.:RIMproInsider:.

Local advertising continues to change. In a recent article by Greg Sterling, a expert in local search advertising, he reveals some interesting statistics based on two surveys. The first one was September 2003 and the second was just recently completed.

Among many other questions, we asked consumers, “In the past year, which of the following sources of information have you used or referred to when shopping for products or services in your local area?”

That study found that traditional yellow pages, white pages and newspapers were the dominant sources of local information. The Internet was then in fourth position. A follow-up survey with 500 consumers earlier this year found that, remarkably, the Internet had moved into a tie for first position.

This indeed has some significant implications for us in the RIM vendor industry. As a very “local” oriented business you need to be aware of these changes.

Sterling goes on to

Traditional yellow pages and newspapers remain powerful local shopping resources but have lost some of their reach. The Internet has emerged as a potent source for local business information. However, “the Internet” is itself a universe of numerous types of Web sites, including Internet yellow pages, online newspapers and search engines.

Search engines in particular — driven by broadband adoption — have shown significant growth. Yet consumers do not regard search engines as reliable sources for local information in all cases.

One should resist the temptation to see Internet adoption as a zero-sum game vis-à-vis print media. Use of the Internet does not mean that consumers have abandoned traditional media. But it does mean that their local influence has diminished somewhat.

Keep your head in the game. The words my coach reminded me of years ago on the football field are applicable to you today. You can get so busy with the day to day that you forget to be aware of these sigificant changes that have occurred within just two years.

“There is only one way to judge the effectiveness of a marketing piece, and that is by the number of responses you get.” - Heidi Richards -

Multi-step marketing is a simple yet extremely powerful strategy when you use it to its full potential. Multi-step marketing is selling people who have contacted you and asked for information about your product or service; a great way to build your own mailing list of prospects and customers.

You are able to send multiple mailings to those same people from which you have created your own mailing list. The key to multi-step marketing is following up with the prospects using an intensive direct mail campaign. How do you develop your multi-step marketing campaign? Follow these four simple steps… click here to read the entire article.

Step One
Use some sort of direct response advertising to obtain your “leads.” Your ads should have a powerful headline directed at your target audience that causes them to read the rest of the ad and respond. The purpose of your ad is to arouse the reader’s or listener’s curiosity, getting them to call. Always offer them something for free. Your goal in step one is to generate leads.

Step Two

Your prospect reads the ad and calls - leaving her name and address or she writes to you for more information. Using voice mail almost always generates more leads because people want things quickly and easily. Thank the prospect for calling, state a couple of major benefits, and end by asking for her name and address. The message should be between one and two minutes - no more. The goal in step two is to record your leads.

Step Three

Send your direct response offer to the prospect. These prospects fall into one of three categories. We’ll call them cold, warm and hot prospects. A Cold prospect is slightly interested; she is looking and will not buy. These prospects represent a small percentage of your inquiries. A Warm prospect is very interested, but not ready to buy. They represent the majority of your inquiries. A Hot prospect is very interested and ready to buy. They also represent a small percentage of your inquiries.

Step Four

Follow up with mailings to prospects who didn’t buy. Repeat this step again and again. According to “Sales and Marketing Magazine,” 80% of all people who inquire about a product buy that product within one year, but not from the company that made the original contact. Why? Because the company didn’t follow up. It generally takes at least five contacts with a prospect who showed interest in the product or service you offer before they will buy from you. If you are successful with the initial mailing, you can expect 30 to 70 percent in leads turning into customers with follow up mailings.

You don’t have to change the entire mailing each time. Generally changing the cover letter and making minor changes to the mailing is sufficient. Remember that one of your biggest expenses is getting the prospect. By following these four steps you can watch your sales and profits sky-rocket!

Excerpted from The PMS Principles - Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business © 2005 - Heidi Richards

Heidi Richards is the author of The PMS Principles, Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business and 7 other books. She is also the Founder & CEO of the Women’s ECommerce Association, International http://www.WECAI.org (pronounced wee-kī) - an Internet organization that “Helps Women Do Business on the WEB.” Basic Membership is FREE. Ms. Richards can be reached at http://www.HeidiRichards.com. or Heidi@wecai.org

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

You want to market your business but you don’t want to spend a lot of money. You may be just starting out and have precious little capital or you may have a successful business but want to spend as little as possible for the greatest results. Or, you may just be cheap. How can you create a marketing strategy that results in a steady stream of new clients on a shoestring budget?

The key is having the KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, SYSTEMS and TOOLS to create and implement your marketing plan.

KNOWLEDGE

While service professionals and small business owners are experts in their business, they often don’t have the marketing knowledge they need to grow their businesses. If you aren’t attracting dozens of new prospects each week and converting at least one of them to client status, you need to learn what to do to market your business.

Depending on your budget, you can:

Visit your local library and read a dozen books on marketing.

Spend one or two hundred dollars on a couple of marketing manuals from the marketing masters on the web.

Hire a marketing coach or consultant to help you learn what to do and how to do it.

Pay a marketing expert to do your marketing for you.

SKILLS

Once you have a marketing plan you’ll need to develop some marketing skills, no matter what your role is in your organization. The three most important skills are:

1. Asking the Right Questions

Open-ended questions are the best way to direct prospects to engage prospects, direct their thinking and learn what they want. Do you know:

What your prospects care about?

The problems your prospects want to solve?

What information your prospects want?

Use questions to get the answers. Put together 5-10 questions to ask your prospects.

2. Listening

Listen carefully to understand, provide a synthesis of their responses and use a problem-solving approach to provide the link between symptoms and causes.

3. Writing Compelling Copy

The copy in your marketing materials and the copy you use for your “elevator speech” will make the difference between attracting or boring prospects. Demonstrate to prospects, that you understand their concerns and their business context, and that you are the expert they need. Start by regularly giving them an idea they can use.

SYSTEMS

Establish systems to support your marketing plan. Setting up the systems to market your business costs little and make an unmanageable task a clerical function you or your assistant can do. You’ll need to set a schedule for marketing activities, define responsibilities and use your computer to automate tasks. The most important systems to develop and implement are a way to collect leads and stay in touch with prospects and clients. You’ll need a centralized database and a schedule for staying in touch with prospects and clients in order to do this.

Automate functions where possible so you can focus your time on delivering products and services. There is simple and easy to use software that can help you manage contacts, add prospects to your database and send out broadcast emails to the people who are interested in getting your ideas. Once you’ve put these marketing systems in place, you can focus on handling the growing number of inquires you will receive.

TOOLS

The tools you need to market your business will vary depending on your target market and the products and services you offer. The basics include:

1. Marketing materials, the finished copy you use on everything from your business card, to your brochures, or online.

2. Questions, the questions you use when people call about your services, or when you meet with clients, or to find out what information they want so you can write the perfect proposal.

3. Communication tools, such as a phone, email and website.

Take a look at your marketing and determine if you have the Knowledge, Skills, Systems and Tools to attract a steady stream of new clients. Identify the gaps and fill them. You may need to invest a few dollars to make many, but with frugal marketing strategies you can limit marketing expenditures and maximize profits.

Copyright 2003 In Mind Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.

About The Author

The author, Marketing Coach, Charlie Cook, helps independent professionals and small business owners who are struggling to attract more clients. He can be contacted at ccook@charliecook.net or visit www.charliecook.net to get a copy of the free marketing guide, ‘7 Steps to Get More Clients and Grow Your Business’.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

In a great post on Creatin Passionate Users there is a great graphic of customer relationship.

Please note… love or hate is a good thing… if they could care less, then you are in big trouble.

I want to make sure you hear this and hear it clear…

“Your Primary Job is NOT Records Storage or Media Vaulting or Shredding; it’s the Marketing of Your Records Storage or Media Vaulting or Shredding Services!”

Don’t get stuck in the mistaken notion you can build a successful business just by being the best storage or destruction vendor. You can’t! That is now the price of entry into the game. The price of success is the ability to market the business the best.

I read an interesting article this morning about how hard it is for people to change ingrained habits. Evolability - basically means the ability to evolve.

I heard a statistic a while back; it takes the average person more than 15 days to adapt to a change as simple as moving a garbage can from the right side of their desk to the left side.

This leads me to making a couple of observations.

1. When expecting staff to make significant changes in a sales or operations approach that they have done for months or years, we need to realize that the evolability factor comes into play. I have talked to owners who are extremely frustrated with a staff member after telling them something once that they haven’t done yet. That is not to say they shouldn’t be required to change, but as owner managers we should be aware of the time it often takes people to adapt to changes. It is not that they can’t, it is not that they won’t… it is that their brain is actually rewiring itself to allow this change.

If you spent a few hours a day for the next three weeks learning to play the piano, you would be altering the structure of your brain. Specifically, you would alter a part of your brain that represents your body and helps move its parts in precise fashion. When you learn to play the piano, you stimulate the region of the brains’ map that represents your fingers, challenging your brain to learn the new motor skills.
Inactivity, on the other hand, can lead to a decrease in the brains’ representations underlying a skill - this indicates that the brain is constantly adapting to external events that affect how you use it.

It makes sense now why staff find the changes we demand difficult.

2. In order to be agents of change we need to be people who are capable of evoability ourselves. That means we must manage to keep adapting things in our own lives to ensure we don’t loose the capacity to quickly change. Changing our approach on a regular basis keeps our brains wired to change versus wired to constancy. And every indication I can see is that we are in an industry that demands a constancy of change.

People are often aggravated by their computers. That seems to be a part of modern life. But in an office setting, when the level of aggravation rises significantly, it is an indication that there is a systemic problem with the technology.

Being experts in “space” and “storage,” we treat the problem the way we treat our regular growing pains - with more storage space. We add bigger hard drives, more memory, bigger monitors, and even more computers with newer operating systems. Or, we have an “expert” tweak our hard drives, removing supposed viruses and illicit programs, to find more, well… space. But these things are only symptoms of a deeper problem, one that every growing and successful business has to face at some point in time. The computer aggravation factor is simply the lack of an adequate IT infrastructure.

Well, “simply” may not be the right word. A good IT infrastructure is far from simple. It integrates diverse software application programs effectively with one another and the people using them. As the number and sizes of software applications grow, and more demands are made on our computers, the processes used to manage manage all of these demands become over-taxed. Bigger, and more robust software management solutions are needed.

A good IT infrastructure is particularly important for the RIM industry because of the kinds of technology we use or are beginning to use. Unlike many industries, our very lines of business are heavily dependant on special software applications. Honestly, RIM may well be one of the most technology-dependant industries going, but our office IT infrastructures are often primitive in comparison.

The more successful our business becomes, the more likely we will experience the computer aggravation factor. In time it is inevitable. Upgrade your IT infrastructure to become robust enough to handle your growing success.