Sales leads or enquiries, are an essential part of the marketing process. After all, a steady flow of good quality sales leads, when acted upon correctly, can lead to a regular stream of lucrative business and allow business owners to plan ahead with confidence.
SO, this post gives you TEN 10 popular and powerful lead generation ideas, to add to your marketing arsenal…
Endorsed Relationships, have been referred to by marketing experts, including Jay Abraham, as the most powerful form of marketing in the world. I totally agree. This brief post, will show you what endorsed relationships are and how you can use them to market your business.
What is an Endorsed Relationship?
An endorsed relationship, in marketing terms, is simply a relationship you form with another person / company / brand, where they endorse (or recommend) you and your services to their clients, customers and contacts. This can come via literally any form of marketing…
Joint Ventures, often known simply as JV’s, can be an extremely effective way to generate new business. This is probably why so many of you asked me for information on Joint Ventures, when I asked you for your marketing questions recently.
The following is a brief explanation of what JV’s are and how they work…
This quick marketing tip is all about how to improve your marketing results in the medium and long term. In fact, it will give you one of the marketing foundations behind the most successful businesses in the world.
Following on from yesterdays marketing tip, a number of readers have asked me the same question:
“Why do so many people do the same type of marketing, if it doesn’t work?”
Here’s the answer. Amateur marketers will copy what they see others doing, wrongly assuming that it must be working. This then gets more and more people repeating the same ineffective marketing, which encourages even more people to do the same, etc. In other words, they copy what they see the crowd doing.
Here’s why this is a really bad idea for your business…
Is your marketing shouting at people?
If you go into Starbucks today and start shouting at the people around you, you will definitely grab their attention. However, it’s not the kind of attention you want to attract. Many small businesses use a very similar approach with their marketing. In an effort to capture attention, they act in a way that gets them noticed, but for all the wrong reasons.
They not only fail to generate new business; they can permanently damage the reputation of their business too.
Some examples of how companies shout at people with their sales and marketing:
* Adding people to their newsletter list, without permission. It’s spam.
* Spamming people on Twitter.
* Meeting people at networking events and using that transparent crap; “tell me about your business and how I can help you.” Wake up, it’s not 1985 any more!
* Asking people to join their Linkedin network, claiming they worked with them (when both parties know it’s a lie.)
* Unwanted telemarketing calls to people’s homes at 8pm. Just what you need when getting a young child to sleep or relaxing after a hard day….
Which are you better at: Marketing your services or servicing your market?
I have lost count of how many outstanding businesses I have seen go broke, simply because they failed to market their services correctly. They enjoy superb customer retention, because their services are so good that people just don’t want to leave.
However, because they win too few new customers, their revenues and profits stagnate and if they do lose a big account or have a large, unscheduled financial commitment pop up, they can suddenly be running at a loss. If that loss goes on too long, they are in deep trouble. If only they adopted better marketing, they could achieve great things…
One of the secrets of great communication, is to pick the correct delivery method, to get the maximum, targeted exposure for your message. We refer to this as “giving oxygen” to your marketing.
Marketing oxygen
Some of you will have noticed that when I made my BIG announcement here yesterday, I closed the comments section for that [...]
Here’s a quick question for you:
“Do you fit your business around your lifestyle or your lifestyle around your business?”
Many people start a business with big plans and dreams. They want to get out of the rat-race and start earning what they are really worth; not what their boss pays them. They want the freedom that [...]
This is possibly the most valuable information I have given you via this blog!
That’s quite a statement, but I’m about to show you a business model, which you can use in order to secure your financial future. It’s based on how I earn the vast majority of my income and how every wealthy person I [...]
If you are planning to start the New Year with a marketing push, here are a few questions you might want to ask yourself, before you proceed. Think of this as a simple, New Year marketing check list.
So, before you invest a penny of your money, or your time, on marketing for 2010; take a [...]
This quick marketing tip is all about the marketing power of being one of a kind in a world full of blandness.
One of the many common characteristics of successful businesspeople, is that they have the courage to be different. I’m not talking about being different just for the sake of it – I’m talking about [...]
Great marketing and great comedy have at least one thing in common: Great timing!
Of course, the opposite is also true. A comedian with bad timing isn’t very funny and poorly timed marketing isn’t very effective.
With this in mind, here are SIX timing-related marketing tips, to help you improve your results.
Marketing your events
If you are thinking [...]
One of the marketing challenges that all businesses face, is how to leverage their time and money for the best possible return on investment (or ROI). There are so many things we all could be doing, yet these are not of equal value to us.
For example, there’s an interesting debate along these lines over [...]
Here’s a great way to make your business stand out from the crowd for all the right reasons!
A common marketing problem
Most businesses really struggle to develop something uniquely valuable about their services. That’s why your local; accountants, designers, insurance companies and recruitment firms etc, seem so similar and find they have to sell their [...]
In 2005, I wrote and developed a massively popular audio program called; The Motivation Master Class – available at the time exclusively as a 3 CD box set.
MMC CDsThe program sold all over the world and is based around a set of powerful motivation skills, which I used in order to transform my sales results and thus my income and business results.
The message behind this post can save you from years of frustration and help you dramatically improve your future sales results!
I received an email yesterday, from someone who has occasionally emailed me for marketing advice over the past couple of years. This person (who will remain nameless for obvious reasons), is one of [...]
I was just telling someone about a chat I had a couple of weeks ago, with a VERY stressed out Twitter user. This person, who shall remain nameless, had (for no reason) seen his Twitter account suspended.
He was absolutely distraught and called my office (here in the UK) from his office in San Francisco.
He introduced [...]
Apple launched a range of new products yesterday. There’s a marketing lesson behind this launch, that’s of huge value to the rest of us, if we take a leaf out of Apple’s book. (or notebook!)
Apple iPhone, Safari and MacBooks – FREE advertising & publicity
None of the information I have about the new Apple iPhones, [...]
I received a sales letter last week from Google. That’s right, one of the world’s leading email providers contacted me; not via an email, but via a letter.
Email marketing and Google
Google already has my email address, because I am a user of a number of their services – including Gmail. So, it would have been [...]
