It then becomes your job to track reply rates to each advert. How many enquiries came in? How many of those converted into actual sales? Assuming each of those will spend the same as your customer average over time, you will quickly get an idea of which adverts have actually made (or lost) money and if so, how much?

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

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

By Alastair Campbell. The Ideal Marketing Company

If you are serious about growing your business, this is a useful exercise to assist you in putting across the right message to prospective customers.  You can call it re-framing if you like, but I just think of it as a genuine way of trying to see things from the other persons point of view.

Most of us like to think that by offering the products or services that we do we are helping people.  So for example at the Ideal Marketing Company my main aim is to help my clients to win more business, convert more enquiries and keep their customers for longer – that’s what we do.  Our sole focus as a business therefore is to help our clients.

What are the benefits of thinking like this?  At every stage, including an initial meeting, it means our focus is on ‘what can we do to help?’.  We only work with people who we think we can help.  Our main outcome is to help business owners grow their business.  If we don’t do this then we have failed. Or we don’t accept the business in the first place.

When I meet up with a prospective client I don’t think about selling to them, I think about how I can help them. 

Let’s face it, most of us are looking for people to help us.  That is much more useful to us than being ‘sold to’.  Being ‘sold to’ implies that somebody ‘does something’ to us.  Selling can imply manipulation, deception and tricking people into buying something they don’t want and don’t need.  Contrast this with a focus on helping somebody.  The focus changes and becomes all about assisting them to achieve results.

My suggestion to you is to forget about selling to prospects and to start thinking about ways that you can help people. Now I am not pretending to be a saint, I want to grow my own business and make money too, but I want to do this on the back of helping people.  The great American Sales Trainer Zig Ziglar once said ‘You can get anything you want in life – if you help enough people achieve what they want in life” That’s a better philosophy than screwing the last penny out of everybody that you can and tricking them into buying things that they don’t want isn’t it?

So, to paraphrase, if you want to grow your business, focus not on what other people can do for you, but what you can do to help other people. 

Alastair Campbell is MD of The Ideal Marketing Company based in Leicestershire, England.  He offers marketing ideas and support to business owners and is author of the book The Marketing Launchpad available now on Amazon. 

 He also offers a free 60 minute no obligation marketing consultation – see www.idealmarketingcompany.com for more details.

The headline should be lively, relevant to the subject that follows and imply a benefit. Look how newspapers use headlines. They use them grab our attention and make us want to find out more.  They also signal the type of stories that you will find inside. The headlines they use actually sell the papers. (It’s the same with magazines – the right photo and headline combination can double sales of a title).  A good headline will stop you as you cross the petrol station fore-court or pop in to the corner shop when you buy your milk in the morning. Then once you have bought the paper, each story headline sells each individual story.

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

Want to stand out from the crowd? Then don’t produce a marketing message that is the same as the crowd. A bold benefit led statement, strong visuals, consistent branding and a bright, simple graphic will help you be noticed and remembered above all the noise.

Do you need some free advice on your current marketing campaign? To find out more about our 1 hour  free consultation call us on 01858 44 55 43 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

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

Local business owners are invited to a free seminar in Leicestershire next month (February) to find out if they are eligible to claim back funds spent on research and development.

Figures show that 40% of businesses that have invested money in research and development fail to claim back the money they are entitled to. The government has a wide definition of research and development and the seminar, which is a being held on Tuesday 7^th February at Market Harborough’s new Innovation Centre, will assist companies in checking their eligibility for funding.

The event will include a presentation by HMRC (Leicester R & D Unit) on the research and development scheme, followed by Richard Cullum, Managing Partner of R & T Consultants who will explain how to make a claim. There are several other confirmed speakers offering their expertise and the event is being introduced by James Briggs, former chair of the Leicestershire Economic Partnership.

“Few people realise that you don’t have to be a multinational company to make an R & D claim,” explains Richard. “Many smaller companies who conduct research and development projects are entitled to claim. Unfortunately, most of these companies don’t realise that through tax credit schemes they can claim back a majority of the money they have invested.”

The seminar will give everyone attending the opportunity to find out if they are entitled to claim and will offer advice and assistance in putting forward a claim.

To book your place on the seminar contact 01858 414200 or e-mail reception.harborough@oxin.co.uk. Due to anticipated demand, places are restricted to a maximum of two per company.

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.