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Marketing Strategies

We recently attended a

Stealth Marketing Symposium

Designed for Coaches in Business Marketing

Presented by The Abraham Publishing Group.

The goal of this symposium was to expose us to highly successful marketing and sales techniques that will produce increased profits for our Business/Marketing clients. These unique initiatives were primarily designed to rely on our clients’ present marketing budgets.

The following is a brief synopsis of 25 of these strategies that can help you to out-market and out-perform your competition.

We would be pleased to discuss these strategies with you in greater detail.

  1. Work Your Present and Past Customer Lists. You have spent thousands of dollars to locate, court and eventually close these people. Once you have developed a customer, you have your most cost-effective, direct access to future business!
  2. Stop Spending So Much on Ineffective Advertising. Institutional advertising is ineffectual, hard to measure, and can quickly dissipate your marketing resources. Good advertising must be tangible and highly quantifiable.
  3. Follow UP! After doing any outreach program to past, present or prospective customers, follow up with a well designed, information oriented, telemarketing and email program.
  4. Keep Following Up! Keep following up tenaciously with any customer or prospect that comes into your sphere. By continuously following up with appropriate information and attractive offers, you will move a significant number of these people into decisive action.
  5. Use Risk Reversal Techniques. Take action by offering to guarantee their purchase. Thus, by reversing their risk of buying, you will get a lot more business!
  6. Bump and Up-Sell. Car dealers are the experts at up-selling, once they have sold you the car, they persuade you to add all kinds of options plus financing, acrylic coatings… These additional offerings can bump up the dealers bottom line by thousands of dollars.
  7. Sell, Then Sell Again. Research has shown that if you contact all of your customers within 15 to 30 days after their initial purchase, 10% to 30% will be ready to purchase something else from you on the spot!
  8. Utilize Host-Parasite Relationships. This relationship occurs when a parasite (another business) contributes to the well-being of the host and the host provides a reward in return to the parasite. A good example of this relationship is when you receive a statement from a bank, credit card company or department store and there is an offering from another non-related business in the envelope.
  9. Turn Your Competitor Into A Joint Venture Partner. In many cases competitors can help each other by filling the gaps that each of them may not be good at. If your in a business where you give lots of quotes, do lots of bidding and generate lots of prospects, it is only natural that you won’t do business with all of them however, you could recommend some of them to your competitor and earn a percentage of the sale.
  10. Offer Extended Guarantees and Special Incentives. Very often we think more about our needs rather than the needs of the customer. Many marketing failures can be attributed to the failure to provide your prospective customer with an adequate incentive to buy. Incentives can take on many forms and are conveyable in many ways. For example, an incentive that is built around a bonus that will accrue to the first time purchase or perhaps when they buy certain large amounts of your product.
  11. Lock In Advance Sales. This concept can be applied to any business that offers ongoing services like a stock broker, a publication, a restaurant chain etc. For example, a restaurant might provide a complimentary meal to a customer if he or she signs up for their meal a month plan.
  12. License Your Successful Concepts. There are a lot of businesses that are struggling and are looking for ways to attract customers. Almost anything that you have developed that works e.g. customized business software programs, special promotions, unique training programs, successful advertising campaigns, time- saving production procedures, powerful sales letters etc. is of value to other companies. By paying you a licensing fee, these companies benefit from your expertise without having to invest in the time and expense on their own.
  13. Just Break Even on the Front-End. You should be willing to break even on an initial promotion if you know that you will make a profit on the back-end. In other words, know what you are willing to pay to “buy” a new customer.
  14. Test Your Pricing. You can win a lot of customers by offering them your product at the “right” price. Thus, it is necessary to employ price testing to determine the “right” price. Different prices for identical products often outperform one and other by enormous margins.
  15. Reposition Yourself as an Expert in Your Industry. Here’s a market niche that’s crying to be filled! Reposition your company as The Source for industry information. As the expert in your field, you’ll be amazed at the heightened awareness of your brand and the increase in your business.
  16. If You Know a Company That is Going Out Of Business, Buy Their Customers and the Right to Fulfill on Their Orders. Buy their customers, buy their inventory, buy their unmet fulfillment orders, buy their telemarketing service, buy their website and URL, buy any hard assets (equipment, raw materials, real estate) finally see if you can ‘buy” some of their best people.
  17. Decrease Your Overhead. If your short on cash and you need to cut back, don’t cut your marketing budget. During hard times, the first thing companies cut is their marketing budget the very thing that will allow them to drive business. Clearly, it is wiser to cut back on excess inventory and nonessential staff, negotiate with your venders for better terms, perhaps outsource certain business functions, etc.
  18. Don’t Burn Your Bridges. Most successful people don’t burn their bridges. They have learned that there is a distinct difference between being tough and being fair. There is a big difference between extending yourself when there is nothing in it for you and dumping people because they can no longer benefit you. Remember that wonderful things do accrue to people who commit themselves to others even if there is no immediate reward.
  19. Avoid the Ostrich Marketing Theory. This theory comes into play when you become deluded into thinking that your customer is only interested in your company and your products, and is not being induced or seduced by your competitors.
  20. Just Create Direct-Response Ads. Here is the well-known formula (AIDA) for writing this type of highly measurable, sales communication material.
    1. Grab the reader’s ATTENTION
    2. Deepen the reader’s INTEREST
    3. Increase the reader’s DESIRE
    4. Motivate the reader to ACTION
  21. Create Headlines that PULL. Failure to use a powerful advantage or result-based headline can reduce the effectiveness of your ad by 70% to 80% and a prospect will simply not spend the time to look at it! Headlines must provide a highly desirable benefit that the reader will receive in exchange for reading your message.
  22. Carefully Analyze Your Results. The marketing program you decide to implement must be tested against other methods and strategies. When you experiment with different guarantees, bonuses, sales approaches, headlines, etc., you will be amazed at how much one approach will out-pull the others by a huge margin.
  23. Don’t Put All of Your Eggs in One Basket. Diversify your resources in this economic period. Do not put all of your resources into one business. If you are contemplating a joint venture, get your prospective partner to finance part of your project. You must find a winning niche for your new product or service.
  24. Get Your Clients to Provide You With Potential Customers. A satisfied client should be pleased to refer you to a business associate or friend, all you need to do is ASK!
  25. Identify Your Hidden Assets. Sit down and outline all of the assets and liabilities your company has. Then try to determine who might be interested in leveraging your assets (through a joint venture, or licensing agreement). Next, determine who you need to help you reduce your liabilities.