Technology & Data Recovery

Whether you are marketing to Millennials, generation X or Y, marketing basics remain the same. The only difference is essentially the technique used to communicate your message.

Keep It Simple

A great formula for marketing success is M.O.A.T. The moat approach as I like to frame it stands for “message”, “offer”, “audience”, and “timing”. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, to be success in print, online, or in this Web 2.0 world, your marketing needs to be based on a deep understanding of your audience, the messages you disseminate, the timing of your messages and the offers you provide.

Be in tune with your Audience

In order to communicate effectively to the market you wish to reach, you need to know them – what are their likes and dislikes? What matters most to them? How can you reach them? What media do they use to get their information? and so on.

By knowing your audience, you can effectively craft messages that are meaningful and personalized. Instead of sending a traditional form letter, you can craft a message they gets your prospect to stand up and take notice, generate an emotional reaction, or simply create a response. Start with an understanding of your marketing and your messaging will take shape.

Also, knowing more about your audience can help you determine when they need to receive their messages from you. Is there an event that would be a great catalyst for a purchase decision? How about a certain time of year when they need your products or services above all else? Let the market be your guide and work with their timing, not yours.

And lastly, what about the offer? If your market resonates more to social causes, then offer to make a donation to their favorite charity instead of providing a meaningless coupon. Again, focus on offers that have meaning to the individuals you are trying to reach, not something you deem cute or eye catching.

Keep In Mind These Marketing Basics

Your marketing can be most effective, regardless of who you are targeting if your remember to follow these marketing basics:

Message. Speak the same language as your audience. Determine what matters most to them and communicate using the right language and media.

Offer. Generate offers that have meaning to the audience you are attempting to reach vs. a generic offer or contest that they may care very little about.

Audience. Walk in the shoes of your prospective customer. The more you understand them and their behaviors, the more success you will have in developing effective marketing campaigns.

Timing. Executing on your marketing campaign is only as effective as your timing. Make sure you communicate the right message to the right audience with an effective offer at the right time and results are sure to follow.

Once you develop a campaign, test, test, and continue to test. Similar messages may seem equal but consumers may respond differently. Let your audience be your guide and don’t forget to keep it simple.

Traffic exchanges are exactly what the name infers.  You are essentially exchanging traffic.  Here’s how they work.  You sign up for an account and “visit” other web sites.  Each time you view a web site or squeeze page, you earn credits.  These credits can be used for traffic.  After you earn a certain number of credits, your web pages are shown throughout the traffic exchange network.  Each time these pages are viewed by other members, you are charged a certain number of credits.

It may sound a bit confusing but actually it’s quite simple.  You browse web pages and other members browse yours.  The most productive way to utilize traffic exchanges is with the help of high converting squeeze pages.  If all you want to do is drive traffic, then you can easily set your web sites home page as your main display URL.  If on the other hand you are looking to build a list, develop powerful squeeze pages with an offer that encourages individuals to click through or sign up.

Over time you can generate a significant number of views for your web site or web page. Set your browsing page as your start page each time you open your browser.  This takes less than a few seconds to set up and can generate additional credits for you.  Most exchanges, including Traffic Swarm provide benefits for specific actions like loading your start page.

Premium versions are also available on traffic exchanges, allowing you to earn credits even faster.  Once you’ve begun using traffic exchanges, and see the type of traffic they are delivering, consider premium options.  The quality of traffic you receive can vary greatly from exchange to exchange so make sure you’re tracking properly and focus not just on traffic but on conversions are well.

There are tons of additional tools to help generate traffic to your web site at little or no cost.  I’ll cover additional tactics in the future but suggest that you start using traffic exchanges today to get visitors to your website.

So here a couple of things you can do to make sure that you have the ‘right’ marketing materials, and secondly making sure that it reaches the right people.

Getting Your Marketing Materials Right

1. What action do you want the reader to take, as a result of reading your brochure/flyer/web-page/email/sales letter? The job of your marketing material is to motivate the reader to take action, so first of all, you need to be really clear on what you want to accomplish. Try to accomplish too many things simultaneously, and you will fail.

2. Does your marketing material inform or persuade? Many people think all they need to do is print up some information about themselves and the services they offer and then wait for the telephone to start ringing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that! I think of marketing literature as a ‘sales person in print’. In other words, it needs to do all the things a real live sales person would do: get rapport with the reader, engage in a dialogue about their needs, understand their problems, recommend a solution, overcome objections and close.

Take a long hard look at your marketing material, does it do all of these things? If not, then you need to change it. Even if the action you want the reader to take is ‘phone for a consultation’, you need to include all of the above steps. When you have done the above, then you need to make sure that your marketing material gets read by the right people.

Getting Your Marketing Material Read By The Right People

As I said above, I don’t recommend randomly distributing flyers, because you have no way of measuring their effectiveness. You can’t tell who saw your brochure and who didn’t. You have no idea who was tempted and who was put off. So for this reason, I favor a ‘multi-step’ approach which focuses on getting your target audience to ‘raise their hands’ first, then you send your brochure and now at least you have some way of measuring the effectiveness of your brochure. The number of sales divided by the number of brochures you sent out equals your conversion rate! So this is where you need to get creative.

Start to brainstorm lists of places where your target audience is likely to congregate. Will you find them online, offline or both? Are they members of clubs or associations? After you have identified a few places, you need to give them a reason to ‘raise their hands’. I like to offer an ‘Ethical Bribe’ such as a free report, e-course or teleseminar. When people raise their hands, then you can send them your material (by post or email) and gauge the response. The point I want to make for now is that you need to take steps to make sure your marketing and sales materials are being seen by the right people.

It doesn’t stop there… So, now can you sit back and wait for the phone to ring? If you have followed the above advice, you can certainly expect some response, but the thing you now need to do is measure the effectiveness and see what you can do to increase conversion rates. This is the fun part of marketing, as you can start to see what small changes can bring huge results. But my overriding message for you is this: just changing your sales literature – whether it is a brochure or a web page – without paying attention to who is looking at it, is just a stab in the dark.

Post provided by Bernadette Doyle who publishes her weekly Client Magnets newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, then sign up for her weekly e-zine now at http://www.clientmagnets.com

In order to have testimonials work for you and increase your client base, you must be careful how you phrase them. Testimonials are a marketing effort, which means that they need to be geared toward making your company look spectacular. For example, instead of writing “I love their vitamins”, write “Taking these vitamins everyday gives me lots of energy and keeps me feeling great all day long.” The latter testimonial is a lot more eye-catching and will be more effective in gaining a customer’s confidence than the former. Ask customers who are willing to write testimonials to be specific.

Cherry Pick Your Testimonials

If you don’t have any testimonials, check your company’s email inbox for customers who sent compliments. If you can’t find any ones you like, look at your client list and find out who is buying your products and at what frequency. Call or email a handful of your best customers and ask them to write a specific testimonial. Have them send a picture as well. This will give potential customers further reassurance of the validity of the testimonial.

Testimonials will not only improve your business, but will also improve your company’s image as one that values customer satisfaction. So make the effort to get some strong testimonials.

1. Once you have the testimonials, you need to figure out where to put them on your site. Placement is key, particularly when using flash. You want your testimonials to give maximum impact. The most common place on a website is for them to have their own navigation button titled either “Testimonials” or “Rave Reviews”. This way more testimonials can be viewed on their own page.

2. Another option is to use flash testimonials on a sidebar on the homepage along with the customer’s name, job title and company or logo. If you are using the testimonials in the masthead, they should rotate every 7-10 seconds then stop after all testimonials are shown. You don’t want a testimonial to be so distracting that it takes the emphasis off of the content and what you are selling or offering. By having the flash cycle stop, you are allowing viewers to see the testimonials and then freely look at the content without the excess flash.

3. An alternative way to present testimonials is to sprinkle them throughout the site, highlighting them within the content using graphics, such as a color block background, upper and lower bar, etc. These visual stops are equally effective in reinforcing your credibility and can act as an additional selling point for specific products or services.

4. If you have the option for audio or video testimonials, this can be very effective in boosting your company’s credibility. Audio is easy to record using Audio Acrobat. Video, on the other hand, requires more thought to positioning and angles. If you are at a trade show or with a client, you may want to pre-plan these testimonials for more impact.

Remember that in order for a testimonial to be effective, it needs to be specific, believable and placed in a credible location. With these three tips in mind, your testimonials will build customer confidence and web success.

This post provided by the Web Success Team. Contact the Team today and we’ll show you how to beef up your online marketing efforts make your website capture more buyers and generate more income for your products and services. http://www.websuccessteam.com