Want to know what the highest-impact, lowest-cost tool is in your marketing toolkit? First, here are ten reasons to start using this tool right away: 1. It won't get tossed out with the rest of the junk mail. 2. It builds a genuine bond with the recipient. 3. It's personal, a 1:1 "marketing touch," and customized. 4. It costs less than 40 cents. 5. It takes less than 10 minutes to do. 6. It requires no expensive investment. 7. It's low-tech, but high-touch. 8. It's a great way to turn downtime and waiting into productive marketing time....

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Lost & Found for the 21st Century Here in the 21st century our lives have become more and more reliant on mobile items. As we go through our days, keeping a mental log of everything we have and where we have it becomes more and more difficult. It is inevitable that some things get lost. In fact as stated in a recent research "Around 62,000 mobile phones were left in London taxis during the last six months. That's an average three phones per taxi, according to a survey of licensed London cabbies by the Taxi Newspaper and Pointsec Mobile Technologies....

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Effective marketing for the small business begins with market research If you don't know who your customers are, how on earth are you going to reach them? The most effective small business marketing strategies are the most highly targeted ones: the ones which are based on a clear understanding of who their target audience is. What's your target age group and income bracket? What publications do they read? What do they do for fun? For it to be truly successful, your marketing should try to address an issue your target market deal with, fulfil a need or answer a problem....

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Let's face it, the name "proposal" is a great misnomer, but since many businesspeople take it literally, they often paint themselves into a corner of chasing buyers, many of whom requested the proposal to collect idea for in-house implementation. Yes, it is a scumbag approach to drag honest folks arounf by their noses, but apparently there are many scumbags who practise this dishonest technique knowingly, and some innocent folks who believe this is normal and have fallen into the trap. In this article we discuss a few ideas on how you can protect yourself against slimeballs who expect you put in the time and effort to create proposals and want to use them against you in a comparative "the cheapest wins" scenario....

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One key discipline of successful direct marketing has been to test marketing communications tactics to continually improve results. There is now an alarming trend according to a recent survey that we conducted among business-to-business marketers who are readers of Sales Lead Report. Only 24% of the marketing professionals surveyed said they usually or always test their marketing communications tactics before rolling them out. The survey was completed by 280 of 940 subscribers who received and read a special edition of the enewsletter Sales Lead Report....

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Having difficulty knowing what to offer people online? Worried that your prospects are too bombarded by sales pitches to pick yours out from the hundreds they get every day? Try something different - an event! Events are perceived as informational and are often more accepted than sales pitches. Events generate a sense of urgency as they are scheduled on a certain date with a registration deadline. By sending an event e-mail, you can reach people's inbox, a place they look at nearly every day....

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How does a marketing plan relate to an organization's communications plan? What are the differences? Is the marketing plan just one aspect of the communications plan? Should one consider combining them into a single document? A communications plan is a PART of your marketing plan. A communications plan is a focused strategy you use to get the word out about your business, product or service. You may use a variety of communications tactics such as public relations, advertising and speaking engagements....

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You can use great design and copy to get a better response. When you send a mailing to your customers or prospective customers you are counting on making considerably more money in new business than you spend on the mailing, right? It is obvious that if you were not going to profit from the mailing, you wouldn't send it out. A little less obvious is that it costs almost the same amount of money to send out a very attractive mailing piece with brilliant copy which is more likely to produce a great response rate as it does to send out a boring, poorly designed piece guaranteed only to land rapidly in the trash....

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On Superbowl Sunday, Domino's Pizza delivered more than 900,000 pizzas-and mapping technology helped. How do 60,000 pizza outlets serving 3 billion pizzas per year compete in an industry where reputations and dollars are dependent on "fast, hot and delivered to the door?" Global Positioning System (GPS) technology! Here's how you can use this great invention to increase your direct mail results--even if you've only got one store with local customers. GPS may be mapping from outer space, but desktop mapping technology can be a "weapon of mass destruction" for competitive marketers....

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In a previous installment, we spoke about how to come up with a list of persons you currently know. Although everyone on that list will not necessarily become your client, everyone can lead you to clients. In this section, we will talk about how to get referrals from all of the people on your contact list and what to do once you have those referrals. Most people will not feel comfortable giving you referrals until they know how you intend to handle these contacts. No one wants to refer you someone that you are too aggressive with, that you take advantage of, or for what ever reason, that you make them look bad in front of....

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Have you ever chosen to pay attention to someone just because they were so self-absorbed they didn't even know you were in the room? Of course not! We pay attention to people who take an interest in us. If we want our readers to pay attention to us, we better pay attention to them! The people we come in contact with through the course of our jobs are human beings with feelings, needs, wants, and desires. When we take the time to figure out how what we have to offer fills one or more of their needs, we discover the way to grab-and keep-their attention....

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Customizing booklets can be done by industry or by company. "110 Ideas for Organizing Your Travel Business Office" or "110 Ideas for Organizing Your Beauty Salon" or "110 Ways for Organizing Your Fitness Center" are examples of customizing a generic booklet about organizing your business life according to specific industries. "110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life" with a logo on the front cover from XYZ Financial Planners, with their locations on the back cover, and their company history on the inside front and back covers is an example of customizing by company....

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