Hi Everyone,

In talking to a lot of people who have their own businesses I often hear I know everything about my business, but the phone isn’t ringing. What’s wrong?

It’s a problem that almost everyone in business that isn’t a marketing expert faces. You can be the best plumber, tax accountant, or doctor in the world, but if you don’t know how to get the word out–how to market your product or service–there’s no way you can get the customers you need.

Here are six essential steps to follow to get great marketing that doesn’t cost a fortune.

1. Define your market.

Decide who your main customers are. Find out all you can about them. Look at your past sales and see any commonality and don’t be afraid to ask them questions to find out more about what you can do to help them and find similar prospects.

2. Find out what media your target market uses.

Is it TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines or the Internet?

3. Limit the media you use to what you can afford to use consistently.

The key to effective marketing is consistency. You have to hit the audience with your message again, and again, and again.

Don’t blow your entire marketing budget on a one-shot try. Choose a less expensive type of media that you can afford to use week after week. That’s how you get marketing success.

4. Sell the main benefit of your product or service. Make your marketing geared to your clients.

How does your product or service improve your customer’s life? Talk to your customer from their own perspective.

5. If you don’t have a big budget, use FREE mediums such as Social Networks. If you have a good public interest piece or newsworthy, call your local news editor and try to get them to interview you.

6. You have information that is unique to you and your business. Give some of it away as newsletters or white papers. This will let people know you are real and knowledgeable. Even if they won’t buy from you today, they’ll remember you tomorrow.

As always, please contact me if we can be of any help to you in your marketing efforts.

Best,
Laura Betterly
President
Yada Yada Marketing, Inc.

www.yadayadamarketing.com

727-442-5888

Yada Yada In the News:
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10417905/1/six-tips-for-marketing-to-parents.html

We’re quoted on page two of this article.

Yada Yada Results:
On a head to head comparison to Reach Local our campaign created 5X the leads and calls for one of our clients.

Technorati Tags: marketing, promotion, sales

Hope you are all doing well.

I thought I’d spend a few minutes going over an interesting discovery with regarding website conversions.

As you probably know, we almost always suggest putting a lead form on all websites. We also suggest that a phone number is prominently displayed on the site.

In addition, we add statistic tracking to the site so we can see what specific keywords brought the person to the site and which of those keywords were the most effective for gaining a lead or sale.

Now, most of you know how paid search works. You do some research on how people are searching and what competitors are doing, place some ads and if your research and ad are done right, you will get a percentage of the people clicking on to the target website.

That is the first threshold of what needs to be cracked so to speak in order to get an efficient campaign.

Now, what if you’re getting traffic and you are not getting leads or sales?

There are a few potential reasons for this:

–Your website is not designed for conversions. Some sites, although aesthetic, are really designed for PR purposes, not to sell.

–There wasn’t enough market research done in the first place so that certain elements such as price point are not right.

–There was no optimization done (split testing, and work done on these specific pages designed to make them convert.)

–There is no market for your product (which would have been known if market research was indeed done.)

–The site is really is converting and you didn’t know it…Huh? How could that be? You might be thinking, I have my tracking set up correctly, so how could I be missing conversions? Simple, when you omit the phone calls that came in as a result of your web promotion, you are painting a false picture on your conversion tracking.

This is not hard to see when you realize that your most interested people will CALL and not fill out a lead form. So, how do you figure out which calls are a result of your web promotion? Well, you could ask everyone who calls religiously where they found out about you, but in reality, not many organizations will do that when really busy.

We found a great resource for doing this, an online telephone center that gives you a toll free number. Not only does it give you reports of who called and when, it gives you the ability to forward to any phone (including your cell) in essence creating a virtual office.

When we started to add this to our conversions we found out we were way more successful than we realized. In some cases as much as eight calls to one lead form.

So, the lesson for today, is to really monitor your conversions, you need to make sure that the calls in are accounted for.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if we can be of help to you in your marketing needs.

Till next week.

Best,

Laura Betterly
President
www.yadayadamarketing.com
727-442-5888

Here’s another bit of shameless self promotion:
I had the pleasure to first meet Laura while I was at Live365 while she was running PC DJ. I loved the software and thought she did a great job getting the message out about the product and company. After she left PC DJ, Laura took her marketing skills and put them to use starting her own operations. She has a solid grasp of the Internet, how to reach an audience and is never afraid to try something new. She is a solid marketer and a wonderful person to have in your corner – especially when you need results oriented marketing.
A. W.

Technorati Tags: marketing, promotion, sales