Who do you want to sell to? Small business owners, pensioners, young people or somebody else? Be clear who your CENTRAL audience is and make your message pertinent to them. If you catch other people at the same time that is great, but be clear about whom you focus your activities on based on the numbers, interest in what you do and ability to pay.

For more information or to find out how marketing can work for you visit our site or contact us on 01858 44 55 43 or email alastair@idealmarketingcompany.com

 If you were asking what people really want from a marketing campaign, most people would say generating high quality leads. 2-step marketing is designed purely to generate high quality leads.

2-step marketing is a good way of establishing your authority. I’m a marketing consultant like 1,001 other marketing consultants that are around, but say, because I’ve written a special report on how to double the sales of photocopiers, if someone in the photocopy industry is particularly interested in that report, I come across as having some authority within that area. I am not just “another consultant” but a consultant who’s written something that is very specific and of interest to that particular business. It is a very good way of quickly, easily and inexpensively establishing authority by producing a reasonably authoritative work which will be of interest to people.

You must remember that this is not about selling straightaway, but about getting a foot in the door. It’s about people raising their hand and gathering the names of people who have said that they are potentially interested in finding out more about what it is you’re talking about. They are not ready to buy but, they are interested.

We offer a 1 hour FREE consultation, if you would like to see what we can do for your business contact us 01858 445 543 or email alastair@idealmarketingcompany.com

2-Step marketing is designed purely to generate high quality leads. By that, I mean people who are in the market for buying the product or service that you have to offer. That is what two step marketing is all about. Even better than that, the leads tend to be quite warm.

Why does two step marketing work so well?

For those of you who haven’t read it, there is a fantastic book I would recommend called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.  It talks about lots of different factors that influence people and help them make buying decisions. One of the key things that he talks about is something called the law of reciprocity.

An example that he gives is this: there is a temporary member of staff that goes into an office. He works quite hard, goes out to lunch, comes back from lunch, and says to the people who work in office “By the way, I’m running a marathon for charity, would you sponsor me?” He gets some interest from some of the people in the office, but not very much. Another temporary member of staff goes and works in the morning, goes out to lunch, and when he comes back from lunch he buys a bottle of Coke for everybody in the office. He says “It’s very hot outside so I just thought everyone would enjoy a Coke.”  Then an hour later he asks people if they would mind sponsoring him. The results are incredible.

If you give somebody something for nothing, they feel a moral obligation to return the favour in some ways. So it works on the basis of that. If you give somebody something for nothing that is of value and helps them, they feel obliged to return the favour in some way. That might be by passing on a lead to someone else, by writing a testimonial, or it might be by buying something extra from you.

 To find out more about the ideal marketing company, and what we can do for your business contact us on 01858 445 543 or email alastair@idealmarketingcompnay.com

How important is the front page of your brochure? Ask any magazine editor if the front page of their magazine is important. More time is spent on the look and feel of the front page of a magazine than on any of the articles inside. They’re competing for buyers, just like you are, and getting the right picture on the front can make a huge difference to the circulation in any given month. So take a leaf from their book: if you are using a picture, spend time selecting an interesting one.

People love looking at faces. The human brain is very good at seeing and remembering other people’s faces and is amazingly sophisticated at it. One of the reasons that so many magazine covers have close-cropped photographs of faces is that such an image is almost impossible for us to ignore. In tests of magazine covers, the close-cropped photographs of faces are looked at more quickly and remembered far better than any other image. Although this treatment may not be exactly right for your brochure, you should at least consider using a face somewhere on its cover.

This is one of the ideas covered in the book – “the Marketing Launchpad” by Alastair Campbell available now from Amazon – order your copy today.

This is probably one of my favourite marketing subjects because it gets to the absolute core of what people look for marketing to achieve. If you were asking what people really want from a marketing campaign, most people would say generating high quality leads. They want leads from a person who are potentially interested in buying from the company and that is exactly what two step marketing is all about.

Why does two step marketing work so well?

 It focuses on the right people. If you send out a direct mail campaign to a hundred people, which of those people are you going to follow up on?  By using 2-step marketing, if ten of them have replied to you using the reply mechanism that you’ve included and asked for their free offer, free report or CD then those are the ones to follow up. They are the ones that are clearly interested. Those who have not responded are probably less interested. If you’ve done everything right, you’re first going to follow up with the ones who have already raised their hands. Imagine you were talking to a room full of people and you ask the question “Who in this room owns a Mercedes?” The people who put their hands up are the ones that are interested in what you’re selling and that is exactly what two step marketing does. You ask people to raise their hands: they are not saying they want to buy a Mercedes, but they are interested in finding out more. Those are the ones that you focus on.

For more advice on PR & Marketing contact us on 01858 445 543 or email alastair@idealmarketingcompnay.com

The research traced it back to kids getting away with it in the beginning. The students would miss a lesson and because it wasn’t detected, they would miss another. Then they would miss one or two more in the week. After that there was a snowball effect. Students found out they didn’t get caught if they skipped lessons, so they would just carry on doing it.

We developed a text messaging-based product that enabled the school, the first time a child didn’t attend registration, to send the parents or guardians a recorded message or a text message from the teacher to report that their child hadn’t attended school that day. They were asked to phone the school office to explain why. The mere introduction of the system had an effect on reducing truancy. Instantly, fewer children attempted to play truant because they knew they were going to get caught straightaway. In some cases, attendance rates rose between 10 and 20 per cent because students knew they were going to get caught.

This is one of the ideas covered in the book – “the Marketing Launchpad” by Alastair Campbell available now from Amazon – order your copy today.

That is one of the great things about niche marketing. You are trying to appeal to those in a buying frame of mind. If you’re able to persuade them to visit your website or shop, there is a much better chance of selling them a washing machine than the wide variety of electrical goods you sell. So you want to make it very clear that you sell washing machines. You’re not trying to talk about all the other things you do, but being specific about the services you offer. In that way, you’ll stand out from all the other people trying to get that buyer’s attention.

This is one of the ideas covered in the book – “the Marketing Launchpad” by Alastair Campbell available now from Amazon – order your copy today.

And that’s not all. In 2005, Google estimated that people would tolerate 15 seconds for a page to open.  In 2009 it was down to three seconds. If your website is badly optimised with heavy load of graphics and takes more than 15 to 20 seconds for just the first page to open, you won’t even have a chance to make the first impression. The potential customers would have gone faster than they came.

This is one of the ideas covered in the book – “the Marketing Launchpad” by Alastair Campbell available now from Amazon – order your copy today.

• “ under construction”
• or it is an amateurish, unprofessional website
• or it is out of date

…then it will probably do you more harm than good. This may be a reason why some introductory mails go unanswered and some phone calls aren’t returned.

This is one of the ideas covered in the book – “the Marketing Launchpad” by Alastair Campbell available now from Amazon - order your copy today.

What do you want your advert to do? Is it to sell ‘off the page’ or is it to generate leads? Be clear what the central aim of your advert is and make your advert work to that goal

You probably have some idea how many people you will need to have enquire before you make a sale. For some industries it is one in 10 – for others it might be almost one in one. Your price per enquiry is the number of enquiries you receive for every pound you spend on advertising. So a £500 advert that produces 10 enquiries means that each lead costs you £50. How profitable the advert is depends entirely on how much your service costs and how many of those 10 you are able to convert.

This is one of the ideas covered in the book – “the Marketing Launchpad” by Alastair Campbell available now from Amazon – order your copy today.