The Top 10 Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business i

The Top 10 Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business in 2004

by: Jay Lipe

Looking to grow your business? Make sure you have these marketing tools in place:
#10 A powerful tagline
In 10 words or less, a good tagline reinforces a company’s reason for being. And smaller companies will find it to be one of the hardest working tools. To get one, first boil down to a single sentence, the benefits of doing business with your company. Then, take write up a few version of this and take them to a good copywriter. After deciding upon one, marry this tagline up with your company name and logo wherever they appear.
#9 Consistent branding elements
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a rancher would mark his cattle with an exclusive brand. This brand, depicting a unique visual image, distinguished his cattle from another rancher’s. A branding effort for a growing company works the same way. The consistent use of branding elements (i.e. name, tagline, logo, colors, fonts, and typestyles) clearly identifies your company from the competition.
#8 Search engine positioning
Today, just having a highquality website doesn’t mean success. Having large numbers of qualified prospects visiting your site does. If you’re not spending equally on the promotion of your site through search engine positioning, then your website isn’t working hard enough. One recent client of mine who found my site through a search engine, generated a whopping 1,500%+ return on my search engine investment.
#7 Callstoaction
It’s not enough to just rattle off your product’s features and benefits. You must go one step further by telling your reader exactly what you want her to do next. Too often marketing materials effectively present a company, then leave the next step up to the reader’s imagination. This is a missed opportunity. Instead, spell out exactly what your reader should do next. ขVisit www.emergemarketing.com and register to winข, ขCall our estimating department for a free quoteข or ข Email us with your suggestionsข are callstoaction that leave no doubt about what you want your reader to do next.
#6 Attentiongrabbing testimonials
Buyers of your product or serviceespecially firsttime buyershave reservations about doing business with you. Will your product deliver? Will you answer your phones? Will you be around next month? Written testimonials from your satisfied customers, scattered throughout your materials and website, smooth over buyer fears.
#5 Key messages
Remember back in English class how we were taught to write down a paper’s thesis before we wrote the paper? This thesis statement was the argument you wanted to assertthe central point of the paper. Think of your company’s key messages as the thesis statements for your marketing.
The next time you have to write copy for your brochure or website, identify the three most important things that distinguish your company from the rest. Then, write your copy so that these three ideas come through loud and clear.
#4 Resultsoriented metrics
Can you imagine a doctor examining a patient without a thermometer? Yet this is precisely how many growing businesses approach their marketing analytics. Without metrics to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, decisions are just…guesses. Develop two or three key metrics (i.e. # of new leads per month, cost per inquiry, or sales calls per month) that measure the true health of your business’ marketing.
#3 Ongoing customer communication
Your customers have invested a lot in your company already; time, money and emotional energy to name just a few. Keep in frequent touch with them and they’ll shower your business with repeat purchases, referrals and positive wordofmouth. Use catchup phone calls, email blasts or personalized letters to keep customers abreast of new products, promotions or just plain news.
#2 A marketing plan
The cornerstone to any successful marketing effort is a marketing plan. A good one lays the groundwork for action by covering the ขwhysข behind each task. It also helps break down a seemingly daunting effort into a series of more manageable chunks. And when the phones stop ringing, it gives you something to go back to. You’ll never again ask ขWhat should we do now?ข
#1 A process for implementing your plan
Developing a marketing plan is only half the battle. Without a concerted effort to implement the plan, your marketing effort will fail. To avoid this common marketing mistake, use weekly project updates and quarterly checkpoint meetings to ensure your plan is successfully implemented.
Don’t forget that proper implementation also hinges on having the right person in place. Who is this person? In three wordsa project manager. Without a deadline driven, nutsandbolts type at the helm of your roll out, you’ll drift like a rudderless ship.

About The Author

Jay Lipe, CEO of EmergeMarketing.com and the author of The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses (Chammerson Press), is a small business marketing expert who helps companies grow faster. He can be reached at [email protected] or (612) 8244833.

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This article was posted on July 31, 2004

by Jay Lipe

Branding your products is important

Branding your products is important

by: Marsha Maung

I was chatting with a couple of friends, all of us are either copy writers or graphic designers…or both….in the advertising industry, so, naturally, our conversations leaned towards the topic. This one particular friend who works in an American advertising firm is now an Art Director, so, needless to say, he considers himself a notch higher than us mere freelancers and employees. After all, he is the one person who decides on the direction of a whole advertising campaign. He is also incharge of a couple of large International brands of products. And during this conversation, he told me about this story that inspired me. He says that branding is so important to a product that it can either make or break a product…or even the company.

For instance, he was trying to come up with something unique for a particular brand of body wash (he thought the smell was awful because it smelt like mud…wet and totally disgusting). Guess what he did? He went the NATURAL WAY……

Obviously, it worked wonders for the product! He came up with headlines like

ขSo natural, you’d roll around in itข

ขJust like a second skinข

ขAromatherapeuticข

ขGo back to natureข

…and the likes.

I was impressed. So happens that he brings back a lot of samples of products each time he comes back to Malaysia and this time he had the said product handy to show us – to although I didn’t think it was disgusting (he has a way with words, shall I say?ข), it wasn’t your conventional bath wash. It sure didn’t smell like anything else I can get here in supermarkets.

Joe, my friend from America, said that he steered the product in the realm of conservation of the environment, going natural, using natural products, natural cleansing properties….etc and it worked wonderfully. When combined with a superb design and ad, the product sold like nothing else he had known! This was the product he thought smelt like mud, remember? And with good direction, copy and design, the product is as good as sold.

The theory is that, people’s mind accepts what they want to accept. Let me give you some examples of beautiful copy work for International brands.

ขmilk bathข – Johnson and Johnson. Sounds simple enough? But accordingly, many people bought the products, not because it was superb or any better than all the other Johnson and Johnson products or bath gels, it was because the ‘milk bath’ copy suggested that whenever you use the product, you’d be bathing in milk, pampering yourself, making your skin whiter and smoother. Asians will buy anything that you say can turn their skin white.

ขNot perfumed, Not coloured. Just kindข – Simple.

This is a very unique stance taken by a skincare company because Simple is the first brand that suggested that you don’t need anything extra have superb skin. Simple is….well, simple, but it gives you good skin because it doesn’t make your skin look worse.

ขAgainst animal testingข – The Body Shop.

The products being sold by The Body Shop, without a doubt, is produced without being tested on animals. This, they claim, is because the properties used to produce their products is very natural. I think placing the words ขAGAINST ANIMAL TESTINGข in bolded letters in all of their labels is a good idea. Anyone who loves natural products and are animal lovers will definitely stay true to The Body Shop.

ขThe beer only a true man knows how to appreciateข

This is a tagline being used by a wellknown beer company. I am not certain of the exact words being used, therefore, I decline to name the brand and beer type. Anyway, this tagline suggests that if you’re a man at all, you’ll like this beer…..and if you don’t, you’re not a TRUE man. I am a woman and I like the beer because of its richness in taste but I absolutely object to their tagline. I suppose they have their reasons. Their target market were mostly men and if they were women who drink, they will let the tagline slide because they like the beer so much.

So, you see, the kind of branding, the kind of tagline and headlines that you use determines the direction of your product. If you use a tagline like ‘lustrous long hairข….don’t expect a lot of male customers who takes you up on your offer. So, decide on a tagline once and for all for each and every one of your products, take them very seriously and if you can’t think of anything, hire someone to do the thinking for you. Branding and copy writing is SO IMPORTANT that you’d rather pay for it than be stuck with one that gives out mixed messages.

About The Author

Marsha Maung is a freelance graphic designer and writer who has been working from home for the past 6 years. She lives in Selangor, Malaysia with her husband, Peter and 2 kids, Joshua and Jared. Marsha is the author of กRaising Little Magiciansก, กNo products to sellก and the popular กLance in Freelancingก. For more information on Marsha, visit her website http://www.marshamaung.com or to buy her books, visit http://www.lulu.com/marshamaung.

This article was posted on February 26

by Marsha Maung