Marketing Ideas

No one buys anything from a person or business he doesn’t trust. You wouldn’t buy a car from a dealer you thought was ripping you off, or from a salesperson who you thought wasn’t being honest with you, right?

Most people have always gone into a skeptical mindset when they make big-ticket items, like televisions and cars, but that skepticism is leaking into smaller purchases too. With all of the hyped-up advertising, with promises that can’t be delivered, you can’t really blame consumers for being cautious.

It’s precisely this reason that you need to use marketing techniques that put customers’ minds at ease. Here are a few ways to get trust from your customers, which is a first step to making any sale:

Testimonials
People believe what other customers have to say about you and your product more than they’ll believe what you have to say.

Using testimonials in your catalogs, brochures and other marketing materials is what will convince people that your product is the best, that it works and that it won’t break.

Get testimonials by asking customers what they liked about your product or service and how it helped them. Ask if you helped them solve a problem – these kinds of benefit testimonials work especially well. Write down their comments, and get their written permission to use them. It helps if you offer a discount or something valuable in exchange for their time. But, be sure you get the testimonial before you offer the discount or you might be called out for bribing your customers!

Write articles to establish yourself as an expert
Writing free articles for your local newspaper or magazine can be a great source of getting trust from the community. Write about what you know – your industry or your type of product – but don’t only talk about you and your product. In fact, it’s best if you don’t mention your affiliation at all in the article. Your name, occupation and/or business name will most likely be in the credit line. You might also get a headshot to accompany the article. People want to buy from those they think are knowledgeable – knowledge equals trust.

Ask for referrals
Give out your business cards to your customers and ask if they know anyone who might need your service. You can also ask your friends and family to ask their friends and family for referrals. Also, try some networking events like social industry dinners – they can be great places to strike up a conversation and find someone that might need your product, or knows someone that might need your product.

Personalize your direct mail
Use people’s names on letters and postcards – people will be more apt to read something that is addressed to them by name rather than to “Dear customer.” You trust someone that you know personally, and using names are an easy way to evoke trust. Also, try to get to know your target market – whether they have kids, pets, etc. and use that info in your direct mail pieces. “Now that your kids are about to go back to school …”. Make people think your direct mail is talking directly to them.

Lastly, once you establish a contact, keep following up periodically. Once a month or once every other month is good – enough for them to remember you, but not enough to annoy them. Once you earn consumers’ trust, the rest of the sales process is much easier!

If your sales presentations aren’t getting you a lot of return phone calls, you should read the following tips for ensuring your sales presentation is the best it can be.

1. Time it. Your audience has a limited attention span, no matter what their age! CEOs get bored just as quickly as teenagers. If you drone on for too long, you’ll lose any interest gained in the first part of the presentation. Keep it short and to the point.

Follow the 60% rule: however much time is set aside for your meeting or presentation, use 60% of that total time. If you have a half-hour scheduled, use about 18 minutes for your presentation. If you have an hour scheduled, your presentation should last about 40 minutes. This allows your prospect to think it over and ask questions without being rushed.

2. Match your prospects’ tone while speaking. If your prospects (or main prospect, the highest-ranking person in the meeting) talk fast, you should talk fast. If your prospects talk slow, and take time to pause before the next phrase, you should try to do the same. The way they speak is the way they best understand speech back to them.

3. Watch your body language. The way you hold yourself can contradict the words coming out of your mouth. If you’re slouched over and have your arms crossed, it’s going to be hard for the prospects to get excited about anything you have to say. Stand up straight, use eye contact with everyone in the room (not all at once – although that would be an interesting trick!) and be careful of how much you use your hands. Use your hands to point to posters or other visuals to emphasize a point, but try not to let your hands get distracting by flailing about.

4. Use visual aids. Visuals aids should be just that – things that help you make your points – they shouldn’t be your point. Don’t rely on your visual aids to tell the whole story for you. Visual aids can reinforce your message and they increase retention, so definitely use them, just don’t abuse them! And definitely don’t read straight from them like a boring college professor – paraphrase the words on the visual or add information to them with your speech.

5. Keep your prospects involved. Do this by asking questions or use your presentation as a stage for a demonstration. Let the prospects use your product as they or their customers would in a real situation. Use their reactions and questions to gauge their interest.

6. Avoid clichés and overused phrases. People will start to ignore you when you say “We’re the best, forget the rest” or “I’ll be honest with you.” If you use phrases that are old-hat, you’ll lose attention and interest. Take time to rehearse your presentation and if you find you’re using clichés when you don’t mean to, write down some alternative wordings and practice with those.

7. Practice, practice, practice. You can also find phrases or parts of your presentation that don’t work and you’ll have time to fix them before the real deal. This is the best piece of advice because the more you practice, the better you’ll become and the more comfortable you’ll become with your presentation.

As your organization grows, your marketing needs will change. As you add materials to your marketing arsenal or add products to your product line, you need to change your brand to reflect your current business image.

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them” that identifies the products and services of one business and differentiates it from other businesses.

Branding often appeals to the emotions – you want people to feel a certain way when they see your packaging, your Web site, your brochures and other marketing materials. If these items are inconsistent people will get confused. If you want your branding to make people feel like they can trust you, using copy emphasizing trust in your flyers and using copy emphasizing consistency on your Web site, your potential customers may get confused.

Here are some pointers on how to evaluate your brand and decide whether to rebrand:

Has your brand promise changed?

Your brand is your promise to the customer. It should convey to them what they should anticipate from your products. It should tell them how you are different from your competition. Your brand should be based on who your company is, what you want your company to be and what people perceive you to be. You need to review your promise first, because that promise is at the core of all your brand messaging. If your promise has changed, you need to rebrand.

Evaluate your branding look

If you created your brand look – the color palette, fonts, photos, etc. – years ago, you may need to rebrand. There’s no definite number of years that a brand can last, but if your look just isn’t capturing the feeling you want customers to feel, it’s time to update the brand. If your business has grown and now uses the latest technology, your brand should show that. Homemade-looking materials that worked years ago just won’t work now. You need to keep up with the changin’ times.

If your logo or another key element of your branding design is out of date, you can just update that one item – there’s no need to update every element of your brand if only one piece isn’t working.

Another tip is to not change your brand design just because you are tired of it. Many people haven’t even seen your brand yet, so if it’s been working and it still gives the feeling you want people to receive, don’t change it. If you’re a cliché person: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Update for consistency

If you add product brochures for each new product you make, you need to make sure it looks consistent with all of your other product brochures and other marketing materials. All of your materials should look like they belong to a family when viewed together. A family has certain characteristics that look similar, but that doesn’t mean they look identical. The elements that should stay the same are: color palette, graphics, fonts, and logo usage. Lay out all your marketing materials and see if you can tell they all represent the same company. If not, it’s time to rebrand for consistency.

Rebranding is not something to take lightly – make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons and that the rebrand will enhance your customers’ understanding of your business and will give them the feeling you want. Rebranding willy-nilly whenever you feel like it without doing some evaluation will just end up confusing people in the future.

How much money do you have to blow on marketing? Unfortunately you’re going to need at least a little money set aside to take care of your marketing, so how can you make that budget stretch as far as possible?

Let’s look at posters as a good example. First off, posters are a rather cheap form of marketing to begin with; you just have to put more of your time into it. Time isn’t the easiest thing to come by, but often you’ll have more time on your hands than you’ll have money, or that’s how it usually is for me.

But before I go into the footwork of posters, let’s go back to the ways of stretching your marketing buck. If you’re going to buy posters you’re going to want to go with wholesale printing and get the biggest order that you can.

See, the thing about printing is that the most expensive part of the printing process is typically going to come from actually printing the design as opposed to the number of posters you’re getting done.

To make it a little clearer, when a company first prints your order they need to set up the equipment to get your order going, and this start up is where the bulk of your costs will lay. So let’s say you’ve designed a poster that promotes your company but isn’t limited by any kind of timeframe—no upcoming sale or something like that.

What you can do is get the biggest order possible and set aside the extras for future use. You can get a massive order of color posters for cheaper than it would’ve taken to do two orders. Really, it comes down to planning ahead to what you’re going to need later on rather than just what you need at this moment.

Ah, the horrors of planning ahead. I swear a lot of people seem to fear this concept as if it were a virus. They live so thoroughly in the moment without any care for what tomorrow holds.

If you want to save your cash, then you need to know about these kinds of things and get the proper sized order.

Now, as for the time investment I mentioned earlier, the other great thing about posters is your ability to go yourself and put them up at various locations. You don’t have to pay to mail them out to a bunch of different people when you can just go yourself and have them at specific locations.

It might not be the fastest way you can get those posters up, but it will get them up, and the only thing you will have lost is time and a little bit of gas—or just walk if gas prices are getting you down.

Welcome to the world of inexpensive marketing. It isn’t the most entertaining thing, but it still works.

Promotional items of every type and variety can be seen at trade shows. These days, attendees of trade shows expect their schwag at each booth visited. Many business owners do not put sufficient thought into which items they select. Oftentimes, they end up picking whatever is cheapest. This proves to be a mistake.

The first consideration is durability. If you give an item which only last a few days, then you are spending far more per time viewed as opposed to an item which sticks around for a year. You should think of it in terms of a billboard. Which is more valuable, a billboard which will be up for a year or one which comes down after three days? This obvious answer is ignored by those purchasing promotional items.

Items which are displayed out in the public are great choices. A tee shirt or baseball cap are salient examples. The wearer essentially becomes a walking advertisement for you. Close attention must be paid to quality and wording. A torn and frayed tee shirt does not convey the branding message you desire.

Color is very important. Psychologists have derived a quick guide to color selection. Blue is good for men in general while pink is obviously good for women. Those in the healthcare industry should receive white. Orange is perfect for construction, building or safety. Green being the color of money suits bankers and others in finance. Techies like gray. Who knows why?

Next time you are purchasing promotional items put sufficient thought into your selection. It can often be the difference between wasted marketing expenses versus high advertising ROI.