Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

  • Home
  • About
    • About Jim Connolly
    • My top marketing tips for 2025. Yours now, for free!
    • Privacy Policy
    • How I use cookies
    • Contact
    • Disclosure
  • Hire me
    • Let’s Grow Your Business
    • Pick My Brain for the results you need!

How to get your marketing noticed AND improve your response rates

By Jim Connolly | July 30, 2013

If you’re not seeing the kind of response rates your business needs, I believe you will find the following ideas really useful.

Training the marketplace

The store that’s open from 9am to 6pm, but has a sign outside 24 hours a day, saying ‘We’re Open!’, quickly trains people to ignore the sign.

The business that advertises special offers, which are just not special, quickly trains the marketplace to ignore their future offers.

Here are a couple of questions, to see if we can find a way to massively improve your marketing response rates and help you avoid the most common mistakes.

How special are your special offers?

For a special offer to work, you need to focus hard on the ‘special’ part. A small discount or a slightly faster delivery time are not special.

Not even close.

That kind of generic non-offer is so predictable and of so little value, that it washes over people. Get creative. Make it truly special.

How accurate are your marketing promises?

You say you offer ‘outstanding customer service’. Are you absolutely certain that your customer service stands out from the best of your competitors? Don’t forget, your competitors care passionately about their customers and go the extra mile for them.

Get specific. Show people HOW you came to the conclusion that your customer service stands out from the competition.

In short: You can either train the marketplace to sit up and take notice or you can train them to ignore you. It takes creativity to earn their attention again and again, but it’s the only way forward if you don’t want to be ignored.

PS: Read this post on how a special offer went badly wrong, before you work on your next special offer!

FREE marketing tips & advice

Get my best marketing tips, advice and ideas delivered direct to your inbox. Just add your email below.
I respect your privacy.

Hi! I'm Jim Connolly and I help small business owners to increase sales, boost their profits and build amazing businesses. Read more here.

Featured by

marketing advice, marketing help

Site sponsor

packaging consultancy

Categories

  • Blogging (406)
  • Business development (479)
  • Copywriting (303)
  • Email marketing & mail shots (186)
  • General marketing (1,663)
  • Professional development (534)
  • Social media marketing (355)

Hosting provider

20i hosting

Search

Recent posts

  • The feels? July 11, 2025
  • Give it away July 8, 2025
  • The false assumptions that destroy your results June 30, 2025
  • Here’s how the best paid service providers earn the highest fees June 25, 2025
  • Hard work isn’t enough (here’s what is) June 24, 2025
  • Make your marketing totally unmissable. Here’s how! June 19, 2025
  • Discounts: The full cost to your business June 17, 2025
  • Rapid, massive business growth: With MBRs June 9, 2025
  • For next-level success, swap your fears. Here’s how! June 6, 2025
  • It works better than advertising June 2, 2025
  • It’s the most valuable question in sales! May 27, 2025
  • Grab. Focus. Urgency: How to vastly increase your sales May 20, 2025
  • Attract. Don’t sell May 14, 2025
  • Marketing gold: The follow-up May 10, 2025
  • How to make more sales, in uncertain times May 8, 2025
  • 17 Tips to help you grow a stronger business May 6, 2025
  • How to increase your prices May 2, 2025
  • Your economy April 27, 2025
  • From rags to riches? April 26, 2025
  • Tiny tweaks. Huge wins April 21, 2025
  • Home
  • About
  • Hire me

Copyright © 2025 Jim Connolly