As a general rule, people respect experts and listen to their opinion. Television shows are always bringing on experts – often with deliberately conflicting views!
You probably already know your subject.
So how can you show you really are the expert?
Despite what you might think from all the television commercials and other adverts, price is just one part of the sales equation.
Often it’s used as a shortcut: if something is more expensive, it must be better quality mustn’t it?
But quite often price is fairly low down the list of considerations that buyers make and if you do things right you can make sure it stays that way.
Free samples work well, regardless of the industry you’re in.
You see it all the time in supermarkets – free samples of tasty food get more sales.
Sometimes it can take a bit of thought to work out precisely what you could give away for free but it’s almost always possible…
LinkedIn is a useful business to business site but it’s not particularly intuitive to use unless you’re on it almost all the time.
It often shows up high in search results for your name and quite a lot of businesses are finding that it’s their best source of new leads.
So how can you get the most from LinkedIn?
Unless you have the luxury of being able to pay to build a brand, your adverts need to pay their way.
You need to make sure that you’re tracking response from your ads.
It’s rare to be asked where you found out about a business and, with the internet taking so much of people’s share of mind it’s easy to get lazy about tracking which adverts are paying their way and which adverts are just “there” but aren’t contributing to your bottom line profit.
Flyers are cheap – maybe £100 for a batch, printed in full colour on both sides.
But cheap doesn’t mean nasty.
Used correctly, flyers are quick way to drum up more sales for your business.
Magnetic vehicle signs aren’t used much in the UK but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.
They’re inexpensive and mean that you don’t have to go to the trouble and expense of sign writing your vehicle (which could be awkward if it doubles up as the family car or expensive when the time comes to sell it).
Postcard marketing is something that should be done more often.
Postcards evoke a holiday or special occasion feel and there’s the extra advantage that there’s no envelope to open, so your message is instantly seen.
They’re also cheap – there are services here in the UK that will print and mail your postcard design in small quantities for less than the cost of a 2nd class stamp.
I’m going to talk about low-cost ways to get more sales.
Because, let’s face it almost every business wants more sales – especially profitable ones!
Generally speaking, most people need persudaing to spend money. Sure, some people use “retail therapy” but that certainly doesn’t include everyone in the world.
One low cost way to do this is to create a Facebook page. At the moment, this is free to do (excluding the cost your time or whatever you pay to a designer).
Facebook don’t charge you directly to create a page – maybe because this is still a relatively new feature for them, maybe because they figure that the cost of hosting a page is approaching zero and they should be able to more than make that back from selling adverts on the page you create. Whatever the real reason, it doesn’t matter. It just matters that it’s free to create a Facebook page.
Everyone from Coca Cola downwards is doing this.
And they’re training people to go direct to Facebook by putting that web address in their adverts rather than their “real” domain.
Why?
Because almost everyone in their target audience is a member of Facebook. So they know there’s no barrier to people going to that page.
They also know that some people will “like” their page, so updates to the page will appear in their Facebook summary and the “like” will show to their friends.
It’s a really low cost form of marketing.
And it doesn’t just apply to big business. And it no longer applies just to B2C (business to consumer) companies – it’s working well for B2B (business to business) companies as well.
In fact, Facebook works well for anyone who has any kind of customers.
Which means you need a Facebook page for your company!
This video explains more:
The question of single vs double opt in for list building is one that has been around for what seems like forever. It’s almost on a par with whether the chicken or the egg came first and – like that conundrum – there’s no consensus on the correct answer.
Single opt in means that your potential list member just has to take a simple action such as putting their email address into a box on your site and pressing a submit button of some sort.
Double opt in means that they have to do the first action (naturally, otherwise they wouldn’t stand a chance of getting on your list at all) and then they have to click a confirmation link that – hopefully – doesn’t get sent to their spam folder.
So, which method is better?