Do It! Marketing
David Newman
As a small-business owner or solopreneur, you wear many hats–perhaps the most important of which is marketer.
But these days, with so many new ways to reach customers and clients — and only so much time in the day — it’s hard to know where to start. Should you be using social media? Email? Blogs? Video? SEO?
Small business marketing doesn’t have to be a mystery. It’s just a series of simple decisions (and the action steps to implement those decisions) that will help you regain the clarity, confidence, and control you need to succeed.
Do It! Marketing is a quick read and an encouraging kick in the pants that will reignite your marketing mojo. The underlying premise is that “only action creates results.”
Packed with do-this-now ideas to attract, engage, and win more customers and clients, this no-nonsense book reveals how to:
- – Avoid blah, blah, blah marketing
- – Use magnetic marketing strategies that pull (not push) qualified prospects into your world
- – Get noticed using the power of 3PR
- – Position yourself as the go-to expert in your field
- – Become the obvious choice by building your Thought Leadership Platform
- – Do social media right
- – Zero in on your customers’ pain/gain factors
- – Learn to speak prospect language about prospect problems
- – Generate a steady stream of referrals
- – Identify and focus on high-payoff marketing activities
- – Gain clarity, confidence and control so you sell more – more easily and more often
- – Cultivate and leverage enthusiastic advocates
- – And more
Energetic, inspiring, and filled with concrete strategies, tactics, templates, and tools, Do It! Marketing shows you how to stop “marketing by accident” and start outsmarting, out-positioning, and out-executing the competition.
- WHO is your best, highest-probability customer or client?Where do they hang out (online and offline)? What are their specific pains, problems, heartaches, headaches, challenges and gaps? What are their (again, specific) hopes, dreams, goals, aspirations, and priorities? What are their personality traits, characteristics, and behaviors? How can you plug into that with your marketing messages to convey the fact that you “get” them completely? What do they TALK about when it comes to solving this problem – what WORDS do they use? What do they struggle with? How can you, your company, and your products and your services HELP them? If you’re unclear, vague, or fuzzy about this, then LISTEN, ASK, and SURVEY them to find out for sure.
- WHAT has worked well for your company?What has been a dud? How can you take stock of all your company’s products, services, and programs and KILL the duds to make room for some new, fresh, innovative ideas that your customers and clients might just BUST DOWN your doors to get their hands on? What can you do to shift from “push” marketing and selling to “pull” strategies? Look at your product and service mix – what needs to go? What needs to change? What needs to be added?
- WHY do customers and clients buy from you?How can you articulate that with sharper, clearer, stronger language? More testimonials? Bolder success stories? Why do they seek the results that you provide? What are the “reasons behind the reasons” (emotional, intellectual, personal, professional, and organizational)? If you can grasp the emotional “gut” reasons they buy from you, you’ll be much better positioned to enter the conversation already happening in their heads and you’re much more likely to trigger a sale – or at least a sales conversation – because now they GET it, they NEED it, and they WANT it.
- HOW can you diversify while still specializing? Whatever your current mix of products, services, and programs, ask these questions to come up with new ideas to further expand your market, your offerings, and your money-making activities: What else could you do? For whom else? How else could you do it? Where else? You might also consider developing a second parallel offering (or division or brand) that taps into your company’s unique expertise but appeals to: DIFFERENT industries, needs, audiences, niches, or price points.
Take a 2-hour strategic retreat with yourself and these 4 questions plus a legal pad and some colorful markers – answer them in your favorite coffee shop, park bench, or bookstore – and this might end up as your best year yet!
David Newman is a nationally-recognized marketing expert and author of the Amazon #1 bestseller “Do It! Marketing: 77 Instant-Action Ideas to Boost Sales, Maximize Profits and Crush Your Competition.” David runs a marketing strategy firm dedicated to helping consultants, speakers, and solopreneurs maximize their influence, impact and income. David is a regular blogger for Salesforce.com and for Vistage, the world’s largest CEO peer group organization, and his instant-action marketing advice has been featured and quoted in The New York Times, Investors Business Daily, Sales & Marketing Management, Selling Power, Entrepreneur Magazine, and hundreds of media outlets throughout North America. Free marketing resources are available online at http://www.doitmarketing.com/
