Know How Smart Marketing Strategies

Americans spend billions of dollars each year on marketing. In fact, Americans spend over $250 billion per year just on marketing alone. That should tell you how important marketing is for businesses big and small. No one would do it if it did not work.

Of course, there is also the statistic that four out of five new businesses fail within the first five years of being open. To avoid becoming one of those types of statistics, use the smart marketing moves outlined here.

Discover your niche. I am talking about two niches here.

1. Figure out your niche in the marketplace amongst your competitors.

2. Figure out your niche target market. Once you find out how you are different than your competitors and what you can offer customers that other businesses cannot, you have a unique selling proposition (USP) that you can use over and over again in your marketing materials.

Now, who do you market to?

That is the second part of discovering your niche. You should have a narrow target audience, or target market, that you are trying to reach. The mistake most small businesses make from the start is to try to market to everyone. You cannot be everything to everyone. No one has succeeded with that line of thinking.

Use color in your marketing materials. Full color brochures and flyers are much more appealing and eye-catching than black-and-white ones. Color printing might seem expensive, but compared with television and radio commercials, it is actually quite a bargain. Use brochures, postcards and flyers to advertise your business until you have enough money to invest in other types of media.

Gain expert status. How do you do this? Write articles, e-newsletters, contribute to online forums and anything else you can contribute your opinion on. Write emails to local television or radio shows and offer your time as an expert for any upcoming stories. You can also host seminars and workshops for people in the community. People would rather buy from an expert than someone they have never heard of, so get your name out there as a local expert.

Develop relationships with non-competing professionals. Swap business cards and stories with professionals in businesses that complement yours. A dry cleaner could develop a relationship with an alteration service, for instance. Both businesses probably have a similar client list, but they are not competing for business. They can be marketing partners: split the costs of advertising, keep brochures of the other company in each other’s stores, etc. This is a great way to share resources without giving up a lot of money.

Ask for referrals from customers. Whenever you have a satisfied customer, give them your business card and ask them to think of you the next time someone they know needs a service like yours. Referral cards that sweeten the deal work really well: offer your current customers a credit of $25 or $50 for every referral card a new customer brings in with the current customer’s name on it.
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Article Marketing. The Challenging way to maximize the benefits

If you are currently using article marketing technique, these 7 challenging ways can help you maximize the benefits you are getting from writing and distributing your articles online:

1. Learn how to attract attention. You must be able to grab the attention of online users to increase the chances of your articles being read, picked up, and widely republished online. You can easily do so by using titles that are striking, interesting, and those that have the ability to invoke action.

2. Impress your readers. Once you have successfully grabbed the attention of online users, you must know how to keep them interested to compel them to read on. Offer them valuable information that are useful and cannot be found elsewhere. Also, give them great reading experience by making sure that your articles are well-written and easy to understand.

3. Stick to the facts. Some marketers are stretching the truth or insert misleading statements just to create a need for their product and augment their sales potential. This bad business practice can greatly hurt your credibility online and can easily make you lose the trust of your clients in an instant. That is why, it is of outmost importance that you always be truthful and keep your content fact-based.

4. Obtain more quality inbound links. By this, I mean multiply the number of your articles as each submission grants you one backlink for your website. You can either spend more time writing or hire ghostwriters who can provide you quality articles for $5-$12 each depending on topic and word count.

5. Make your articles easy to understand. Your readers must not spend too much time analyzing your ideas just to get the message you are trying to get across. Make it hassle-free for your readers to understand your content by using simple terms and short sentences. Avoid using offbeat acronyms that are not familiar to your readers. Do not use highly technical terms or big words that are difficult to understand. Remember, you are writing to inform and not to impress.

6. Topics. Before you engage in article marketing, you have to understand that you will need to write a lot of articles to generate more quality inbound links for your website. Thus, you will need many topics to write about. You can actually write numerous articles that are targeting the same keywords. For instance, if your main keyword is badminton, you can write about "how to play badminton, 10 tips that will help you excel at badminton, Best badminton strategies", etc.

7. Do not advertise on your articles. If you think that you can augment your sales potential by inserting your sales pitches on your content, you are wrong. When you do this, your readers will be annoyed as they are expecting to get information from your content and not blatant advertisement.
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