Top 10 Cost Effective Small Business Marketing Tips

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by James Copper

I was talking to a veteran marketing consultant the other day and I asked him quite cheekily for his top 10 low cost marketing tips. To my amazement he complied and rattled off the following answer. I grabbed a notebook and feverishly started writing.

Please note that this man has spent a lifetime reading and researching the marketing game and helping thousands of small business owners to institute their marketing strategies. He said the following were guaranteed to help business owners get more customers, increase sales and income and build wealth.


The 10 Tips

1. Make a list and work on your marketing activities each day

It does not matter whether you are planning activities and promotions, or actually implementing them. As long as you stick to your list of six or seven items and plug away at them religiously each day, you will achieve your goals. But dont get stale. Periodically add two or three additional tactics to your strategy to freshen up your strategy and makes things fun.

2. Use buddy marketing to promote your business

Make a reciprocal arrangement with another similar or complementary business so that when you distribute brochures you include a leaflet, flyer, or business card of your buddy business. They do the same for you.

3. Advertise on your car its free

Order a pair of magnetic signs at your local sign shop. Include your business name, phone number, web site, and perhaps even a short blurb or special offer to build excitement.

4. When you are playing you should be working to promote your business

Remember, you are the best ambassador for your business. Wear t-shirts printed with your company name on them. Wear them when you go bowling, play in a band, or go to your children`s baseball games. Hand out your business card to absolutely everyone you

5. Advertise in inexpensive local flyers

This is a low cast winner. Advertise in free sheets, brochures and leaflets distributed by sports club or sports event organizers, social clubs publicizing dances or other gatherings and even church communications. You never know who will see these little flyers.

6. Offer lottery tickets as incentives?

Lottery tickets are cheap but they have a million dollar cachet. Offer your customers a great incentive with a free ticket in the lottery.

7. Send candy in the mail and deliver cookies

People love anything sweet candy and cookies especially. Whenever you send a mailing or a package include candy.

8. Join your local chamber of commerce.

It sounds like a bore but this is a cheap and effective way to develop relationships, become involved in the community, build your contact and prospect list, and increase your knowledge.

9. Think about giving and not just taking

Approach every customer with the idea that you are there to help them really help them You should consider making the sale a secondary consideration. Its funny the sale will follow automatically

10. Marketing by walking around

You should walk around your neighborhood, talk to your existing customers and anyone else. Remember, they are your prospective customers. Word of mouth will start working for you

James Copper is a writer for http://www.marketinglinx.com/ where you can find marketing tips UK.

Published By: Indocquent.com- An online resource that allows businesses and individuals to promote their business, products and services in over 20,000 cities throughout 200 countries around the world.

Spread the word about your business with large posters

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by Chris Broad

A successful business is one that manages to grab the attention of the target audience and survive against tough competition from the other players in the industry. The advertisers and marketers are constantly improvising and innovating new mediums for the promotion of their products and services. The print and electronic media have always been the popular choice for the advertising industry but the new media has also made a deep impact within a short time of its arrival. However, some important facts to be considered before selecting the correct medium of promotion is the cost associated with it and the reach of such a medium. In both these scores, large posters are the preferred choice for many marketers and advertisers. The posters not only reach a huge target audience at the same time and are cost effective as well.

Large posters are one of the most creative ways to promote a product or service and also many organizations and individuals use this medium to get across a message to the public. It is easy to see why large posters would be a favored choice of promotion. The attractive look of a poster conveys a lot more than an extravagant advertising campaign consisting of the broadcast and print media. When you put up the posters in a place of mass gathering like an exhibition, trade fair or even malls it is quite obviously going to attract the attention of the crowd. So a single poster has the potential of grabbing the eyeball of a large number of people at the same time same place rather than an advertisement in the television, which may or may not be seen by a desired number of target audience.

So when you desire that your message be put across in as attractive a manner as possible and that too in a cost effective method, large posters should be your choice. Select an artist or designer who would like to give his creativity a suitable platform in the form of posters. As the artwork is one of the most crucial attractions of a poster it must be paid great attention to. Also, the message should be catchy and well crafted to grab the attention of the audience who are usually present at the venue for some or the other purpose. Once the message and the artwork are in perfect co-ordination, it makes the best vehicle for promotion of your products, services and ideas.

Today, in spite of innovative mediums of promotion making an appearance in the field of advertising and marketing the large posters are yet to lose their charm. Many vendors offer their services in providing posters of various sizes and designs to the advertisers, however it is advisable to carry out a proper market survey before selecting a particular vendor. Check out the choices offered and the rates at which he is offering the posters. Only when you are satisfied with the quality and cost of work should you go ahead and select the vendor. Select the medium of promotion with care and your business is sure to reap the benefits from it in the long run.

Chris Broad has a special liking for a variety of posters. Collecting different kinds of posters is his hobby.He is very dedicated towards his work.If you want to know more about Banners, large posters, Banner stands, Canvas printing, Retractable banner stands and Custom banners visit www.postersigns.com


Published By: Indocquent.com- An online resource that allows businesses and individuals to promote their business, products and services in over 20,000 cities throughout 200 countries around the world.

How to Make Your Business Plan More Sound

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You already have the desire and drive to run and operate your own business. By now you should already have your business plan in place. But how do you know if it is adequate enough to get you that business loan, or enough detail to make sure any forecasts you have in there are accurate.

In this article we are going to cover 5 tips that you should follow to make your business plan sound.

• Complete your financials
  Your business plan should be completed with a full detailed financial and marketing plan. Define how much potential your market can make, where that income is dervived from, how much your competitors make and so on.


• Strengths, Weaknesses & Desires
  According S.C.O.R.E., "Your marketing strategy should be built around your strengths, your competitor`s weaknesses and your customers` desires." Outline what your strengths are, what your competition lacks, and then in your business plan, detail how you will use both to your advantage.


• Business Know-how
  Test your business out. You want to find out if your business model will work, what makes it work and what changes you may have to make down the road. This is your step by step process to help your business succeed.


• Change or Fall Behind
  There is an aged old saying that says if you are standing still, then you are falling behind. That is true in business. Your competition is always moving forward, making changes and doing new things. You must do the same. Spend at least two hours every week for updating and fine tuning your plan. These updates can be crucial to adding nmew sources of revenue, eliminating items that may cost your business and so on.


• Operating Plan
  You should have in your business plan an operating plan. This plan should be reviewed and updated monthly as to how you are going to carry out the next month, 3 months or twleve months of the businss.

Your business is an ongoing chaning process and you must change with it. However, if you detail your business plan enough, any changes you have to make to your business will not interfere with your day to day operations.



By: Bruce A. Tucker



About the Author:

Bruce A. Tucker is the Associate Director of http://www.Indocquent.com, an online resource for individuals and businesses to post their products and services for sale and hire. You can follow Bruce on Twitter at http://twitter.com/indocquent.

Published By: Indocquent.com- An online resource that allows businesses and individuals to promote their business, products and services in over 20,000 cities throughout 200 countries around the world.

How to Incorporate Technology Into Your Business

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Honestly I can say I am a geek when it comes to technology. I love the latest inventions of anything that is electronic. Whether it is the iPhone, Blackberry or some new laptop that innovates the industry, I love to try it out.

However as a business owner it is more than just having the latest tech items. You must be able to use those items so that the return on your investment for that item is warranted. In other words, you wouldn`t spend five thousand dollars on a computer if it did not in some way make your business run smoother, faster and/or more efficient. That would make it a waste of money.

In this article, with the help of the Counselors to America`s small businesses, or better known as S.C.O.R.E, I want to give you 5 helpful tips for when you implement technology into your business.

Plan, plan, plan. This is true in area of life, and especially true when you are integrating technology into a business. You must have a plan. Just like you would have a business plan or marketing plan, you should also have a technology plan. This plan should outline what kind of technology you are going to implement, its purpose, cost, a strategy as to when you will upgrade it, who will maintain it and so on. Your technology plan, like all other plans, should fully detail the who, what, when, where, and why questions.

Design your goals. In the design of your plan make sure you outline the goals you want this new technology to achieve. For our business we implemented the latest version of the MySQL database. Our goal was to use the new version for faster response time and a more efficient means of the database design. Your design of your plan must end up with you reaching the goal for its intended purpose.

Investment. As SCORE puts it, you want to think of technology as investment into your business. The technology you implement should help your business run more efficient, faster, more cost affective and so on. A friend of mine runs a home repair business. Recently he purchased a customer tracking and invoicing piece of software. His plan was to make sure he could track all of his customers, their needs, and subsequent invoices for jobs with a few mouse clicks or little typing. That piece of software helped speed up the tedious task of office work which was dragging him down. Therefore his investment into that software was worth it.

Solve those problems. You can start by defining what problems your company or business faces. Then define how technology will help solve those problems. In our example above, the problem was the amount of time wasted by organizing paperwork, doing invoices by hand and so on. The new software implemented, solved that problem.

Seek the experts. Last but certainly not least, however last for a reason, seek the advice of technology experts. Although you may love the new tech gadgets, software and devices, you may not have all the answers to your needs. If you know what your problems are, but aren`t sure how to solve them with technology, talk to someone in the technology field who is an expert. You can always look in the yellow pages for computer and software professionals. You may not know that a piece of software exists for what you need, but they sure do. Just keep in mind, as with all partnering, and that is basically what you are doing here, good partners will accelerate success, while bad ones will accelerate failure. Do your homework on the expert. Make sure they do have the experience of what they are talking about and have your best interest at heart and not their own.

Technology is a beautiful thing. When implemented properly it will help your business tremendously.

By: Bruce A. Tucker



About the Author:

Bruce A. Tucker is the Associate Director of http://www.Indocquent.com, an online resource for individuals and businesses to post their products and services for sale and hire. You can follow Bruce on Twitter at http://twitter.com/indocquent.

Published By: Indocquent.com- An online resource that allows businesses and individuals to promote their business, products and services in over 20,000 cities throughout 200 countries around the world.

Advertising Tip – Advertising the Why not the What

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by Roberto Bell

Advertising is one of the most important key roles in marketing yet not enough marketing strategy is put into the action of creating an advertisement.

You might want to reanalyze, what is advertising? Advertising in simple terms is sharing your company`s marketing message through various medias. Without advertising many of the products in the world would have a very hard time being discovered and businesses would have to settle for a lot less in customers and sales. Advertising is both information and inspiration depending on you create it. In your advertisement you try to include your inspiration for the products you offer. You try to inform the potential buyers of your product and price based offer.



What your marketing message is and what is perceived as the message can be the matter of two different perceptions. For instance, you may be advertising the value and benefit of your specialized shoes but the consumer may only see a shoe sale. What could cause this to happen where your inspiration only equates to “another sale” to your prospective buyer?



A shoe sale may be great to some, but a sale is just any other sale and there is nothing stopping one consumer from shopping at another location with a sale of the same goods or services if the message conveys just a sale in the consumer`s eyes. You need to find a way that shares your enthusiasm with the consumer to build a rewarding customer experience before the consumer ever is your customer. You need to make the consumer want only your shoes, not just because it is on sale.



If you haven`t caught on, in this article we will hypothetically be a shoe store which obviously will be selling shoes. We will not go into the specifics of the shoe but rather the advertisement of shoes. I just had to make it clear that the shoe store is only an example. This article applies to all businesses.



The case with many advertisements these days with many businesses is a phenomenon called advertising myopia. Advertising myopia is when you focus more on advertising your product than other possible elements that can benefit a customer. If the overall benefit and value of your product is never properly conveyed in your marketing message you end up with just a product or sale being advertised, nothing more and nothing less. Not too exciting is it? There are plenty of shoe stores with plenty of sales, simple as that.



Before coming up with an advertisement, start to think what it is that makes your product(s) special to the consumer than just a price. It doesn`t matter if the brand is established, there is no reason to get lazy and leave it to the brand to sell. An established brand will have many retail outlets other than yours anyhow? It is up to you to make a convincing and compelling advertisement to help your business.



Ask yourself some questions before creating an advertisement such as how do your shoes feel to your customers? Are they made to be comfortable? What is their durability? Are they made to make someone feel more appealing? How might a good shoe make your customers life better than it already is, better sports performance, less shock?



I am not saying toss the promotional sales pitch out the door if you have one. What I am saying here is don`t forget to tell your consumer market what benefit there is to having such a sale on your product. In other words detail the benefits. It is through adding the benefits into your advertising message you display a value. The value will create far more than just the intended sale, you will create a rewarding purchase for the consumer which in turn can equal into more benefits such as buzz and customer loyalty.



Coming up with an advertisement that can conjure more emotion than just an impulse sale is an advertisement that does more for your budget and will create much more of a reward for both you and your customers. Good luck in your advertising efforts and may you succeed in whatever you try to sell.

Need excellent advertising and national branding for your business? TopSavings.Net offersinbound phone sales leads and advertising in a unique new way that gets a buyers attention at the most opportune moment of a purchasing decision. Visit TopSavings.Net today or call (831) 454-8034

Published By: Indocquent.com- An online resource that allows businesses and individuals to promote their business, products and services in over 20,000 cities throughout 200 countries around the world.

How to Define A Business Emergency Strategy Before It Is Too Late

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We all remember how New Orleans, LA looked after it was ravaged by hurricane Katrina. How can anyone forget? The sites of homes flooded up to the rooftops, people sitting by the Superdome with what seemed like no hope in sight.

Take into account the many businesses that were up and running before Katrina hit, and how many have disappeared because of it.

Imagine for a moment you are building your business. You sell widgets, you are buying, selling, tracking orders, doing account, and the many other facets of tasks that go into your business`s daily operation. In a moment`s notice, your business is wiped out. Not by bad financial planning, not by some bad accountant you hired or a lost account, but because of a natural disaster.

Is your business prepared to rebuild after a disaster? Is ready to pick up where it left off, as if nothing happened? If you answered no to both those questions then you need to get an emergency plan in place.

Backup your data. Believe it or not, even in today`s high tech world, a lot of businesses do not back up data properly. Some do it once a night and then the backup is in the same location as their main data centers. This makes no sense. If your building is wiped out, all of your data and all of your backup data is in the same place. You need to separate the two. You should do a backup of your system every night. There are many services out there that offer this at a nominal cost. When compared to what the cost will be when you lose all that data, hiring a firm that specializes in data backup and recovery will be well worth it.

Team organization. Even if you are able to rebuild your data center from your backups, if you and your team, meaning your employees, are not on the same page, and have no idea what the next steps are, or what their roles in the recovery are, you and your team will look like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. You should have a written plan in place as to what the efforts of each team member will be after a disaster occurs. Keeping everyone involved, and informed as to what they are responsible for, will make a transition to getting your business up and running again, a smooth one. This plan must be updated periodically, especially as employees come and go.

Write it all down. Finally, get the entire plan in writing. This plan, must be a detailed outline of steps and procedures as to exactly how to get the business up and running. It should also outline what each person is responsible for, how to get the data backup and running, who handles acquiring a temporary space to run the business and so on. This document, will be the most important item of your emergency plan, because it is the actual plan. Make sure each employee has a copy, as well as a saved version on your computer system so it gets backed up with all of your other data. Since you now have a separate vendor handling backup and recovery, your plan is safe. You may want to consider using document version control software such as Documentum. This type of software versions your plan with the ability of people making the changes of checking the document in and out, just the way a library works. When someone has it checked out, no one can make changes to it until they check it back in.

Get your emergency plan in place. You never know when a natural disaster is going to hit, and for that reason, you do not want to be unprepared when it does.

By: Bruce A. Tucker

About the Author:
Bruce A. Tucker is the Associate Director of http://www.Indocquent.com, an online resource for individuals and businesses to post their products and services for sale and hire. You can follow Bruce on Twitter at http://twitter.com/indocquent.


Published By: Indocquent.com- An online resource that allows businesses and individuals to promote their business, products and services in over 20,000 cities throughout 200 countries around the world.

Tips For Effective Copywriting

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by Kaitlyn Miller

In addition to your flyer printing design, your copy is the next factor that decides whether your target readers would keep you or throw you out in the trash. If you want to have killer copy for your club flyers, here are a few tricks you can use for an effective copywriting:

1 – Drive your audience to the first line of your flyer printing copy.

This is probably one of the most difficult tasks of writing a copy – get your readers so interested that they actually read your first sentence.

It would just be a waste of your time, money and effort if your target readers would just skim over your copy from top to bottom without fully understanding what you’re trying to say. In fact, it significantly reduces your chances of making your readers act positively on your offer.

When you get them to your first sentence of your copy, the rest of the steps will follow. In fact, your fist sentence’ main job is to get your audience to read the next line; the next line’s job is to get your readers to read the next line; and so forth and so on.

It is very important therefore to have your first few lines short and simple, without being aggressive that your target readers would feel wary about your copy. In fact, it should be so clear and simple that your potential clients would be more than willing to read through the next lines and then the next and then the next…

Then there’s the easy transition from your copy to your call to action. Your copy should be able to anticipate the questions that your target readers would most likely ask as they read along your copy lines.

2 – A cliché should be left in other people’s vocabulary, and not in your headline.

When you want to attract attention, the best headlines are those that cause your audience to think and engage them in your sales copy. A cliché just doesn’t get you to think that profoundly.

And you don’t just make them think, but you make them look at themselves and your business, and the connection between the two. You should have a headline and sub-headline that would compel them to see your business in terms of the miracle drug that would make life better for them.

Lastly, your headline should be able to make them want to know more and read the next lines of your copy.

3 – Use breakers such as sub-headlines to keep your copy interesting.

Straight lines make it hard for people to stay interested. So be sure to have a copy that gives your readers the chance to breathe and have a break in every section. This makes your copy easier to read and digested. It would make your club flyers look short and preppy, rather than long and winding into nothing.

So the next time you’re writing your ad copy for your flyer printing materials, be sure to include these tips to help you create effective copywriting to your collateral.

For more information, you can visit this page on flyer printing and club flyers

Published By: Indocquent.com- An online resource that allows businesses and individuals to promote their business, products and services in over 20,000 cities throughout 200 countries around the world.