Marketing Cues For The Clueless

By Kevin Nunley
Posted Sunday, August 22, 2004

Any successful small business owner knows that the key to success is a strategic marketing plan. However, many of us "little people" can't afford to bring in heavy-hitting marketing executives to develop and carry out such a plan. Lucky for us, there are a lot of things we CAN do to ensure our marketing plan is successful. Here are just a few of them.

Promote Your USP

Your USP is your Unique Selling Position. It's the one thing you have that your competitors don't. When you promote your USP you get more customers.

Your USP could be a product or service that people want, but the others don't sell. It could be something a bit more intangible, like friendly service.

One search engine promotion firm I worked with NEVER answered email. Another always replies within hours. There is never any question which will get my business.

Put your Unique Selling Position on your business card, in your newspaper ads, and front and center on your web site.

If everybody in your business keeps their prices a big secret, publish yours right out in the open where anyone can examine them (you might be surprised how many of us won't buy if we aren't given the price without having to ask).

If all the others have the same products, point out how your products are original, one of a kind, or first to market.

Keep Old Customers Coming Back

It is always going to be faster, easier, and cheaper to get your existing customers to buy than to lure in new customers.

Give your customers a new reason to buy again. Offer the service or product they have bought before, but this time with an added incentive. You not only design the web site, but also promote it for the first month.

Big discount stores like Kmart and Walmart have discovered the truth in this system. You'll notice they go wide but not very deep. Instead of selling six different styles of can openers, they sell just one or two types of 60 different kitchen utensils.

Use this same principle to maintain your business' niche while bringing existing customers more and more related products.

Each time you add a new related product to your line, blast out another email to your customer base announcing your addition.

Get More Visitors to Your Site

Need a quick boost in web site visitors as we go into the holiday shopping season? Here's what to do:

1. Offer free software to your customers. Check out tucows.com for software developers who are eager to distribute their work for free.

2. Offer a free course via email. This can simply be a few informative pages that help your target customers solve a common problem.

3. Offer to help or answer questions at no charge. My offer to look at your web site and offer an opinion always draws lots of response (so much so that I'm almost afraid to mention it heregrin).

4. Start your own contest. Have lots of winners of small prizes with each winner eligible to win a much larger prize.

5. Write a press release about all the special promotions you are doing. Put it on it's own web page and register with Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo, and Hot Bot. Use my free press announcement builder at
"(http://internetwriters.com/release.htm)"

About the Author
Kevin Nunley provides marketing advice, copy writing, and promotion packages at "(http://drnunley.com/)". Reach Kevin at kevin@drnunley.com and 801-253-4536.