Marketing Strategy

Blog » Marketing Strategy

Marketing Strategy

Are Your Small Business and Online Goals The Right Ones?

By Charlie Cook | May 1, 2007

“Last year I made $170,000 with my Internet business, working on it part time. I want to make more this year and U have a ton of ideas for products and services, but I every time I think about working on them I lose interest. What can I do to regain my focus and make more online?”
– Chris

Chris is one of my clients, and when I asked him what his personal goals were, he hesitated and the admitted he didn’t really know. He knew he wanted to make more money so he could confidently quit his day job, but didn’t have a clear vision of where his business was headed.

Without a doubt Chris has been reasonably successful but he’s only tapping part of his potential as an entrepreneur, and he knows it. With his ideas and talents, he could be making $750,000 or more, but he’s stuck. What does he need to do be outrageously successful?

No matter how brilliant you are, no matter how successful you’ve been, without a vision of what you want to do with your business and without defined goals to achieve that vision, I can guarantee you’ll wander.

If you’re not making money or not making as much as you’d like to be, the solution could be as simple as clarifying your vision and rethinking your goals.

Say you really wanted to go on a vacation but had no idea when, where or with whom. Chances are that you’d end up just taking a few days off and staying home or hitting the local golf course for a few rounds. Okay, but not great.

Now, imagine you wanted to take the ultimate vacation with a friend or your spouse. You’d make a list of places you want to go, what you’d like to do and see, and the level of luxury you’d like to enjoy. You’d create a vision of your trip.

Then you’d start to make plans, setting dates and making reservations. Of course, this trip would cost much more than a few rounds of golf, so you’d start figuring out how you could make enough money to afford it.

My wife and I have been talking about taking a trip to Bhutan for years. But it’s a vague wish rather than a clear vision; we’ve never figured out when we’d go or what we’d do. At this rate, we’ll never get there.

Having a vision of what you want to do with your business is the starting point. If you just want to make more money, there are hundreds of ways to do it. You have to know where to focus.

Are you thinking of adding a few more clients, or are you planning to be the top investment advisor (or whatever) in your state? Do you market online?

Are you wondering how to add an additional revenue stream, or are you could be planning to develop five new niche info products, each making you over $250,000 a year? Do you see your business becoming the dominant player in your industry or in your town? What do want your role to be?

Want to know the fastest way to grow your business? Set your goals and then discover how to reach them.

Several years ago I set myself the goal of making my business not only more profitable, but portable, so I could run it from any place that had broadband Internet access. This past December my wife asked me how many days of skiing I wanted to do that winter. I actually hadn’t pinned down a number until that point, but I told her that getting in 30 days on the slopes would be awesome.

When the snow finally started finally falling in late January, my business was set up so I could work from our condo in Vermont. I’m happy to say I reached my goal of 30 days of skiing, and continued to grow my business.

What is your vision of success?

What do you want to accomplish this year? In three years? In five years?

What are your top three goals for this month?

Like my client Chris, articulating a vision for your business will focus your thinking. Then it will be easier to set specific goals and make plans to achieve them. Keep track of your progress, regularly update your vision and your goals, and you, too, can become outrageously successful.

– Charlie
Small Business Marketing That Gets Results

How Much To Give Away with Your Small Business Marketing…

By Charlie Cook | September 22, 2006

“What advice you can offer for my 31 yr old musician/artist son who is designing a very artsy website that hopefully will flourish into a great enterprise for film/video/music/store. He thinks he should give his first album away for free!! He is trying to generate a following but . . is this the way to do his small business marketing.” – Bettye

Giving content and items away for free is a great way to generate interest and demonstrate your expertise whether you’re a musician or a consultant. The more you giveaway for free, the more people will buy. Of course you don’t want to give away your primary source of income, the product or services that bring in the revenue. If you give everything away for free, no one will buy anything.

So how much should you, or in this case your son, give away for free to promote his new business?

I like Amazon.com’s marketing strategy. Let people listen to 30 seconds or so of a song, for free from their site, just enough to make you want to hear the whole song. In your son’s case giving away 1-2 songs for someone who is unknown and getting them circulating is a good idea, giving away his whole album is probably a mistake.

Want some more ideas on how to build trust and build your business? Read this article on to improve your small business marketing
– Charlie Cook
Small Business Marketing That Works

How to Market to Women – Suprise, It Turns Out Seduction Isn’t…

By Charlie Cook | July 17, 2006

I had to chuckle this weekend when I read the story in the New York Times titled, “What Women Want”. After years of trying to sell women’s underwear using seduction as the primary marketing tool, big businesses like Sare Lee Branded apparel which owns Playtex, Bali and Hanes has decided to change its marketing strategy.

These corporate giants are testing a new marketing technique. Instead of focusing on super models they’re taking a lesson from the small business marketing approach that smaller companies like Title Nine have been using for years.

Instead of trying to get women to buy underwear based on its seductive appeal, these companies are shfiting their focus to the tangible benefits of their products, comfort, breathablity, flattering fabrics, etc. Instead of selling based on getting women to buy into an unattainable super model image, these companies are starting to sell the products based on their actual benefits.

For years I’ve been helping businesses grow by getting them to stop copying the failed marketing strategies of big business and get them to focus instead on how they help their clients, an approach that has been proven to work over and over. Now even big business is catching on.

To get the details of this proven marketing strategy use this link >>

Best,

Charlie Cook
Helping you grow with marketing strategies that work

What’s the Single Most Powerful Small Business Marketing Idea?

By Charlie Cook | June 7, 2006

Want to know one of the most effective ways to generate sales? Use this small business marketing strategy!

Last week I needed to get a signature notarized so I walked over from my office to my bank. Most banks will notarize customers signatures at no cost. I walked in to find only one of the three bank representatives at their desks and she wasn’t a notary public. Her suggestion was to drive to another branch in the next town.

Is this a good way to market a business? Of course not.

What was my local small town bank has been bought and sold many times in the last few years and is now owned by a large corporation that is focused on increasing profits by cutting staff. They market to small businesses but they don’t back it up with service.

My response was to walk across the street to Wachovia, the competing bank in town. I asked about getting my document notarized and even though I’m not a customer, they instantly agreed and pointed out they had four employees currently in the bank who were notary publics.

When I left I started to wonder where I should be doing my banking – with a bank that is cutting back on service or with one that welcomes people and provides simple services like notarizing documents for free.

Giving away a service or information for free is one of the most powerful small business marketing strategies on the planet. Each time you use this marketing strategy you attract business and build loyalty moving prospects that much closer to becoming customers.

Want more clients and people buying your products? Use this simple – give to get – small business marketing strategy to get more prospects and more business.

Discover which small business marketing strategies work to attract clients with this link >>

– Charlie Cook
Helping you with small business marketing ideas that get results

How to Evaluate Your Small Business Marketing

By Charlie Cook | September 4, 2005

What’s the first thing you look at to tell if your small business marketing is working?

You look at the response you are getting. Each ad, letter, call or web site you have is the equivalent of a marketing action. And each time you put time and money into one of these you want to get a huge response? When you put an ad in the newspaper you want the phone to start ringing of the hook with prospects. Is that what usually happens?

If you’re not getting the response you want from your small business marketing, the first thing to realize is that the problem is not your advertising, sales letters, cold calling or your the internet. These are just the delivery vehicles for your marketing message and marketing information.

Typically a low response is directly correlated with how you talk about your products and services. If you’re not getting a ton of calls from your marketing, the problem is your marketing message and your marketing information.

While advertising and promoting your business can cost a lot, changing your marketing message and rewriting your marketing copy is relatively inexpensive. Want to grow your business? Test out new ways or talking about what you do. With the right marketing message, you’ll see your small business soar.
– Charlie Cook

How Do You Know When To Change Your Small Business Marketing Strategy …

By Charlie Cook | August 14, 2005

Are you having the same problem with your marketing my Dad has with his favorite skiff? Read the article below to find out. And, yes the story about my Dad isn’t just funny, its true.

How Do You Know When To Change Your Marketing

When you put an ad in a magazine, send out a sales letter, or put up a web site, you want results. You want your prospects to contact you and to buy from you; you hope to get a flood of calls and sales.

If your marketing isn’t generating the results you want, then it’s time to change your marketing strategy! Don’t expect to improve your results using the same strategy.

Here’s an example. A search engine positioning firm I work with was having trouble generating leads. Yes, in spite of their superior ability to put their site at the top of the search engine listings and do the same for their clients, they were hardly converting any of their site visitors into leads and then clients. They were getting well over a thousand visitors a week to their site and generating at best a single inquiry per week.

Think about this for a minute. Most people assume that getting your web site to the top of the search engine listings will solve all their web marketing problems. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how many visitors you get to your web site (or how many sales letters you send or ads you place,) if you aren’t generating leads and converting them to sales.

Find out how to change your small business marketing so that your ads, your sales letters and your web site get a huge response. Use this link to discover a proven marketing strategy for generating a steady stream of sales.

The search engine positioning firm I was working with has many satisfied national clients, are highly skilled and great people to work with, but their marketing strategy was broken. Their website looked very similar to their competitors’ sites. In fact, with a lot of information about what they do and who they are, it read like a blend of the information found on websites of other firms who offer similar services.

Many small business owners look at their competitors’ marketing materials and cobble together the information for their own pieces based on what they see. The problem with this approach is that they are copying a strategy that isn’t working for someone else. Once they publish their materials, someone else copies the same stuff and tries to make it work. Know anyone who has done this?

Nine times out of ten, marketing materials put together in this way lead with the company name and then list services or features. I can guarantee that if you are using this approach to marketing your business, you’re not happy. This marketing strategy doesn’t work.

Discover a business marketing strategy that can help you attract more prospects, generate more leads, and increase your sales. Use this link to find out how to generate more leads and grow your business.
Is your marketing working? Ask yourself the following questions:
– How many leads did my web site generate relative to the number of visitors it gets?

– How many leads did my ad generate relative to the cost and number of people who saw it?

– How many leads did my sales letter generate relative to the number of letters I sent out?

Then ask yourself:
– Given the number of leads generated, how many did I convert into sales?

– What was the dollar volume of sales generated from each lead?

It’s not a matter of time, either. If your marketing materials aren’t pulling in clients within a few days, they’re not going to do any better if you keep running them for months.

This client had the same problem with his small businesss marketing strategy that my Dad has with his boat; he just couldn’t let go. After years of being dragged up and down a rocky beach, my Dad’s aluminum skiff has lost many of the rivets in the bottom.

Put it in the water and throttle up the outboard, and fine sprays of water push up through the small rivet holes as you pick up speed. Everyone in the boat gets an upside down shower. Wherever you’re going, you arrive damp.

Every year, the family tries to get Dad to replace his skiff, but he’s had it so long he can’t bring himself to part with it, even though its not doing the basic job of keeping water out.

Is your marketing like my Dad’s boat? You’ve used it for years but it’s not generating enough new business. If so, then it’s time for a change. It’s time to use a marketing strategy that puts you on top. Use this link to discover a proven and reliable system for attracting clients and increasing your sales.
– Charlie Cook

To Succeed With Small Business Web Site Marketing – Think Big

By Charlie Cook | August 10, 2005

My current site, www.marketingforsuccess.com, has become one of the top sites on the web. How did this happen?

Each week for the last two years, I’ve written an article a week and more recently added a couple of blog entries. Page by page the site and the resources it provides has grown until it now is big in content.

Want your small business site to be big in profits. Start thinking big in terms of content. Add a page to your site each day and soon the search engines and your target market will be seeking you out.

– Charlie Cook – Helping you get a better response and more clients with your marketing

Why You Should Make Marketing Mistakes

By Charlie Cook | August 1, 2005

The smarter you are the more you know what you don’t know. That being said, as a marketing expert, I know that no matter how good I am at coming up with the perfect marketing copy or marketing message that I’ll never really know whether its the best unless I test it.

To find what works the best I put up a bunch of ideas. Some work and some don’t. To discover the best I know I need to make a few mistakes.

Using Google Ads, I test similar marketing messages and usually find one that pulls much better than the others. Or I’ll find two or three that work equally well and two others that are out and out losers. I never know until I test them.

Did you test your marketing message?

If not you could be generating 4 times the response with a better marketing message. Discover how 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 Way to Expand My Small Business Marketing Locally?

By Charlie Cook | June 22, 2005

“Up until now I have used my business website as a way for referred customers to view my work. I would like to expand my client base by marketing to people in my surrounding area for commissioned work. What’s the best way to do this?” – Kathy Swantee

Currently your web site features your artwork but does little to explain the problem you help prospects solve or why prospects should contact you. You need to start by adding some marketing copy to your web site that details why people might be interested in working with you, taking your classes and how you can help them. You also need to give them a reason to contact you. You might offer some free postcard samples of your work in return for people within your surrounding area filling in a request for a more information about a commissioned work.

Once you have your business web site set up to explain what can do for your prospects take this same marketing copy and put together a one page business marketing handout/ mailer. Then take an edited version of it and create a postcard to use in marketing your business. Of course if you want help with putting together your marketing information let me know.

Call each past client, let them know you are seeking referrals and that you’ll be sending them some information sheets to share with their friends. Then send them the information. Want to discover how to put your referral strategy into gear? I’ve detailed the whole process in The 5 Principles of Highly Effective Marketing for small business .

Do the above and you’ll have a low cost small business marketing strategy which will bring in all the clients you want.
– Charlie Cook

« Previous Posts

Newer Posts »