Charlie Cook's MArketing for Success Insider's Club

Small Business Marketing

Will It Cost More To Attract A Flood of New Clients To My Business With My Marketing?

By Charlie Cook   |   November 23, 2005

This is one small business marketing question that always suprises me because I think the answer is so obvious but, well, obviously its not.

Imagine you lived in Houston and wanted to travel to New York. If you take the wrong road, one headed, let’s say, towards Las Vegas, you’re not going to make it to New York, no matter how hard you try.

If you’re on the wrong road with your marketing its not going to all of a sudden get you where you want to go. It’s just going to keep taking you further away from your destination, costing you in time and money.

Just like most men don’t like asking for directions when they are lost, most people resist getting advice from a marketing expert. They want to keep doing it on their own in hopes of a miracle. Are you waiting for a marketing miracle?

If you’re marketing isn’t getting where you want to go, wouldn’t you agree that the smartest thing to do is to stop what you are doing and get advice from someone knows the answers and who can point you in the right direction? Makes sense doesn’t it?

When you know how to market yourself and your business, you’ll actually spend the same or less time and money on marketing. The big difference is that you’ll see results from your efforts. Instead of generating one or two leads you’ll generate ten, twenty or a hundred and you’ll convert more of these into sales and cash you can put in the bank.

Want to spend less and make more? You can! Use this link to discover the secrets to small business marketing that attracts clients and helps you grow your business.
– Charlie Cook

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Small Business Marketing Tricks and Treats to Use All Year Long…

By Charlie Cook   |   October 27, 2005

If marketing your business has you spooked, discover how a Halloween marketing strategy can pull in all the business clients you want.

If you live in the U.S., at the end of October you’ll be preparing for a stream of young children to come to your door on Halloween. One by one or in groups of friends, they’ll ring the bell and shout, “Trick or Treat”.

To avoid having them actually play a trick on us, you bribe these youngsters with a selection of mini candy bars. You could offer them healthy treats like apples or small boxes of raisins or you could try something novel like telling them a favorite joke, but most young children are on a mission. They want to fill their plastic pumpkins and pillowcases with candy as quickly as possible.

You may not be a fan of sugar-based diets, but if you enjoy seeing all those undersized fairy godmothers and ghosts and goblins on Halloween, you’ll indulge them and dole out one candy bar after another. Your costumed customers know what they want. If they don’t get it from you, they’ll go next door.

This Halloween strategy can also help you grow your business. Want to get a steady stream of customers coming to your door? Want to avoid having potential clients go next door? Offer them a free treat! It works to get children ringing doorbells and talking to adults whom they barely know, and it will work for your business.

What kind of treats will bring in your prospects? Probably not Snickers Bars or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, delicious as these are. The answer depends on what you sell and what your prospects’ want. For example, if your prospects want to:

– Improve their finances – offer them a free guide or a workshop on ways to make more and save more money.

– Sell their home – give them a guide to maximizing their profits.

– Increase their physical mobility and avoid pain – give them tips on ways to improve their posture and strength.

– Get better results with their advertising – give them a guide to writing ads that get a better response.

If you know what your prospects want, you can pull them in like kids at Halloween with the right treat, free report or workshop. Using this strategy on the Internet, you can attract hundreds of qualified prospects each month to your business.

Over twenty thousand people currently subscribe to my weekly marketing newsletter. Each of them signed up in response to my offer of a free marketing guide. And this free marketing guide continues to attract over a thousand new subscribers each month.

Marketing Tricks to Avoid
Some companies think that tricking people into trying their services or products is a clever way to attract customers. phone companies and credit card companies offer low introductory rates that are subject to steep increases a few months later. Some small businesses make wild promises that their services and products don’t live up to.

No one likes to have tricks played on him or her at Halloween or any other time. Strong sales depend on trust. Violate trust and good will with marketing gimmickry, and you’ve lost your prospect for good – and probably several of the friends they tell about you as well.

Marketing Treats to Use
Offer prospects a treat to get them to contact you, to stay in touch, to visit your showroom and to thank them for making a purchase. Not sure what to give away to prompt prospects to contact you and visit your store?

In the 1930s, Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota built a reputation and their business by giving away a glass of ice water. Before cars were air-conditioned, the promise of a cold glass of water was enough to pull a steady stream of hot and thirsty travelers off the highway and into the store.

Today people are hungry for information and ideas that will solve their daily problems and simplify their lives. A Stamford, Connecticut financial firm used a series of f.ree workshops for wealthy investors to pull in prospects and quickly added mill0ns under management.

Make your free offer something your prospects won’t want to turn down, whether its a report, article, workshop, or educational CD. It doesn’t have to be big but it does need to target the interests of your market and be related to your products and services.

With the right freebie, you’ll attract prospects by the thousands and see your sales skyrocket.
–
Speaking of freebies, don’t forget to sign-up for the free small business marketing guide with this link.
– Charlie Cook

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Are Small Business Owners Just In It For The Money?

By Charlie Cook   |   September 27, 2005

Apparently not! Based on a recent gallup study, 47% would continue working even if they won $10 million in the lottery.

So if its not money which motivates small business owners to market their businesses, what is it?

Is your primary interest in helping others?
Is it beating the competition, playing the game?

What motivates you to succeed in business and then once you’ve made your first million or ten million, to keep on growing your business?

Pitch in with your answers.

– Charlie Cook

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What’s the Fastest Way to Build Your Small Business?

By Charlie Cook   |   September 13, 2005

If you want to grow your business quickly there is one thing you’ll need in abundance, more prospects. Sounds obvious but few small businesses have a reliable or cost effective system for generating a steady stream of leads and clients.

Here’s the fundamental small business equation. More prospects, more people who know what you offer and how you can help them, equals more business profits.

Each month you want to contact more qualified prospects than you did last month. Do this and I guarantee you’ll have more clients and more income.

How can you get started? Use the lead generation tools available on this site to start building your database of qualified prospects and converting them to clients.
– Charlie Cook

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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

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More On Personalizing Your Small Business Marketing

By Charlie Cook   |   August 9, 2005

Here is the link to the Not Work part of my web site. The part that prospects love to view and actually ends up selling my marketing manuals even though it’s just includes photos of my “not work” activities. See what sells.
– Charlie Cook

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Personalized Selling Works

By Charlie Cook   |   August 5, 2005

Periodically I post pictures of myself on vacation, kayaking, skiing, or hanging out in Tortolla. These add a nice touch but the interesting thing is that they also help sell product.

When I include a link to these pictures in my newsletter, I get hundreds of people clicking on them to see what I’ve been up to. When I put these pictures on a page that has links to my marketing manuals, the people clicking through to see me having fun in the sun, buy my manuals.

They buy my – 15 Second Marketing Guide and discover the fastest way to increase their sales.

They buy my – Small Business Marketing Manual and double the number of clients.

They buy my – Creating Web Sites that Sell and turn their web sites into incredible profit producing centers.

Personalize your marketing to increase your sales. It works.
– Charlie Cook

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How Much Time Do You Have To Get Your Marketing Message Across?

By Charlie Cook   |   August 1, 2005

This weekend my wife and I took a trip to Maine to visit various relatives and do some kayaking. On the way up and down I tried to see what I could learn from billboards.

Why do I care about billboards, which I consider a blight on the landscape?

If you have or are planning a web site you should look at billboards too while you drive by at 60+ miles an hour. Ask yourself:

How much of them can you actually read?
Of the few words you can read do you understand the message?
Can you remember the billboard’s message ten miles down the road?

The way you read billboards is the same way people read your web site. Ask yourself:

If people read your web site in the same amount of time it takes for you to pass a billboard, (2-3 seconds) do they understand what you do and how you can help them? If not then it’s time to rethink your marketing message.
– Charlie Cook

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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

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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

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