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When asked “what business are you in” many business owners often identify an industry, for example, “I’m an accountant” or “I run a beauty salon ” or “I own a restaurant.” But claiming to be part of an industry is not what attracts customers. Customers come to you because you offer a specialty.
For example, which advert are you mostly likely to respond to:

Advert 1: “Established since 1985, you can be assured of a great service.”

Advert 2: “Experts for all small to medium sized businesses”

Advert 3: “We specialize in new start-ups”

The chances are you’d be more likely to call the company who placed Advert 3 Why? Because they tell you exactly what they do best. They specialize, they fill a niche!

So, if you were a start-up company you would be looking for a firm of accountants that provides this specific service to fill your immediate need.

In fact most companies, whether big or small, direct their marketing to select niche audiences. Even the country’s largest manufacturers target specific market segments to maximize the effectiveness of their programs and often market different niches for each product group.

Niche marketing can be extremely cost-effective. By targeting a specific niche, your marketing budget can go a lot further. As opposed to mass (general marketing), your marketing efforts will be high impact and targeted: people who have a specific interest or need can usually be found in the same places.

Andrew Ludlam is a client attraction expert, and Director of Maverick Marketing Solutions. If you’re deadly serious about maximising the potential of your business, then I urge you to visit http://www.maverickmarketingltd.com and sign up for the monthly ‘Maverick Marketing Solutions Newsletter’… where you’ll also receive the FREE white paper “Six Magnetic Ways To Attract More Clients To Your Business In The Next 90 Days..!” (Value $37)

Warning! This could be the last business marketing website you ever need to see…

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Everything happens Quickly and Instantly on the Internet. In the blink of an eye your easily transported around a whole planet. It’s a smorgasbord !! The web site you just visited could be in Singapore, the e-mail your reading now could have come from Alaska. The Internet is just one big Soup Bowl of Information just waiting for you to come and gobble it up.

We live in a world of “Everything Quick”. Quick Food, Quick Money, Quick credit, Quick Advertising, Quicker Cars and the faster we get Quicker, the better!!

Not only is it possible, but it’s not that complicated to achieve. Most experts agree that advertising in ezines is THE quickest way to effectively generate more traffic to your website and increase your sales.

Ezine Classified Advertising is incredibly popular which means most ezines are being filled with classified ads. Some people use their lunch time to glance over their e-mails while chowing down. The average ezine reader sees hundreds of headlines and classifieds every day, taking a quick peek to if it might be worthwhile. So, How does your Classified Ad Look ?!

The 3 things

Every ad needs 3 basic things. A HEADLINE that stands out, Quick and easy to understand CONTENT, and an ADDRESS on how to get there.

Your HEADLINE should say everything in 5-7 words or less. It should for all intensive purposes “make the sale” Some ads look fantastic using all capital letters and then switching to lowercase for the content, but on the flip side, remember it can end up looking tacky as well.

Your CONTENT should always be very specific. It has to or it becomes cyber-trash very quickly. A favorite Internet saying i’ve heard is to ” KISS IT ” or, in it’s original form, * Keep It Simple Stupid !! * Big words can be overwhelmingly impressive but i have found that shorter words easily read and just work better. ….. (ironic eh)

Part 1 The Headline is your menu

How do you make eye grabbing HEADLINE? I’ll bet you didn’t know it’s always been right in front of you the whole time, and your going to wonder why you never thought of it. Ready??….. Your email box.. It’s a treasure trove of headlines just waiting to be found. Now, i’m not saying that you steal someone else’s headlines. That wouldn’t be nice at all, now would it!!

That doesn’t mean you can’t get idea’s from them though. Here’s a simple way to find a few “catchy headlines” (You need to do this fast OK. Really Fast!!) Every time you open your email box, Quickly scan the contents. Which one do you remember the most?

It doesn’t really matter which one it was, just be honest with yourself. Begin a list of catchy phrases and write it down somewhere. If you have more than one email box use it too. (Build’s your list quicker)

The next step is the Fun Part. Sit down and start butchering these Headlines!! Go for it!! Grab a word here, a phrase there, change a couple words around in a sentence. Replace words that would better identify your opportunity or service your promoting.

Soon you will have a nice selection of Headlines you created yourself. No one has a monopoly on words, so i’m certain the Internet cops won’t bother you for this apparent “theft” of words…..ya think??

Part 2 The Content is your appetizer

Most classified ads usually contain around 25-50 words each. You only have so much space, and you have to say everything in a little teeny tiny spot. I can’t emphazise how very important it is that the content “grabs” the readers attention. This is the meat of the ad.

Create an irresistible offer. Tantalize your readers, entice them into wanting to take a bite. Make an offer that is so overwhelmingly attractive, that they would have to be insane to pass it up. Give them a tidbit by adding something free. Anything, just make it free.

What’s that?

You say your not so good at writing classified ads like that? I’ll wager a bet you are!

There is a way to write great ads quickly. Yup you guessed it!! Read a few of the emails and save the ones that caught your eye. Get out the knife and cut up those ads using the same technique you used for Headlines.

Once you have 6-8 contents ads written, simply get the Most Excellent Headlines YOU created and start slicing and dicing. Mix them up, change them around until your happy with them. You might end up with over 20 different ads to chose from… (bummer huh)

CHOP-CHOP time again!! You don’t want those 20+ ads… do you? Some of these ads aren’t quite as as good as the others. That’s OK, it’s time to trim the fat anyway. Select the 5 choicest ads and remove the remaining ones

Part 3 The Address is the dinner bell

E-mail address or Website address. The person reading your classified ad has 2 options. Read the next ad or click your link. They have either eaten enough of your ad, or their ready to gobble up the main course.

Your ADDRESS is a way to get more information about the opportunity you are promoting and is achieved by putting either your Web site ADDRESS to take the visitor there or an E-mail ADDRESS to contact you directly.

You can spice up your address by giving your webpages catchy names, but a draw back is the length it may create. problem is, People don’t like 86 character website addresses. Their either too hard to remember, or mistakes are made when entering it into their browser. You just lost a prospective sale right there. (another bummer huh)

Another option is using a re-directed address. There are several companies that offer this service FREE, which allows you create nice short, easily remembered website addresses. Two places that give you 3 different addresses are rename.com and iBoost.com Thats 8 different addresses leading to the same page

***Caution; It’s not wise to submit these redirect addresses to the search engines because, they don’t like being tricked. Duplicate sites usually get “UN-indexed” …..rather quickly and forever too!

Dinner is served! Pass the Gravy!!?

You have a visitor!! Hopefully your ad was tasty enough to bring you the Gravy too!! You got them there so give them your main course. Make sure you get a counter or some kind of tracking system set up to follow your ads progress to see which ones worked the best…… (i’ll save that for another article)

About The Author

A.L Haines is the editor for several leading Internet Marketing publications supporting free Internet marketing opportunities and resources.

http://alhims.tripod.com

http://articlesarchives.netfirms.com

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Tactical marketing processes are once again undergoing fundamental shifts from traditional to web-based processes. Many traditional marketing firms/agencies are still touting the tried and true to their clients; i.e. Tradeshow attendance, Print, Traditional PR, TV and Radio. However, these conventional marketing processes work best for broad market awareness and/or branding, especially for a Fortune 1K company with significant resources to spend on demographic analysis, test marketing and more test marketing. It’s much more difficult for a smaller company (startup to $50M per annum) to leverage the economies of scale that are typically available for a larger company for the media buy and operational efficiencies.

It’s obvious that lifestyle and business processes are shifting towards a much greater dependence on digital media - people are traveling less due to cost issues and the ever-increasing speed of business is underscoring the usage of the Internet for information and research. If you’re a small to medium sized business the chances are that you’ve probably cut your marketing budget significantly - by eliminating or scaling back tradeshow attendance, trade magazine advertising and/or direct mail in favor of response driven marketing on the web that can be deployed faster and more cost-effectively than traditional marketing methods.

Capturing leads from a web site generated by opt-in e-mail, newsletter inserts, text link advertising and/or other forms of pay per click marketing is still the absolute best way to generate leads that are quantifiable as soon as they are generated. You have the ability to easily track where the lead came from and via what interactive advertising process; assuming this has been setup for you by your interactive ad agency or with the online publisher. And, there are typically no lead times like more traditional marketing processes - we’ve created and deployed campaigns (creative, media buy, testing, ROI analysis, etc.) for our clients in 3-5 working days in some cases.

There are some pitfalls to web-based lead generation and follow through that you need to be aware of as you deploy an interactive campaign. Here are five of the most important “gotchas” that you need to think about as you build an interactive lead generation program around your web site:

1) Don’t make it difficult for people to contact your company - make sure your web site really communicates with your prospects - by “communicating” I mean by providing telephone contacts, e-mail address and/or a lead capture form that is short. Note: this form has to be supported by a published Privacy Policy (”we won’t divulge your info to a third party under any circumstances”) and it absolutely must be short; i.e. don’t request any more than baseline information, name, phone, e-mail and address, augmented with a comment box.

2) Your marketing objectives have to be supported by your sales team - the sales team has to be incentivized to respond to inbound e-mails and requests for information via a contact form in a timely manner, within 24 hours or sooner. If you have a geographically dispersed sales team then make this clear on the web site by providing specific contact points for states, regions and countries.

3) Make sure you IT person/department attends your marketing planning meetings with your sales team - your web site will need some type of a lead capture setup that redistributes leads based on function and/or geographical responsibility. Your IT staff has to create a database solution that captures, stores and distributes leads - this does not need to be done in-house, products like Act (the market leader in contact management software) are now web-enabled, you can capture leads via a web server and share leads with others via a browser and very inexpensively.

4) We don’t advocate popup advertising for most of our client’s advertising campaigns. But, we have “crossed over to the other side” and we do (highly) recommend using popups on our clients’ web sites to present opportunities that in turn capture leads. Studies have shown effective popup lead captures increase lead generation by 40-85% depending on the market segment. Popups can be set so they only launch on a frequency basis per session (visit to a web site) or a number of times for a specific visitor - they don’t have to setup so they are intrusive and annoying.

5) Last but not least (drum roll) - make the customer’s usability experience the most important aspect of your web site. Create a user interface (”experience”) that is pleasant for your visitors; i.e. use standard universal (top of page and local page left) menus, utilize 2-3 sentence paragraphs with lots of white space, don’t overload your pages with graphics that slow down load times and make sure your contact points (phone, e-mail) are readily available from every page.

So, to summarize; advertising is shifting from traditional to web-based or interactive if you will - so, to get on board this tsunami build a web site that communicates with your prospects/customers, provide contact points via telephone and e-mail via the site, involve your IT and Sales staff with the lead capture process so they are all stakeholders and utilize popups to accelerate your lead capturing.

About The Author

Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is an internationally recognized e-business strategist. Check out her free tipsheet “Beyond the Search Engines” for 17 ideas to promote your Website: http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be reached at (831) 465-0317 or mailto:pgamse@CyberSpeaker.com.

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