AWC Small Business Development Center (SBDC)

New post on: Duct Tape Marketing

Lots of folks are joining the ranks of “business owner” as a career path these days. Some by design and some, unfortunately, because they have little choice. Many of these business owners are choosing to open up coaching, consulting and service businesses in part because it’s so darn easy to do. The barrier to entry is sometimes little more than printing up some business cards.

Now, I’m not suggesting that people who start these kinds of business don’t have incredible experience and expertise to offer, far from it. But, because it is so easy to start a business offering consulting, it’s more important than ever that you find a way to differentiate your coaching and consulting business so prospects can understand your unique experience and expertise.

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Trends: solopreneurs, the new artisan economy, social media, a lot of one-on-one relationships, the long tail, splitting larger groups into smaller groups. More channels, each of them more focused.

With that in mind: For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

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Internet Marketing: a Brief Overview With this powerful medium, business owners can now explore a myriad of avenues to expand their businesses. For successful Internet marketing, it is imperative for you to adopt a strategic Internet marketing plan. Before deciding on a particular Internet marketing plan, you should carefully consider your options.

Steps to Set up a Strategic Internet Marketing Plan The fist step is to decide on the products you want to promote and sell online. On the Internet, you can sell just about anything, from an ordinary ebook to the latest software. The next step is to decide whether you would like to design and create the products yourself or outsource the production. You then need to identify your target market.

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Create a website or blog
To start as an affiliate marketer, you must have a site on which to place links to the products or services you recommend. There are many inexpensive website services such as Hostgator and GoDaddy. It’s also easy to set up a free blog through services such as Google’s Blogger blog network. I also use Namecheap for domains and Hostnine (get a reseller account) for hosting.

Decide your product/service niche
Affiliate marketers help companies and entrepreneurs sell everything from jewelry and cell phones to website services and how-to e-books. Choose an area you’re familiar with or one you’re enthusiastic about learning. You’ll be more likely to do the work and less likely to get bored before the money starts rolling in.

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Focus on presentation. When the economy falters, it’s even more important to make doing business with your company as pleasant as possible, says Liz Goodgold, a small-business branding consultant in San Diego. If you operate a web site, make sure it’s organized and free from bugs. For service businesses, be professional and seamless. And for upscale bricks-and-mortar businesses, your store should be both clean and well-organized, she says. Also, switch out your store’s displays often, as this will emphasize the uniqueness of your products.

Boost communications. To aid your customer-service efforts, Goodgold says that “every small business today must have a database system.” You’ll want to be able to 1) stay in contact with your customers, and 2) keep track of their purchases. When they’re online, make sure there’s something for free such as a newsletter that they can sign up to receive. Don’t forget to reassure customers that you won’t sell or exchange their information, she adds.

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Create the Consumer Experience
The reason copy must appeal to the five senses is simple. Consumers can hear or see what the product being advertised can do for them, but they can’t experience it first-hand. The copywriter’s job is to create the user experience for consumers by stimulating their five senses. In other words, effective copy allows consumers subconsciously to smell the product, touch it, taste it, see it and hear it as if they were actually using it at that moment.

Bottom Line
Your copy needs to fill the gaps that the advertising medium can’t reach. However, every ad or marketing piece doesn’t need to appeal to all five senses. Consider the target audience, the medium and the goals for each specific ad, then select the senses that will drive the strongest results, and focus on those areas in your copy. Reduce the copy clutter by delivering only the best messages that create the most compelling sensory experiences for the target audience.

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Today we will begin a series of articles designed to help you understand the options and develop a web strategy for your company that will address the Internet, your intranet, and whether you need an extranet.

Background
“The Internet” has become one of the hottest buzzwords in companies of all sizes, in countries around the world. You have been told that you have to “Move your company to the ‘Net” to keep from getting left behind.

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Uncertainty crashes all around us like a violent hurricane. Now is the time to bolster your sales and marketing plans and get ready for disaster business planning. Lehman Brothers went under, Merrill Lynch was picked up in a fire sale by Bank of America and AIG needed government assistance to stay afloat. We’re worried about the Chinese pulling their money out of our economy, sending us spiraling further downward. And nobody has figured out what to do about huge federal spending deficits. Then there’s trade deficits (although the plunging dollar will help curb that problem), the sub-prime crisis, plunging real estate values, a crashing stock market, not much hope for venture capitalists getting money out of their investments for a while, and, wow, take a breath, what else?

Go first to your sales and marketing plans. Review them conceptually. What are you selling, and how will your business offering fare during hard times? Take a step back from the business and give that some real thinking. Some shifts in demand are predictable; some changes in customer base are predictable, too.

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Q: My wife has an idea and rough design for a baby-related product that apparently has not yet been patented. Once we have a patented concept, what’s the best way to ensure that a consumer-products company will see value in it?

A: Convincing a company to pay you for a product idea is a hard sell. And the vast majority of patents — some estimates suggest up to 97% — never reach the market.

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Passion Soles is a women’s only shoe store in Tacoma, WA. Tacoma badly needs an upscale shoe store for women because the current stores have an inadequate selection. Currently, women that need a special pair of shoes often must travel up to Seattle to find the right shoes.

Passion Soles will have an unmatched, extensive selection of different shoes. Generally, the size of Passion Soles’ selection is cost prohibitive due to all the different sizes that must be stocked per style. Passion Soles has a unique business model that allows them to have an extensive selection at the cost of only stocking one size per style.

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