How do you grab people's attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you've identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your business or profession. To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and evolving marketing strategies and trends in our culture.

While not all inclusive, the following list of marketing strategies, marketing tools, and small business marketing tips can help establish a marketing framework that can put your small business on a faster track to growth.

Small Business Marketing Tips #1: Gain Customer Confidence. Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It's up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or added value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence and overcome sales objections. If you haven't clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they'll be hesitant to commit and the sale will go to your competitor.

Marketing Tips #2: Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using integrated marketing strategy, which in many cases would include a well-planned website marketing strategy. Stated simply: the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing strategy is partly the result of exposing your target audience to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible (frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.

By the way, if direct mail is one of the ways you intend on reaching prospective customers, DCMG.com can provide you with a direct mail list that will put your message in the hands of targeted prospects. It's a technique that continues to work for companies of all sizes.

Marketing Tips #3: Sincere enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious (and I'm not talking about using multiple exclamation points after sentences!!! That detracts from your credibility and perceived professionalism.) If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you. Your words are important, but your nonverbal communication -- your tone of voice, inflection, rate of speech, volume, facial expressions, your listening skills, eye contact, amount of sincere smiling, and overall responsiveness -- can have an even greater impact on how you influence and persuade your prospective customers, clients, or members.

Marketing Tips #4: Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales and marketing process as focusing attention on product features and benefits.

Marketing Tips #5: Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction whenever possible, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations.

Marketing Tips #6: Impose a deadline. Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendancy to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it's often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Marketing Tips: Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.

Marketing Tips #7: Create a small business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your marketing strategies should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, target market analysis (know your customers), and readily available marketing tools, as well as marketing strategies and tools that you need to research or acquire.

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