Go Take A NAP

Ya you heard me, go take a nap!

Seems that marketers all over the place are trying to connect with customers and prospects. Social, web, mobile, email, direct mail, phone. Go take a nap.

NAP is nothing less than Name, Address and phone number.

If you’re into social media marketing you want the 3 F words working for you (friends, family, fans), lots of them. But to take it to the next level you want to take a NAP with them.

This kind of central…

GM pulled of its ads from Facebook, this led many marketers to wonder if advertising on facebook or any social media site is a good thing. It is, and it isn’t. With 900 million (900,000,000) active users can you ignore facebook and all of social media? Is it worth paying for? Another good question.

 

In a study by Resolution Media and Kenshoo seperatly, they7 looked at the effectiveness of Facebook ads, these 2 companies analyzed global data of 65 billion (65,000,000,000) Facebook ad…

So you’re asking what the heck am I talking about. In marketing there is a rule of thumb that 40% of a targeted marketing program or a direct mail project should be n the list, 40% should be in the message and 20% in the creative. It is one of those things that history has shown us is a truism.

It is like a lot of things in advertising, marketing and graphics people want to take short cuts. It happens all the time. (See yesterday’s blog) like when I want to add a mailing program with…

You want more leads, my prospects more customers. Who doesn’t?

So what do you do? Join a Chamber of Commerce? At Professional Industry Association?  Formal Networking Groups? Let’s look at the cost incurred by each.

They all have their place if you get work out of them, or do you just like being in a group for the fun of it? Me, I join for the money. Friends are a side benefit. Education a side befit as well.

So what are the “true”…

I have found in some 37 some odd years in business that there are 5 steps to better delegating and supervising that will bring you the kind of results you want to get your expectations met and successful results are achieved.

Step One: The first step in delegation is to be totally clear about the results that you want to achieve out of the job or project. The more clarity YOU have the greater the…

No wonder we are getting so busy. 75% of all b2b marketers will be or are launching ad campaigns designed to focus on new account acquisition. That, of course, is our primary job. To find our customers new sales leads now. The remaining 25% is divided. 15% is on brand awareness and 10% for customer retention.

29% of would be marketers are increasing their 2012 budgets.

In order to achieve their goal of finding more customers, marketers will but using a variety…

In bringing in new customers you need to move away from thinking like you are in charge of your message. With the advent of Social Media Marketing you need to engage your prospects. If they don’t like it, you had better not like it.

So what is a poor marketer to do?

Ask yourself a few important questions:

1) What are you trying to say about your product or service that will help to influence the customer to buy from you…

In today’s world of lead generation you need to take a hard look at how you are generating interest in your company. As dumb as it is, you might be surprised to find that some prospects are prompted to consider using you thru twitter posts, let alone longer blogs or facebook fan pages.

As a B2B marketer I spent my time, aside from dong active lead gen, trying to figure out how a person (or company) makes a buying decision. Perhaps Hank Trisler said it best when he said…

When looking over the potential of your company’s expansion never assume that a brand or company with higher awareness and exposure than yours is already under consideration.

You might need to identify various audience segments and cross them off your leads list but in doing so you need to better understand when and where marketing functions can play a stronger nurturing roll in new account acquisition.

In a report from McKinsey & Company it seems that the…

14 stats that mattered most for media and marketing in 2011.

1.) 50 million -- The big number from the Census everyone was talking about was the number of Hispanics, which crested this milestone for the first time. Later the Census and the New York Times found that even more people in the U.S. (51 million) are at or near the poverty line.

2.) 50% +1 -- Sometime this year the children being born in the U.S. tipped to majority-minority, according to…

Think about it. Why did you buy the last product or service you bought?

Two things come to mind with that question. First off you bought or purchased, you were not sold, and second you must have had a reason to buy or at the start of the sales process, you must have had a reason or need to buy or at least have a need.   Every successful salesperson I work with has a few impeccable traits. They don’t get greedy, they don’t sell to people that don’t have a need and they find…

According to Facebook there are now only 4 degrees of separation in the world. And you know they might be right.

For years, there's been a theory that every person is only separated by six degrees, or relationships. I found it sometimes hard to believe when one year when not thinking hard I found that I was only 3 degrees of separation from the President of the United States. Like WOW!

Then in comes Facebook, with its data of over 700 million people and their…

As a lead generation – telemarketing company we are in a constant dilemma as we shift though and search for prospects, leads and customers for our clients.

We are suppose to be the miracle workers, finding golden nuggets where normal sales people cant or aren’t able to.

It’s a not nice world out there. We don’t always get want we want nor are we able to get the desired result we are looking for.

That is why I love the rule of #2. The rule of…

I have been playing a little bit, a very little bit with Yelp. It is not my main push as a marketing tool that being a B2B company but still I play just in case I have a client that needs to be there.

But how long will Yelp be around? Does it, can it make money?

Well, it doesn't! At least, not yet.

 …

With so much emphasis being focused on Social Media Marketing these days it is easy to under estimate the power of the phone for establishing deep long lasting customer relationships.

What I think you need to remember is that of all the channels you can use for Marketing, Cold Calling is still one of the FEW ways if not the only way to be proactive in your marketing attack. Everything else waits for the prospect to contact you! With cold calling you go out and contact the prospect. In…

You want new customers, I want new customers, everyone wants new customers. (Well not everyone, believe it or not but in some of my calls some owners tell me they don’t want any. Go figure.)

Lead Generation is a game, cat and mouse, back and forth, win or lose, give and take. If you’re in it you want to be taking more than your giving, I would hope. And if you want your business to survive you need to win more than you lose. Even in losing you want to win.

So…

Getting more hits or sales off a telemarketing campaign can be difficult and daunting to say the least.

It is somewhat a science in setting up a good campaign and then it becomes an art form. An art form you ask? Oh yes, only 7 percent the communication process is based on what's said. 38 percent is based on style of speech and 55 percent on body language.

Basically you have 2 different ways to get a better ROI. First is to decrease the cost per order (CPO)…

Is it the right thing to do? Does it work? Do people or your kind of clients respond? The daily deal has become one of the hottest marketing trends going on in marketing today. Thank you web and social media marketing. Heck we at Larson & Associates are using it. Groupon, LivingSocial, Larson, are all hammering the Daily Deal idea. If done right it can be a good thing as 74% of those using daily deals do make a profit, but that does leave 26% losing money. If they are doing their deals…

If you did not already do it, do yourself and your business a favor and make a Facebook Fan page. If you can make a Social Media Profile page you can make a Facebook Fan page.

In looking at Time Spent On web sites even the most callus person has to admit that Facebook not only rules but Is Growing At An Astonishing Rate.

 …

We all understand how powerful it is to own the top spots in a key work search. The higher up you are usually means you are going to get some good quality hits on your site. On the same line of thought, a keyword search is one of the few chances where you have someone just stopping by (your web site) and basically saying “This is what I am looking to buy.”

So some of my more aggressive customers have come to old Uncle Howard and asked, “How can I get more without killing my…