Let Them Know You Exist: “Promote And Prosper”

According to Ms. Raleigh Pinskey, Author of 101 Ways to Promote Yourself — “In order to promote and prosper, I feel that you have to take responsibility for your own success, take charge of your destiny.  If you don’t introduce yourself, if you don’t tell them what you’re all about how are they going to know you exist?”

Here is a list of 10 ways to promote and prosper as recommended by Ms. Pinskey:

1. Sponsor or create your own event
2. Teach a class
3. Exhibit at tradeshows
4. Write articles or a book
5. List your company in “expert directories”
6. Mentor kids in the community
7. Volunteer/community involvement
8. Send out press releases about new hires, products, clients, and more
9. Postcard or e-mail campaigns
10. Sit on the boards of organizations and associations

What do you do to promote yourself or your business?

2014 Interactive Marketing Budget Forecast

Change is here—the ways in which your audience view and process information from standard media sources has changed. Technology has empowered the consumer to access information as they read and surf across offline and online media. My children (I am guilty of it as well) are engaged in watching TV, chatting with friends on Facebook and surfing the Internet to research a movie/song/gadget/concert all at the same time.

Small, medium and big companies are paying attention to the digital culture. Forrester Research provides a peek at the interactive marketing budget of US companies. The interactive marketing spending as a percentage of all advertising spending will grow from 13% in 2010 to 21% in 2014. The two top choices for interactive marketing investing are search marketing and display advertising. See chart below.

Source: American Marketing Association, Forrester Research’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014; Cambridge, Mass.

6 Ways To Stay In Touch With Your Clients

Staying in touch is an effective marketing tool because it keeps you at the top of the list with your clients and prospects.  Here are six simple low cost ways you can stay in touch with your clients or customers:

1. Create an eNewsletters
   Build on your relationship by sharing industry news, special offers, or invitations to events. Importantly, eNewsletters contain links to drive traffic back to your website. This means people will see more of your brand image, and can read about your products and services.
2. Sponsor Events In Your Community
   If the opportunity presents itself, sponsor your community church, school or sports team. Your contribution does not have to be monetary.  Give of yourself—give your time.
3. Use Postcards For Announcements
   Postcards are not used for coupons or sales only.  Send a birthday wish or boast about an industry award. There are an infinite number of things to share with your customers using the postcard.
4. Share Articles
   You can stay in touch with your clients by reading newspapers and magazines. Be aware of your clients’ interests to occasionally clip an article or a quote that might interest them. Don’t forget to forward pertinent Internet stories (no jokes or chain letters please).
5. Send A Hand Written Note
   Never underestimate the power of a simple thank-you note, remembering a date or a place that’s important to a client, or a note of congratulations.
6. Take Your Client To Lunch Just Because
   No sales pitch, no pressure—have lunch (or breakfast or coffee) just to shoot the breeze. Catch up on new interests, problems, additions to the family, etc. Then follow up with a note saying “it was fantastic to catch up with you today, here is an article on preparing your child for college…”

6 Ways to Spruce-Up Your Brand

1. Press Releases
   Press releases as part of a marketing program can be a powerful lead generator for your business. So announce a product or service. Duct Tape Marketing offers a free online press release creator. Once it produces your nicely formatted press release, you can send it out by using an online press service such as PRWeb.
2. Corporate Website
   A good website designer already knows how to code their website’s HTML so that it will present the same no matter what browser your visitors are using (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Mac or Windows). But search engines like Google don’t care what your website looks like; they care that they can easily sift through your code and images to find the actual searchable text in the content on your website. They also can’t index graphic images or Flash elements, so keep that in mind when designing your website. If you’re home page is just one big Flash graphic, you’re not helping your search results at all.
3. Research
   Know where you are today by conducting quantitative research with your target audience, Benchmark your most important audiences annually and your less important audiences every three years. Put it on your marketing schedule.
4. Marketing Plan
   A marketing plan will assist you in defining your business mission and values, competitors, financial and non-financial goals, as well as provide the opportunity to assess your strengths and weaknesses. A marketing calendar allows you to not only budget for campaigns, but execute and monitor their progress as well.
5. Email Marketing Template
   Excite and thrill your current and potential customers, by sending a professionally designed email message. Display your logo right in the inbox. With a template, your email appears more professional and can draw attention with nicely designed graphics that not only look great, but also promote your business.
6. Postcard
   Update current or former customers about what your business is up to. If you have a new product or service that you are promoting, no one will know about it unless you inform them of your updates. A branded postcard is an excellent way to show off your identity and bring in more business by making sure your clients know of your new ideas. Not only will a postcard enforce your branded identity, it can be an affordable sales and promotional tool.

Click To Download Images…Arghh!

I met a young executive at a conference last month who had already begun her e-mail marketing initiatives. As she was fine tuning her campaign her team had one question. Below was my response to her. I hope you will find it useful as well. As always, I encourage you to share information with my readers. If you have anything to add, please leave a comment.

Question
Do you find that often when sending HTML e-mail campaigns, depending on the e-mail service provider, that people have to click to download the pictures (red x)?

Answer
Unfortunately you as the sender of the e-mail do not have control of the download issue. That is actually a setting in Outlook. It is activated or deactivated by the individual user. You can however educate your e-mail distribution list on how to activate the auto download of images as most of them do not know how. Read Email Safe Send Instructions>>

Incorporating the tip below can increase your chances of eliminating the red x issue. But as I said before, the recipient is the one who ultimately decides if they want to enable images automatically or not.

Tip: Improperly referencing your images can cause them to appear broken when you send your message—the dreaded red x. To insure the image is referenced correctly it must appear as, img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com….” rather than, img src=”/images/picture.jpg”. Alt tags are another important part of your images. The new security features on almost every e-mail client these days disables images automatically. Having alt tags in place allow your reader to identify the image and determine if it is safe to enable.