Marketing Strategies

Marketing Strategies that Help Generate Leads, Inquiries, and Referrals

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, technologies, and trends in our culture -- such as the growing influence of YouTube and Internet video marketing.

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

Marketing Idea #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. For business-to-business sales situations, a well-organized marketing proposal can make the difference between winning the bid or not.


Business Marketing Idea #2:
Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using an 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, then the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective business 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. Although Facebook marketing and Twitter marketing can be effective tools for attracting customers, building brand recognition, and staying in touch with clients, Email marketing remains one of the best ways to keep your name and marketing message in front of customers and prospective clients.


Business Marketing Idea #3:
Sincere enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious. 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, and overall responsiveness -- can have an even greater impact on how you influence and persuade your prospective customers, clients, or members.