- Part 60

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What to Advertise to Generate Large Sales From Your Small Business Marketing

By Charlie Cook | July 26, 2005

Want to know what to put in your ads to pull in prospects like a magnet?

Think like your prospects. What is important to them?

Do they want to know your company name? (Eventually but that’s not their biggest concern.)

Do they want to know how many years you’ve been in business? (Maybe but its not high on their list.)

What they want to know is how you can help them. Use the limited space in your ads to get to the point, to tell them how you can help them and how they can get what they want.

Do this and you’ll see your sales go through the roof as one of my clients did when he changed his ad. His biggest complaint now is how to handle all the business he’s getting.
– Charlie Cook
Discover what can happen when you have an ad that pulls in prospects and sales

How to Select the Best Keywords for the Search Engines

By Charlie Cook | July 25, 2005

Now there is an alternative to using Overture’s keyword suggestion tool.

Keyword Discovery provides you with a list of the most frequent uses of the various uses of your keywords. – Charlie Cook

What’s the Shelf Life of Your Small Business Marketing?

By Charlie Cook | July 24, 2005

Your marketing information is perishable like a loaf of bread. Leave it on the shelf for longer than 7-10 days and its stale as far as the majority of your prospects are concerned.

I was talking with David, a client from Arizona who owns four physical therapy clinics in the Tucson area. I asked him how business has been since we talked two weeks ago. He said three of his clinics were booked solid but the fourth was suffering from a lack of clients.

When I asked him what he thought was the problem, he acknowledged that his sales representatives for that clinic hadn’t been in touch recently with the doctors who refer patients to them. In contrast, the pharmaceutical companies have three reps assigned to visit each of the same doctors’ offices every week.

Even though doctors in the area had used David’s firm’s services in the past, and their patients have a continuing need for these services, without recent contact the doctors had started referring their patients elsewhere.

As David had quickly learned, just because someone knows about your services doesn’t mean they will remember you when they are ready to make a referral or a purchase, even if they were a satisfied customer.

According to a study by e-consultancy.com prospects cool quickly, at an estimated rate of 10% per day. In other words the shelf life of your marketing on average is about the same as a loaf of bread, 7-10 days. Click here to read the rest of this article …

Where To Put Your Marketing Message?

By Charlie Cook | July 19, 2005

One client wrote to tell me,

“We have placed the marketing message you wrote for us on the back of our envelopes not knowing what would happen. Well, I have a complaint to make. You forgot to warn us!! The phone calls have increased leading to even more sales. We must and will blame you for our increase in sales”.

Once you have a marketing message that you’ve tested and you know pulls in prospects, use it everywhere, on your business card, in your ads and on the back of your envelopes.

Discover how to write a marketing message that helps you increase your sales with,The 15 Second Marketing Guide
. – Charlie Cook

Why I’m No Longer an Advertising Skeptic …

By Charlie Cook | July 14, 2005

Ever run an ad or a send out a mailing and get hardly any response? I get calls daily from people who believe advertising can help their business generate leads and sales. What happens when they spend money on advertising? Too often, a whole lot of nothing.

Is advertising a waste of money?

I’m a skeptic about most things so when clients ask me to write ads for them I always wonder, will it work? I don’t want to embarrass myself by charging big money to write them an ad and then have it flop. So last month when a client called and wanted me to write a 35 word newspaper ad for their property management business, I was skeptical. Their current ad wasn’t generating a single response and I wasn’t sure if their target market was paying any attention.

I’d never written a marketing piece for a residential property management firm and didn’t want to embarrass myself. I bit the bullet and wrote the best 35 words I could come up with.

Did it work?

The only way to know whether an ad is any good, is to test it or at a minimum quantify the results. Three weeks after the ad began running in a couple of local papers I called my client for the good or bad news. I hadn’t heard a word from him since I’d delivered the ad copy so I was curious and concerned.

What news did my client have about the ad’s performance. In the first three weeks it had brought in a flood of inquiries resulting in nine new clients and $180,000 of additional revenue for the year. He been so busy handling the new business he hadn’t had a chance to call.

Now with those type of results its hard to be a skeptic about advertising!

What’s the Best Day of the Week to Market My Business?

By Charlie Cook | July 8, 2005

“I want to pick one evening a week to devote to telemarketing for my home improvement business. Without making hundreds of calls on each night how can I find out which is the best night to devote to making marketing calls?” – Steve C.

It’s true you’ll get a highly variable response to your marketing depending on the day of the week and the product or service you are marketing. Few people are looking for small business marketing solutions on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Of course, the opposite may be true for your home improvement business.

The best time to market your business is, …

when your prospects are searching for the solution you provide.

How can you find out when this is? As you indicated, making hundreds of calls would be costly. Instead you can put up a Google AdWords ad and track the number of page views and click-throughs you get. I show you how to do this in Creating Web Sites that Sell. Use the page view and click-through statistics to determine the best day of the week to devote to making your marketing calls. When you market on the days of the week people are looking for a solution, you’ll generate more leads and more business.- Charlie Cook

What Are the 4 Most Common Web Site Marketing Mistakes?

By Charlie Cook | July 6, 2005

When a prospect visits your web site you have 3-5 seconds at most to get their attention. What are the most common reasons web sites fail to do this?

1. Barriers to viewing. I love movies, colorful logos and pictures as much as the next person but its information that your prospects want. Research shows 80% of people find Flash movies annoying and will just go elsewhere instead of waiting it out. Other design elements may not be as much of a hurdle to your readers, but you’ve only got a couple of seconds to help your prospects understand why they should view your site. Make the most of it to focus their attention where you want it.

2. The over use of your company name, logo and generic taglines. The object of your site is to get the attention of prospects who don’t already know and trust you, people whose biggest concern is if and how you can help them. Give them a headline which explains what you do and why they shoud contact you.

3. Marketing copy written by your webmaster or the people on your staff who developed the products and services. Webmasters are expert programmers but in most cases writing compelling marketing copy is not one of their skill sets. If you had the people who developed your company’s products and services write your marketing copy, you may have found someone who can write in easy to read English but my experience is they don’t write for the people you want to attract. As a company insider it is hard to realize how little your prospects know and most company authored marketing materials tend to bury the content that should be in the foreground for your prospects.

4. The absence of enough reasons to act. If you want your prospects to read your copy, to trust you, to call you or order from you they need reasons to do so. Don’t assume your prospects will figure out that by calling you they’ll learn more. Tell them how they will benefit from each action you want them to take.

Discover how to avoid these common web marketing mistakes and instead use your web site to increase sales with Creating Web Sites that Sell or if you’re too busy to learn another skill set ask Charlie to show you how to write and structure your web site or have him write the copy for you so you can focus on processing more sales.
– Charlie Cook

Lead Generation and Conversion Rate Benchmarks for Web Site Marketing

By Charlie Cook | June 28, 2005

In this week’s More Business Marketing Newsletter I explained how to measure your web site’s performance by evaluating your conversion rate. In addition I added a web site conversion calculator for you to use to calculate the numbers you need to assess your site’s performance.

Now that you have your conversion rates for your site, what are the norms? How well could you be doing? What are the industry benchmarks? Remember these represent the average of companies doing it right and wrong. They are a baseline and you should be able to do even better.

According to information from Fireclick’s Web analytics and e-consultancy, average conversion rates are:

Lead Generation
2-3% of visitors sign up for a free registration process
10-12% of visitors sign up when the benefits are promoted
50% of visitors sign up when incentives are used

Conversion of Free Subscribers to Paid Subscribers
1-7% will convert

Conversion of Browsers to Buyers
.5 – 8% depending on your target market, what you’re selling, your site and how you phrase your offer.

How do your numbers compare?
Are you above or below the industry averages?
More importanly what can you do to improve your conversion rates?

The easiest way to lift your conversion rates is to clarify the marketing copy you use on your site, and your page design. In a word, simplify.

Want help increasing your web site conversion rates? Find out how with Creating Web Sites that Sell or contact Charlie to get help from a web marketing expert.
– Charlie Cook

Do You Know What Your Prospects Are Thinking?

By Charlie Cook | June 24, 2005

When a prospect visits your business web site or reads your marketing materials, what are they thinking? Are they true believers in your products and services or are they ..

.. skeptics?

Unless they have bought from you before or were referred by someone they know and trust they are viewing your information with a healthy degree of skeptisim and they’re thinking –

“I don’t know who this small business is.”
“I don’t know what they do.”
“I don’t know how they can help me.”
“I don’t know if they are credible and can actually deliver on what they say they do.”
“I don’t know their customers.”

Your prospects are asking themselves –

“Why should I read this page?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Why should I give this small business my money?”
“Do they give me any reason to contact them?”
“Is there a compelling reason I should pull out my credit card and buy from them and not just keep looking for another place to get what I want?”

Does your marketing give your prospects the answers?
Does it give them a reason to contact you and buy from you?

If your marketing doesn’t answer your prospects’ questions you’re wasting your time on your advertising, web site and marketing materials and you won’t earn the return on your marketing investment that you’d like to and you won’t be able to grow your business.

Want to find out how to make your small business marketing work for you, instead of against you? You can with the marketing manuals on this site and my marketing services.
– Charlie Cook

How Do Prospects Read Your Ads?

By Charlie Cook | June 24, 2005

Want to see what your prospects see when they scan your ad or your web site’s homepage in 3-5 seconds in order to determine whether they are going to read the rest of it?

Before you launch an ad campaign pin your ad to the wall and step back, fifteen feet or so until you can barely read the words in the largest type. In the case of your web site moving back seven feet from your screen should suffice.

Which words do you see?

Do you see copy that appeals to what your prospect is looking for?

If you look at most small business web sites or ads, you’ll see the company name as the easiest to read item and then a phrase like “our top three priorities” or “we’re a …. company based in …”.

Most companies lose their prospects in the first 3-5 seconds with their ads and their web sites. Don’t make this small business marketing mistake!

Use your marketing copy, your headline and the words that appear below it to grab your prospect’s attention, get them to understand why they need your products and services and to contact you. Find out how to write a marketing message that gets results or use a business marketing expert to write your marketing copy for you so that your ads and your web site do what you want them to, help you grow your business.

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