You will not resonate if you are bland.

One of the most overlooked principles by organizations is to forget that you must target your marketing and communication messages. If you are a small business, your messages will likely sound very drab and generic if they are not targeted at some specific segment. For you non-profits, the message resonates much better when the audience actually believes you are talking to them!

Some quick principles:

1. Work on using demographics to understand your target market.
2. Develop core messages that resonate with the needs of this market.  Speak their language.
3. Identify areas where you can provide a strong solution to their needs.  Don’t just develop a product.  Become the solution they can trust.
4. Set your price – if your identified segment won’t invest, decide if this target market is really your ideal client!

If you get off track, refocus and keep aiming.

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So, it’s mid-January already!  Yes, those first couple of weeks since the toast of the New Year are gone.  All those ideas of implementing a host of marketing tools, techniques and tasks . . . well, they are still sitting in your idea bin.  Runnin’ behind already?

You need a marketing calendar to guide you.  John Jantsch makes a case for marketing by a calendar as well, and you can also view how John manages his social media system on a calendar (this is an extremely practical way of doing it!)

Have you heard this cliches?

• “MORE MONTH THAN MONEY” – don’t wait until the end of the week to see what time you have left for marketing.  Just like giving to your charity or church, you need to intentionally set aside your weekly offering and give first.  If you hum-hah around and wait until Friday lunch to see what you can accomplish in your marketing, the 5:00 bell will be calling for the start of your weekend before you’ve done one thing.
• “GIVE TO YOURSELF FIRST” – every financial planner will tell you to give to yourself first.  Set aside money in savings, or pay your salary first, so that you have it to give to others.  So while this principle is about money, do the same thing with your marketing time.  Make specific marketing projects a priority, even before typical time-consuming things like responding to emails, checking Facebook, or making sales calls.
• “MAKE AN APPOINTMENT” – just like some of you demand your customers to do, your marketing needs to be set up on a systematic approach that is given a specific time/day to accomplish it.  Just like you would honor a customer’s appointment time, when that alarm goes off, push everything else aside and do whatever marketing task is demanding your time that hour.

So use a large over-sized wall calendar, create a digital calendar with Excel or Google Calendar, or make your own calendar (here’s a good sample from a fellow Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Bill Belsford – also I found this sample calendar from a real estate agent).  Whatever system works best for you and your team, just create something that identifies specific times of each day/week to accomplish certain tasks and then stick with it!  You need the accountability!

Speaking of accountability, our Marketing Strength Training offers just that for anyone looking for a low-cost way of getting fed consistent marketing strategy, with a host of practical tools and links to resources articles on a timely topic.  In the past couple of months alone, we have covered topics like email marketing, differentiation, capturing customer testimonials, and how to have an integrated social media strategy.  Why not join now for only $8!

Coaching Program Promotion:  Save over $900 if you sign up by 1/19!

We’re thrilled to be a part of a great marketing coaching network, spreading around the world (some of the newest DTM coaches are from Columbia, Budapest and Australia!)  Duct Tape Marketing continues to help small businesses in any industry by providing a foundation that is simple, effective and affordable (like duct tape).  We love installing systematic and comprehensive marketing systems for any organization, including non-profits. A recent report names the extremely popular Duct Tape Marketing blog as one of the Top 5 marketing blogs read by executives and organizational leaders.  In the ranks with names like Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Tom Peters is an incredible achievement by creator of DTM, John Jantsch.   What are YOU reading?

Our next coaching program begins 1/26, but be sure and take advantage of our promotional pricing that has been extended until Tuesday.

-Randy

“Press releases don’t get press. They should rename them seo link releases,”  tweeted Jim Kukral, Marketing Web Business Coach.  I agree with this fact and most small businesses and non-profits never take advantage of them even though just about everyone wants “to get found on the search engines.”  While the magic algorithms of Google are not privy to you and me, one of the keys to any organization’s strong web presence is having a dynamic number of high-value content pages pointing to you.

Your web presence is dead unless there is new, fresh material out on the web talking about you.  If you are simply relying on your “About Us” page to get you found, I’d not holding my breath.  Search engines love and tanglbly acknowledge new content as they weigh their choice of what results to post on page 1 of Google.  In real simple terms, they serve the customer searching online and they must provide high-quality search engine results.  Therefore it’s to your advantage to have multiple streams of content highlighting your relevance.

The actual number of pages may not be that signficant (you don’t have to have a site with 200+ pages just to be found online).  But if you’re trying to “add more pages” to your current site, press releases are a great way to getting this done.  If a searcher stumbles upon a variety of web pages about you on pages 1, 2 and 3 of their search engine (I mention “Google” because they still dominate over half of all internet searches), their decision making just got narrowed down.  Why not give them a litany of news releases that mention your name.  It’s hard to ignore the company that seems to pop up all the time.  Thus the quote at the beginning of this message reminds you that having a strong press release strategy is key simply because of the opportunity to create endless numbers of highly-targetd and strategical optimized press releases that mention your name.

Using a press release distribution service is one of the keys to your PR and SEO strategy.  There are a number of services that you can pay for, but we recommend PRLog.com, mainly because it’s free!  Yes, it’s not only free to create an account, but also it’s free to submit a press release (and there are no limits on how many you can write).   So not only is this a strong part of your PR strategy, each one of these online press releases is a new web page talking about you, making it part of your organic search engine strategy.  So while submitting your press release to local media should be part of your PR campaigns, there’s a greater good that can result from getting those press releases online.  Having an online newsroom full of press releases is not so much about getting picked up by the local media (if you’re dealing with offline press releases, then that’s your one and only measurement for the press release’s succes, right?)  It doesn’t make any difference if you’re online news releases gets mentioned on local radio or makes headlines in your Sunday paper.  Within a few days, the search engines begin to see this news release as another high-value, optimized (with keywords matching what your prospects are searching for) web page directing searchers to your website.  There’s the reason for doing it.

Practical applicaiton:  use Grazr to create a FREE widget so you can import your PRLog pressroom directly onto your website (here’s an example of one of our clients).  Each and every time you create a new release on PRLog, this widget automatically updates.  Easy!