Archive for December, 2009

8 Common Marketing Mistakes

Marketing can be one of the most efficient methods to promote and develop your business or else it can be one of the fastest factors that lead to bankruptcy. More new customers and higher profits can be obtained through right marketing strategies. Conversely, you have to quit from your business if wrong marketing strategies are implemented. Right marketing strategies can stimulate business growth by raising profiles of your products. Regrettably, some of the small enterprises only obtain minimum returns although they spend huge amount of money on advertising. Therefore, you should avoid the below mentioned common mistakes in order to get maximum returns from your advertising.

1. Focus on your products and services

Address necessitates and needs of your products and services are important if you wish to give publicity to your business. The number of years you have been in the business is not the major concern, but the understanding of your products and services. You have to identify the importance and functions of your products and services. Advertisement can be used to recognise at least one general problems of your mission and the advantages of utilising your products and services.

2. Uncertain Marketing Message

All of us get to advertisement frequently but sometimes it takes some attention to understand what they are actually promoting. Therefore, a clearly defined marketing message is important. You have to ensure that your advertisement contains a clear narrative of your client base and the functions of your products and services so that people who read or listen to your advertisement understand how you can solve their problems.

3. Use Erroneous Words

The respond rate will change dramatically if a correct word or a proper phrase is being used. When you invest on marketing, you should carry out testing on a few versions of the proposals in order to identify which one can produce the best results. The final advertisement copy which is customer and solution focused will be selected. Based on previous data, this method has been stimulated sales for a number of small enterprisers.

4. Absent of Motivation

Most of the advertisements overlook the points of transforming missions into actions. Indeed, you should include some promotions or discounts in your advertisement with the aim of motivating people to visit your shop, your website, or get in touch with you.

5. Missing in Frequency

Some customers make purchasing decisions spontaneously, but some only purchase after taking into account of all aspects. They need to have better understanding of your products and services prior to any procurement. This process takes time but it can be accelerated by advertising more often. Therefore, you need to make sure that your prospects have high publicity frequently.

6. Inactive Websites

Some small enterprisers publish their missions and objectives to a website where they have more comprehensive explanation about their products and services. These websites help to attract more visitors but only generate a small number of sales probably due to lack of feedback to the potential buyers. Indeed, you should ensure that the actions are taken immediately once there are visitors to the websites. You may include your products and services catalogues in your websites or provide them with service survey form, in order to attract more new customers.

7. Lacking of Follow Up

Calling your potential buyers or mailing them a memo occasionally is required to generate sales. Some of them may provide you with their contact details and their problems if you have successful management strategy. You should fully utilise the modern technology such as phones, websites and emails to follow up and complete the sales.

8. Absent of Monitoring

You are at the right direction if your earning is more than your spending on the marketing strategies. Most of the small enterprisers unable to recognise which of their efforts aid to stimulate the sales successful. A more accurate budget can be achieved by keeping track on each of your promotion campaigns. You should determine your marketing strategies and resources available properly. The specialists can provide you with professional advice on strategy planning, patents, public relationship, and media selection.

You should analyse the income generated against cost spent on each of your promotion activities so that you can identify which of your efforts works. By avoiding these common marketing mistakes, you may notice that there are more enquiries about your products and services. Also, efficient marketing strategies can be achieved.

4 Simple Tips in Niche Marketing Success

Finding and exploiting an underused niche market is the most important factor in online marketing success. There are several things that you should look into once you have found these niche markets.

1. Collect e-mail address

Collecting email address is the key for your online business. It is not only allows you to sell to your niche prospects immediately, but you can sell them other products or services in this market over and over again.

2. Provide free newsletter

Provide an informative and quality article in the form of newsletter to the subscriber. It is preferable to have the article with the information around your niche but it can be also in other niche market. You do not need to worry about the contents with the topic that you are not familiar with, you can always get these articles from thousands of article directories in the web that allows you to republish them for free.

3. Provide free niche report

Once you have gathered a list of emails and now it is time to provide them a free niche report. The simplest way to do this is to compile a series of articles in the topic of the niche market and put them together into a niche report. Be sure to include affiliate links to the products within the same niche and also place a link pointing back to your own website. Do not add any restrictions for the report so that the subscriber is able to share it with others which they think the report is useful for them. With this, you are creating a very powerful viral marketing effect, and will drive a lot of traffic to your niche website and to your affiliate websites.

4. Create a product for sale within your niche market.

Create an eBook and discuss thoroughly on the niche that you are in, it can be with the question “how to” and end up with the absolute solution to the question. You can either create the eBook by yourself or you can hire a freelancer to create the eBook for you. Sale the eBook in your website with the best marketing methods that you have learned in the past.

The key is to create a mailing list, distribute lot of articles and reports, and finally create a product to sell in the niche market. It is not necessary to be an expert but what you just need is to find an easy product creation solution.

What a toll free number can do for your business

You can always complete a task with a thrifty way and it can save you a lot of money. But this is not a good strategy from a successful business point of view. For example, you can always have your inventories count to be presented in an excel report as opposed to SAP system which could save you few thousand dollars just for the license. But, is that worth to save if the improved impression of professionalism put forth in all of the accuracy of inventories that could earn you more money by getting more business?

If you have spent months or years developing a presentable ecommerce website to give prospects or customers the impression that your company is the best option for whatever product or service that you are trying to sell them, then you should have not dismiss all the professionalism that you have done by not getting a toll free number!

The fact is, the sight of a toll free number is something that subconsciously stirs an idea of professionalism – something we’re accustomed to from corporate America. Area codes are for calling your relatives and friends, after all. The phone prefix “800” or “877” or “888” for some reason, as if by magic, stirs in us the image of a phone operator in a tall skyscraper that deals with hundreds of clients a day – someone that doesn’t make their living off of ripping people off. The appearance of professionalism is the embodiment of confidence within the business world.

If there is no toll free number setup for your ecommerce business, you will realize that it will cost you more in the long run than the short term savings. Furthermore, toll free numbers are not as expensive as you think! In fact, there are some providers who are able to provide toll free numbers at as low as 2 cent/min.

However, toll free number is not the only available telecommunications service that is useful and beneficial to an ecommerce business. Conference calling, low long distance rates, broadband internet access, and so on are all examples of communication channels that can be obtained with more cost effective. By all means, register a toll free number today for your business and start beneficial from this great communication tool.

6 Ways to Overtake Your Competitors

overtakeThe best way to overtake your competitors is to buy whatever product or service that they are selling and try to evaluate them. You should enter the market, and discover the best options that you can identify.

How to find out what your competitor is selling

It might be persuasive by using the online search engine to find out the product or service available from a certain niche, but there are still plenty of businesses are running offline. You should pay more attention on traditional ways of advertising, such as the directories, newspaper adverts and even flyer.

Keep your competitors as reference

It is not necessary to do better than what your competitor is doing but you have to create something different. Never think to have the same performance if you are able to create the same or better thing as they do, remember, they have more experience than you and they know their product much better than you. Always think to improve from your original point so that the consumers who are looking for specific product will keep an eye on your product.

Price vs Quality

Some of the business tends to charge a premium price by providing a quality service and some of them might be charge for a must lower price but the service provided is extremely poor in quality. You can try to create a product or service that is slightly better in quality than what your competitor is providing and only charge half of the price, I am sure that the consumer will be alert about your product.

Provide the best service and win the game

Most of the consumers care about after sales service; if you are able to provide an excellent after sales service to them then you stand a very high chance to win the competition even though you are providing exactly the same product. This is especially if you are selling high technology product like computer software, provide a free installation rather than just selling the software alone, consumer will be happy.

Simplicity is the best

If you are the expert of your product and you know every single thing about it, but sometime you will find it difficult to explain it to the consumers. Say you are a paint seller for home use, you know the process to manufacture the paint and you know what raw material to use in order to make a good paint, but the end user will not want to know about this. You have to try to make things simple when it comes to explanation, think at the consumer stand point and make your explanation easy to understand for them.

Review the design

Try to amend the design, it can be from the size, color, function as so on. You should always look into the possibility to create a product that the customers will really appreciate.

Take these tips as reference and implement them wisely, you can expect your business to fly higher than your competitors.