Support4Business Ireland - Small Business Marketing - Help and Assistance for Irish Companies

Focus Your Marketing - Fend Off The Recession

2009-10-21T03:42:00.000-07:00

Some marketing experts may advise you to expand your marketing reach when times are tough, but I believe the opposite is true. (In fact, the only thing you should do in good times and bad is the right thing – bad times just seem to have a way of getting your attention.)
The most effective strategy you can adopt now and in the future is to think narrow.

Narrow your target market focus – define who makes an ideal customer and who doesn’t – serve only one of them.

Narrow your core marketing message – find a way to stand out to be different and build all of your lead activities around owning that difference, that word.

Narrow the gap between you and your customer – build community around your current customers, bring them into your marketing mix, ask them what they think, give them something they didn’t expect, help them get more of what they want, call them for no reason at all – and build through their referrals.

If you can become known by a very narrow target market for doing something very specifically unique in a way that your customers adore, you will no longer compete on price and no longer live at the mercies of the ups and downs beyond your control.

Talk of a good old recession can be good for business as it has a tendency to weed out competitors who believe that cutting their prices is the way to a turn around!

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I Don't Have Time For Marketing

2009-10-20T03:11:00.000-07:00

"I don't have time for marketing." It's a common complaint from self-employed professionals and small business owners. When you are the only one who can serve the clients, manage the business, and perform all the sales and marketing functions, time becomes the most precious commodity you have. How can you find time for marketing with so many other important priorities?

Marketing is and must become a habitual activity in your business. You must live by the marketing calendar or die by the lack of time available to complete the greasing of the squeaky wheel. The only way to find time for marketing is to plan for it. Create a marketing theme for every month of the year and then build marketing activities on a daily and weekly basis around the theme.

You know you need to increase your network of contacts to make your referral leads really soar - make that April's theme. You know you need to start a blog as part of your Internet presence - make that May's theme.

Create the biggest, most hard to ignore wall calendar you can find and post your year of marketing themes. Then break each month down into the action steps needed to make progress on the monthly theme. Finally, assign yourself or someone daily action steps, appointments really, and then complete the daily marketing action before you pass Go or return another email.

That’s how you make time for marketing, that’s how you build marketing momentum and that’s how you make marketing expand to fill the time available for its completion.

Emails - Writing Effective Subject Lines

2009-10-20T03:10:00.000-07:00

Subject lines are one of the most important components of a successful promotional or newsletter email. Working in tandem with the from line, the content of a subject line is the key determinant for whether a recipient will open an email, delete it immediately, ignore it, file it for future access, report it and/or filter it as spam. The subject line content is also a major component in the algorithm of many ISP and recipient-level spam filters. In other words, a poorly written subject lead may not only go unopened, it may not even reach the recipient’s inbox in the first place.

Keep these six principles in mind as you approach writing subject lines for your messages:

Inform: Subject lines should convey something important, timely or valuable, and should say to the recipient: "If you don’t open and read this email, you'll miss out on something of real value."

Intrigue: Your email is competing with 50 to 100 or more other emails for the recipients' attention. To increase the chance of having YOUR email be opened it must intrigue the recipient, the same way a well written headline does. It must stimulate some part of the recipient’s brain, prompting them to open the email immediately.

Entrust: Your subject line can support or hurt your brand image. Subject lines that over promise or mislead will ultimately destroy trust with recipients, damaging your brand and driving customers away.

Action: Subject lines are a major driver of click-through rates, as they “direct” recipients to pay attention to specific articles, products and information. Every email you send should have an overt or implied strategy behind it. You hope that specific products are purchased over others or that recipients read a specific article and then visit your Web site seeking additional information. Subject lines should reflect your goals and help direct recipients to take the desired action.

Empathy: While your emails may be distributed to thousands or millions of recipients, they are being received by individuals. Subject lines must recognize this and “speak” to the needs and interests of your recipients as individual customers, readers or prospects.

Togetherness (Subject Lines and From Lines Must Work Together): Largely because of the dramatic increase in spam email in the last year or two, recipients increasingly look at a combination of the from and subject lines to determine whether it is from a trusted source. As a result, the job of a subject line now must not only entice someone to open an email, it must discourage the recipient from deleting it as an unwanted email.

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You've Just Found Your New Marketing Department

2009-10-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

If you have a small business but don't have enough resources to hire a full-time marketing person, don't sweat it. These posts will help you get started in learning how to effectively market your own business and its products/services.

If you need any help/assistance in getting a marketing or sales campaign off the ground, or perhaps require some form of freelance support please contact Darren on 087 698 1353 or visit http://www.support4business.ie/

An Irish company supporting Irish business.