How to Start Smart and End up with All Kinds of Cash

Coming up with great ads for your company begins long before you write web copy or design a brochure.

You can start smart by considering the identity of your audience, your own brand message, and the strategy in which you want to deliver it.

Target Market

Know Thine Customer!

Seems like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised by how much advertising is incorrectly targeted to the wrong audience.

Before you even begin writing those ads, creating that brochure or developing web content, find out the answers to some critical questions.

Who is your customer?

Are they male or female?

How old?

Do they have kids or are they childless by choice?

What do they do for a living?

What drives them to purchase?

Is it economics? (And who isn’t driven by price these days?)

Is it fear of failure? (Look at some classic 1960s ads to see what Mad Ave determined was the driver behind purchases made by women—the desire to be a perfect wife and mother by way of a clean oven, a sparkling toilet and the perfect oven in which to cook their roast beef dinner.)

Most importantly, what is your target’s problem and how are you going to solve it for them?

Put yourself in their position. See life from their perspective. The better you know your target, the more easily you’ll be able to craft your marketing message.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Know Thine Self!

Your USP is what distinguishes you from the competition. It is the characteristic of your brand that makes you stand out in the marketplace.

It is the reason, for example, that someone will choose to purchase your foot fungus powder over the other 378 brands of foot fungus powder on the market.

To determine your USP, ask yourself the following:

What can my company offer my target that no one else can?

Are our services new?

Do we offer products/services that are an improvement over what the competition is currently offering?

Are our services somehow more convenient to use either in contracting or in fulfillment?

Do we specialize in an area that others don’t offer?

Is the quality of our service better than the competition?

Viral Marketing

Know What's Catchy!

Viral marketing is just like that cold you had last week that you got from your kid, who got it from his classmate, who passed it on to her teacher, and on and on and on. It's a phenomenon that works exceptionally well with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and other social networking platforms.

When you create a message that’s fun, fascinating, provocative or amusing, your core audience is more likely to pass it on to their friends, who will forward it to their family, who will send it on to co-workers, etc., etc., etc.

From the original Hotmail viral campaign (those clickable email sig files attached to every email sent from a Hotmail account--“Get your free email at Hotmail”) to more complex, professionally produced videos, like the John West Salmon Bear Fight ads (with more than 1,182,953 views on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVS1UfCfxlU) viral marketing works.

If you can create a great viral marketing strategy, your target audience will be doing the marketing for you, and you won’t even have to put them on your payroll.

How’s that for smart?

Want to Know a Secret?

Ask me anything (about marketing your small biz, that is.) I'll reveal any and all marketing secrets ...kind of like those magicians who let people in on the secret of their magic tricks, much to the annoyance of all other magicians. Click on FOLLOW ME to find out the insider info stuff that others want to charge you for before they'll reveal.

Photo credit: Salvatore Vuono-- http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=659

Make Your Small Biz Stand Out in a Big Way!

Our neighbors recently chose to replace the existing muddy brown cedar siding on their house with a taupe-colored vinyl. This made it the 2000th house in our neighborhood to be blanketed in one of the following electric colors--cream, ecru, sand, tan, fawn, mushroom, camel, beige or buff. The capacity for mediocrity here is dazzling.

Now don’t get me wrong. I haven’t got it in for earth tones. It’s just that when there’s a whole spectrum of colors from which to choose, why do people deliberately pick one that so clearly defines them as having all the zing of oatmeal?

Because everyone else is doing it, that’s why.

So what does any of this have to do with marketing a small business? Plenty.

Mom was Right. You Really ARE Special.

As a small business owner, you are a far cry from mediocre.

To be a solopreneur requires creativity, courage, vision, endurance, commitment, discipline and a lot of other heavy-duty adjectives that sound like something you’d place in want ad for a super hero.

And because you’re unique, talented and a visionary, shouldn’t your marketing be as well?

But alas, as we all know (despite our mother’s insistence to the contrary) we’re not really geniuses when it comes to EVERYTHING.

And unless the dethroned Prince of Nairobi really has transferred the millions he’s promised into your bank account, you’re probably looking for ways to market your small business on a shoe string.

What Makes Me Think I’m So Smart?

Thirteen years ago I started up my own little business venture doing the only thing I’ve ever really known how to do—write. I’d spent the seventeen years preceding that working for various agencies as a copywriter, pounding out ad copy for catalog companies, educational publishers, and credit card firms.

I know. Exciting stuff.

Then, in 1997, I decided to take control of my own life and embrace the freedom and creative challenge of freelancing on my own.

I switched on my computer, scooched my chair up to my desk…and waited.

[Insert the sound of crickets here.]

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. I had to market, e.g. buy ad space, make cold calls (ugh), network, mail out brochures, print up business cards, design a website, yada, yada, yada.

And it STILL wasn’t easy.

Pay Attention! Here Comes the Big Reveal...

What I wish I’d had (and what I should have sought) was a mentor--someone who’d cleared the path and hacked away at the underbrush of business on his or her own already.

Instead, I lumbered ahead on my own. And I learned a ton—from mistakes, from blunders, from embarrassing screw ups, and finally, from successes.

And then I began meeting other solopreneurs. And they started asking me questions: Should I spend money on direct mail? How do I even begin to put up a website? Do cold calls really work? Should I send out a newsletter? How can I get more business? Who invented cheese?

With the exception of that last question, it seems that I've managed to discover some answers. And that’s what brings us here today.

As a fellow solopreneur and small business owner, I want you to know the way and know how to do your own marketing, or at the very least, to be informed enough to know what to expect when you hire someone else to do it for you.

I hope you’ll sound off in the days ahead, tell me what you think, tell me what you want to know, tell me I’m full of crap…I don’t care. Just tell me. Let’s get the marketing portion of your biz up and running…and then let’s watch your business grow.

Questions? Email me at wayhownow@aol.com
Want more info on my writing and marketing services? Email me at writeeffct@aol.com
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