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Low-Cost Marketing Strategies that Produce High-Value Results
“Due to the small size of most home businesses, it’s often easier to be flexible and quickly adaptive to changing market conditions and customer demands,” affirms sales and marketing expert, Debra Jones. Debra is intimately aware of this truth, having started two multi-million dollar companies from her kitchen table — one training mortgage lenders, the other selling nutritional products in several countries. Debra, the high-energy speaker and author of From Thin Air to Millionaire, knows what it takes to transform a fledgling home business into a thriving enterprise.
Recently, Debra shared with HOME BUSINESS® Magazine her advice on marketing on a budget, promoting one’s business on the Internet, and designing attention-grabbing marketing pieces.
HOME BUSINESS® Magazine (HBM): When money is tight, what are the best ways home business owners can market their businesses?
Debra Jones (DJ): There are three things that can be done to market your business when money is tight. First, get back in touch with your previous customers as they are your most likely source of additional business. If people have used you once and thought you did a good job, it’s only natural that they would be willing to do business with you again and/or refer you to others.
Second, pick up the phone and make sales calls. It sounds so simple, and yet, far too many business owners will do everything else under the sun before they do the obvious, which is to pick up the phone and make a sales call.
And, third, have an Internet sale. If you have an e-mail database of your customers and prospects, you literally have gold at your fingertips. Whether you’re selling products or services, send out e-mails to your database offering a very attractive sale for a limited time, i.e., “Order within the next 3 days to receive…,” etc.
HBM: Aside from launching an e-mail marketing campaign, what other methods can home business owners use to market online?
DJ: Obviously, having a web site is extremely important in today’s business world. However, many people have noticed that “Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.” In other words, you can spend a fortune on a glamorous web site but if you’re not driving traffic to it, your business won’t grow as a result of your web presence.
I advise my clients that there are four things they need to consider before launching off into Internet marketing. One, they must have a web site that educates and informs the visitor. Two, they must have a way to capture the e-mails of people who visit their site, i.e., allow people to sign up to receive a free report, subscribe to a newsletter, etc. Three, they must have a system for following up on the leads that the site generates. Four, they should investigate whether or not paying for sponsorship-pay-per-click would be advantageous to them. Sponsorship-pay-per-click is the fastest way to appear in the top 3 rankings when customers search the Internet for services. Every major search engine, i.e., Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., offers some form of this service.
HBM: What are the key things to remember when creating your marketing materials?
DJ: You must be able to grab the reader’s attention in approximately 3 to 5 seconds or the reader will trash your material. Use headlines and bullet items to draw the reader’s eye vs. run-on paragraphs of copy. Like it or not, we live in basically a non-reading society. The MTV generation, which affects all of us, wants their information in easily digestible sound bites.
The questions I always ask my clients to ask themselves when designing marketing materials are: “What is the purpose of the piece?” “How is it being delivered, i.e., hand-delivery, snail mail, e-mail, fax, etc.?” — as that will have a bearing on the design of the piece. “What do you want the reader to do?” “Are you making it easy for people to reach you and/or take action?”
It’s amazing to me the marketing materials I have reviewed over the years that I know cost thousands of dollars and looked beautiful, but you would have needed a microscope to find the contact information. Focusing on those four, simple questions sets the tone for how a piece should be designed. HBM
For more information, please visit www.DebraJones.com.
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