Being in business is hard and many business owners know they need to be marketing and advertising but usually lack direction. 

Here are some pointers:

Create a business identity.
Do your business cards, stationery and web site all have fragmented themes?  Do you have a professionally created logo?  Are you embarrassed to hand out your brochure or other collateral? In this world of advertising clutter it is important to do everything you can to stand out in your customers mind.  By creating a corporate identity for your business it will allow customers to easily remember you.  The good news is you can start this right away.  Even if you’ve been in business for a while you can pull all of it together and create one cohesive brand for your company.   In addition to being professional it also says to your prospects and customers that you care about your company and are it for the long haul.  Make sure you create your identity with your customer demographics and psychographics in mind.

Know your customers Demographics and Psychographics
I can’t tell you how many time I’ve heard “everyone is my customer” when asked who are your customers?  Lets use the 80/20 rule.  Eighty percent of your income in business comes from twenty percent of your customers.  Who are the top 20 percent?  Are they a stay at home mom with one child and a husband that is a white-collar professional? Blue-collar worker? Is the family income over one hundred thousand dollars a year?  Do they own a home?  Are they college educated?  Do they have pets?  Do they have a grandmother or grandfather living in the household?  Are they married or single?  Do they live in a certain zip code?  Etc., etc. What if you’re a business-to-business company?  Demographics could include; type of industry your targeting, yearly income, number of employees, business credit rating, square footage, how much do they spend on your particular services, location information, etc.  So how do you gather all this information?  Its simple.  If you have existing customers you ask them.  If you don’t almost every business has industry groups you can ask, there are also government websites to find this very important information. Psychographics are targeting by attitudes, lifestyles, beliefs, values, personality and purchasing motives.

Get some sales training.
There are many people that start a business thinking they are “natural” sales people.  And I can tell you they are not.  They might have charisma and that’s start but a far cry from having the ability to probe and close the sale.  In fact I think many business owners would benefit from a sales class or audio training course. In business, nothing happens until a sale is made.  NOTHING.  Even if you have a product that requires very little selling, it still needs to be sold. No matter what the product or service, if your customers have questions about the product or service or are on the fence about the decision you are going to need sales skills to persuade them to buy from you and not the competition.

When you are in business you need the skills necessary to make sure that your prospect stays engaged long enough to be able to identify their needs and ensure you have a solution to their problem.  Without sales skills your conversations will end too soon and questions will go unanswered.  And you will not be able to identify the need or the time to close.

Don’t advertise with blindfolds on. Get some advertising direction
When you are advertising your company in media it’s important to have a well thought out campaign that is designed to attract people and turn them from suspect to prospects or immediate buyers.  Your advertising campaign should not be created by the advertising representatives selling you the advertising placement.  Many of them are looking for you to succeed so they can sell you more advertising but their ideas become stale with time or they tell you what your competitor is doing and you do something similar without seeing if it is actually working. The graphic departments of the publication usually create ads that all start to look the same from company to another.  This is a bad thing.  Your advertisement should carry a message and a look that makes you stand out for the sea of advertisements in a newspaper, magazine or web site.  Your campaign should have a strong headline, a image that is of the same subject of the headline, a strong offer in the copy and a strong call to action.  The more copy the better. If you need more copy to explain your offer then use it.  Short and sweet will seldom work well.  It might create calls but many will be unqualified.

Do not advertising in too many places and make sure you have enough money for frequency.
Marketing your business is a slow methodical scientific process.  Blowing your budget on 5 publications and 20 web ads per month without knowing what is working will hurt you and might put you out of business.  In advertising, frequency is always more important then size.  So if you can only afford one place to advertise but you can do it at least 26 times then that’s the vehicle you choose. (Providing it is targeted to the right demographic.)

Just say no to changing the look of your advertisements every week.
Keep the same look or theme to your advertisements each and every time you run an ad.  This means if your ads are in a publication for 26 weeks the only reason to change anything is if it’s not working.  If the ad is working but not to your expectations or not working at all you DO NOT change the overall appearance.  The ad should be tweaked to pull more customers.  But YOU CAN ONLY CHANGE ONE THING AT A TIME SO YOU KNOW WHAT WORKED.  First you would change the headline.  It can be a one word change.  The message subject should remain the same.  Then see how that works, keep changing untill you get a better response.  If after a while you don’t see a difference then try changing the main picture of the ad.  It still must relate to the ad copy and the headline.  Then if all is not working then you try tweaking the offer.  Then the call to action, etc.,  until it works.  Then when it works you run the same ad in another publication that targets your demographic and the whole thing starts all over again.  Keep in mind that all advertising should answer the question what is in it for me as the customer.

Don’t pull an ad just because you’re bored with it.
If you are running an ad the ad is working but you see the ad over and over and so does your family and you start to get bored with the look so you decide to change it.  BIG MISTAKE.  YOU NEVER, EVER, NEVER, CHANGE AN AD THAT IS WORKING, NEVER!  You only change the ad when it stops being profitable.  And even then you would re tweak it till you know its dead.  Yes that might sound expensive but just pulling a working ad is much more expensive.

That’s all for now.  Your comments are appreciated.