Smart Marketing

A Couple of Ways to Improve your Marketing Proposals

For many small business marketing efforts, a marketing proposal is THE key document. Here are three ways to make your marketing proposal work harder:

Always include a section entitled "Cost of Not Doing Business"

Clients need to  be reminded that NOT inking a deal with your firm is more costly than signing the contract. That's why I recommend that a marketing proposal always include include a section entitled "The Cost of Not Doing Business with XYZ Company". Then outline what costs the firm will incur by not giving your firm the business. Common costs of not doing business are: 1) Lost sales to competitors 2) declining sales 3) Eroding profits 4) Lower awareness or 5) Lost momentum.

Always offer a range of options for the client to choose from

Offering a good-better-best array of pricing options subtlety shifts the decision making over to the client. In today's opt-in marketing world, clients like to feel like they're in control. Offering an array of options in a proposal helps the client reach a decision faster, and also lets them feel as if they are still in charge.

In future issues of my Marketing Tips and Tools e-newsletter, I'll cover even more Marketing Proposal Tips.

Small Business Marketing Tip - Make your URL more readable

Most small business marketing people look for ways to make their brand stand out. Here's a great way to do this with your small business website's address, or URL (uniform resource locator).

If your small business website URL combines several words (e.g. www.emergemarketing.com), make sure to capitalize the beginning letter of each word in the string. So, www.emergemarketing.com would be written www.EmergeMarketing.com . Make sure you do this in any offline marketing effort (e.g. direct mail, etc) as well as in your online efforts (e.g. e-newsletter).

When you do this, you help the reader distinguish the different parts of a URL and make it easier for them to understand and internalize your small business brand. If you don't do this, readers of your promotional messages will find it that much more difficult to understand what your site is called.

For example, when you read the URL www.gooverit.com you may be tempted to think it's the GooVerit site rather than the GoOverIt site.

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Small Business Marketing: More Rules of Thumb

Following up my post on Small Business Marketing's Rules of Thumb, here are three more Small Business Marketing Rules of Thumb to follow in the year ahead:

• Be satisfied with a response of one - There's a myth that's been widely propagated among B2B marketers  that any response rate of less than 2% is unacceptable. This myth arose from the consumer direct marketing days where companies mailing for consumer product sales (e.g.  magazine subscriptions, credit cards) routinely saw response rates in the neighborhood of 2%. But B2B marketers have to understand that in the arena of larger-scale service purchases, a response rate of only one can generate a more-than-acceptable return on investment. Think about it; if your small business offers architectural design/build services for major construction projects, you only need one big project to result from a marketing effort to generate a very acceptable ROI.
• Concentrate on starting and sustaining dialogues - In the post-war and pre-Internet days of marketing, we focused on delivering one-way messages. So, a television commercial for a breakfast cereal sought only to drive consumers to the grocery store to buy a box. Today, with the Internet dominating the marketing landscape, we have to find marketing programs that move buyers to start a dialogue with our companies. More often than not, these buyers can find most of the relevant information they need about making a purchase well before they identify themselves (e.g. a home buyer surfing the net for houses in a price range and specific neighborhood). But they will still have questions about their purchase that only you and I as marketers can answer. If we give them a taste of the information they crave, and then provide follow up details (e.g. "If you have specific questions about buying a home in this neighborhood, check out our online forum. Your question may have already been posed and answered there"), we position ourselves as the "helpful expert".
• Cater to anonymous shoppers - Given this transformation to a self-serve society, where buyers identify, compare and shop by themselves, the role of the intermediary is disappearing. Just look at the rapid rise of comparison shopping sites like PriceGrabber.com and Froogle.com. Sure, these are consumer products sites, but there are also sites like AllBusiness.com that provide B2B product shopping for the do-it-yourself-shopper. The lesson for the small business marketer? You must 1) have a website 2) make that website approachable enough to generate dialogues and 3) ensure that website contains a wealth of information so that you are perceived as the go-to expert.

In future issues of my Marketing Tips and Tools e-newsletter, I'll cover even more of these Marketing Rules of Thumb.

Small business pricing; The metrics behind Radiohead's marketing move

The numbers behind Radiohead's creative marketing approach to its pricing are in, and they're not encouraging. You'll recall that Radiohead adopted a "pay whatever you want" approach to its recently released album. Because the English band lacked a major record label, it decided to deliver its album on its own website and asked each consumer to pay what they wanted. What were the results?

According to data released by comSscore inc., of those consumers who downloaded the album:

• 62% paid nothing
• 17% paid less than $4
• 6% paid $4-$8
• 12% paid $8-$12 and
• 4% paid more than $12.

Disappointing to say the least if you're an artist contemplating doing this. A clear majority got something for nothing and 85% of all consumers paid less than $8. Clearly, given the chance to pay what they'd like, consumers will take this opportunity to pay less than the stated price.

There's an important lesson for small business marketing here: Arrive at your prices after a thorough analysis of your margins and your competitors' pricing, then assertively defend your price by explaining all the value in your offering. If you don't, buyers will immediately challenge your prices and expect a pricing concession. This kind of aggressive pricing negotiation will only become more common as record labels train the public to pay less than market value.

If you'd like to learn more about small business pricing, read my recently published article "4 Ways to Market and Sell your Services with Price" over at the RainToday.com site or subscribe to my Marketing Tips and Tools e-newsletter.

Small Business Marketing Rules of Thumb

Here are three Rules of Thumb for small business marketing that you'll find useful. If you're in charge of marketing your small business, try following these rules of thumb:

• Buzz marketing trumps traditional advertising every time - Recent statistics show that the marketing strategy called "buzz marketing", and consists of word-of-mouth marketing, buzz marketing, and viral marketing, commands a larger share of marketers attention and spending dollars. In recent years, according to the Blackfriars Report, companies' spending on advertising has dropped from 31% to 22% while spending on non-traditional marketing methods like buzz marketing has increased to an almost 14% share. I must admit I hate the term "buzz marketing". It seems to imply that the key benefit of this  approach is to create a buzz. But this misses the point. The real benefit is that others, usually  satisfied clients and customers, attach their personal recommendation to your product.  When you get a buzz marketing effort underway you necessarily get people talking about your product, service or company in the best light possible.

• 90-day Rule- Every small business should strive to be in front of its buyers every 90 days. This kind of continuous messaging establishes a healthy top-of-mind awareness for your company, while also steadily educating buyers as to why doing buwsiness with your company is the most logical choice. Sure, 90 days is a tight timeline, and it'll put some pressure on your company marketers to keep coming up with new and fresh ways to say things. But isn't that what good marketing is all about anyway?

• Write it once, use it thrice - Marketers are just too busy these days to craft original content whenever they park themselves in front of a computer. Given the swirling pace of work these days, the best advice I can give small business marketers is to write a certain piece of marketing content once, then try to find ways to use it three times. So you could  1) write a blog entry for your company blog, then 2) add it to your website's FAQ page and  3) work it into an article that you write for an online site. This forces you to not only be efficient with your time, but to also choose your subject matter and content keywords carefully.

In future issues of my Marketing Tips and Tools e-newsletter, I'll cover several more of these Marketing Rules of Thumb, but for now, these will get you started...

Should you hire a business development manager to do your own marketing?

Many free lancers, consultants and professional service providers wonder out loud to me if it would be worth the investment to "hire someone to do my marketing for me". Realizing they are experts in something other than marketing, they quite correctly look around for someone to outsource this function to. I have a very definite opinion about whether or not you should do this if you're a consultant. And the answer is......ABSOLUTELY NOT.

You should hire a marketing consultant to help you arrive at a plan that covers your goals, your target market, your company's positioning, your marketing strategies and tactics and your budget (all the things I help clients with, by the way), but when it comes time to talk to prospects, meet with them,  establish your expertise, and close them into clients, don't outsource this function.

The reasons I believe you should handle these key tasks personally are:

• You are the chief chemistry officer for your services - Clients want to know they have a certain  chemistry with you before they hire you. The only way for them to know this is to hear you in action over the telephone or see you in action in a sales call.
• You know your processes better than any business development person - Many times a client wants to know what your consulting process is. What steps will you take to solve my problem? they ask. You, and you alone, know all the steps in the process...and any nuances to this process. A business development person can show the prospect a flowchart of your processes, but you are the only one who can bring it alive.
• Being present creates credibility - When you discuss your qualifications, in first person terms, in front of a prospect, you build a personal credibility with that person. The prospect hears you tell him/her about your qualifications and subconsciously transfers that credibility to you personally as they hear you tell it personally. When a business development person describes your qualifications to the prospect, the prospect is left with an invisible "distance" between themselves and you.

Maybe I'm all wet here, but in my opinion the very best way to personally market a personal service business is....personally.