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Posts Tagged ‘budget’

3 Simple Steps to Marketing Even If You Hate Marketing

Of all the things entrepreneurs struggle with, this one is probably the most difficult and most dangerous. Why? Because it directly impacts the success of your business.

I know I’m not revealing any big eye-opening secret when I tell you that if you don’t regularly and consistently market your business, your business won’t grow. I know you know this. But none of that helps you when you hate marketing. (In fact, it probably makes you feel even worse, doesn’t it?)

So what did you do? Here are 3 steps to get you started (hint — these work even if you love marketing):

1. Find a marketing strategy or tactic you enjoy. There are LOTS of ways to market yourself, I guarantee at least one of them you will like doing. Your job is to find it and then build your main marketing strategy around it. Here’s a list of a few marketing activities to get you thinking:

a. Writing — blogs, articles, etc.
b. Speaking — live, on teleclasses/webinars/livestream, or even podcasts
c. Being interviewed on radio or television
d. Video
e. Chatting with people via social networking

At least one of those should resonate with you.

Once you figure out your favorite marketing activity, the next step is to build your marketing strategy around that activity. (More on that in step 3 but first…)

2. Outsource what you hate to do. The problem is no matter how much you may love one marketing activity, there are probably other essential activities you don’t love quite so much (hence why you probably hate marketing to begin with). So the trick is to build your marketing plan around what you enjoy doing then you outsource the other pieces you don’t enjoy.

Sounds pretty easy when I put it that way, eh?

Okay so what if you have no one to outsource to and you’re worried about cash flow. My advice is to take a deep breath and find someone. Look, outsourcing your marketing is the easiest way to see a return on your investment — if you start consistently marketing your business that money WILL come back to you.

Start by looking at your budget. See what you can put aside each month for marketing help. Then find someone who can do the tasks you need done in that budget. You might not be able to get everything done, but prioritize what’s most important (i.e. what you’re going to see a return on your investment the fastest) and focus on that.

3. Start small and build from there. Yes I know there are lots of marketing activities out there you could be doing, and the more marketing you do the better your results. However, that doesn’t mean I want you try getting everything done tomorrow.

Here’s the minimum of what you need to have a successful, growing business — one main lead source bringing leads into your business and one main way of converting those leads into customers and clients. That’s really it (at least for the marketing side). You get that nailed down and the rest will come.

And here’s some examples of how this can look:

1. Lead source (speaking, blogging, videos, interviews, social networking)

2. Lead cultivating (ezine, free calls)

See how simple this can be?

And to take this one step further, let’s say you love speaking and hate writing. You can focus on speaking and hire a virtual assistant to take care of putting an ezine out for you.

Voila! Marketing plan built around your strengths and outsourcing your weaknesses.

Then once you have that nailed down you can start adding more marketing activities to the mix. Before you know it, you’ll find you have built up an amazing marketing system that’s feeding your business (and better yet, you may discover you don’t mind marketing quite as much as you thought you did).

Business Stationery Is Here to Stay

A lot of businesses these days have almost easily moved to modern means of communication such as email, social media, and online marketing. They presume that printed marketing is old and should not be used again. Although modern communication is ideal in today’s fast emerging world, you have to understand that your business still needs to communicate and establish its name with printed marketing materials.

Compared to electronic communication, printed materials have a lot of lasting uses. They continue to be seen and read long after the emails or tweets have been deleted. They are also perfect to use in tradeshows, conferences, and direct mailings to tell the story of your business. It’s important though that the printed materials must put your business on a positive light. They must represent you impressively and professionally.

Business stationery is among the important printed communication tools that every business should have. But before you go running off to the nearest office supply store, have you ever thought of giving your stationery a stand out design? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a material that will let your stand out from the crowd? If so, why don’t you create your own business stationery? Here are useful tips to help you make your stationery design stand out:

• Understand that the design of your material should be a reflection of your business. It should highlight the good points about your business and tell people why they should patronize you. It would be best if you have your design professionally done.

• You don’t need to spend a lot to come up with an impressive design. A lot of designers these days can design your material affordably. Even the printing cost is significantly cheap with full color printing and double sided printing not relatively affordable.

• Make sure your stationery complement your other marketing materials. Use the same color or font to promote consistency. Keep in mind that a set of consistent and well designed materials will look professional and help improve your business image.

• If you want a unique design, you can always take advantage of embossing, die cutting, and spot metallic. Ask your printer which best suit your business and your budget.

• Make sure to put all pertinent details in your material. That could include your logo and complete contact details. You can also include your tagline and brief information about your products or services. Just keep the details short as there is not enough space to accommodate all details.

• Create a good letterhead. This will help set your business apart from the competition. You can use templates to make the design process quick and easy. Be aware though that your letterhead can look generic and won’t give you a unique image. If you have extra budget, opt for a custom letterhead design.

However you want to design your custom stationery, make sure you use a clean and attractive layout. This will help your materials become more compelling and effectively communicate your benefits.

Crafting an Exceptional Business Letterhead

Business experts would often recommend sticking with simple designs in marketing materials. But to new and inexperienced business owners, simplicity is a complicated word. They find it hard to come up with an exciting material out of a simple sheet of paper. As a business owner, though, you need to traverse through difficult tasks effectively. Even though it may seem impossible to come up with remarkable materials on a limited budget, you have to use your creativity and imagination in order to make a seemingly simple material exceptional.

If you are truly on a limited budget, one of the best marketing materials you can invest in is letterhead printing. A beautifully crafted company letterhead will make a huge difference to the way people perceive your business. But in today’s high tech business world, why should you still invest in a letterhead when you can always use email and other modern means of marketing?

Understand that as a business, you need to convey the image of stability, credibility, and professionalism to your customers and prospects. A well designed letterhead will help you do that. It will should your customers that you offer high quality products or services, and that you are committed to providing good customer service. The letterhead will show people that you are stable and that you have enough financial means to stay in business for a long time.

Sure, websites and email are widely used these days, but you have to understand that not all your target customers are online. There would still be plenty of instances when you need to send written correspondences. This would require you to use your stationery which is printed with a remarkable letterhead. Both the stationery and the letterhead will help give your business a good brand image.

It’s vital that you lay a good foundation on the design of your letterhead. Don’t just focus on what you want to incorporate on your material. You need to also consider what your customers would want to see from your design. Keep in mind that they will view your business from a different angle as you, so their opinion would be an invaluable help to the success of your design.

If you can get your customers’ opinion, that’s better. It would even be ideal if you design with your customers in mind. Just don’t forget to put your logo and essential contact details to make it easier and quicker for them to contact you. You can also add your tag line so people won’t have a hard time understanding what benefits you can offer to them.

Perhaps the best way to come up with an impressive design for your letterhead templates is to look at what your competitions are doing. Collect their letterheads and see the good points from each design. You can then incorporate the good points in your own design or if you want to be unique, you can create an exactly different design from your competitions. The point is you know what your competitions’ letterhead look like so you have every means to do better than them.