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Marketing is a great field to be in because there will always be companies who need help selling their products.  The following steps will help you get started in this profitable and creative line of work.

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To determine if your company’s marketing campaign is successful, it is most useful to gather and analyze data pertaining to your customers and their habits. This can be gathered in several different ways. 

Website traffic analysis

Any successful business should have a website these days, even if you don’t do business directly through it. Of course, it is a good option to allow customers not only to learn more about your product, but also to make purchases via your website with a credit card. Many types of shopping cart software are available, and most of these allow for easy tracking of customer habits. Not only do they tell you what the customer bought, they can also tell you which other items they have viewed without buying. 

Likewise, you can also track where a customer came from using link tracking codes or web analyzers included in many website hosting packages. These will often tell you what site or page the customer came from, what the last page on your site they looked at was, and how many hits any page has gotten. Use this data to see which sites bring you the most customers, and put more of your advertising on sites that generate the most web traffic for you. Affiliate links can be used in the same way: using tracking codes to see what sites are bringing you the most money, and where click-throughs are coming from.

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It is important to regularly assess your marketing efforts to make sure they are producing the results you expect.  When you do so, watch out for these signs that should be red flags.

Not Doing Your Homework

We’ve all done it before.  We see or hear about a new marketing technique that sounds great.  So we throw it into our campaign without a second thought. 

Not a good idea.

When you assess your marketing efforts, look for any of these type of tactics that were thrown in without due diligence.  Go over them a bit more closely than you do everything else.  Make sure they are holding up their weight.

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Advertising is important in creating your brand presence, but a strong brand is more than a name and a logo: it must generate an emotional bond with the customer to keep them coming back. It must be memorable enough to gain the attention of potential customers and differentiate it from other brands. What is it about your brand that is special? Why should a customer choose your brand over others? Your advertisements should build and then communicate these things to the customer. A strong brand should seem relevant to the lifestyle of the customer to keep them coming back even after they have made an initial purchase.

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We all know that we are in the midst of a recession.  To put it mildly, times are tough.  Virtually every business is having a harder time making sales and increasing profits.  A lot of companies (too many, to be honest) are simply trying to survive.  Most likely, your company is also struggling a bit.  It is in your best interest to explore every possible avenue to improve your performance and help get you through this downturn. 

One business strategy that is often overlooked is cross promotion.  Cross promotion is simply teaming up with another company to help each other out.  Naturally, you do not generally want to promote one of your competitors.  But there are plenty of companies out there who either compliment your business, or who have no relation to your business at all, that you can team up with.  You can also team up with suppliers or distributors.

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Have you ever wondered why so many door-to-door salespersons, Online ads, and infomercials use those annoying sell techniques? Surely, if they knew how much it turns the stomach, no one would use the hard sell approach, right? Wrong. The hard sell will continue to be used because it works. “Cold call” advertising requires a much more aggressive approach; these companies don’t have the advantage of time to develop relationships through a series of postcard and brochure mailings. As corny and obvious as the hard sell can be, any company can benefit from incorporating some of the techniques into their printed advertisements. Here are some tips so that you can increase the effectiveness of your printed brochure or printed postcard by learning from the hard sell.

1. Hype
The hard sell hype is ten times more extreme than other hype methods of advertising. Hype allows the salesperson to create an “event” surrounding the launch of a new product or service by literally counting down the weeks or days to a deadline, such as placing a countdown clock on the website. This is often used in postcard printing by sending out a postcard in threes, such as three months in a row.

2. Time Limit
A time-sensitive offer invites urgency, creating the sense that if a buyer doesn’t act now, they’ll miss out on a valuable opportunity. In a hard sell, the time line has always (it seems) almost expired. Of course, the offer stands again the next day or two. Yet, including a time-sensitive offer encourages consumers to act faster, so use this technique in your brochures and postcards by including a timely incentive. For instance, offer free shipping for the month of June only.

3. Reviews of Value
Have you ever wondered if those reviews of the product are real? Sometimes, yes, but most of the time they are exaggerated. Hard core salespersons know that social reviews of a service or product improves the believability of their offer. The only problem is that most of these reviews are encouraged to be over-the-top by promises of special discounts or the ability to order early – just to make sure the reviewer gets the product before they run out. Including customer testimonials in brochure and even postcard printing really does work, as long as it’s real. Include the customer’s first name, the company if appropriate, location, and even a picture if the customer approves. Use the exact quote that the customer sent. People can tell when it’s not real.

4. Intimate Approach
Also known as Guerrilla Marketing, reaching prospects on a personal level can build trust. Although this is only short-term relationship building (remember the time-sensitive offer?), this approach gives buyers the feeling that a company knows exactly what is needed to solve their problems. Unlike an impersonal brochure, Guerrilla Marketing involves telling personal hardships and how the buyer can overcome them using the service or product offered. A brochure can be made more personal by including such information. For instance, feature a short success story of a customer or two to connect with prospects on a more personal level.

There are many more hard sell techniques out there, but these four are the ones most important to incorporate into your brochure and postcard printing pieces. Just try to avoid the corny phrases (Don’t be only one in your neighborhood without one. Order now – only 10 left!) and be honest so that your customers will order your products or services for years to come.

Every company needs an Internet presence and marketing plan. A company without these marketing strategies is a company that is missing out on valuable opportunities to reach a nation or world-wide customer base. Even for those businesses who only want to keep their customer base small or local, an Internet marketing plan gets them in touch with the perfect customer they may otherwise never have come across. A dynamic website design, the use of search engine optimization, social marketing, and even print media are all a part of making your presence known on the web.

Dynamic Website
The design of your website needs to be professional, which is why many businesses opt for a web designer. A professional designer knows the current trends for website design and can combine these trends with the image you want to portray. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you can build your own website, but be sure to keep some design tips in mind:

• Keep it simple – most websites today are leaving a lot more white space around text and images and breaking up text into columns for readability purposes.
• Use large fonts – the larger your headline font, the more quickly customers will notice it. It should be noticeably larger than the rest of your text, including any subheadings.
• Include vivid, bold images – the more attractive your graphics, the more attractive your website will be. 3D graphics are very popular, as well as enhanced photographic images.
• Study your favorite websites – get inspiration for your website design from those that appeal to you the most. Not sure where to look? Check out these 16 Sites for Web Design Inspiration.
• Use tutorials – especially if you are a beginner with web design programs, using a web design tutorial will help you get the professional look you need.

Search Engine Optimization
Even if you design the most attractive website out there, no one will find you if you don’t show up in the first few pages of Google or Yahoo. Getting your website to meet SEO standards requires more than can be discussed in this article, so your best bet is to hire a professional. Or you could teach yourself some of the basics and at least get the ball rolling until you can afford to hire a professional. Many free SEO tutorials are available and provide both the information and tools you need to get started.

Social Marketing
Keeping up with your customers through social marketing sites builds strong loyalty. Social marketing helps your customers feel like you are there for them no matter the time of day. Posting regular articles through Facebook and Twitter updates customers regularly in regards to your company. Any relevant useful tips are also great posting material. Starting a blog and allowing customers to leave comments allows them to feel involved in your day-to-day operations, and builds a relationship with your customers.

Print Materials
What, exactly, do print materials have to do with Internet marketing? Everything, in a sense. Even if your business is solely Online, you have to have business cards to hand out at business conventions or to the prospect you meet at the grocery store. Even brochure printing, flyers, poster printing, or any other print media will help spread the word about your website. If you have an office or storefront, advertise this information on your website, and advertise your website on print media. This technique gets you more results for your marketing dollar.

In short, no online presence equals an old-fashioned appearance. Keeping your company image updated with current marketing trends will show that your business can handle your customers’ needs more efficiently than your competitor who barely has a working website.

OBD is a book about branding by a non-brander. In fact, Lucas Conley is a business writer who controls his resentment of the excesses of branding he describes. Conley investigates and explains in detail the extent to which branding has seeped into modern culture, and how far companies will go to promote their products.

Forms of invasive branding
Those in the marketing and graphic design fields that have worked on brands won’t be surprised – branded golf holes, branded urinals, fake bloggers and even branded beach sand are uncovered as examples of branding going too far. Conley doesn’t say that we don’t need branding – he’s not one of those who think everything should be “no logo, no brand” – but in Conley’s view branding has become more of a Band-Aid or a solution to inferior products instead of companies actually fixing the broken product. He criticizes executives for becoming “so focused on the strength of the all-encompassing idea — the brand — that they ignore the physical properties that compose it.”

Conley gives numerous examples of forms of invasive branding that threaten people’s understanding of life and culture. He asks “What does it mean when our ‘sense of meaning’ and our ‘sense of identity’ are shaped by someone trying to sell us something?”

After talking with a branding fundamentalist, Conley notes “The more he describes branding, the more it appears to consist entirely of vague idealism and seemingly vain efforts to create something meaningful and permanent of what is often superfluous and transient. The simpler the product, the more Byzantine the branding seems.”

Watch out for Cincinnati
Conley doesn’t see the ad agencies as being the people behind all of this. In fact, he writes that branding has “superseded the advertising industry, either claiming advertising outright or dictating the message that advertisers are allowed to deliver. Increasingly, marketing has also become a division of branding.” He also has no qualms pointing fingers: apparently, Cincinnati, Ohio is a hotbed of professional invasive branders.

Watch out graphic designers!
Conley ties branding into graphic design pretty plainly for designers: people don’t understand design – they don’t “get” it. But clients “get” branding. They get the idea that a brand can make their product better, more appealing to consumers. So, to many companies, graphic design is to follow branding; that is – graphic designers should design for the brand, instead of the other way around.

The branding problem
Conley says the problem with branding is that “…branding, when it’s consistent, provides us with clarity and simplicity in a progressively hectic world. But branding has become unhinged from its initial principles, and its aims have become increasingly exaggerated and warped.”

I’d like to think that there are still some companies left that grow their brands organically – that is, without lies, exaggerations and such. Some companies do it the old-fashioned way – their brand builds with real word-of-mouth (not the 7% of mothers that are compensated for WOM marketing, as Conley states) and real customer service. Oh yeah, and a quality product.

But, unfortunately I see Conley’s take as being all too real for more and more companies. As Publisher’s Weekly states: “Conley’s perspective on branding’s encroachment into social areas is as alarming as it is stimulating.”

When you read or talk about how the marketplace is changing, it’s generally linked somehow to the Internet, and technology that connects people to the Internet. The Internet has changed how businesses conduct their sales and marketing, as well as how they whole business operates (online-only businesses). The Internet has also changed how consumers research and buy products and services. The Internet has changed how people find and apply for jobs, and even what is sold. (What did Google start out “selling” anyway? Nothing. And Craigslist stays afloat without charging anything for classified ads (although, that’s starting to change in Craigslist’s bigger cities.))

Who would have thought that Wikipedia would render your parents’ Encyclopedia Britannica set useless? Wikipedia is not only as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica, but is also over a hundred times larger.

Consumers also make recommendations to each other and discuss pros and cons of products and services in ways online that was never possible before the Internet. Now you can compare notes with people across the country, or even across the ocean. Homebuyers don’t have to consult realtors any more to browse available houses.

What do all of these changes mean for the marketing industry?

Plenty.

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Marketers need a blog. These days, blogs are more popular than forums or product review Web sites, and anyone can have a blog. It’s up to the marketer to find out what consumers are saying about your company on these blogs, and to either give out info that consumers need, or do damage control and correct the record when bloggers get something wrong about your brand.

Your company should already have some sort of Web site; a blog is the next logical step. But in addition to just having a blog, you should also be keeping closer track of the traffic to your blog. You need to have good visitor metrics and ways to find out what kind of people are visiting your blog. You should also think about video blogging, as that’s becoming more popular as well.

Texting. Texting consumers cell phones is also a new trend that seems to be growing. Many people say they don’t want marketing texts, but some marketers are having such success with texting that they keep doing it. This is an iffy trend right now that we’ll have to wait out to see how it flows.

Increasing your marketing budget, or better allocate your budget. If you can’t increase your marketing budget to include Internet ads, text messaging and newer technology, then you need to allocate your budget to include these tactics. Traditional marketing techniques like brochures, postcards and billboards still need to be used in addition to the newer marketing tactics. And if you can afford it, tweaking traditional tactics, like a billboard, into an electronic billboard is a great way to get consumers’ attention while integrating technology and traditional marketing.  

When it comes to finding people in your target market online, it can be hard, grueling process. Although you can buy Google AdWords that are targeted on different Web sites, or pay for Google search engine results, there’s no guarantee that people will click through to your site. There’s also no guarantee that people will even read your ad – I know that I tend to ignore Google AdWords anymore, just because I see them everywhere. I don’t have to read them to know what they are.  

So how else can you get a target market online?  

Many blogs and articles I’ve read talk about using affiliate marketing, but it all seems fishy to me. Let me explain how I understand affiliate marketing, and then if I’m off base, maybe someone can help me understand.  

From the HowStuffWorks Web site, I got this definition: “Affiliate programs, also called associate programs, are arrangements in which an online merchant Web site pays affiliate Web sites a commission to send them traffic. These affiliate Web sites post links to the merchant site and are paid according to a particular agreement. This agreement is usually based on the number of people the affiliate sends to the merchant’s site, or the number of people they send who buy something or perform some other action. Some arrangements pay according to the number of people who visit the page containing their merchant site’s banner advertisement. Basically, if a link on an affiliate site brings the merchant site traffic or money, the merchant site pays the affiliate site according to their agreement. Recruiting affiliates is an excellent way to sell products online, but it can also be a cheap and effective marketing strategy; it’s a good way to get the word out about your site.” 

That’s the clearest explanation I’ve seen from any other sites I’ve visited. It sounds like swapping links, but instead of an affiliate getting some link love, they get money instead. It almost sounds better for the affiliate site to me.  

Amazon.com has over 500,000 affiliate Web sites that they pay if the affiliate can send someone over who actually buys something from Amazon. It seems kind of easy to work for a site like Amazon, which is known as the place to buy books, but what about the new sites that are unknown? I don’t usually buy from Web sites I’ve never heard of, or at least can’t find reviews of because I’m afraid of getting burned. I ordered some clothes from a Web site I’d never heard of, and when I tried to return an item, no one would email me back and I couldn’t find a phone number. Now I know better!  

I suppose if Amazon is using an affiliate program, as is TiVo and many others, then it could be legit. Then again, the HowStuffWorks article talks about multilevel marketing being similar to a type of affiliate program – that makes a red flag go up. Anything that reminds me of Amway tells me it’s bad.  

But still, I’m torn. Are affiliate programs good or bad? Someone please give me some laymen terms into what’s going on and whether it’s shady or not.