Marketing planning must be really difficult and complex, otherwise why would there be so many books written on the subject ? right? Well, I'm just enough of a skeptic to believe that many of these books were designed more to make money for their publishers and authors than to make marketing planning simple and understandable. I spent more than 30 years working with very successful small business people who never wrote a single marketing plan. Why didn't they need complex, 100-page marketing plans chock full of statistics, charts and graphs like the experts recommend?...

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Are you planning an event or participating in a trade show any time soon? If so, consider the following 10 low-cost marketing tactics before mailing your payment. Event Marketing Tactic #1 -- Is the purchase decision-maker attending the event? Are you certain? Let's say you sell gifts that help increase employee moral and you're considering exhibiting at the National Association of Human Resources annual conference. Is your decision-maker attending? Who attends this event -- HR directors, managers or VPs?...

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How often do you sit around and wonder how to make more money and get more people to buy more from your company? It's one of the most basic problems every company faces. The answer is astonishingly simple. Too simple maybe. But I've seen it work over and over again with our customers in every line of business you can imagine. You have to promote. Your income is governed by the size of your customer base and how often and effectively you communicate with those customers. So raising your income is simply a matter of keeping in touch with your existing customer base, reminding them you are there, offering them goods or services they might be interested in, in such a way that they want to buy more and more often from you....

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Marketing can be expensive. It doesn't have to be, but sometimes you will spend more than you should. Usually you'll realise this after you've done it. But here are two tips that can save you thousands of dollars. 1- Make sure you really understand your market and your distribution channels. Sounds simple, doesn't it! For example, one client had developed an information product for small businesses. They had some assistance from another agency to check the market and confirm how they should present the product....

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What's a small business owner to do if they have more than one audience to market to? Perhaps they need to attract clients but they also need to recruit business partners or vendors. Do they need two marketing plans or can they use one plan that tries to address both aspects? This is a great question that applies to many different types of businesses who find they need to market to more than one group of people. You only need one marketing plan. However, you will have two different target audiences within that plan and you'll need to have a marketing strategy for EACH of these audiences....

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Can you remember the last dozen advertising messages beamed at you today? Can you remember even one of them? Most people can't. This illustrates a major obstacle you need to overcome before you can successfully promote your product or service. You have to capture a prospective customer's attention in the first few seconds or your sales message will be ignored. This is especially important on the Internet where a visitor can simply click away from your website ...forever. Here are 4 proven techniques you can use to quickly capture a prospect's attention....

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So you have a Web site. And so does most every business these days. But what you really need is a way to set your business apart from the competition, an online presence that will keep clients and prospects coming back again and again. As usual, outstanding content may be your solution. While clear, well-written content is vital (see my June 2004 newsletter for tips about this), fresh, well-written content may be even more important for bringing new and repeat visitors to your site. Fresh, or regularly updated content, can help you and your business in several ways: 1....

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Buying your promotional products and corporate apparel online provides five major advantages: a greater selection, better pricing, convenience, customer service, and faster ordering time. Manufacturers often display their entire line of products on the internet, providing you with a greater selection of products. With all of these manufacturers online, you gain the opportunity to compare pricing and quality in a simple and accessible online format, instead of wasting time flipping through endless catalogs that crowd your workspace....

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I just collected my mail. As usual, more than 80% of it was junk. Marketing junk. What did I do with it? Threw it in the garbage without reading it. Same as you do. Only it made me think about this article, which I guess might be of some use, unintended by the morons who send me all that useless direct mail. When I open a local newspaper, the first thing I do is chuck away all the god-awful leaflets and flyers hidden inside it. Same with anything people put in my mailbox or tuck behind the latch on my door....

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Some of the research that has been done today gives us alot of information on the values of today's society. WhatI'm referring to is a lifestyle in which there is more todo in generally less time in which to accomplish it. There's more to spend money on so there's less disposableincome. Quite often there's just one parent instead of thetraditional two parents. Safety and security is important, Quality and value are more important than ever. People arewilling to pay more for desired quality. People are alsowilling to withdraw from the unnecessary and focus onessential stuff, and Convenience is extremely important....

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I'm reading Seth Godin's Permission Marketing and he brings up the difference between Interruption Marketing and Permission Marketing. Interruption Marketing is when you interrupt people from what they are doing in order to ask them to pay attention to something else. Permission Marketing is when you build your product around a consumer base that is expressing a need that you design your product to fulfill. If you've read The Tipping Point then you already know that as soon as Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen get ahold of a good message, it can spark a social epidemic and change everything....

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GETTING INTO MARKETING MOMENTUM: The 5 Power Principles for Getting Your Business into High Gear Do you know the #1 reason why most businesses fail and why you could become a fatal statistic as well? The answer is ... MARKETING, MARKETING, MARKETING. Marketing is the "life blood" of any business. Without marketing, there are no revenues. Without revenues, there is no business. So what is blocking you right now in your marketing efforts? What will it take to get your marketing into high gear?...

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