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Establish Yourself As An Expert In Your Industry Welcome to the “Embossible Times” Marketing Newsletter once again. Sorry we are a little late this month. Hopefully you are incredibly busy like us but with the year end in sight. Keeping this in mind, I will keep this newsletter simple, and to the point. FACT: Prospects will gravitate to the authority on a subject they are interested in. You need to become that authority. If you can establish yourself as an expert in your industry, qualified prospects will be attracted to you, period. Your competition, and you for that matter, do plus or minus 10-15%% of the same thing, you take similar actions, you market in a similar way and you often get similar results. If you want better results, higher quality accounts with more profit, then you need to establish yourself as the industry expert. Its simple, and you have the information in your head or at your finger tips so start to use it. Here are the simple steps. OFFER FREE INFORMATION REPORTS People seem to be starved for information - they really are. They want information before their purchase. They crave details. They have the natural desire to become as well informed as possible. The more expensive and/or complicated the item, the more they want to know. Your company can take advantage of this situation and get leads. Offer a prospect a free report about your product or service. Make the information valuable to the prospect by making it complete. A leather retailer may offer "How To Spot The 5 Most Common Mistakes People Make When They Buy Leather Products”. An embroidery or screen printing business can benefit from providing information to their customers too. If you sell direct to businesses then show them "How To Increase Your Companies Exposure With Every Sale You Make". The ideas and applications are unlimited. If you are stuck, simply email us your line of business and a few details on what you do best. BE short clear and concise and we will help you out, our email address is: info@permaboss.com A major advantage of giving away free information is that you gain credibility and the respect of a prospect. Follow up all leads you get with a telephone call. Continue following up until you get a sale. This is where most companies fail! Fact: 1 out of 3 leads are never followed up properly! Another advantage is that you can cover lots of information in the span of a few pages. Putting it together ready for distribution can be accomplished at a reasonable cost. The benefits you will gain will far outweigh the costs. WRITE A BOOK / START A NEWSLETTER Something almost magical happens after you write and publish a book. All of sudden, one is thought of as an expert in the field covered by the book. Authoring a book gives you almost immediate gains. It adds prestige and credibility. It can open new vistas for you in many areas. Virtually any field of business could make this work, providing that the marketplace would have access to your book. You can offer it on your website in your mailing etc. Just make sure that you exchange it for their name, address and contact info. Offering it in an electronic format is very easy as well, and it’s the cheapest way to distribute it. Don’t forget that a hard copy has a greater perceived value and will be carried around and passed around better than an electronic version. You can test the marketplace to see if people will buy your book even before you finish writing it. You can test small ads and small quantities of sales letters without risking a lot of money. You will know quickly if you have a subject matter that is needed and will sell. You can self-publish your work to keep the costs down. If you use 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper, you can even have it photocopied. Today's photocopy machines are of great quality. Then you can have them bound, or put them into a three ring binder. This process can save you thousands of dollars in up-front costs of printing, or hours of frustration looking for a publisher. Each year, thousands of books are self-published. UNDERSTAND AND ADDRESS YOUR CUSTOMER'S FRUSTRATIONS ABOUT YOUR INDUSTRY Within every industry group there are frustrations that customers have. This means frustrations with the industry in general, not your particular firm. For example, in the retailing industry, people get frustrated by long lines with few clerks. In computer sales, people are frustrated by hearing too much technical talk. People have a lot of frustration with mail order firms who don't ship their order promptly. It makes sense to discover these quandaries and attempt to solve them. You can address them in your Unique Selling Proposition. You can state some of them in every ad and sales letter. Remind your prospects of their worries, and tell them how you will address each frustration. This is a part of the process of educating the customer. PEOPLE WILL READ LONG COPY Whatever method you use to deliver your message has no relevance to the length of copy required to properly convey it to a customer or potential customer. Your offer must be clear and understandable. You must state and emphasize the benefits of your product. Trying to economize on advertising or printing and postage is false economy. Personally, I have received complete and clear offers on a single one-sided page, and complicated propositions on sales letters of up to 28 pages. Believe me, there is absolutely no fixed length required. If it takes 4 pages, fine - if a 12 page letter is needed, then make it 12 pages. The more you tell, the more you sell. TIP! As your proof read it ask this after every sentence “SO WHAT?” If you can’t answer that then remove the sentence or make it answer that question. Some might say that people will not read long copy. Not true. Those interested in the offer will read every word. Of course, those are exactly the prospects you want. If a person is simply not interested in your offer, it won't matter. These are not true prospects anyway. RENT OR JOINT VENTURE A MAILING LIST You can indeed make money from the use of customer mailing lists. First of all, you can rent a list. Check the yellow pages for list brokers in your area, or check in a large public library for the Standard Rates and Data book. This reference book lists brokers nationwide, as well as all the lists available at the time of printing. Talk with several brokers and decide on the one with which you feel most comfortable. Another method you can use to get extra revenue without much work is a joint venture with another company or rent their list. Choose firms which sell products which will go along with your products, but not be in direct competition to them. Draft a letter and contact them directly. Their list is made up of actual buyers, and describes what they bought. Cover the mailing costs and rent the list or better still offer a percentage of the net profits. The percentage you negotiate should be between 10 and 25 percent (of the profit) Joint ventures can be very lucrative and very low risk for both parties. Warmly PSS. For those interested, we have adapted our embossing machines to emboss the left chest of finished leather jackets. This means that for the ASI reps out there you can use one of our clients to do your leather embossing work on a jacket that comes from companies like Canada Sportswear, Stormtech, and some Trimark products. Or you can even contact Beardmore Leather directly at http://www.beardmoreleathers.com and they can emboss your customers logo on their jackets in-house so there is no drop shipping headaches at all. Need samples of embossed leather? Call our office for a leather sample and a Did you enjoy this issue? If so I would really appreciate if you would pass this along to your friends and acquaintances. You are also welcome to post this issue to
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