There are tons of different marketing tactics that are available for you to use and you get inundated with many “new” opportunities every week.  How do you figure out if you should do a specific marketing activity or not?

Below are a few questions to ask yourself when confronted with a great, new, one-of-a-kind, stupendous, money-making, guaranteed marketing opportunity!

1)  Will this marketing strategy actually reach your target market?

It goes without saying that any marketing you do needs to be aimed at your target market.  That being said, we can still get wooed by a great talking sales rep!  You want the marketing vehicle to be as specific as possible in targeting your target.

That’s why you need to really think hard about advertising in more broad-based mediums like magazines and newspapers.  For example, you maybe don’t want to reach all financial planners but only those that specialize in legacy and inheritance issues.

Try to get into special supplements, inserts or sections that are particularly focused at your segment of the readership.  This is key with these broad-based media vehicles because they also are usually quite expensive.

2)  How frequently will your message be seen by prospects in your target group?

This is an important consideration when choosing any marketing activity because we’ve all heard it takes anywhere between 7 - 11 exposures to your message before people will react.

If you can only afford to run an ad in the newspaper, magazine or ezine once then it’s most likely not the best use of your money.  Of course, you need to weigh the perceived credibility of the marketing vehicle and how much “bang you’ll get for your buck”.  For example, one ad during Super Bowl may make sense if you’ve got the money - because of the number of people you’ll reach and the prestige of being one of the advertisers during the Super Bowl is priceless.

So maybe you’ve got a great one-time opportunity to advertise in a big-name person’s workshop binder or new book they’re putting out.  Just make sure that the value and exposure to your target group make the one-time price worth it.

Try to use marketing tactics that allow you to keep in contact with your prospects and clients frequently.  That’s why email marketing and having a newsletter are such cost-efficient and effective marketing strategies.

3)  Is this marketing tactic something you can do consistently?

One of the worst things people do with their marketing is to start something, do it for a little while and then abandon it when something else grabs their eye.  To reap the most benefits (read: profits and great relationships) you need to choose marketing tactics that you can do consistently and in that way build the relationship with your prospects and customers.

When evaluating a new strategy figure out if you’ve got the time, money and sometimes most importantly - the interest in doing it on a consistent basis.  For example, don’t start a weekly ezine unless you can dedicate an hour each week to writing it.  You don’t want to send a message to your prospective clients that you can’t be reliable and “stick” with something.

Next time you’re told about THE newest, best marketing activity that you MUST try, step back and take a few minutes to ask yourself these 3 questions.  It will make marketing easier and less stressful for you and also for your prospects!

It’s pretty hard to have a relationship with somebody if they don’t ever hear from you!

That’s why the cornerstone to creating an ongoing marketing relationship with your prospects and clients is to build a permission-based email list.

Only when people have given you their permission to market to them, and you have their name and email address, can you start to have any kind of business relationship with them.

In order to build a hot and steamy list….or at least a satisfied and happy list of prospective and current customers, you need to strategically use every point of contact with people.

Here are some suggestions on different ways you can get people to opt-in to your list:

• make sure you have an opt-in box/sign-up form on the top of every page of your website
• advertise your opt-in form when you ship products - include it in a postcard or a colored one-pager included in the shipping box/envelope
• include a “send to a friend” option with your ezine, special reports and so on
• have the link to your free-giveaway/ezine sign-up form in your resource box at the end of any articles you distribute to article submission sites and other people’s ezines
• give information on how people can sign up for an email subscription with all your print ads and direct mail
• have your opt-in message and box on your shopping cart pages when people purchase something
• have email signatures on all email being sent out by you and employees to have a one-line blurb about signing up for the company email newsletter or free report
• include information and link to your ezine/free report opt-in page in any press releases you send out
• add sign-up information to invoices, warranty and product registration cards
• have call center and sales staff ask people if they’d like to receive ezines and informational emails - whenever they’re talking to a prospect or customer over the phone
• promote your free-giveaway and provide sign up information at all your in-person meetings, workshops, trade shows and presentations
• promote your ezine or free special report in consumer and trade publications, other company’s publications, industry sites and directories
• add the opt-in box to any reports, white papers and registration forms you send out
• include information on how to opt-in to your ezine or free-giveaway on any surveys you send out to people

As you can see, there are many places of contact with your prospects and clients where you can tell them about your free-giveaway, special report or ezine subscription. Take advantage of these opportunities to add people to your email list - so that you can ensure a profitable and productive marketing relationship between you.

In order to gain your prospects’ and clients’ attention you have to appeal to their pleasure or their pain.

Your future and current customers are looking for products and services that will enhance their lives personally, professionally, spiritually, emotionally or physically.  You will enhance their lives either through alleviating or eliminating some kind of pain for them OR providing them with something pleasurable and enjoyable.

You’re probably thinking that I’ve “dumbed” it down too much but it really is that simple.  Your prospects and clients will go searching for something when they have pain or want some pleasure.

Or maybe I should say, they will pay money to you to change how they feel - positive or negative.  They might go looking for solutions out of curiosity but the majority of them won’t hand over their hard-earned money to you unless they are actively needing something.

So that means your marketing needs to target people’s points of pain, discomfort, dissatisfaction or on the flip side, it must show how they can add more pleasure, enjoyment, joy, happiness, satisfaction into their lives.

Of course, sometimes the two (pain and pleasure) aren’t mutually exclusive….get rid of some pain and the person will feel better, but the important thing is that the person went looking for pain relief.

Before you can determine if your marketing message and communication is around pain or pleasure, you need to figure out what your products and services promise.

What benefits do you guarantee your business offerings will provide?  Does your product help people alleviate pain or obtain pleasure?

Remember that people make buying decisions because they believe that a service or product will help them in some way.

It may help them gain more:  money, health, success, love, time, recognition, security, confidence, respect, and control.

Or it may help them avoid:  danger, losing money, ridicule, losing love, frustration, pain, risk, failure, embarrassment.

A free-giveaway is a vital first step in marketing your business and building a list of prospects that you can turn into customers and clients.

Once you create your free-giveaway, you don’t need to touch it again.  Remember, there will always be new people who “discover” you - new people you’ll be getting into your marketing funnel, pipeline or pyramid (however you think of it).

Your free-giveaway is aimed at this constant stream of new prospects and is the vehicle you use to build the marketing relationship with them, build credibility, earn their like and trust and convert them into loyal clients and customers.

So your free-giveaway will always exist as a stand-alone and entry point into your marketing system for the majority of your list.  This doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t build on the work you’ve done with your free-giveaway and leverage its power.

Another word for this is re-purposing your work.  That’s what smart marketers and business people do:  take the time and money you’ve invested in something and re-purpose it to use in conjunction with, or as another marketing tactic or product and service.

For example, with your free-giveaway you can take out pieces of it and write articles around it, blog posts and ezine content.  In this way, you spend the time once on creating your free-giveaway but you take parts of the content and re-purpose (or recycle) it to use in other marketing strategies that you employ.

Smart marketers, like yourself, know that the power of leveraging new marketing tactics with existing strategies is the way to get the most out of your time, expertise and resources.

Schedule a few minutes today to see if you are utilizing the power of your free-giveaway to the fullest.

When approaching the media, you’d better be darned sure your story is interesting. Got a new product to announce? Just signed a new client? Opening store? If so, that’s great. But it’s useless in the eyes of the media unless you have something that makes it unique. So what makes a good story? How can you turn your announcement into a fascinating topic of interest to the media. Here are a few must-do’s:

• Focus - Your story should be about one specific topic. Being too broad makes the story vague and uninteresting. Don’t add a bunch of mumbo-jumbo just because you want to fill a page of paper, keep your story focused on one topic. Any filler information should only serve to support your main idea.

• Drama- Your story needs to have something that is dramatic, unique, different… If you’re opening a store, what makes the opening different than others? Why is it unique? These are questions you need to answer yourself before you propose the story to someone else.

• Sources-When promoting your story, try to look for other sources that support your idea. Customers that enjoy your service or product and are willing to speak with the press are a great resource for a reporter. Perhaps even a spokesperson from the Chamber of Commerce or local Kiwanis club. Anyone that is independent of you and is willing to offer “kudos” to a member of the press can really help set your story apart from others.

• Biggest? If your story is a “first” (or biggest, largest, fastest, etc…), the press eats this kind of information. In fact, you might even want to try to contact the reporter you think might give you the best exposure to your customer base. Offer an exclusive. An exclusive is an offer to a journalist to run the story first, before anyone else. Now if you do offer an exclusive, it really has to have an incredible “Wow” factor, so think about this carefully first.

• Data: Reporters love data. If you can provide any kind of statistical data that supports your story, you’re more likely to get the attention of the media. If you think about it, you’ll often hear the media quote a source saying; “The top ten reasons….” Numbers and statistics can really make your story more interesting to reporters.

Just remember, when you’re writing an announcement, don’t get caught up with ensuring you write what you want. Its not about you…it’s about the journalist and their audience you’re trying to reach. What will get their attention and how can you write a story idea that will stick? Follow these suggestions and watch how quickly your idea will be gobbled up by the press.

If you need expert PR advice and a professional to help, check out Resource Nation’s business center of public relations professionals.

A lot of us small business owners are so busy getting the next marketing tactic up and running that we don’t even think to ask ourselves if it’s working.

That’s why it’s smart marketing to set up some tracking mechanisms at the same time you are implementing the marketing tactic.

Below are 3 methods for keeping tabs on how well your marketing is actually working:

1)    Web site links.

Include web site links in your ezine so your subscribers can respond to special offers or promotions. You can track of how many people are interested enough to click on the link, and you should also be able to measure sales as a direct result of that promotion or offer (with your shopping cart program).

2)    Build in tracking mechanisms to a specific activity.

For example, if you are doing a teleseminar and you are inviting the attendees to visit your web site to sign up for it, create a special page on your web site to drive them to. Then use some kind of free website analytics program like Google Analytics to see how many people visited that page and signed up.

3)    You can also create specific web pages for a campaign and track the hits you get from a campaign. You can look at the links that people come in to your site from (referring URLs) - these can be very useful in creating online relationships. Call the people that are linking to your website - they may be interested in purchasing your services or hiring you for a workshop or event.

With these tracking methods, you will be able to determine what percentage of the total pieces distributed or people reached, responded to your marketing offer and how many took the action requested (i.e. downloaded your free-giveaway, subscribed to your newsletter or ezine, purchased your product, and so on).

Then you’re in a good position to make smart decisions about which marketing tactics you should continue to use, which ones need some “tweaking”, and which ones you should stop doing.

Your free-giveaway needs to be something that your target group finds valuable and has need of.

The product (ebook, CD, etc.) you are giving away for free needs to be something similar to your other products and services (if you have any yet) that you will be trying to sell to these people later on.

Everybody starts to get a bit panicky and anxious when they think about coming up with content for their free-giveaway.  But the truth is that if you take a look around your office, you’ll see you have lots of information that you can pull together or put into a different format that would make a great free-giveaway.

• bundle together articles you’ve written
• combine blog posts you’ve written
• provide a song clip or art sample of your work
• copy of audio of a speech you’ve given
• offer free chapters of a book you’re writing
• transcribe audio or video of a speech
• audio of a teleseminar you gave
• use existing handouts and PowerPoint slides
• transcribe a teleseminar you’ve given
• bundle tips and checklists together
• a video of a speech you’ve given

You can use the content from above to create all kinds of different free-giveaways:

• a checklist
• a quick-start guide that helps people get started in the area of expertise you specialize in
• lessons on how to do something
• offer a free consultation
• 3 months free to a membership group you have
• self-evaluation test or online assessment
• offer an introductory/quick-start session
• list of top ten tips & tricks
• steps to creating something
• free software
• links to free products
• free membership to a forum you run

Take some time today to jot down some ideas about what you know your prospects and clients need on information on and start writing….or better yet, just re-package/re-format something that you’ve already done!

Offering something of value for free is a very important step in marketing. It is a way of introducing yourself to prospective clients in a non-intrusive, friendly manner. People are naturally more cautious and skeptical these days so you need to make it as easy as possible for them to get to know you at their pace - which will be different for each person.

As well, offering a free-giveaway is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to build a list of prospective clients and customers.  In order to do this, you must ask for the person’s name and email address. When people have indicated an interest in finding out more about you by asking for your “sampler”, then you can offer it in exchange for their name and email address.

The easiest way to get a prospect’s contact information is to have an opt-in box on your website.  When you use this in conjunction with an autoresponder/list management system such as Aweber, people’s name and email addresses are captured automatically and put into a list so you can contact them further via email.

In this day and age of Internet selling and buying, the majority of people are comfortable with giving you this information. Once you have this data you will now be able to continue to develop the relationship with these prospects and move them through the other steps in your marketing process.

If you don’t have an opt-in box but you do have a website, the best thing to do is get one created and set up.  It doesn’t cost much as it’s pretty easy to do and many Virtual Assistants can do it for you.

However, don’t worry if you haven’t got your website up and running yet, you can still collect names.  You’ll just have to do it manually and then input them into some kind of spreadsheet (Excel) or a database program like Microsoft Outlook or ACT.

There are many ways to use your free-giveaway and leverage it.  But first you need to have a free product to entice people onto your list, and into a marketing relationship with you.

I encourage you to spend some time today thinking about what you already have of value and how you can repackage it into a valuable free-giveaway that your target group wants and needs.

Part of marketing is measuring how well each marketing tactic is working - on an individual level and as a contributor to your overall success (or not).

Some simple methods for measuring that you can start implementing right away are:

1)  Ask your prospects and clients how they heard about your business, product or service - when they are making a purchase or getting some information.

This is not an exact science because people often don’t recall exactly how they heard about you, especially if they have been exposed to several of your marketing activities.

2)  Do a survey.

You can send your clients a satisfaction survey after they make a purchase and include a tracking question in the survey.

3) Track you website statistics.

To find out how many people are visiting your website, be sure to have a statistics program in place and know how to read it. I like Google Analytics, but there are many good ones out there that are free, including www.webstats.com.

4)  Use unique codes.

If you are creating flyers or coupons promoting a particular product, service or offer, include a unique code and require clients to enter that code on your web site in order to qualify for the special bonus or discount.

When you take the time to look at how well your marketing is working, you increase the chances for your success.  You can toss out what isn’t working and expand on what is working.

If you need help with your marketing, check out Resource Nation’s online marketing business service center.

Marketing consists of longer-term, big marketing strategies and also small, quick tactics.  Marketing should be done daily - but no-one said it has to take hours every day!

Maybe you’re having a “blah” day and don’t feel like doing much?  Pick a handful of these fast and easy marketing tactics, do them and then go read your fiction novel!

• check out competitor’s websites and see what kinds of products and services they’re offering their clients
• send a response to a client’s question that was sent in via website, blog, email, phone message, etc.
• send out an email to your list just to say hi and give them a couple valuable tips or some interesting, helpful links
• check out different groups on Facebook and Yahoo Groups that you might join
• call or send an email to a customer who has just purchased something from your website.  Say thank you and ask them if they need any questions answered or anything clarified
• if you’re offering a teleseminar, give enough advance notice and send reminder emails providing the pertinent details
• check out a company’s website that you are interested in possibly doing a joint venture with
• put a link on your Facebook profile to your new ebook
• send out a press release talking about the teleclass that you’re going to be giving
• send a friendly reminder email to remind people that your special promotion is ending today
• call a new client to find out if they have any questions on their recent purchase
• send an article, with a note, to a client you know is interested in the topic
• order a thank you gift, on the web or by phone, to be sent to someone who just referred a client to you
• submit an article you’ve written to an article directory website
• send a handwritten note to someone you met recently - and make a note in your calendar to follow up with them in one month
• write up something for your blog and post it
• record a podcast of an article you just wrote and submit to podcast directories

If you are need to expand your marketing activities and don’t have the time, visit Resource Nation’s online marketing business service center.