One of the most frustrating aspects to business is when you have all the marketing tools your business needs, perhaps even some your business does not need and yet you still see no results. You may even be spending time and effort marketing your business and yet conversion ratios and traffic remain constant or even drop. The reasons why marketing plans fail are numerous however; one of the primary reasons is that it was not the right marketing plan.

Every business is different and that includes businesses that sell the same products and services. Every business has something that is unique, the group of people they are targeting, the area they are working in, the options they have available to them. These different aspects mean that the same marketing plan is not going to work on every business.

When a marketing plan fails, it is important to find out exactly why it failed first. The reason or reasons are is essential. It may be that there is only one aspect of a marketing plan that failed, it may be multiple items or it may be the entire plan.

Research

Research is an essential aspect of marketing and inadequate research is one of the biggest pitfalls that can affect a marketing plan. Research provides a wealth of information that is vital to the success of a marketing plan. Generally, research is done on the target market. If a target market is not known, research is done to determine what market is going to be the most likely to benefit from the product or service provided by your business.

This is the group of individuals you will want to target and in some areas there may be multiple groups. While it may be possible to market to all these groups it is, in most situations better to market to a single group or groups which contain a large percentage of similar traits. This makes it easier to consolidate a marketing plan as well as eliminates a significant amount of research, time and effort.

The second aspect which needs to be researched for a marketing plan to be successful and is also one of the reasons why marketing fails to produce appropriate results involves research competition. Researching competition is not just about researching the prices of a competitor. It includes noting things such as lay out, finding out what marketing techniques the competitor is using and how often these tools are used for example.

Many business owners and beginning internet marketers fail to note anything more than price and perhaps general layout. As a result, they are missing vital information that can save time, money and effort when it comes to setting up their own marketing plans. It is also important to keep in mind that you want your business to be unique from your competition.

Get a good idea of the types of deals, offers, discounts and promotions that your competition uses and offer something different to help your business stand out. Many people simply do what their competition does. In doing so, they often lower their marketability and their marketing plan can ultimately fail in this area.

Marketing Tools

Having enough research to create your marketing plan is only the first step in solving the problems that often cause marketing plans to fail. The next step is to take the time to pick out the right tools. Having the right tools for the job is essential to ensuring you get the most out of your marketing strategies.

Marketing tools have diversified over the years. Tools are not limited strictly to email and promotional options. Video, social networking, SMS texting, in addition to email and promotional marketing tools are also available. The increase in available options means that there is a greater spectrum to work with. It also means that picking the right tools is more important than ever.

Pick tools that are going to be easy for you to use, require minimal maintenance but provide you with maximum potential results. This will help to prevent your marketing plan from joining the ranks of those that have failed. Knowing the right tools to use can often be a trial and error process. The important thing is to avoid one of the reasons why marketing plans fail. In this case the reason involves putting too much into a single marketing tool.

Action, Action, Action

One of the biggest reasons why marketing plans end up failing is the lack of action. Marketing is an active part of your business, it is not a set and forget aspect of you business. In order to ensure that a marketing plan succeeds you must be actively engaged in working that plan. This means that email marketing messages should be updated and redesigned regularly.

SMS messages should be rewritten after very send. These messages should be short, contain only the minimum necessary information. It is important to remember that SMS marketing is relatively new and involves sending messages to mobile devices that often indicate repeat messages.

Videos should be produced, edited and updated to as high a level as possible. Computers and technology can turn just about any computer into a production studio with the right software. Keep videos interesting, engaging and relevant. The videos should be related to the company, the products or the services offered.

It is important to set up a marketing schedule and find out how much time, generally through trial and error that you need each day, week or month to handle all your marketing tasks and keep everything up to date.

The reasons why a marketing plan might fail are numerous. Some of these reasons include, failing to do the proper research into the market, the competition as well as the tools available. Other reasons can be failing to have enough tools, having too many tools or not using the tools you have effectively. Taking the time to make sure that you have the information you need as well as putting in the effort to ensure your success can go a long way to eliminating these reasons.

Next, Discover here how to outsmart your competitor, ethically dominate the search engines,and legally siphon off tons of cash in hand buyers from your website!

Welcome back to “The Five Stages Of The Buying Cycle” series. In the previous part we discussed the “Get Attention” part. Today we go one step further and discuss the “Grow Interest” part.

Now that you have your readers their attention, deepen their understanding of what your product does. A link to your created Video Tour is especially effective at this stage.

If you reach a “general audience,” encourage them to find the business that best fits their situation to see how your product can help them. On the other hand, if you reach a “specific target market” (ex., affiliates) or a “specific demographic” (ex., Work At Home Moms), send them to your specific landing pages.

If your visitors are retirees, Webmasters, real estate marketers, students, network marketers, auction sellers (eBay), and so on… create landing pages specific to their needs.

As always, mix and match links that best fit your approach and audience.

You can strike a positive chord with your visitors by showing how your product connects emotionally with its customers, the way Apple or Google does. That type of connection occurs for only one reason…

Your productis much more than “site-building” or “Web hosting”. It’s even more than about building successful businesses. It’s the end impact that is so important, creating lives of freedom and independence.

By the end of this stage, you should have some very interested pre-customers who want more information.

Next, move your visitors from “high interest/emotion” to logic and verification…

Previous parts:
1. Introduction
2. Get Attention

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In your consulting business, chances are you have spent a lot of time thinking about the specific services you can offer to clients. You’ve probably spent a great deal of time and effort working on processes, so that when clients come to you you’re able to offer them real solutions.

Unfortunately, many solo professionals don’t put the same kind of time and thought into their marketing message. They put up a website, perhaps, that goes into great detail about how it is they can solve their clients’ problems. Then, they can’t understand why no one is buying.

It’s because they haven’t developed a core marketing message. What, exactly, is your core marketing message? It’s the message you want to get across to your potential customers. It’s the thing that will convince potential customers that you have the answer to their problem. The success of your business will, ultimately, depend greatly on how clear and effective your core marketing message is.

Introducing Yourself

One of the reasons you’re marketing your business is so that people will choose to hire you. That sound’s rather basic, but it can be overlooked. Your marketing message needs to say who you are. Making sure your name, or your business name, is included in your marketing efforts will help insure that, even if the potential client doesn’t hire you right away, they’ll remember you for when they are
ready to buy.

In the process of introducing yourself, don’t get carried away. Talking about yourself can distract your potential customers and, in many cases, push them away. They’re not interested as much in who you are as they are in what you can do for them.

In some niches, it can be useful to provide some biographical information. For example, you might say, “I am Dr. Rogers, and I am a physician at State Hospital” or “I am Jan Smith, a certified clinical psychologist.” If your niche has recognized certifications or associations, you can certainly include this information in your marketing. As a general rule, however, brevity is best.

Identifying Problems

The next thing you need to focus on in your core marketing message is a problem that needs to be solved. People buy things, and they pay consultants and coaches, to solve problems. This is true for just about any consulting business. If you’re a writing coach, your clients have a problem with their writing ability (or with selling their writing, perhaps.). If you’re a weight loss coach, your clients probably have a weight problem. If you’re a back pain coach, your clients have back pain.

It seems basic, but identifying the specific problems that your coaching solves is integral to your core marketing message. You want to reach people that have a need, and then say, “Hey! You there! I can fix that!” That is how you get clients’ attention. That’s how your potential clients know you’re talking to them, and how they know you have something that they just might want to listen to. Think about some of the most effective commercials and marketing campaigns you’ve seen.

Acne medications don’t start out their advertisements by talking about ingredients. Instead, they say, “Are you tired of not looking your best?”

They identify a problem right away: with acne, you don’t look your best. Your core marketing message should address a problem or problems of your target market. Make a list of the top problems in your target market – perhaps three to five problems – and decide which ones you can solve. Focus your marketing efforts on these.

Offering Outcomes

The natural thing to do, once you’ve identified a problem, is talk about solutions and processes. However, when it comes to your core marketing message, solutions and processes need to take a back seat.

You see, people out there who have a problem aren’t looking for methods. They aren’t looking for a process. They aren’t even looking for solutions.

What they want are outcomes.

The person with back pain doesn’t want medicine. They don’t want exercise, physical therapy or coaching. They want to be free from back pain. The person with acne doesn’t want hydrocortisone creams or UV treatments. They want to get rid of their acne. It’s not enough to identify problems; potential customers know they have problems. Identifying problems is just how you get their attention. You need to tell those potential customers exactly why they need you. You have to be able to identify specific outcomes. You need to know what your potential clients want to get out of the situation, decide if you can provide it, and then offer it to them.

As the next step in the process of developing your core marketing message, you need to consider each of those problems you identified previously. For each problem, ask yourself, “What is the ideal outcome your potential customers are hoping for?” Once you’ve identified those outcomes, they become an amazing tool in your marketing efforts.

A Note About Process

Just because the process of solving problems shouldn’t be included in your marketing message doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider it. Before you attach a given outcome to a problem, you’d better be sure you have a process in place that will solve the problem and provide the desired outcome. If you can’t create the outcome, you have to strike it from your marketing message.

Putting it All Together

So, now that you have identified the various components of your core marketing message, it’s time to actually formulate and articulate that message. Your core marketing message says something along these lines:

“I am _____. I work with _____ who have this problem_____. I help them to _____.”

So, you might say, “I am John Sebastian. I work with older men and women who have lower back pain. I help them to manage their pain effectively and lead normal, productive lives.”

Establishing a coherent core marketing message that identifies who you are, identifies the problem you can solve and gives the potential customer a look at what life looks like after their problem is solved is key to success in your consulting business.

Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet of paper when you’re supposed to be writing articles for your blog, for your ezine or newsletter and for article submission so you can promote your books, products or services?

How would you like to find ways to tap into a limitless supply of article ideas?

Yes, our imaginations run thin every now and then, and no, it isn’t easy to come up with article ideas sometimes. But, I promise you that there are ways to tap into a limitless supply of article ideas. No matter what your expertise lies in, you can always generate new and interesting ideas for articles IF you follow these guidelines…

5 Ways to Never Run Out of Article Ideas  

1) Get inspiration from magazines covers.

Find a magazine that is as close as you can get to your niche and look at the titles on the magazine cover. Look at the titles that jump out at you and make you say, “That looks like it would be a good article–I want to read that!”

Many times you can bounce an article off of a title you see on a magazine cover. Can you convert that title to apply to something in your specific niche?

Now, notice I’m saying, “find a magazine that is somewhat in your niche.” Many of us have websites that are in niches that do not have their own magazines. For example, there is no magazine that I know of about Article Marketing.

But I sashay a short distance from my specific niche and look in related niches, such as Writing, Creativity, Productivity, and possibly even SEO. These are all issues that lie at the heart of article marketing, so they work as inspiration launching pads.

2) Don’t forget about the newbies.

When we’re writing on our area of expertise, sometimes we can overlook the obvious. We want to write helpful, educational articles, and our minds quite often go to topics that are more advanced.

Have you ever considered that someone reading your article might not even understand the basics of what you’re talking about?

I have to remind myself of this all the time–not everyone knows what article marketing is, and not everyone even knows the reasons why it’s a popular online marketing tool.

Could the same thing be true in your niche?

Think about it–although our articles are not sales oriented or promotional in any way, when we educate our readers on some aspect of our niche, we are increasing the likelihood that they will one day be our customers.

So, don’t forget about the newbies who are in your target market but aren’t knowledgeable about what you do. Try to think back to questions you had when you were first starting out. Think about what confused you. Think about the very basic things that you wish someone had explained to you before you became the expert.

3) Think about: “What are the 10 questions that my customers (or potential customers) most frequently ask me?”

Write those questions down and address each one of them in a separate article.

By completing this writing exercise, you’re letting your target market tell you what to write about. This makes perfect sense since you’re trying to appeal to them anyway.

4) Use template titles and fill in the blanks.

Here are some of mine:

• 10 Great Reasons Why ____
• How To ____ in 7 Easy Steps
• 3 Secret Tricks For _____
• How To Conquer ______
• The Top 10 Mistakes People Make When ____
• Reader Question: “[insert question here]“

You may notice that these titles are all List articles (any article that has a 1,2,3 etc list in it), How-To articles, and Question articles (articles that answer a question that is stated in the title).

These are my go-to article topic stimulators. Just seeing the format for the title gets the wheels of my brain moving (which helps creativity!)

Try filling in the blanks for the template titles listed above, and I bet you can come up with a compelling title to base a new article on.

5) Use Instant Article Writing Templates

Here are some of the article-writing templates that will help you…

• Myth Buster
• Top 10…
• How-To…
• Quiz
• Failure to Success
• Timeline
• 7 Things You Need
• What’s Hot, What’s Not
• 3 Stages
• Problem/Solution
• Differentiate Yourself – this template made PR Leads more than $10,000
• Plus many, many more

By following the five strategies above, you will:

Gain the confidence to write articles whenever you want

Banish writer’s block forever

Remove all the frustration out of writing articles

Develop ALL THE CONTENT you will ever need for your website, for your blog, for your newsletter and for article submission

So, are you ready to start writing your articles faster so you can get maximum exposure for your books, products and services?