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Even in a downturn, if you don’t get in front of people and explain your unique value proposition then your chances of selling will be restricted to current customers or accidental passersby.  Marketing is what sets you up for selling.  However, there are three important things you should appreciate before you start.

1.    Your target customers need to hear your marketing messages at least 7 times to influence a buying decision.  Sounds like a lot - it is. People just don’t always take in all the information at any given time. Especially the first time they hear it, so you need to choose strategies that allow you to repeat them often enough to work for you.

2.    Expensive ads don’t guarantee sales – even when they are popular with the public. Companies have gone broke over big ticket ads. Every marketing dollar has to translate into sales.

3.    A sure way to improve sales is to use multiple marketing channels. Your underlying message should be consistent, but you need to get it out in a variety of mediums.

So, if you’re a small to mid-sized business on a limited budget your tactics should be to optimize your spending so that you get in front of the right customers regularly and in a variety of ways.  Here are four techniques you can use to achieve that.

Identify and target niche customers
Unless you are a major player with an unlimited amount of money to devote to scatter gun marketing - go narrow. Do your market research and focus on niches - those groups of customers you can clearly identify who would be interested in your offering.  Customers who are affordable for you to reach! Then get your message out into local clubs, trade shows, industry publications, niche newsletters, anywhere you can reach those specific prospects.  continue

Target every new contact for follow up communications and watch customer loyalty – and your profits – grow.

A good quality customer and prospect database for email or direct mail can mean the difference between business survival and failure, especially during times of slow growth. The same list, combined with smart communications, will make the good times even better. It costs more money to find new customers than it does to nurture repeat customers through regular contact, so you need to make accurate list-building a daily habit.

Here’s a checklist of ways you can effortlessly add more potential customers:

Direct web traffic
Put a prominent message on your website inviting browsers and customers alike to sign up for regular contact. Your pitch needs to be more than an exercise in collecting names and addresses. Make it clear you’ll be rewarding customers with discounts, sending regular free tips or professional advice too, by mail or email. You must also clearly stress up front, the ease of ‘opting out’. People are more likely to give you their details if they are sure they can leave your list as easily as they joined it.

Customer lists
If you already have clients’ addresses for purchasing, invoicing or other purposes, invite this already ‘warm’ list to receive marketing news too. It may also be appropriate to ask them during regular contact, to recommend or refer like-minded colleagues, particularly if you can offer an incentive for them to add to your list. continue

Poor relationships within the team will always reflect on morale and have been proven to impact on the bottom line.  You can make or break a career or a job depending on the way you behave with fellow workers.  Workplaces need to be profitable for businesses and for the people in them – and that means personally and financially.

Whether you are a leader or a team member there are actions you can take to create a positive, empowering, motivational work environment for people.

A CEO complained that his managers only brought him problems. When you come to the meeting with a problem, have some suggested solutions ready at the same time.  The negative effect simply complaining disappears, and is replaced with an atmosphere of constructively sharing in resolving issues.

Constantly laying the blame on someone or something else is negative and often destructive of team spirit. Don’t put your effort into finding ways to point the finger at others. People are more likely to recognize their contribution to the problem if they are not publicly humiliated in the process.  You will alienate others and end up with enemies, not conducive to your future job prospects or your business’ success. continue

Want to stay in business and be profitable in this economic climate?  The answer is to plan, but it is difficult to think in terms of three to five year plans these days.  So focus instead on the next 12 to 18 months and use “what if” scenario planning and stress testing along the way.

Build scenarios
Create a forecast for the next 12 months to 2 years. Take your business plan and then impose a series of scenarios. A business-as-usual scenario, for example, might have flat growth. Another scenario might project a 10% drop in revenue and a 20% increase in input costs.  These scenarios show you the effect on the business of outside forces, and allow you to develop contingency plans to mitigate their effect if you start to detect their impact through your monthly reports.
You might decide that if revenues decline for two or three consecutive months, then you will implement a stronger marketing and sales program. If that fails, then you might move to significant cost reduction activities. Look at what happens if the company loses customers and suppliers.
You might need to draw up plans to create other ways of drawing revenue, like discounting, or going to other markets or changing production. Identifying a critical threshold means you can start thinking about how to mitigate it.

Develop your business plan
Critical to forecasting is your  business plan;  it should cover market analysis, organization and management, strategic analysis, marketing and sales, products and services, the amount of funding needed to start or expand the business, and financials. The best business plans are updated every six months, though you should be reviewing it quarterly.

Do you find when it comes to a choice between serving a paying customer and writing a business plan, like most small businesses, you go for the money? Lack of time is a major reason many small companies don’t have plans. The answer for some businesses is to prepare the plan on the weekend. It might take an entire day, but it’s a worthwhile exercise.  continue

Despite the benefits of online contact any time, from anywhere, personal interaction is as good for business now as it was 20 years ago. In the world away from your desktop, your competitors are shaking hands with your potential customers over lunch or a laugh right now. What are you waiting for? Get out of the office and network.

Making personal business connections may take longer, but they are potentially as important as driving web traffic and planning your advertising campaigns. For relatively little expense, seeking industry events and other face-to-face business opportunities should form an equal part of your marketing strategy.

When business is slow, mass marketing or email marketing your existing clients seems the obvious low-cost option to generate sales, but forging personal networks with face-to-face contact brings a unique set of advantages. And there’s no ‘delete’ key.

Networking builds trust

The important thing missing from online contact is the real connections that create genuine trust.

The advantage good networkers enjoy is access to more private or useful knowledge only available through personal contact. Filing unmanageable amounts of downloaded documents or exchanging emails is no replacement for conversations that spill over into further mutual contacts and unexpected opportunities.

Meeting with people also brings different skill sets to a business relationship. Online, you tend to stick to one topic or problem. Where a gathering incorporates socializing, common interests outside business tend to crop up too, leading to wider networks and experiences. continue

Pro Painting Net started out as something. Now it’s evolving into something else.

We started out creating well optimized mini-sites as an additional online presence to help painting contractors generate leads…and it’s working!  Our page holders are getting ranked in Google and generating some leads:  Here’s what one of our page holders had to say recently:

I just landed my second job from the PPN site.  Thanks a bunch!

Mark Bromfield, Richmond VA

What we have found out from our clients is that they want and need more, so Pro Painting Net is now offering or will be offering in the coming weeks the following search engine marketing services and more:

• SEO Audit of your Website
• Key Word Research
• Competition Analysis
• Site Optimization
• PPC Management

What our clients need more than anything is reliable, concise information about Internet Marketing.

As a business owner, you are likely bombarded weekly if not daily by companies who say they are the answer to search engine marketing. How do you know what to believe?  We can help.

Sign up for our free newsletter.  Here’s what’s in it for you:

How do you keep up with all the latest online developments?  How do you decide which web strategies and tactics to employ?  You’re busy running a successful painting business - where are you supposed to find the time to conquer the internet too?

You don’t have to - we’ve got your back. continue

Professional Painters - Do YOU want to show up on Google’s first page in the top ranked search terms for painting contractors in your local area and get leads?

Advisors On Target has added a new service and we want our clients and newsletter readers to have the first opportunity to see what we have going on and to participate if you are interested. Advisors On Target and Web Strategy Lab have teamed up to launch Pro Painting Net, which we believe will be of tremendous value to our clients.

Are you ready to get better business results online?  Then claim YOUR local service area now with your own Pro Painting Net Mini-Site!

All 3 of our On Target Beta-Testers are on the front page of Google for the top ranking search term with their locale! This happened within days.

Some of you may be able to say you are already on the top 10 listings in Google, if so, Congratulations. But most of you are not ranking where one of your sites have the best chance of being found.

Would you like to be here? Look at these results for Painting Contractor and On Target group member, Mario Guertin

Now you too can be a part of Pro Painting Net - a network of websites built around the highest volume painting-related keywords on the search engines. What’s in it for you?

• You get your own 3-page ‘mini-sites’ optimized for local searches for your painting services in any of your service areas.
• You get exclusive rights on any PPN Domain to any service area you choose - and you define the service areas.
• You get quality backlinks to your existing website.
• You benefit from the success of every other member of the Network.
• By the way, it’s very affordable

Your Mini-site is meant to be a piece of your online presence – another way to get you found and will in most cases rank faster and higher than you can get your “main” website to rank for the top search terms

But does it really work? We asked 3 On Target Members to be beta-testers for this new program, one in a small market and two in larger markets but using a the name of a local service area within the larger market as a key word. Here are our Beta Tester stats from March 1, 2009 for the term “house painting” followed by the local name: continue

In my quest to become a perfectly optimized business owner, I love to read books on productivity and time management that will help my clients (and me!) to operate on a level that uses our talents effectively and gives us the quality of life that we really enjoy.

David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, has a little book called Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life, and in the first chapter he states the following:

Something is coming—probably within a few days—that’s going to change your world.  You don’t see it yet.  You don’t know what it’s about.  But it’s there, rolling inexorably forward, destined to throw you a curve that you do not expect.  It could show up sooner or later—but it will show up.  Trust me.

Write down these words exactly four weeks from today on your calendar: David Allen said a month ago that something was coming I couldn’t foresee that would affect me significantly.  Prove me wrong.

What are you doing to be ready for anything?

What would happen if you suddenly landed that big job or project that you hoped would come? continue

A lot of things need to come together to create a great email newsletter, including well written content, attractive formatting and an accurate match of the content to the interests of your target audience. But sometimes even a great newsletter ends up the victim of the subscriber’s Delete button before it even gets opened. Here’s how you can improve the chances of your subscribers actually opening and reading your e-newsletter.

1. Avoid the spam filters: ISPs use rigorous spam protection mechanisms to trap and delete suspect email before it gets into their customer’s inboxes. To make sure your emails don’t get filtered out as spam avoid overdoing ‘come on’ words such as ‘free’, ‘$$$’, ‘save’, ‘discount’, etc. in both the subject line and content of your email. Also, ISPs will blacklist you if you do not remove any invalid email addresses they inform you of.  If that happens, even messages to legitimate addresses may be blocked and that could include things like order confirmations as well as your e-newsletter.

2. Encourage subscribers to whitelist you: Spam filters that come with email clients can create a whitelist of addresses from which mail is always acceptable (safe senders). Subscribers can be coaxed to put in the effort of whitelisting you in a number of ways:

• On your order confirmation page suggest that they whitelist you to ensure they receive order and shipping information
• Run competitions that necessitate them receiving your emails to participate
• Near the suggestion that they whitelist you, provide a link to ‘How to whitelist’ information covering the most popular email clients continue

Customer loyalty programs work big time for big companies but small business owners are often deterred from developing one because of worries about how much it would cost or how difficult it would be to organize and manage. As a matter of fact, the very same principles that keep customers coming back to big companies can be utilized to develop a small business scale loyalty program without a lot of cost and drama.

Make customers feel like ‘members’

Creating a ‘club’ that provides special incentives to members is one of the best ways to retain customers. This approach works because it is based on the primal human need to ‘belong’ to something - especially where belonging also makes us feel we are being treated as special.

Who gets to be a member? A customer loyalty program based on membership should convey a feeling of privilege for those selected so it can’t be open to all and sundry. Customers may qualify for membership either by purchasing their entrée or by dint of their past support and loyalty.

General Nutrition Centers, a specialty retailer of vitamins and supplements, offers a Gold Card membership program that provides discounts on products, personalized mailings and email on health related topics, product news and exclusive offers. GNC found that they could even use their program to actively iron out lows in their sales pattern by offering a special discount on sales made on Tuesday, traditionally their slowest sales day. continue