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Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Checklist for Becoming an Innovative Small Business Marketer

By: Dan Kennedy on: January 5th, 2010 7 Comments

When clients retain me as a marketing consultant they’re actually paying for two basic things, experience and innovation. Experience can be gained in only two ways, through your own situations or by reading and hearing about other situations. Innovation though is a method of thinking.

The first thinking that I do when facing most small business marketing situations is to run through the same fundamental principles of success that govern all aspects of business.

One good source of such a checklist is the book ‘Think and Grow Rich,’ by Napoleon Hill and its thirteen principles based on commonalities discovered in over five hundred super successful business people.

Incidentally it’s worth mentioning that this book is a remarkable success story in itself in the publishing industry.

This book was published back in 1937 yet as recently as this year, Think and Grow Rich continues to enjoy healthy sales, the book is periodically re-issued in new editions, and in very recent years it has appeared on national bestseller lists.
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Why are These Companies Excellent?

By: Dan Kennedy on: December 28th, 2009 5 Comments

I want to talk just a little about the few truly excellent American companies I carefully observe and respect and why they’re so successful.

First, let’s talk a little about the lack of excellence and one great place to find that is the hospitality industry.

The hotel and motel industry is, in my opinion, the most screwed up, poorly managed, insensitive, uncaring industry there is. I travel a lot and my company’s booked meeting rooms and convention space in hotels all across the country. Almost all of them rate between poor and awful and in terms of valuing the customer…most have no understanding of this idea whatsoever.

The exceptions are so notable that I can actually remember the details. Most of the hotel executives and employees dealing with meetings and conventions make the mistake of thinking business is based on the facilities, the brass railings, the marble in the bathrooms, the rates, the financial statements, they forget that their business is customers and customer service.
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August 2000 Interview Between Dan and Bill (Pt 2)

By: Dan Kennedy on: December 7th, 2009 1 Comment

Bill: It takes about eight minutes to get out 10,000 messages, which is fascinating. Because Dan, as you know and we’ve had many discussions about this, my sales associates who work in my stores, they are required to make telemarketing calls to their previous clients, which is a very, very strong media which I highly encourage people to continue to do. But a good sales associate can make maybe, if he’s really good, maybe 20 calls an hour. Well, with voice broadcast, you can make 10,000 calls in eight minutes. So you can really hit the masses with this thing.

Dan: Okay. So this call was then made in follow-up to the Thanksgiving card. And in this case, it got you how much of a bump over the previous year?

Bill: This one was a little over a 35 percent increase in volume over the previous year. We did also follow it up with one more call. That call was done the day before Thanksgiving, and then I also followed it up with the Friday after Thanksgiving in the morning, with very similar message again. “This is Bill Glazer again. I just want to remind you that we sent you this special offer and you can shop in one of our two stores today, tomorrow or Sunday and get the special offer.” So we did do one more follow-up to it.

Dan: And did you have people coming in specifically mentioning having gotten the call?

Bill: Happens every time we do it. Now we’ve done it dozens of times. First of all, people mention that you get the call, because a lot of consumers really think it’s very ingenious. They really enjoy it. Also, a lot of consumers mention the special code word, because they no longer have the direct mail piece. They’ve throw that away. So you hear the code word very often. I’ll tell you one little almost humorous aside to this. If I’m out on the selling floor at one of my stores, invariably a customer walks up to me and says, “Are you the guy that leaves me those messages on my phone?” And I always turn to them with a big smile and say, “Yeah. And I only call you. You’re the only person I ever call.” Like you said, Dan, people really think that you’re calling them up. If you have a problem with that, you could say in your message, which I have one client doing now, same message, “Hi, this is whoever. I know these messages are annoying, but this information is just so important that I wanted to leave you this recorded message.” So if you have some kind of problem with that, you can certainly change your message to disclose that.

Dan: I imagine if we had open phones right now and the Gold members could ask you questions, one of the questions somebody would be bound to ask would be about the negative response to this.
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Owning Page 1 of Google for Your Name

By: Brian Horn on: November 18th, 2009 11 Comments

Do you Google yourself?

How many of the listings on page 1 are about you?

How many are about some other tool that just happens to be blessed with the exact same name as you?

If a potential client or customers is researching you, the first place they will go to (in most cases) is Google. Of course, your website should be there, but what are some other easy ways to own the 1st page with more content about you?

It’s actually not terribly hard, and it doesn’t require a whole lot of work.
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Critical Copywriting Strategies for Marketing a Small Business

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 23rd, 2009 4 Comments

Around here, on Planet Dan, we say “Copy Is King”…and we focus on the Message (and on Message To Market Match). But, as the highest paid professional, freelance direct-response copywriter working today, I can afford to tell you…and do tell you….things other copywriters will not. While it must be on target, copy gets credit for only 20% to 25% of a successful direct-mail piece/campaign, ad, web site, etc.

Another critical element is the ‘who’ reading the copy. In direct-mail, this makes careful, thorough, precision list selection and segmentation critical; in online marketing, it has to do with where traffic is being obtained from.

Then, another critical element is the presentation of the message. In face-to-face, person-to-person or person-to-group selling this may encompass the salesperson’s attire, personal appearance, body language and voice inflection; his props, visual aids, demonstrations; even the environment in which the selling is taking place. In media, there are seven major items on the Presentation of Message List.
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How to Get 500 Free Leads from Facebook with 1 Hour of Work

By: Brian Horn on: October 7th, 2009 35 Comments

GUEST POST FROM BRIAN HORN

One of the most powerful ways to build a Facebook Group or Fan Page size is virally. Whenever someone joins your Group, all their Friends will see that on their Wall.

The problem for us, as business owners, is that most people will not rush to join a business’s Group or Fan Page (especially if they are not familiar with you or your business).

So how can you use the power of the viral marketing in Facebook?

Well, I stumbled on this trick during the Presidential elections last year.
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Entitlement vs. Initiative

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 5th, 2009 15 Comments

I have a particular philosophy about entitlement vs. initiative.

This has always kept me oriented toward self-help; towards resourcefulness; towards responsibility, thus providing me with an exceptional level of control. (Imperfect, but exceptional.)

I was in an Italian neighborhood recently. An old Cleveland neighborhood originally populated by Italian immigrants, still populated by a lot of first generation Italian immigrants as well as second generation families.

Plus a slight homogenous mix of everything else.

I walked through a Lowe’s store and a Walgreens. Saw no signs in Italian. But Lowes and Walgreen stores in many parts of the country now have signs in Spanish for Mexican immigrants. On the chains’ part, this is obviously smart marketing.
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What’s Your #1 Job?

By: Bill Glazer on: September 24th, 2009 20 Comments

I had a recent consulting call with a client. I asked him about his progress on what we talked about during our past call and he reported that hardly anything got done because he had a lot of other things to do in running his business and was constantly being interrupted by employees with questions or who required advice.

That’s when I went into my rant that…

“What we talk about and agree to get accomplished should NEVER take a backseat to anything else he needs to get done. I reminded him that his #1 job as the owner and President of the company was the MARKETING!”

After all, it’s the marketing that’s driving sales and withOUT sales there is no need for anyone else to work in the company. No need for an accountant, customer service representatives, buyers … no one.
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