Strategic Marketing vs. Tactical Marketing

Most businesses have both a strategic marketing plan and a tactical marketing plan, and it’s important to keep these two platforms separate. People often mistakenly assume that when you talk about marketing, you’re speaking of “tactical” marketing, which consists of placing ads, generating leads, sending out mailers and brochures, etc. However, strategic marketing focuses on the message and communication of the message. Simply put, tactical marketing is the execution of your marketing plan—the medium by which your message is delivered, and strategic marketing focuses on the content of your message—what you say and to whom you say it.

The key difference is the focus on making sure overall customer situations mesh with your overall company direction. Not to get distracted, or veer off course of your overall company direction, but at every step of development for your strategic plan, and execution of your plan, you are indeed on course for the overall vision and goals of the company.

Content vs. Execution

Many companies try to figure out how to sell more before they find out how to provide a solution to their consumers’ needs. The procedure for accomplishing this is exactly the same every single time, for every kind of business. It is the advertiser’s job to pay attention to human nature, to research human nature, and to have some insight into how people make their purchasing decisions. Strategically, marketing programs and advertising should get the attention of target market prospects and facilitate their decision-making. This lowers their risk for taking the next step in the buying process. By understanding what’s important to your target market, you can then put together a strategy that gets more qualified prospects to call, reduces your sales cycle, and increases your conversion ratios. After the strategy is in place, the tactical execution simply consists of testing and implementing your strategic plan.

Business-to-business Strategic Marketing

There is a business-to-business aspect to many companies, in which case these business-to-business transactions count as customer situation. For marketing to businesses that are your clients and customers, this means combining industry sector segmentation and product use with other factors related to purchasing decisions. For example, this would include purchase criteria and decision motivations that effect larger, enterprise sized purchases. In this case, part of your strategic marketing plan is to build strong, personal relationships with these larger businesses, and focus on providing customized service, products and even anticipate the needs of your business clients. Although a business is obviously a larger entity than a single customer, many of the same principles prevail; the most important being a keen sense of service, and making them feel they are important and that you pay special attention to them.

A strategic marketing plan encompasses developing a message, and developing the best way to communicate this message—and contemplates the best strategy to deal with communicating this message. Tactical marketing is important as it executes the strategic plan, but it is important to keep these two subjects divided as you develop a successful marketing plan for your company.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

Find Out What Keywords Google Really Sees Inside Your Site

This post is part of my new “Technical Quick Takes” series. Meaningful examples of quickly executable content that will help you attract new visitors to your site. The posts are short, to the point, and immediately actionable.

Google has a slew of tools to help you analyze, optimize, and understand what’s going on inside their index.

If you want to find out what keywords Google actually has in it’s index for your site, you’ll need to register for their Google Webmaster Tools. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes to setup. You can start by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/

The picture below is a snapshot of the actual keywords and keyword phrases that Google has inside their index. It’s very informative to know which words and phrases actually are inside their index compared to what we “think” Google is indexing.

Action Tip Takeaway (ATT): Register for a Google Webmaster account (or have your Webmaster do it) and get your site setup so you can find out what keywords Google has in it’s index for you. After you find your indexed keywords, you may want to alter some of your HTML content and tags to align with what’s in the index.

Email Strategies for Strategic Marketing

If you run an online business, you already know that email is an essential portion of how you do business and communicate with customers – a veritable lifeline to your client base. There are several email strategies, besides the overused spam and direct mail, which will help you reach potential new clients, inspire them to want to reach you, and to build stronger relationships with your existing clients.

Email Signature

A very simple and obvious way to raise your company’s awareness is to install an automatic email signature at the bottom of all outgoing correspondence. This is something that most companies are probably already doing, but it’s important enough to be mentioned. If you do not already use an email signature, it is time to start, and if your company is using an email signature—bravo—but this is also a good time to re-evaluate the autograph and company information that appears in the signature. Is it clear? Easy to read? Does it contain a link? These are a few things to consider when designing your email signature, and evaluating the effectiveness of an existing signature.

Email Newsletter

Publishing an email newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with your prospective customers, raise brand awareness, share information and build relationships. It may sound like a lot of work, but you may only choose to release a newsletter monthly or quarterly, so it need not be intensely time consuming, and it is an excellent, non-invasive way to reach out to customers.

An email newsletter on the surface is simply a way of sharing news and information with customers and potential clients who have usually voluntarily asked to receive this letter. Email newsletters are usually sent to existing customers who have signed up for the service, so it is a way of keeping in touch with and reaching out to customers who are already interested in your business and services. An effective tactic here is to personalize each email/newsletter by using distribution technology that uses the client’s first name. Use of a client’s first name will further solidify your relationship by extending personal attention and courtesy that the customer may not get from another website business.

Special Offers

Sending coupons to your existing customers and letting them know of special offers via email is a useful marketing strategy. This will make customers feel that you are looking out for their interests, that you appreciate their business, and want to reward their loyalty. This will make those customers feel that they have been recognized, and that their business matters to you, further increasing their loyalty to you.

This need not be a costly strategy for your business. You can offer a small percentage-off coupon, which in the long run won’t affect your bottom line, but will benefit customer alliance. In addition to this, the percentage of customers who actually redeem these coupons and special offers tends to be small – they may not need to re-order products at this time- but the effect of increased loyalty will be achieved whether the customer redeems the coupon or not. These compatible marketing strategies are a strategic choice, and an effective way to build relationships with your customers, and to increase your business.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

10 Low Risk High Return Tactics to Attract New Clients for Your Business in 2010

Evan Sohn, a Business Networking Specialist from New York shares his insights on how to attract new clients for your business.

All businesses share the challenge of finding new business.  We recently conducted a survey of 700 small businesses.  43 percent of them needed to add over 10 new clients a year.  It should come as no surprise that $90 billion is being spent by businesses in the US to grow (American Marketing Association).  $20 billion is being spent in online marketing alone.  The common marketing portfolio for a company includes advertising (online and offline), public relations, event marketing (tradeshows), client marketing (referrals) and telemarketing (cold calling).  An effective marketing strategy will employ multiple initiatives under these areas targeting their customer/prospect segments.  Each of these items is important (in different varying levels) to achieve marketing results.  But, is there a way to achieve consistent marketing results without having the budget of a Cisco or a Microsoft?

Having been in technology marketing for nearly 20 years, I have seen various marketing methods emerge and some fall to the waste side (does anyone remember direct mail?).  The Internet has also provided alternative marketing methods by establishing new channels to targeted customers.  Our survey pointed out that most small business are not only concerned about getting good results from their marketing campaigns but are also concerned with high upfront costs of specific marketing campaigns.  With this in mind, here are ten low cost and low risk ways to drive new clients for your business.  By the way, it goes without saying that you have a clean web site that provides enough of a user experience regarding your service and easy links to the appropriate calls-to-action.

The top ten low cost and low risk ways to drive new clients for your business:

1. Client Referrals

Your path of least resistance to new customers is often from your existing client base.  Assuming you are delivering quality work, getting a client to refer another client often happens without even asking.  So why not ask?  Put together a campaign to drive new client referrals offering incentives to your existing clients.  Perhaps make a donation to their favorite charity, or discount on your service or even cash!  Be prudent in tracking client referrals as it is likely that your best referrals will originate from the same set of clients.  Always send thank you notes although I recommend David’s Cookies or Dale and Thomas Popcorn (a real office pleaser).

2. Blog yourself

While I know I am merely inviting you to join the myriad of people out there who are sharing their views, opinions and thoughts via the web it really is a good way to get the word out there.  Blogger and WordPress are two free Blog site that make it really easy to set up and publish your blogs.  Blog regularly and more importantly make sure you publish your blog on your social network pages.  Blogs are often tapped right into the search engines so even by doing nothing you are getting the word out there.  (Check our Fastpitch Networking Blog promotion tools.)

3. Inverse Public Relations

Have you ever read an article online and seen a trail of comments and responses to the article?  Well why not do that yourself (assuming you have something interesting to add).  If you are a subject matter expert (and even if you are not) why not add your two cents to topical articles.  Include a link to your Blog or your web site in the response.  Of course it is self promotion but it is promotion nonetheless.

4. Socialize yourself online

Word of mouth is always a great way to drive new business.  Working ones rolodex was often the terminology for the art of taking out ones rolodex and “dialing for dollars” – reaching out to your contacts to see who might be able to refer some business.  Social networking and moreover professional networking has added a whole new dimension to managing ones rolodex.  Networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook as well as niche professional networks such as BizNik and Fastpitch make it easy to establish an online profile and provide good tools for reaching out to your network.  Join a group on Facebook or set up a live event on Biznik.

5. Face-to-face networking

Although there is a fee for the more popular networking groups they are a great way to meet other professionals all of whom are interested not in sharing photos or videos but in growing their businesses.  There are online versions of these groups such as Network for Professionals and a number of Meetup groups.  Start a Meet up or join one inviting everyone to happy hour (on you of course).  You’ll be certain to draw a nice crowd of likeminded professionals.

6. Web site optimization

Having a web site without it being optimized for search engines is like having an unlisted telephone number – both are bad for business.  You need to make sure that people could find you.  Go to Guru.com or eLance and find an expert in SEO (search engine optimization) and pay some money to make sure that your web site is posted across the internet.

7. Pay-for-Performance

If you don’t have the stomach to deploy a PPC campaign and wade through all the unqualified leads and responses why not look into a pay-for-performance model.  These are also called CPA or cost per acquisition.  Usually the vendor will determine the price per successful lead acquisition.  This could be paying only for leads that complete a registration process for instance.  Salesconx.com (self promotion) also employs a pay-for-performance model which allows the buyer (the marketer or business) to establish the price for being introduced to a potential customer.  Salesconx has one advantage over current CPA provides insofar as having no minimum commitments.  This lets you get up and running very easily, quickly and inexpensively to closely monitor your return on investment.

8. Share the Wealth (Partnering)

Aligning yourself with another company is a great way to “double up” on your sales efforts.  If you providing expertise in X and a likely other vendor of your customer provides Y why not partner up with that company.  Create an incentive for the other company such as a percentage of revenue generated.  You could share clients and create targeted marketed programs reaching out to both your client bases.  Maybe deliver a unified presentation or online seminar to draw the synergies of both your companies.  This is generally an easy initiative to ‘kick off’ but often a bit harder to deliver in full.  To make a partnership successful requires investment (mostly of time) so be patient.  Keep in mind that your object is to add N new clients from this partner.  So as long as you are meeting your objective it is certainly worth the time and money.

9. Expert yourself

Assuming you are knowledgeable in a certain field why not make your expertise available to others ‘free of charge’?  For example, if you are a Tax specialist why not offer your community church or local library a free communal lecture on “Tips and Traps for Tax Preparations”.  Many organization and institutions are regularly looking for topical content and experts so why not offer these folks your services.  My mother was an interior designer in her own practice and started out by writing articles for the local paper on low cost decorating tips.  If you are in the health sector try the local gym – they regularly have evening informational classes.  Local chambers of commerce also have periodic meetings are often seek panel representatives.  Any opportunity for you to speak in front of an audience where you look like an expert in your field is a solid opportunity.

10. Independent sales reps

If you believe that your product or service is easy to understand and relatively straightforward to sell, why not recruit selling professionals that are paid only on commissions.  It wasn’t too long ago that most sales representatives were independent and there are presently 2.4 million independent sales representatives in the US alone.  Granted most of these folks aren’t selling synergistic products/services but, it does demonstrate just how many folks out there make their money solely through sales.  Try placing an advertisement in Craig’s list for independent sales reps in your industry or marketplace and see what happens.  It does require a good of time to train and manage independent folks but getting a few more clients into the pipeline thru a commission only source is certainly worth the effort.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

1 highly effective way to have your Twitter post go viral

How a single Tweet post went viral

If your looking to increase targeted traffic to your website or blog, here’s a straight forward strategy that I used to bring 172 people (210 pageviews) to my blog in a few short days using a viral content method.

Basic Testing Method

Through testing different Twitter post headlines, I found one that one style (quantification of facts) of headline outperformed my control headline by 210%. The Tweet post that I used was “6 effective ways to use twitter as a lead generation tool“. Now obviously you can tell by the title that there’s a clear benefit that was stated with a quantifiable fact. Instead of just saying “effective ways to use Twitter”, I started it with “6″. By using qualification in your Tweet posts, you add more believability, credibility and newsworthiness.

Follow me, I’ll follow you – Reciprocation

If your using the “follow me, I’ll follow you” method of reciprocation to add followers to your Twitter account, you should be choosing who you follow strategically. Choosing people who are your ideal target marker, or have a high probability of benefiting from your product or service is a good way of thinking about who you should choose to follow. If your in the PR, SEO or Copywriting business and you’re not targeting business owners who have a high probability of using your services, your Tweets will fall on deaf ears.

Tailor your Tweets to go Viral – Write with your end user in mind

If your using Twitter for business purposes, it’s essential to tailor your Tweets with your end user (you followers) in mind. My blog is about Joint Venture Marketing and Business Optimization Strategies, so I keep my Tweets tailored to these topics 95% of the time. Simply by tailoring my content to my target audience and providing highly relevant content with the right message, at the right time, and to the right audience I was able to get my Tweet picked up by 38 other Bloggers and media websites.

So my point is, regardless of your niche, you can get very targeted traffic to your site with the right message, at the right time, to the right audience.

Action Tip Takeaway (ATT): Go to your followers on Twitter and click on at least 10 profiles to see if you can find a pattern, consistency or particular demographic that will direct you in a particular direction as far as the type of content you may want to consider writing about. Once you find a pattern that your folowers fall into, use some type of quantifiable fact to further increase the benefit to your offering.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

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