little less obvious is that it costs almost the same amount of money to send out a very attractive mailing piece with brilliant copy which is more likely to produce a great response rate as it does to send out a boring, poorly designed piece guaranteed only to land rapidly in the trash. Why?

The major part of your expenditure is in the mailing list and the postage. The printing costs are about the same for a perfect card as for a mediocre one. All right. So a good design and excellent copy is going to cost a little bit more. But only a little. You send out a postcard mailing to get a response (preferably lots of responses).

The front of the card, graphic and headline, is designed to attract the reader’s interest so that they read what you have to say. In short, to attract his or her attention.

The copy on the front and back of the card is designed to get the reader to respond, either by calling you or e-mailing you or visiting you or going to your web site. A response.

If your card accomplishes that, it’s done its duty.

How do you get it to do that?

Good design. Good copy. Assuming you have sent the cards to people who are likely to be interested in what you have to sell. (There’s no point sending a postcard selling raincoats to people in the Sahara Desert. They are the wrong “public”).

It is more cost effective in the long run to hire a professional to do the design and copy for your promotion instead of spending all the time yourself to learn the software. A little time spent improving the design and copy of your postcards will result in much higher ROI (Return On Investment) for your postcard mailing.

Direct Mail Marketing Done Correctly, Cannot Fail

So how do you do it?

Direct mail marketing. When it comes to marketing your product or services there are two basic challenges:

1. How do you obtain new customers or clients?

2. How do you get your existing customers to come back for more?

Direct mail/direct response marketing answers both these challenges admirably (it’s not the only way to do it but it is a proven method that always works). You can ALWAYS rely on DIRECT MAIL MARKETING. The postcard&ndashdirect marketing’s secret weapon…

One of the simplest and most cost-effective forms of direct mail marketing is the POSTCARD. Because postcards work so well they can be considered one of the key small business marketing strategies.

“I switched from sending out a monthly newsletter to my mailing list, to sending out full color post cards.

Not only did it save me money on the cost of printing, but it saved me the hassle of having to prepare the mailings.

Feedback has been very positive from our clients and the leads have been pouring in. Plus my website hits have increased due to promotion or it on our post cards!” Kerry Fuller, Realty Executives

Direct mail marketing strategies…

To get new customers all you need to do is:

1. Get their identities (mailing lists do this).

2. Reach them (direct mail does this).

3. Attract their attention and get your message across (post cards do this perfectly&ndashyou don’t have to open them!).

4. Get them to contact you. (Your mailing piece, letter or, preferably, post card, will do that if it’s well designed and written.)

5. The rest is up to your ability to sell.

To get your existing customers to come back for more all you need to do is:

1. Keep accurate records of your customers (anyone who has ever bought anything from you) in a database and keep it current.

2. Send them frequent mailings. Postcards are excellent. You can send out a newsletter. You can send out personalized letters. But keep contacting them. Tell them about new products or services. Get them to respond.

3. Obviously you have to deliver excellent service or a great product. You will get results with these marketing techniques even if you don’t deliver good service or a great product, but it won’t last long and you won’t be able to maintain it.

4. Remember, the size of your customer base and the number of mailings to it determines how much income you make. Fact.

So, do it correctly and you cannot fail.

Postcards: The Unbeatable Vehicle For Driving Traffic to Your Website

Forget about the old-fashioned, outdated postcards with their yellow tinges and jagged edges. Today’s professional postcards have them beat a thousand times over! Bright colors that create high impact, clip art the jumps off the page, and quality design spell out new, modern and cutting edge marketing tools.

The great thing about the postcard is that even with all of its high tech construction, it still carries a personal, easy-to-read message that will produce results!

Everytime you go to the mailbox, you get more junkmail than REAL mail, right? Sure we all do. We stand at the trash can, mentally label each envelope as something to look at or something to pitch, and that’s that. Advertisements hidden by envelopes never even get opened. Postcards, on the other hand blare their message loud and strong with a quick glance. No need to go through the hassles of opening them.

What does this have to do with Internet marketing and your Website? Think about it… how do most Internet marketers go about driving more traffic to their site? Yeah, of course… they use Internet marketing techniques.

Postcards are an age old method of marketing that most Internet marketers are overlooking. They’ve been proven to be one of the most effective of all advertising mediums, why not use them to send customers to your Website?

A 4 x 5 postcard costs less than 10 cents, is less expensive to send than ads in an envelope and carries a strong impact. They’re easily tacked on the refridgerator or in an office cubicle as a reminder to the busy readers who want to visit your site, but don’t have the time right away.

Postcards are inexpensive, personal, simple and guarantee 100% exposure to your audience. You can’t find a marketing tool that will produce a better rate of return… try it and see. Get one over on your competitors who are missing out on the best advertising tool on the market!

FULL COLOR POSTCARDS AN INEXPENSIVE ADVERTISING ALTERNATIVE

Full color printing services are probably one of the most expensive printing services in the past but with the development of new printing technologies full color printing has become an affordable printing service.

One form of advertising material that commonly utilized full color printing is a postcard. Postcards especially those that have undergone the full color printing process have a more aesthetic appeal than those plain postcards usually sent by excessively thrifty companies.

Receiving a postcard evokes a great feeling of gladness since postcards is a way of saying that you are always remembered and cared for. However, in order to stir up the feeling of anyone or in the case of business postcards stir up the feelings of its target market it is important to have it done in full colors. The various hues of colors would be the determining factor onto the effect of the postcard to its receiver. It’s a fact that colors really do affect the mood of people which makes it even more worthwhile to hire the best full color postcards printing provider there is.

No other advertising material is known to create such great impact on customers like what postcards can accomplish. Postcards have the ability to make its receiver smile and feel happy for no special reason at all.

There are options involve when thinking of using postcards for any advertising endeavor like the option of creating the postcards yourself. However, the problem with creating your own postcard is the quality of the output since it may not meet your company’s set standard for quality. The problem may be caused by the wrong choice of printer or the lack of expertise and knowledge when it comes to the process of full color postcards.

The second option is sending your postcard printing project to a professional printer one that specializes in full color printing. These providers may be found either online or offline. The advantage of online providers over its offline competition is in terms of comfort that is derived from using online services.

In fact, it doesn’t really matter if you are a novice or an expert in using online interactive forms since there are very easy to follow instructions provided by various online printing providers. Aside from that, online printing provider has the necessary online software system that enables for a quick and hassle free sending of all printing projects that is not present when dealing with local print shops.

Aside from that, there are also some online providers that offer free proofing of all submitted printing projects to provide the client company with an overview of the outcome of sent project.