You are currently browsing the archives for January, 2010.

Using Social Media and Email to Generate Leads – 6 Critical Considerations

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11:08 am 11:08 am

Summary: This case study was derived from an actual program used by a high-tech test equipment firm during their initial two-year start-up period. The business had no established brand recognition or customer base.

The company management worked with outside communication resources to develop strong support materials and to manage a small business marketing program of tradeshows, targeted emailing and a strong push into social media to match their target audience profile.

The social media allowed them to distribute “thought-leadership” content and build on-line relationships with key influencers within their prospect base. The media channels they used were: a company blog, LinkedIn Groups, Twitter, Face Book, YouTube, flickr, Marketwire, Pitchengine, and email.

Their commitment to an on-going investment in a steady but relatively low-cost program paid off. By January 2010 over 50 % of their meeting requests came from in-bound web leads. Their 2009 revenues tripled over 2008 despite facing the same economic downturn as everyone else in the B2B market. READ MORE

I Hate Selling! (Part 2)

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6:14 pm 6:14 pm

Creating opportunities to sell

Marketing is an organizational discipline with a distinct creative component. It’s much like cooking. Unfortunately, we have come to believe – anyone can cook, right? All you need is a cook book. This compendium is filled with recipes, the organizational structure for cooking.

It is this line of thinking that has many small business owners convinced that they can cook up their own marketing. After all, one only needs to follow a simple recipe – right? Any one can cook a meatloaf but how many of us know how to prepare braccioli or what to serve with it?

Without a well planned, adequately financed and consistent marketing effort most small business owners are reduced to sporadic selling. With little activity to generate selling opportunities most business owners begin to be haunted with the specter of “cold calling” one of the most dreaded of all of the marketing tools. This is where selling goes bad.

If you have questions or comments about this or any information we post please take a few minutes to contact us by posting or emailing or calling us at (704) 542-9104.

I Hate Selling!

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9:58 am 9:58 am

Actually, I don’t hate selling. I hate having to create opportunities to sell.

When you examine what drives the success of a business you’re sure to find a successful salesperson. For many small business owners, who work on their own, it will be their success as a salesperson that will make or break their business. But, it’s not selling skills that make those people successful. It’s how good they are at generating selling opportunities.

I know there are many shy people who don’t like talking to strangers. And, it’s not unusual for shy people to own a business. But, even shy people are proud of what they do, what they know, and what they sell. Once they start talking about their business they can easily explain the benefits of what they do or offer. They believe in what they are saying. READ MORE

How does one make sense of all this social media stuff?

posted in: Social Media Ideas (Tags: , , , ) - No Comments

1:37 pm 1:37 pm

I just finished an online course about social media that is produced by Duct Tape Marketing. What really struck me is that we all run around trying to get into everything…Twitter, Facebook, Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn, Blogging… the list is endless, and if one did them all, there would be little time for anything else!  So to me, the best comment made in this program was “if you don’t have the time to do more than one, don’t.  Find the one that will give you the most return for the time invested.” At least, that’s how I heard it!

There are so many levels to each of these platforms, and so many ways that you can use each one, why not take baby steps and go as far as you can with one before starting the next?

10 Reasons Why Follow-up is Important For Your Business

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6:32 pm 6:32 pm

Did you know that almost 60% of all sales leads are never followed up? It’s easy to understand why. First, business owners and sales managers are close to obsessed with the chase for immediate sales. Second, it’s rare to find a company that will invest in an organized and simple follow-up program. Yet, our experience has shown that simple follow-up is a very rewarding activity. Here are ten areas that you can influence with follow-up. They will put money in your pocket.

1. Build relationships

People need to learn to trust and like you before they’ll enter into a relationship with you and that takes consistent connection. Follow up with people to let them know that you are sincere in wanting to form and nurture an ongoing relationship, that you understand their concerns and problems and that you’re in for the “long haul”. READ MORE

Success with local credit union

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7:55 pm 7:55 pm

Situation:

A small (420 member) Federal Credit Union was saying good bye to its founding General Manager who retired. The Board of Directors decided to hire a person who had no working background in Credit Union operations. The new manager wanted to bring in a marketing group to help him establish some new communication programs.

Strategy:

Because membership in the Credit Union is restricted to a well defined audience of about 2,000 employees and their families it was decide to create a program designed to reach the existing membership first and then target new accounts.

Tactics:

A newsletter redesign, and a postcard series were created. The news letter was sent monthly for the first three months and then every other month after that. It’s a single page / one color on printed on two sides.

The postcards each featured a bank service to call attention to how the Credit Union offered similar services to regular banks but at better rates. These were also done monthly at first then they took the alternating month from the news letter.

Once school was back in session we developed a poster campaign that echoed the postcard offering. These were put up in the main offices and teacher lounges in all schools in the district.

Results:

The client began to experience immediate results from the campaign. Current members began to comment on the new communication effort. They began to increase deposits and because we had launched with a Christmas Club program in September they had an upturn in new account openings. During the first year membership grew to 650. The second year it grew to 875. Deposits at the bank grew over 300%