| And neither can your customers and prospects. Unless you put your photo on it. On your business cards. On your handouts. On your website. On every piece of marketing material that you have.
Ever get a business card at the networking event, then look at it days or weeks or months later, and can’t remember for the life of you who that person was? What if they had their photo on the card? You’d remember them, wouldn’t you? How many times has someone else done that with your card? Your photo is worth more than any amount of words, more than your logo, more than your title, more than any cute tagline. If you don’t have your photo on everything, go, right now, to your nearest photographer and spend a little money on a professional headshot, and put it on everything. You do want to be remembered, don’t you? |
Basic Email Basics
A few basic things you should know about email:
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How to get them to listen
 All effective marketing pieces need to follow a common formula, whether the piece is an email, postcard, web page, coupon, radio or TV ad, brochure, flyer, verbal presentation or anything else that is used to promote your business and gain customers.
There a four functions to a marketing piece: Grab, Engage, Inform and Offer (GEIO) These functions are performed by the four parts of a marketing piece: Headline, Subheadline, Body, and Call to Action.
So here’s the formula again: It’s a simple formula, and you can easily apply it to any new marketing efforts you undertake, or use it to evaluate your current efforts. |
Your energy signature
 Every piece of marketing material you create has an “energy signature”, which refers to the emotions (positive or negative) that piece creates in the mind of the recipient. For example, if your business card is professionally-designed, made of heavy card stock, is colorful, has your photo on it, and presents a professional image, that would be a positive energy signature. If it’s made of flimsy paper and looks like it was printed on a cheap inkjet printer, that doesn’t make for a good impression, and would be a pretty negative energy signature.This principle applies to your brochures, website, blog, email signatures, voice mail message, the words that you write and speak, the demeanor that you exhibit when you meet someone in person, EVERYTHING you present to a customer or prospect.
Review your marketing materials and ask yourself what kind of impression they make. That impression is your “signature” – make sure it looks and feels good before you sign it! |
Is less better than more?
| Fewer words is better than more words.
E. B. White wrote in “Elements of Style”: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should contain no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” This applies to any written work, whether a brochure, a white paper, an article, a blog post or website content. Don’t use TMW (Too Many Words)! |
There are three parties involved with a website, and only one of them is important
| There are three parties involved with a website, and only one of them is important.
The parties are:
The user is the only one who matters. The focal point of all discussions and decisions must be the user. The end result of everyone’s efforts must be to see that the user’s needs are served. Your needs get met by meeting the needs of your users. |
Understand why your website is important
| Understand WHY your website is important to your business.
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A recent study indicated that around 70% of people looking to buy a product or service will visit a company’s website to get more information before they will contact the company directly. And you don’t know that these people are even there. And you don’t know who they are. So you can’t communicate with them. The only tool you have available to move them to the next step in the sales process is your website. And that tool has ONE chance to do its job.Branding is now
Your brand is not your company name, your logo, your slogans, or your tagline (however cute and catchy it might be).
In fact, your brand is mostly not anything that you have much control of.
Your brand is not what you say about yourself – it’s what everyone else says about you.
Your brand is the marketplace’s perception of you.
How do you think the marketplace sees you? What do you think they think when they see your name, your business name, your website, etc?
It’s difficult — nearly impossible — to put yourself inside the marketplace’s head and look at yourself through the marketplace’s eyes, but you still need to try.
Do you need to do some work on your brand?
Short, Sweet and Frequent
I see too many blogs posts that are way too long.
Blog posts should be in the range of 100 to 200 words. 300 max.
Blog posts are not “articles”. Articles are longer. If you want to publish an article, put it on a separate page in your site and link to it from a short blog post, using the post as a way to introduce the article. You can make the article any length you want.
The problem is that people have short attention spans, especially when reading blogs.
The other common issue with blogging is frequency. Posting every 3 or 4 weeks is completely ineffective. You’ll never develop a loyal readership by doing that.
I suggest that you post at least once a week, and once a day is ideal. Sound too difficult and time-consuming? Remember, your posts are going to be short. A really good idea is to write all your posts for the week at one time, then schedule them to be automatically published on specified days. This makes the job a lot easier.
Oh, I forgot the “sweet” part. Make your posts interesting. You must provide value (useful information) to your readers.
Summary — your blog posts should be:
- Short (100 to 300 words)
- Sweet (interesting and useful)
- Frequent (ideally, every day)
(By the way, this post has 216 words)
There’s one place to get the truth
| Thinking about trying a new marketing tactic? Go ahead, try it.The marketplace will tell you whether it’s good or not.
Don’t think it to death before you try it. Just do it. The marketplace will tell you if it’s a good idea. Just like your best friend is the only person who’ll tell you that you have bad breath, the marketplace will always tell you the truth. In fact, the marketplace is the only place you can get the truth. It will never lie to you. It’s your best friend and wisest adviser. |