Recently I have been getting the question, “What took you into the marketing business?” I have always been passionate about 3 things in life: God, helping other people and business. Marketing is the single most important activity you can do for your business. Without marketing you will have no business because no one will know that your product exists. So by helping others market their business I get to deal in all levels of my passion. God gives me the ideas, I use those ideas to help people with their business so they earn money and I get paid.
The reason why my company, “The Marketing Model” specializes in Internet marketing is due to the fact that Internet marketing is the cheapest, most cost effective way to market your business. I have found no other marketing avenue that you can track so easily and measure results so effectively. This is one of the reasons why Pepsi did not advertise in the 2010 Super Bowl Commercials this year and pumped the roughly 10 million dollars usually spent into their Internet marketing campaign.
Personally I love marketing strategies that take people offline and bring them online to your business. Why? When your customers come online you can track them, get their contact information, increase your brand awareness and potentially get a purchase.
Website Marketing
Before you can bring your customers online you have to bring them somewhere, right? So how do you get started in the Internet game? Secondly, how do you get people to notice you online? The first building block to gaining an online presence is having a website. When I say having a website I do not mean setting up a blogger or BlogSpot account. I mean having a professional website, hosted on your own dedicated server that is designed specifically to get you traffic.
You see there are 2 different skill sets when it comes to website design. The first skill set is the actual design which most everyone can do, the second skill set is designing your website in such a way that enables your site to receive traffic online…this is far more rare. Many web designers are way too expensive and produce a product that will leave your website lost in the sea of the billions of web pages that you are competing with via Google.
I wrote an article on, “How to Find Out What Google Thinks of Your Site” that you could read for more information on this subject.
Joint Venture Partnerships
Once you have your website all set up and your product ready to sell, then what you need is help. Finding other businesses that are selling non-competitive products to your demographic is the BEST way to get GREAT conversions for CHEAP. Forming these types of partnerships are critical for letting the masses know about your product and your success.
So how do you form these partnerships? You ask. Really, as simple as that sounds asking is all there is to the equation. But, how you ask is the trick. DO NOT go in with an ultimatum type of offer such as, “Let’s partner up! You sell your product on my site and I will sell your product on my site.” Such an offer will elicit either a “yes” or “no” response. You are guessing, not asking what your potential partner wants.
You will find a much greater return on your partnership idea if you say: “I would like to help you promote your company. I have a couple of ideas on how we could work together but wanted to see if there is an interest first.”
If they say, “yes” than pitch your idea but end your pitch with, “What are your thoughts? I am interested to hear your ideas?” This way you invite partnership, not a client. Do you see the difference?
Word of Mouth Advertising
My third cheapest form of marketing is word of mouth advertising. Though word of mouth marketing is cheapest form of advertising you will ever experience, getting the word of mouth marketing buzz to begin is more difficult and even more difficult is stop!
2 things cause the fire known as word of mouth advertising: under promising and over delivering…and over promising and under delivering. At the root of each of these causes is simply this, “client expectations.” If you can effectively supersede your clients expectations on a regular basis than you will cause positive word of mouth advertising. If you don’t than you will cause negative word of mouth advertising.
Finding Client Expectations
A great way to find out your client’s expect is to visit your competition. What standard do they set as an industry? If you are in the auto-repair business you do not have much competition in the field of surpassing expectations. If you had a clean lobby, comfortable chairs, amazing coffee with flavored creamer, a selection of movies that customers could watch, video games they could play, or computers where they could check their email you would have people standing in line to get their oil changed.
See my point? If the standard for service is low in your industry than you can easily raise the bar and cause positive word of mouth. If the standard for service is high than you could easily tip the scale in the other direction. Know your competition.
So why did I get into the marketing business? I love helping people. If you are the same way than lets help more people by leaving a comment to add value or by sharing this on the social networks below. Only takes a second and you could change someone’s life.
What’s up Steve, I don’t always keep up with your blog but I try to check up on it once in a while. I work in marketing now a days also, but from the other side of the spectrum doing web and graphic design, so I thought I would share some constructive criticism with you and defend my profession a bit.
With all the prefabricated website layouts and clip art available now a days, there is some truth in saying that most everyone can design a website. But with that mentality a client could also say they could pay most anyone minimum wage to hold a sign in front of their store all day to take care of their marketing needs, so why would they hire you? But there is obviously a huge quality difference there, right?
I also remember reading something you wrote a while back about creating a successful blog, that you can commission a writer for cheap to create content for you and then bank off their work (in not so many words). But doing this you are either going to get low quality work, or you will be taking advantage of a desperate writer hard up for cash and ultimately you will loose their respect in the process.
So basically my point is that the work people do on the creative side of marketing is just as important to you, as the work people do on the selling side of marketing is to me, and neither side should take the other side lightly because we all need each other in order to be successful.