Make sure your marketing messages hit the right target

Have you ever been in a situation where you just moved into a new apartment complex and you received a postcard for someone offering discounted exterior painting or snow shoveling service?  Obviously, as a renter, you don’t need these services.  So the person that is sending you this mail is completely wasting their money and they’re completely wasting your time.  If you are a small business owner or real estate agent, you want to make sure your marketing pieces get to the right audience.  Otherwise, you’re wasting everyone’s time and money.  Here are some simple ways to get to the right target.

1. Identify your potential customer.  You want to aim your marketing pieces at those people who are likely to be your customer – not to everyone.  Pay attention to those who are your customers already, since future customers will most likely resemble them.  You’ll want to identify where they’re from, their demographics (age, gender, income level, household makeup, etc.), and their behaviors and beliefs.

2. Pinpoint your actual market.  How often do you check out at a store nowadays and the sales clerk first asks you for your phone number or zip code?  They’re collecting this information so they know who is shopping with them so they can market to that target area in the future.  Start asking your customers for a zip code and/or phone number (for the area code).  If you have customers that are shopping online, it’s still important to collect this information.  You never know – you could be in Chicago and have a huge group of customers on the East Coast!  Find out that information so you could potentially market to them in the future.

3. Observe your customers.  Gather important information such as: age range, gender, job titles, owners vs. renters.  You may gather some of this information by observing them.  However, it’s important to ask questions, too.  Try to strike up a conversation as they’re checking out.  Not only will that make you seem more friendly, but you can learn a lot about them.  Maybe they’re purchasing something for their son’s graduation from high school.  Now you have an idea of their age range, that they have children, and money could be tight in the next few years if they’re going to help him with his education. 

4. Find out what interests them and their purchasing habits.  Are they online shoppers?  Do they get product recommendations from friends or family?  Do they make most of the purchases for the household or does their spouse or partner?  Do they choose quality or price first?  These important questions will help you learn what they value in making purchase decisions.

All of these bits of information will help you stay informed of your current customers to help you generate marketing messages that are getting to the right target audience.  Not only will it save you time and money, but hopefully it will help you learn more about your customers to generate referrals for years to come.

More information can be found in this article. Now that you know who to market to, let us help you get that done! Visit us online to get started.

Explain your job and engage your listener

Have you ever asked someone you just met what it is they do and you either didn’t understand without asking a series of more questions or got a response that practically put you to sleep?  You’re not the only ones.  Dr. Joan Curtis helps professionals become better communicators and wrote a great article on how to present yourself when you’re asked that time-old question, “What is it that you do?”

Dr. Curtis recommends focusing on the positive benefits that you offer, rather than just answering with your job title.  She uses the example of a financial planner.  That title could mean a lot of different things to many people.  Instead say, “I help people invest their money.”  Or “I help people achieve their life-long goal of earning money through investments.”  This is much more likely to turn into a longer conversation and potentially earn new business by explaining more thoroughly what you do rather than just provide a title.

She also recommends explaining your job with passion.  Even if you’re having a bad day, you want your work to come across as exciting and beneficial.  You never know who you’re going to meet that could benefit from your products or services.  Try putting emphasis on the important words. 

Now, don’t go on forever either.  Give the listener a chance to chime in.  Your goal should be engaging them in conversation rather than turning your words into a lecture.  Try to focus on getting them to ask more and more questions.

Focus on your niche.  It’s fine to earn customers and clients outside of that group, but you’ll be so much better at what you do if you find your niche that you’re marketing towards, and selling towards.  Dr. Curtis says, “Once you land with your foot in the door, you can expand.”  So focus on your niche, and then expand out from there.

Visit us online to find the perfect way for us to market your business.

How to improve your cold calling

It’s a lot less common these days for clients to come approach you to purchase your products or services.  You might be getting less traffic on your Web site because of the tougher economy.  So how do you keep your production and business numbers up?  You might have to try cold calling.  Cold calling can put you in touch with new clients and help you make new connections to grow and improve your business.  

The “Queen of Cold Calling,” Wendy Weiss, offers these tips on how to guarantee cold calling success. 

1. Actually make the call.  You’d be surprised at how many people miss this step.  If you don’t start the cycle to introduce your product or service, you’ll never get around to closing the sale.

2. Make lots of calls.  If your energy is focused on getting only one sale, when it falls through you are absolutely devastated.  If you make hundreds of calls, a few unsuccessful ones won’t deter you from picking up the phone again. 

3. Call the prospects that most match your niche first.  They’re the ones that are going to need what you’re selling the most.  You want to spend your time calling those that will give you the highest return on your investment.  Plus, it will help for future marketing efforts to have done business with the most people in your niche.

4. Call high.  Don’t get stuck talking to secretaries and receptionists all day when the decision makers are ultimately their superiors.  It won’t get you anywhere.  It will take you so much time to only later find out that the person you’re speaking to can’t make the purchasing decision.  Call the decision maker first.

5. Know your goals.  Your ultimate goal should be to close a sale, but you’ll rarely do that from the initial phone call.  Figure out if your goal is to get an appointment with your prospect, or their mailing address.  Knowing this will help make the call much more successful.

6. Ask for what you want.  If a script is necessary to help you achieve this, then write a script.  Your prospect can’t guess what you’re calling about.  Make sure you’re asking whatever is necessary to reach your goal from step 5.

7.  Loosen up and have fun.  If you go into cold calling dreading picking up the phone, you’ll have less success because your prospects will be able to hear it on the other end.  Smile when you call!

For more tips and help with your marketing, please visit us online.

Build your e-mail lists with these tips

People always seem less and less likely to give out their email addresses in the age where spam clogs up their inboxes.  They don’t want to get sent emails on a daily or weekly basis anymore.  Ali Brown, an online marketing guru, wrote a great article on how to expand your email list and collect more emails than you know what to do with!

1. You want to decide who your ideal customer is.  This fits back in with the theme of niche marketing.  If you’re a Realtor, you want to pick a specific Chicago neighborhood, for example.  Or lakefront homes.  You get the idea.  Don’t generalize it.  If you’re focused on who you want to market to, it’ll be a lot easier to do it.

2. Research!  Find other companies, competitors, trade publications, etc. that are already marketing to your group.  Come up with a list of the top 5 Web sites and top 5 ezines that market to your target audience.

3. Once you have those Web sites chosen, you’re going to want to contact them.  See if they’ll review your products or services on the site.  When and if they do, ask them to direct consumers back to your Web site for more information.  Then make sure you have a site with online forms for people to leave their information or sign a guestbook. 

You can also see if they’ll accept guest articles.  Offer to write an article on the specific housing market where you’re farming, for example.  Then in the article make sure to list your site to come back to for more information.

For both of you to expand your marketing, offer to swap ads or articles.  Maybe they could post an ad in a newsletter you send to your clients if you post an ad in their ezine.  It’s a win-win situation for everyone.  If this doesn’t work, offer to promote their Web site for them in your newsletter if they’ll do the same for you. 

Purchase a banner ad on their site.  It may cost you a little money, but it’s a great way to get noticed.  Make sure you use a tracking program to find out where your new leads are coming from. 

Make sure your Web site has a link to receive your newsletters and join your mailing list if they enter their email address.  And always advertise your Web site in your e-mail signature and in your address labels.

For more tips and online marketing assistance, please visit us online.

How to choose your niche

On Monday I had written about the important rules of Internet marketing.  One of those was finding a specialized niche to target in on.  I wanted to focus today on how to go about choosing a niche.  If you’re marketing online, you are marketing amongst thousands and potentially millions of competitors.  You’ll want to choose something that makes you unique to your product or service. 

1. Choose a niche where the topic interests you.  Sounds easy enough.  But this is a segment or interest that you’ll be focusing a lot of time on, so make sure you’re interested in it.  If you already have a great deal of knowledge about something, that will help you, too.  As an example, for a Realtor, maybe you want to focus in on the area where you grew up, or you currently live, since you know a lot about it. 

2. Act like Goldilocks.  Find a niche that isn’t too big or a niche that isn’t too small.  Unfortunately, you will never be able to compete with retailers like Amazon.com or Overstock.com – those sites that already sell everything under the sun.  However, if you pick one that’s too small, you won’t have a customer base that’s large enough to sell to.  I’m going to use real estate again as an example.  While Chicago as a whole may seem like a good idea, it’s just too big to have knowledge about every neighborhood.  But you might want to focus in on a certain price point, or choose a couple neighborhoods that you’re familiar with.

3.  Going along with #2, choose a niche with a large customer base.  So even if you only get a percentage of customers from that speciality, it will still be enough to make a decent living.

4. Choose a niche with a customer base that is affluent enough to purchase related services and products.  People always want stuff they can’t afford.  But they actually have to have the means to be able to purchase what you’re selling.  Visit blogs and consumer groups in the area you want to sell to.  It might also be a good idea to become a member so you can get to know the people that join them.  This should help you determine what they’re looking for, and whether or not they can afford it.

5. Choose a niche that has a high level of Internet searches.  Go to Google’s free keyword search tool and enter your main keyword into the box. Click on the “Get Keyword Ideas” button.  If the average search volume is 10,000,000 or more, you know you found a niche with a lot of hits.  If it’s real low, you might want to reconsider.  The list will also show you related keywords that you might want to consider.

6. Choose a niche that is popular, but not crowded by competitors.  You don’t want to be fighting tooth and nail for every customer among the same three competitors.  The easiest way to do this is to pretend you’re a customer looking for your specific product or service.  Do some online research, and see who and what pops up when you begin searching for your product.  Be careful, though.  If nobody is already marketing that niche, then the market probably isn’t viable.

7. Choose a niche that fills a need.  And take your time to research and grow your niche.  Don’t jump in feet first and expect to make your first sale by the end of the week.  Do your research!

For more help on choosing a niche or help with your marketing campaign, please visit us online.