I received an email from a client asking for some advice on how she can close a potential deal. I know she had done things like this quite successfully in the past; but this time she was in a bit of hesitation.

Here’s the situation. There were rumors going around that a previous contact was coming up with a big venture. She found out about some of the plan’s details; and she absolutely knows that she can contribute a lot to its development. Moreover, she wants the upcoming project badly so that she can include it as a crowning milestone on her professional portfolio. The only thing stopping her was that she hasn’t had any contact with this acquaintance for quite some time; and she was very reluctant to do so now. She was in a bit of a fuss; based on how I read her email. Sensing her hesitation, I got in touch with her through the phone;  and pleasantries aside, asked her to reminisce about the days of teenage courtship.

I asked her the question of what if she had an admirer who wanted to ask her out, but was just too shy to make a move. What would she want him do? She quickly replied, “Of course, have him call me!” To which I replied, “There you go. that’s your answer!”

Being pursued in courtship is indeed very flattering. In fact, it’s nice to know that there are people who are interested in getting to know you a little better; and there’s always that possibility of establishing a much closer relationship with an admirer. More importantly, it doesn’t really matter what you think of these admirers. Even if you’re not a bit interested, just the mere fact of them mustering enough courage to tell you that they want to ask you out deserves much respect.

The same goes for getting potential clients. If you see a venture that you want, or you know that you can contribute greatly to, don’t let the opportunity slip away. This applies, especially more, if you have a direct line of communication with the decision-maker.  Don’t hesitate to send out those letters, shoot those emails, pick-up the phone, or set-up an appointment. Who knows? You might just be the best person that he or she needs to get the job done.

So this was exactly what my client did. She picked up the phone and called up her previous business acquaintance; and went straight to the point. It was no surprise that it looks like she’s going to get the project.  She was, after all, the most qualified person to take on the job. But more importantly, it was her go-getter attitude that probably swung the odds to her favor. Her potential client was most probably impressed by the way she just called up and presented that she was interested in taking on the project. After all, wouldn’t it be nice to award a project to someone who’s not afraid to step out of his or her comfort zone to get things done?

As a business owner, you have the responsibility of always knowing who your customers are. Without this basic knowledge, you might as well be groping in the dark finding out what your customers are looking for and if you can truly provide what they need.

Never Guesstimate!

Having identified your target market , you need to research the characteristics of this particular buyer group. Guessing the mix of your customer base is not good enough. This will mess your data up, and of course, wrong data would always equate to wrong interventions or planning. Guesstimating is the last thing that we want to do when profiling customers.

You can do basic research such as surveys and questionnaires. These data gathering methods serve their purpose well for obtaining data from customers. Conducting research can be expensive though, but it’s not impossible to have one conducted with very minimal budget. You can treat customer feedback as your number one source of data.

Another source of data is done through research. Data is usually gathered from reliable and available sources like trade magazines, the local statistics office, Google, and libraries. You can use this secondary data to cross-validate your findings with the results of the initial data gathering.

Another key in going about your market profiling is determined by the customers of your business.  Are you a business-to-consumer type, or a business-to-business type of organization? Knowing the difference produces more accurate data and research approaches clearer.

Profiling Consumers

If you’re a business-to-consumer organization conducting  customer research, ideally, you would need to gather the following data from all customers. The first type of data that you need are the demographics. Demographics concern customers’ ages, income ranges, gender, education, occupations, and religions. This pretty much will give you a snapshot from what group (social, cultural, religious) most of your customers come from.

Another data that’s need in doing research is getting geographic details from customers like the their specific location. You can also get geographic details like city size and climactic conditions from other sources like your local library.

One more type of data needed are the psycographic characteristics of your customers. These involve getting data on your customers’ personality types. You would like to know what personality types buy most of your products.

Another type of data that’s needed are your customers’ behavior patterns. It would be great if you can find out on what occasions, conditions, and when customers buy your products.  Having customers answer why they choose to get your product on certain occasions and conditions will give you a preview of when you can expect customers and sales to pour in.

One of the most important data that you need in your research are the customers’ expected benefits of your product. You need to find out what factors affect customers’ decision to purchase. Are customers buying because of safety? Are they purchasing your products or similar products because of cost-effectiveness?

Profiling Businesses

If you’re a business-to-business provider, most of the types of data mentioned above still apply. In conducting business profiling research though, you would need to consider two additional things. What are the customer types of your targeted business? Are their customers small business owners? Are they franchises or national chains?

Another important type of data that needs to be gathered from businesses are their industry types. Are the businesses you’re targeting retailers or wholesalers? What industry sectors are the businesses from?

What to do with your Findings

Once you have this data, there are different ways on how you can use these to enhance your products, decide on the prices of your goods, come up with promotions, and adapt distribution strategies.

An example is that you can use your benefits data to target your specific audience when it comes to marketing strategies. You can include the benefits that the majority of your customers mentioned in a certain marketing campaign.

Attracting new clients almost always means employing different marketing strategies. Do you happen to know which ones are the most effective for your business? Have you ever heard of the term ‘Inbound Marketing? ‘

In a recent survey done by a website for entrepreneurs, it reveals that almost half of their members find that getting new customers is their business’ biggest obstacle. In order to address that challenge, most businesses turn to more traditional marketing strategies like print ads, telemarketing, mail, and even advertising on air. As a customer I’m sure these practices would remind you of the countless times you’ve thrown print ads straight to the bin,  hung up on a telemarketer, or got impatient at commercials because they interrupt your favorite shows.

As a business, do you have back-up plans on what to replace these tactics with? It seems like that most customers are already sick and tired of the traditional marketing approaches that we’ve been implementing for the past decades. Without any marketing, I’m sure that you will feel that you have no legs to stand on, and of course will cause your business suffer. I’d like to suggest that maybe you can move on from these old-school marketing activities and adapt a much more effective process called ‘inbound marketing.’

What is Inbound Marketing?

Compared to the traditional marketing ploys that we just discussed, ‘inbound marketing’ pulls your targeted customers toward you. As compared to the traditional methods where we ‘push’ our products and services to potential customers, ‘inbound marketing’ finds ways on how to attract your target niche. This means that instead of you exerting all the effort, you just need to lay something out there and your customers will come.

Inbound marketing is predominantly uses the Internet in sending out messages through the use of blogs, RSS feeds, and e-books. Moreover, search engine optimization, Youtube videos, and social networking portals like Facebook and Twitter are also used for inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing activities provide a ‘softer sell’ for your products or services. It allows your customers to connect and get in touch with your business first even before they’re offered anything. The result is that your business will be viewed with better integrity and reputation for less cost but more leads.

The Elements of Inbound Marketing

In adapting an inbound marketing technique, you would need to consider three factors. These are content, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media. Content pretty much refers to the advice that you give people whenever they need it. Most people kind of view them as virtual printed advertisements. These can be in the form of a website, a blog, e-books, forums, or email.

SEO is all about ranking your website on the most popular search engines like Google. It is built on the concept that you get more website traffic if your blog or site appears on the first search page when any  search is done by your targeted audience. The goal of SEO is to dominate your niche by utilizing keywords and providing relevant content to improve search engine rankings. Once optimization is achieved,  you can expect to get more traffic, not only locally, but globally.

The last element of Inbound marketing is the usage of Social Media. Facebook, Twitter, and other networking portals gives you the opportunity to connect with potential and current customers. These are like extensions of your website with pages containing company, product, and contact information.

Today’s market is already saturated. Given this environment, it has now been more important that we effectively reach out to attract more customers to our product or service.  Nothing attracts customers more than being different among the rest of the competition.

Do you happen to know what you have that your peers don’t? Are there benefits in choosing you among all the other providers? These are some of the most important questions to ask when you’re trying to differentiate yourself in a very saturated market. Below are some ideas that can help you answer these questions.

Telling your customers what you can do for them

One very important part of standing out is explicitly telling your customers how they would benefit from getting your products or services. One common mistake that most business owners make is that when they present, they only stick to the features and forget the benefits entirely.

Benefits basically answer the question behind every customer’s mind: “What’s in it for me?” If you can include the benefits in your marketing strategies, believe me, you will get more customers. Instead of writing that your business “provides quality accounting services for small and medium business,” you can also put in some benefits in the mix. With benefits in mind, you can now explicitly tell your customers that your business can “reduce tax expenses, therefore increasing profits and increasing efficiency.”

Avoid generic terms

Generic terms like quality, efficiency, or professional applies to all business. In marketing your product or service, stay away from these terms as much as possible. Instead of differentiating yourself from the rest of the competition, you’d be falling into the trap of being ‘one of them.’ Come up with a creative business proposition that you don’t normally see in competitors. It would even be better if you can come up with taglines and quips that you’ve created on your own.

Unique is Beautiful

In packaging your product or service, make sure that you identify the unique features and benefits of your product and make them your product’s crowning accessory. Moreover, ensure that your product has a different look from cheaper or more inferior products. If there’s a little bit of similarity between your packaging and a competitors’, make sure to change yours. Be creative and innovative in packaging your products as this might be the characteristic that makes your product jump out of the shelf when placed among the competition.

 It’s a Numbers Game

In promoting your product or service, always remember that it’s a numbers game. If your number of satisfied customers greatly outnumber the competition’s, then make sure you capitalize on that fact. Furthermore, publishing factual numbers available for your customers to view ensure that there’s transparency and your business has nothing to hide, therefore trustworthy.

Maximize the Potential of your Website

Keeping your website updated is another strategy that you can deploy in differentiating yourself from the others. No website updates mean that there is no business. You certainly don’t want your customers to think that your business is already closed. What you want to do is keep your customers coming back to your site because of very relevant and updated content on your site.

Research your Customers

The best way to differentiate your product from the rest is making them more targeted to a particular niche. You can get this information by asking your customers why they purchase from you and take note of their answers. You can also ask your customers as to why they chose your product among all the others. In finding out the reason for this, you can capitalize on it as your differentiating factor, and use that piece of customer data to attract more customers.

Don’t forget to Ask yourself

You’ve been looking at everything from all angles, revisiting your marketing, critiquing your product look, and interviewing your customers personally. Never forget the input of another important stakeholder in your business: you! Never forget to ask yourself the question of what sets you apart from your competitors. Your point-of-view also counts when it comes to finding out what separates your products and services from the rest of the pack.

Non-profit organizations,  sporting clubs, or sometimes enterprises will all benefit from getting financial backing from a sponsor. But, How exactly is sponsorship attracted?

When we talk about sponsorship, usually sports come in to mind. Let’s take a look at motorsports. Money is the number one driver for any motorsport. Getting into a great team is quite easy, provided that you can rake in an amount of about fifty thousand to eighty thousand dollars for the season. Unless you have this money on-hand, it means that in order to participate in a competition,  you would need to get financial backing from as sponsor.

Challenge is, getting a sponsorship isn’t quite a walk in the park; especially with today’s economic environment. Nevertheless, getting sponsorships are still quite feasible; and possible whether it’s for sport clubs, new businesses, or the like. I’d like to share with you some tips on how to get you those sponsors.

Being Proactive and Persistent

If this is your first time to consider getting a sponsorship, then most probably you’ll find it quite hard to approach. Let me share a motorsport analogy with you. Let’s say a car driver is a no-show on the starting grid during race day. This means that a race win will never come, no matter what happens.  The same thing goes for garnering sponsorships. If you’re not offering any proposals, then might as well forget any deals. In short, being proactive and persistent is the key to obtaining sponsorships.

Another important thing to consider is that getting sponsorships will always be a numbers game. You will always have the odds of closing a deal stacked against you. You will get lots and lots of rejections, but this is expected. What you can do on your end is to make sure that your success rate goes higher.

Return of Investment

Of course, similar to any other deal, your sponsors will expect something in return. In order to clearly present the return of your partner’s investment, you would need to present very clear plans on how to deliver value-add to your partner’s business. These strategies then become your proposal’s focus for appeal.

You can also consider some factors in coming up with those value-add plans. First consideration is that you always need to have tangible value-add to a partner’s business. You need to explicitly show that your partnership will bring certain benefits to both parties. Next, you can personalize your value-add plans to address the partner’s concerns like increase in customers, brand recognition, or increased sales.

Another consideration that you need to take note of is that can your team actually deliver the partner’s requirements? If you can deliver all the promises, make sure that you have detailed plans on how you’re going to achieve those goals.

Another important part of presenting the benefits of a partnership with a potential sponsor is to present a realistic return of investment to the partner. Very vague and general statements like generate more sales, attract more customers, or increase your margin won’t do.  You need to answer how you’re going to help them attain their goals as their partner.

Lastly, you would also need to consider evaluating the success of the sponsorship opportunity. In presenting your proposal, make sure to indicate what key metrics you will be using to measure the success of the partnership. These can be in different forms like website traffic, online sales, or in-arena sales, etc.

Always keep your promises

Most importantly, when engaging in sponsorship deals, always make sure that you keep your end of the deal. Not doing so would not only affect your integrity, but also will make you lose that sponsorship you worked so hard for. Not only that, since there was a bad experience conducting business with you, potential and future sponsorships with other providers might not even materialize.

Advertising and marketing in all its forms burns so much cash. Unfortunately, for all its being expensive, there is even no way to trace which parts of the campaign are making the real impact to the target audience.

All these so called communications strategy seem like a hundred arrows shot at random until one hits the target; the problem is no one will ever know whose shaft hit the bull’s eye. There’s a sad side about any forms of advertisement, sad but worth pondering: no one really gives any thought whether the ads are posted or not or whether they are effective or whatsoever. No one really cares. It is understandable if the target audience is already indifferent to the various marketing communications strategy because to tell the truth, they could not already tell which ones to believe. The target audience are already saturated with hundreds if not thousands of advertisements every day; they are no longer delighted by its presence. Rather they maybe get pissed because it has become an unwelcome interruption with their routine which they consider to be far essential than anything you could ever offer.

The point here however is not to give up utterly all efforts of marketing communications nor you cease to strategize. What you need to do is to polish whatever it is you’ve got, make it simple and do it in a way that actively engages your target audience. The strength of your message will certainly matter; the other half of the whole thing is how you convey that message. So here are some of the steps that may help you say what you want to say the best way.

• Make it brief – Anything you want to say, things that could really get the attention of your audience, compress and say it in 3 seconds. Make it simple and concise without actually losing the essence of your message. So you may have to be just creative enough to do this. It may be difficult for a while but when you already start going, everything else is a piece of cake. When people already start buying into your tag lines, that’s the time you pull them over to one side and spill everything you got with all the specifics and details.
• Establish your principle – what makes a good advertiser from a bad advertiser is principle. A good advertiser knows what matters to him. Your principle will see you through when you are confronted by hard decisions.
• Be specific– ambiguity does not play well in advertising. When you say things, say it in plain language. There is nothing to gain if you let things hung by the thread. Your target audience will appreciate your clarity when you are specific at all times.

Advertising is already hard enough; make your life simple by enforcing your clarity with your target audience.

Viral Marketing may have already influenced you in so many other ways without you knowing it even exists. You do not know its entirety and how it works. Below are some tips that will make you understand the composition of viral marketing campaigns and how to apply it to your advantage.

Viral marketing works exactly in the same way biological virus does. It lets you spread the context of a product advertisement in as easy as flu is spread by sneezing. Viral marketing saturates a greater mass of people thus increasing its probability of making a sale whatsoever. It works powerfully because it spreads more likely in a form of byword chain; basically a heightened word of mouth advertisement. The principles of this kind of marketing are fundamentally the same with both small and big businesses, and that is to spread it using the people’s interconnected social profile as its medium. Below are some of the simple steps to follow when you want to start your own viral marketing campaigns.

Make your tag line brief yet catchy

Since more likely than not the products name come out even in the most ordinary conversations, it ensures advertising breakthrough. You must be creative enough to make and state your tag line/lines which contain the entire message about the product. The infamous line of Nike “Just do it” is exactly one of the best examples of viral marketing campaigns out there. It is concise yet it catches the interest of everyone, man or woman, young and old. It is so easy to remember that you keep repeating it you almost thought you are singing it.

Establish your status

Viral Marketing campaign is heavily dependent upon the name and reputation of a certain product. A poor service and sub standard products stifle the fun and speeds up the demise of your business. Viral Marketing reaches an unbelievable number of potential targets. Now if you have never been careful in taking good care of your legacy, then you will utterly bring the business down. The word spreads like wild fire whether it’s good or ill intentioned.

Offer incentives

Incentives can do a lot of things; for one, it gets people to talk about your business. Simple incentives will even do, such as books and any other useful stuff.

Give away free stuffs

People love freebies. It is one of the oldest tricks really. But no matter how old this trick is, it still works, and it works wonderfully.

Be resourceful

Viral marketing campaign is a battle of resources. The good thing is, in the advent of technology, resources are now accessible. Most of viral marketing today take form in the web, which actually gives you the idea that you can tap to the resources of any affiliate programs. You can even send emails using some of the free email directories. Lastly, take advantage of the popularity of the social media networks, and use it to your advantage.

Tapping the powerful grip of viral marketing campaign is one of the best ways to hit it big, so learn its anatomy, study how it really works.