PR Equals Free Publicity
There are 3 key areas of public relations you can use to boost your advertising results ten-fold over your paid advertising.
The key to public relations lie in:
- Public relation or publicity
- Merchandising
- Promotions
With a solid plan in place that cover all these areas, you’ll have a great approach to use public relations in the best way possible.
Public relations include all that is the media. Don’t limit yourself. The attention of newspapers, television, radio, magazines, bloggers, etc. and more are all equally powerful. Online marketing is just as, if not more, important as conventional media.
Here are the steps to get noticed by the media:
- Put together a press release for your company. The press release should be relevant to your target market and address consumer interest, not just announce your business.
- Compact your press release to include one hook and one angle. Choose the most attention-getting to make sure the media person you are sending it to is interested in reading it.
- Put your press release in professional formatting. With press releases you need a dateline, the most important information at the top, facts, figures and wrap it up with contact details including who and how. Print the press release on your letterhead.
- Send your press release to all television and radio stations, local and metro newspapers, national newspapers, industry magazines, and any other form of media that reaches your target market. Don’t forgot to include relevant blogs, ezines, press release submission sites and to industry professionals.
More importantly than a perfect press release is to make sure you have addressed the needs of your target market in the products/services you offer and made that clear in the press release. If you are provided people a solution to a problem, a way to avoid a problem and an opportunity to enhance their life the media and public will be interested.
If you have a connection (or the ability to get a connection) with a celebrity, this can practically guarantee you’ll get attention. Make sure you are offered newsworthy information, and then follow up with media outlets to make sure they are publicizing that information.
“One of the most powerful techniques every business should use is free publicity. As the name implies, there is no cost, just the time and effort required to attract attention to your business.” Jay Abraham
How is Your Relationship With Your Vendors?
It’s extremely important to build good relationships with your vendors and those around. They bring in new customers/clients and increase awareness of your company branding.
The people you work directly with on your products or services are really the ones with the most to gain when you are successful. By taking the time to get to know them, you’ll find a lot of new opportunities you didn’t realize were even there.
To grow your business, you have to find ways to reward your vendors for helping grow your business and everyone wins. One of ways you can do this, is by offering performance-based incentives that are much larger than their normal charges.
Here’s the step-by-step process to putting together a partnership with a vendor:
- Approach all the vendors you work with and offer an incentive based on performance.
- Put a generous incentive plan together from their perspective, even take suggestions.
- Develop a clear, concise and easy to track incentive plan. This will increase competition between vendors and therefore higher performance levels.
- Encourage subsequent sales instead of focusing only on the initial sale. By doing this you can give away more of the profit from the initial sale to your vendors and make higher profits off the back end products. Encourage:
- Future sales
- Upsell better and more profitable products/services
- Cross-sell to additional products
- Create an incentive plan that’s irresistible to your vendors by offering generous, exclusive compensation.
Think of all the vendors you work with and the creative ways you can put together a plan that tempts them to be part of your business. Use their talents, capabilities and connections and you’ll both be winners.
Learn From The Big Companies!
Let’s have a look at how the kings of industry wine, dine and otherwise butter up prospects.
Most of successful professionals use a series of information based ads that build emotion and a call-to-action. These are much more effective than a standard company branding advertisements. The same principles that go into putting together a high impact (and, often, high priced) ad campaign can be adapted to fit your needs with similar results.
Here are some ways to put together and execute a professional, effective ad campaign:
- Put together a short report that’ll you’ll automatically send to prospects when they contact you. This should include a short description of your business and what you specialize in. Don’t forget to include case studies, samples or other proof of your success.
- Develop value-oriented yellow page ads.
- Consider newsletters as a way of educating and informing customers about your industry and services offered.
- Offer a free seminar, webinar or other lecture to build awareness of your business, but make sure you make the information pertinent to your target market and find speakers who are respected and known in the industry.
- Buy an existing business, introduce better marketing and grow this new business faster than a “from scratch” business.
- Always test different versions of your ads to find the most effective ones.
- Use direct mail marketing to grow your business.
- Put together a database of previous customers and send them new information.
- Offer incentives such as frequent purchasing benefits, loyalty programs, referral programs or others.
- Approach large firms who may need your services and negotiate a deal to be their exclusive expert in your field.
- Offer a 24-hour information line with a regularly updated recorded message. Make this available to all past and future customers/clients.
- Donate time or materials to local charities to show support in your area.
- Offer public clinics for the general public to come along and discuss what they need that’s free and approachable.
- Organize seminars your customers/clients can pay to attend by putting together a high-perception value package.
- Approach local newspaper by offering to write a weekly column about your area of expertise. Don’t ask for money, just a byline and bio.
- Develop a weekend or other destination seminar for customers/clients, not only does this give you an action-packed weekend with the most important people, it gives them a tax-deductible business adventure.
- Take a good seminar and turn it into written form as a home study, member site program, audio or video program.
- Approach large companies and offer to give seminars to their employees, investors or management.
- Be proactive with your marketing plan.
- Barter for your marketing. Offer products or services in lieu of payment.
- Be willing to bring in new clients, even if at an initial loss because it will likely pay off later.
- Regulate your marketing budget to maximize the potential income from them to hit the next year and try to push back advertising costs for the next year to offset your expenses.
- Make offers to target markets or target market businesses to pay them for referrals or shared databases.
- Offer loaner products to replace equipment that’s be repaired or refurbished.
- Give away something free to everyone who brings in a print version of your advertisement. This is a great way to see which ads are giving you the most bang for your buck.
- Continually consider what new products/services you can offer to current customers/clients.
- Develop a mail order division of your company.
- Offer a proposition to your competitors to trade customers/clients you were both unsuccessful in selling to.
- Use different marketing tactics as an excuse to attract new customers/clients with new offers and goodies.
- Offer a “you-choose-the-price” program. This is especially good for product you just can’t seem to sell.
So, there are 30 great ways to market to other professional and businesses. Some other great ways to get your name out there for little or no cost are:
- Get involved you in your community-volunteer, donate to local events, etc.
- Join your local Chamber of Commerce and attend the networking and other activities throughout the year.
- Join a local, state or regional professional associates for further networking opportunities.
- Become a board member of a local organization.
Advertising should never be your only method of marketing, there are a myriad of ways to get your name out there in a way that feels personal to potential customers/clients.
“Effective advertising…must be used to get your name out to the public. If your name is not familiar to people, they will not come to you.” Jay Abraham
Turn Prospects into Customers Overnight!
Today I’d like to talk about how to turn prospects or leads into customers and keep them on your list for future marketing too.
While, your marketing is doing its job, and your list is growing, you need to be working on turning those leads into customers. There are a few ways to this. To have them buy your product or service and create a sale.
To be able to do this you need to be:
- Inviting
- Informative
- Enjoyable
The biggest fear of most new customers is “buyer’s remorse“. You want to avoid this at all costs and this should be lessen or decreased when you provide a quality product/service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made.
However, this “buyer’s remorse” isn’t always taken away by what you offer. There are two ways to deal with this and give your buyers a good feeling:
- Offer to refund money-no questions asked
- Offer a bonus they can keep, even if they return the product
These offers alone create a feeling that the customer can trust you more, just for offering these things.
There are number of other ways to turn a prospect/lead into a customer:
- Offer a special price as an opportunity for you to test the market.
- Offer a lower price with the reason of pushing inventory to pay a bill, for your kid’s’ braces, or another tangible reason. Customers love that this makes you feel so much more human.
- Offer a referral incentive.
- Offer a smaller, more inexpensive product first to build trust.
- Offer package deals.
- Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
- Offer extra incentives-longer warranties, free bonuses if ordered by a set date.
- Offer financing options, if possible.
- Offer a bonus or discount if they pay in full.
- Offer special packaging or delivery.
- Offer “name your own price” incentives.
- Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
- Offer a trade-up or upgrade to something they already have.
- Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.
The options really are as limitless as you make it. You can use these or other ideas to find what works the best for your business, products/service and target market. Remember this…
“By making it inviting, easy, informative, non-threatening, educational, inspiring and fun to do business with you, you’ll loft your company above the competition.” Jay Abraham
Make your Message Pop!
There are 5 major components to good advertising or blog copy: (The order of these is essential to success)
- Command Attention
- Showcase Benefits of Products/Services
- Prove the Benefits
- Persuade People to Embrace the Benefits
- Call to Action
People don’t like to be sold products or services. But they like it when a problem is going to be solved for them. Even when they didn’t realise they had a problem.
So, when you make a blog or advertisement, you need to think about the unique benefits your products/services offer and showcase that in a persuasive way. You need to emphasise results, not features.
Let’s take a minute to talk about each of these components:
- Command Attention: This is usually accomplished with the headline. You need an attention-getter that makes people want to know more about your products/services. The best headlines give a vivid portrayal of the benefits or show how a problem can be avoided with your products/services. The headline is the advertisement for the advertisement.
- Showcase Benefits: You have to showcase the benefits of your products and services and, more importantly, show how they will solve or prevent a problem. They need to know what’s in it for them. Include useful, factual and clear information to show precisely what the benefits are and how they are going to help the customer.
- Offer Proof: This is where you prove what the advertisement is offering. You need to establish you have a method to deliver. Consider information that establishes credibility and past performance.
- Persuade: You need to add compelling reasons for your potential customers to purchase your products/services. Use a hard sell approach and create scarcity. This will enact your potential customers to feel like they have to act now. Which leads into the last component.
- Call to Action: You need to compel your potential customers to DO something. They need to check out your site, sign up for your newsletter, purchase your products, contact you about services…something. Offer a freebie-a booklet, sample, product, bonus, demo, consult, limited time price…the list goes on. There are lots of ways to get potential customers excited about ordering and help them feel like they are getting an amazing deal.
Good advertisements include all of these components and are not complete without any of them. You can sit down and think through any one of these components, then figure out how to best place them together for the most effectiveness. We can help you with this too.
Learn how to generate all the leads your business can handle and increase your sales…
WITHOUT spending a dime on marketing or advertising.
www.smallbusiness-academy.com