Tweet

Top 10 Marketing Tips

Written by: Helen Dowling

Article Overview: Helen Dowling from Exceptional Thinking shares her top 10 marketing tips to help you in your business.

Top 10 Marketing Tips

1. Become a student of your business. Study your customer, competitors and the industry trends. Make it one of your goals to become an ‘expert’ in your business, so much so that you know how your customers think. The more you know, the easier you will find it to get customers and give them compelling messages that convince them to buy your product or service.


2. Sit down with a friend or business contact and get them to put themselves in your customer’s shoes. Try to come up with ten new ways to market and promote your business. It’s really difficult to come up with these ideas yourself as sometimes you can get too close to your business, but someone else can often give you fresh ideas.


3. Remember that not everything you do to market your business will get you clients. Some things you do will be better for building your reputation or getting awareness of your business (PR for instance is very good at getting people to recognise your business is out there) than getting you clients. You need to have a good mixture of marketing activities designed to build your reputation, get awareness of your business and actually get your customers in order to market your business.



4. If you hate a particular aspect of marketing your business, don’t do it! For instance, if you hate cold calling, why push yourself to do it? There are loads of methods that you might like doing more AND don’t cost a great deal to do.


5. Do marketing!! Most small business owners don’t like marketing. It’s another activity that eats into their time. And on top of that, it’s not much fun. Ideally though, you should be spending 2 half days a week on marketing (at the very least), so choose something from my list of 50 ideas and do it!!


6. Decide what is a marketing activity for you – marketing for me is any activity where I spend time getting new or looking after existing customers (bar working on their projects). So, marketing could be emailing 5 customers a week to see how they’re getting on; writing a proposal; going to a networking event; seeing a potential new customer etc.
Why is defining what marketing is important? Well, once you start doing this, you will realise that you are doing some marketing…then it becomes easier to do more.


7. Stretch your comfort zone – write down what activities you’re comfortable with and also write down which ones you’re not comfortable with. Then choose one activity you don’t really like doing every month and get on with it!!


8. Most of us are very good at following up if we need to. For example, if I said to you “Here is a potential customer” you would probably contact them. But, how many of us follow up without a real reason? Try this exercise – next time you go to a networking event, get the list of attendees (usually available when you sign in) and then contact all those you haven’t met by email asking if they would mind spending 15 minutes on the phone with you so you can find out a bit more about each other. This is excellent for building relationships and may even get you clients too!!


9. Remember marketing is like riding a bike. Most people start off by peddling really hard (doing lots of marketing) and when they get busy and don’t market their business, they can coast for a while. But, if they don’t start to market their business again soon, their bike will stop and believe me, it’s hard work to start peddling again. So, you need to keep marketing all the time.


10. We’ve created a new e-course called “Survive your first year in business”, where you’ll receive a workbook every month direct to your PC that helps you address issues such as getting more customers, keeping motivated, managing your finances and making the most of your time. As well as this, you’ll receive 12 months of unlimited e-mail support and coaching whenever you need it, all for just £25+VAT per month.
If you would like more information, please email me on
course@exceptionalthinking.co.uk or call us on 0845 644 9371.

Related Articles
  Internet Marketing Tips To Increase Traffic To Any Business
  Bookkeeping Tips on Tips
  Handy Tips to a Killer Marketing Plan
  3 of the Best Online Marketing Tips! ~EASY 10K a MONTH
  Three Business Etiquette Tips You Absolutely Must Know In Network Marketing

Article Tags:



Related Forum Posts
Business Tips - How about: Tips for managers to handle employees more effectively? Tips on how to deal with difficult customers? Tips on how to deal more effectively with suppliers? The only three I have in mind right now, but will try to come up with something else. Chris
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: 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.
Re: Should Evan add a "Social Media Marketing" category to the f - Hi, Online Marketing would be a great title, and having sub categories would make it even better, there would plenty of categories to choose from, Social Media, SEO, Article Marketing and yes even Affiliate Marketing to name just a few, great looking site btw Jeff, take care, Carol
Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - [quote="BuzzAroundBooks":1yomg44b] 1.) 10 Recent Posts (takes you to the list of the 10 most recent posts) 2.) Forum Contest & Prizes 3.) How to get started in the EvanCarmichael.com Forums 4.) How to promote yourself in the EvanCarmichael.com Forums 5.) How to start a small business (list of threads with related topics) 6.) SEO Tips (list of threads with related topics) 7.) Better Blogging (list of threads with related topics) 8.) Business Book Reviews (list related forum threads, I know Barbara has tons. We also have threads that list our forum members favorite biz books) 9.) Newest Members (takes you to a list of the newest forum members so that you can help them out or connect with them) 10.) Kevin's Case Studies *I'd think this format would make the forums easier to navigate through, especially for a newbie (which are the main people we're trying to attract to the site).[/quote:1yomg44b] If you're accepting any suggestions for topics -- could SEO tips be changed to Online Marketing? SEO is just a small part of Online Marketing and that would give us some sort of place to zero in on Online Promotional posts. Shri


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

Build Corporate Credit for Your Small Business

What is an Adaptive Organization

Ten Steps to Go from Idea to E-book for Sale

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.