Tweet

7 Marketing Ideas to Expand Your Customer Base and Profits

Written by: Joel Sussman

Article Overview: One of the secrets to succeeding in sales and marketing is to learn how to grab people's attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action. Here are seven tips on how to begin mastering that four-step process.

7 Marketing Ideas to Expand Your Customer Base and Profits

How do you grab people's attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you've identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your chosen business or field. To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and marketing trends in our culture. While not all inclusive, the following list of priorities and small business marketing tips can help put your small business on a faster track to growth.

Marketing Tip #1: Gain Customer Confidence. Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It's up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence. If you haven't clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they'll be hesitant to commit, and the sale will go to your competitor.

Marketing Tip #2: Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using some form of integrated marketing. In other words, the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing is partly the result of exposing your target group to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible(frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.

Marketing Tip #3: Enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious (and I'm not talking about using multiple exclamation points after sentences!!! That detracts from your credibility.) If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you.

Marketing Tip #4: Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales process as focusing attention on product features and benefits.

Marketing Tip #5: Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations.

Marketing Tip #6: Impose a deadline. Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendency to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it's often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.

Marketing Tip #7: Create a business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your strategic plan should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, and target market analysis (know your customers).

Related Articles
  The Keys to Multi-Channel Success
  Why Are You In Business
  How To Cost Effectively Double Your Client Base
  The Main Advantages of Online Businesses over Offline Businesses
  Direct Sales Marketing – Using Direct Selling for your Home Business

Article Tags: business marketing, customer confidence, integrated marketing, market share Effective marketing, Marketing Tip, products services, small business marketing, target



Related Forum Posts
Re: Two Useful Books To Help You Focus On The CLIENT - Hi David, To add to your thread, I'd like to recommend Jonathan Tisch's "Chocolates On The Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience". Tisch's book includes content on "Welcoming Customers", "The New Art of Customization", "The Challenges of Customer Diversity" and "Offering Something Extra to Your Customers" to name a few.
Wearing different hats in Business - I have a business that produces beautiful custom rugs for home and business environments. Different hats that I'm wearing... Rug Fabrication - 10 [i:21cr28m8](partially outsourced to an outfit here in the US)[/i:21cr28m8] Customer Service / Sales - 8-10 Bookkeeping - 1 Marketing - 6 Website development - 5 [i:21cr28m8](mainly outsourced)[/i:21cr28m8] SEO, SEM - 6-8 Accounting - [i:21cr28m8](outsourced)[/i:21cr28m8]
Re: What is your Business? - We are running a Online Marketing Firm and we have some good clients to which we are offering a complete Digital Marketing strategy like Search, Mobile Marketing, Branding and Design. I think in Online Marketing company online presence can be a wining factor for the success of the company.
Re: Joomla Now Has A GetResponse Module - Hi Kevin, Interesting that you tried Joomla and then gave up on it. So did I! There is a lot to be said for Joomla. It can make your site look very professional, you can completely change design in just a few clicks of your mouse, and if you add anything to a panel you can display it throughout your site... Also, Joomla does seem to suck in traffic. My traffic stats improved with Joomla, probably because of the interactive features it offers, such as the article directory feature and so on. However, I also experienced various frustrations with Joomla. HTML is simpler and you have complete control over your site, but you do have to recode every page when you make design changes... (unless you are prepared to learn CSS and then deal with all the browser problems...) Also, I market the Plug-In Profits Site and came to the conclusion that it would be better business practice to show my potential customers what can be done with a Plug-In Profits site by using one myself and modifying it to suit my purposes. After all, there is no better advertisement for a product than the fact that the seller also uses it! On the other hand, I know a lot of Internet marketers who love Joomla, so I think it is just a matter of choosing what works best for you. ... And if you like Joomla and use the GetResponse autoresponder service, life just got easier for you! David H
Re: Let’s talk about the ways of marketing your products, servic - I agree with some of the others who responded it depends on what your selling... but to answer your questions here are some of the methods I use. Forum Marketing Yahoo Answers (I need to use more of) SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Bum Marketing or Article marketing P-P-C (Pay Per Click) Marketing Online Directories Hope this helps.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

10 Reasons Your SBA Loan May Be Declined

International Employment Background Checks

How to Write Your Articles for Better SEO

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.