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Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Getting Found

Getting Found 1As a certified Guerrilla Marketing Coach I’m always on the lookout for low cost, high impact marketing methods suitable for small business. In fact, part of the materials we supply to our Guerilla Marketing students includes a list of 129 marketing “weapons” to consider adding to their marketing plan. We will be adding number 130 for our upcoming session and recommending it to our coaching clients.

One of the most recent social media marketing opportunities, Google+ has sparked considerable controversy for seemingly receiving priority in Google searches. For an in depth discussion of this topic, you may want to check out Danny Sullivan’s article on the Search Engine Land website at: http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-drive-facebook-twitter-crazy-107554

Pros and cons of the controversy aside, as a marketer, any tactic that gives you more visibility than your competition is worth trying! Let’s face it, it’s free, takes a relatively small time investment to set up and post to, and could provide a competitive advantage – what’s not to like!

For good or evil, Google+ is a marketing weapon small business owners should consider.

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The Power of a Marketing Plan

the_power_of_a_marketing_plan_1I recently taught a Guerrilla Marketing Jumpstart Class in Duvall, WA.  The Duvall Chamber of Commerce is committed to the success of the businesses in Duvall and put the class together and brought me in to teach it.

 

The attendees of the class all left with a marketing plan and calendar.  The Guerrilla Marketing plan is less than one page.  The plan is one paragraph made up of seven sentences.  Each of the sentences answers the following questions. 

 

1.      What is the purpose of your marketing?

2.      What are the benefits of your products or services?

3.      Who is your target audience?

4.      What is your Niche?

5.      What weapons will you be using in your marketing attack?

6.      What do you want your identity to be?

7.      What is your marketing budget?

 

If you thinking this is too short and simple to be an effective marketing plan, think again. It never ceases to amaze me the impact producing this marketing plan can have on a business and its marketing efforts. The act of putting a plan in writing will bring clarity, purpose and direction to your business and marketing efforts.

 

One of the attendees in the class was Susan from the Northwest Art Center. The Northwest Art Center provides art classes and mentoring programs for preschoolers through adults.

 

After attending the class and writing her marketing plan and calendar Susan sent me the following note:

“The Guerilla Marketing class really helped me to focus on the benefits of our organization and to define our niche. That list of marketing weapons is awesome. We created our own document by refining some of the suggestions, adding our own and deleting the ones that don’t apply. Then we divided them up amongst our board and are still farming some out to volunteers. My assistant and I have blocked out an appointment a week, specifically to talk about marketing.”

the_power_of_a_marketing_plan_2As you can see the creating the marketing plan provided clarity and direction for the Northwest Art Center. It took the big endeavor called “ Marketing” and broke it down into specific smaller tasks that can be more easily executed or delegated. Taking the time and energy required to build a marketing plan for your business will make your marketing efforts more focused and effective – which ultimately makes your business more profitable.

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Color Cop, a Marketing Weapon

Color_Cop

As a small business owners we are not always able to hire designers to build our fliers, brochures or items we post on the web.  These items can be great marketing weapons and help you attract more prospects.  If you learn to use Publisher (or any similar product) to design and create your own material you will be able to produce high quality fliers, brochures and advertisements for all of your events and/or promotions.  Investing a few hours to learn how to create this material yourself can not only save you lots of money, but will enable you to promote more specials and events.

Another advantage to knowing how to create your own material is the speed at which you can create it.  This skill will enable you to create and customize promotions for any segment of your client base.

Color Cop is a free utility I found that has been very useful in the creation of marketing material. Color Cop allows you to match colors.  Let’s say you are creating a flyer and you have started with a picture and you want some of the text on the page to match a color in the picture.  This becomes very easy with Color Cop, you just drag the eye dropper over the color in the picture you want to match and Color Cop displays the RGB Value of the color plus the HTML hex value.  Depending on your application you simply enter this value for the color of your text and you have an exact color match.

You can learn more about Color Cop and down load it http://www.ColorCop.net.

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Making Your Marketing Message Meaningful

Making Your Marketing Message Meaningful Are you having trouble connecting with prospects? Do they seem to be uninterested in listening to you talk about your product or service? Let’s look at how to change this.

Your message needs to be stated in a way that resonates with the prospect. You can talk about all of the features in your product, but will this resonate with your prospects? for example: The first iPod

  • 5gb disk
  • 1.8″ hard drive
  • mechanical scroll wheel, a center select button, and 4 auxiliary buttons around the wheel.
  • Firewire connections to your computer
  • 10 hour battery life

This is a nice list of features and Apple worked hard to build the device with all of these features, but are you impressed or interested in learning more about the device? You listen to this or read it and you are probably thinking “why would I buy one of these?” Plus, in about 5 minutes you would have forgotten all of the information about the useless product.

For your message to resonate and stick it must simply illustrate the benefit the prospect will receive. By simple I mean in as few words as possible. Your prospects do not have attention spans that will enable them to work hard at understanding what you have to offer. If you are asking your prospect to work hard at understanding the benefits of your product, you are losing most of them before they understand what you are selling.

All of this means you must develop a simple message that resonates with your prospects and makes it easy for them to understand the benefits they will receive from your product or service.

For the message to resonate it must:

  • Be simple
  • Be easy to understand
  • Be short (7 words or less)
  • Contain a benefit the prospect will receive

Do you remember the message Apple use to promote the iPod?Making Your Marketing Message Meaningful

It was simply :

“1000 songs in your pocket”.

If you like music this will resonate with you.

· Be Simple – nothing cleaver or fancy just a very simple example of what can be done with the product.

· Be Easy to Understand – all of your music is on CD’s or tapes and you know you cannot put a 1000 songs in your pocket. As a result you are intrigued and want to learn more about the product.

· Be Short – this one is only 5 words.

· Contain a Benefit the Prospect will receive – if you love music, the thought of having 1000 songs in your pocket is a huge benefit. Especially if you are using a portable CD or tape player.

I challenge you to review your message and ask the question: will it resonate with my prospects? If the answer is no, go to work on your message and create one that will resonate.

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Testimonials

The Guerilla Marketing class really helped me to focus on the benefits of our organization and to define our niche.

Susan Jenkins
Northwest Art Center

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