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    Strategic Marketing: Insights on Setting Smart Directions for Your Business
    Strategic Marketing: Insights on Setting Smart Directions for Your Business
    Strategic Marketing: Insights on Setting Smart Directions for Your Business
    Ebook148 pages2 hours

    Strategic Marketing: Insights on Setting Smart Directions for Your Business

    By Marcia Yudkin

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    About this ebook

    Become the Master of Your Business Fate

    With proper attention to marketing strategy, success is not an accident. Time spent planning where you want your business to go and the customers you prefer to serve pays off. Discover also how to earn and keep trust, build a reputation, amplify sales and set your course for profit.

    Despite today's world of fierce economic, competitive and technical challenges, defining goals and maintaining your intended direction does not require an MBA or high-level number crunching. With both examples and general principles, long-time marketing consultant Marcia Yudkin shows you the key elements for determining your business fate. Learn what to do when complications and uncertainty seem to get in the way.

    Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity, now in its third edition, and 12 other books.

    "Marcia Yudkin is the true north of marketing direction. Strategic Marketing is a compass for finding your ideal position, clients, brand, and future, as well as a superb guide to maximizing perceptions of your value and the reality of your fees." - Alan Weiss, PhD, Author, Million Dollar Consulting and Thrive!

    "What's amazing about this book is the way Marcia applies the often-fuzzy, amorphous notion of 'strategy' in straightforward terms that make it easy to apply to your business. She draws a roadmap with Action Steps following each chapter, so there's crystal clarity on how to define and refine your business's strategic direction. It's like a Dummies book on marketing for Smarties." - Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, Co-Author, Content Rules

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMarcia Yudkin
    Release dateMay 26, 2012
    ISBN9781476182216
    Author

    Marcia Yudkin

    Creative marketing expert Marcia Yudkin has an unparalleled ability to find the right words for a message, an unusual angle to get folks to pay attention, and the promotional strategy that pays off handsomely for her clients.Her 16 books include 6 Steps to Free Publicity, Persuading on Paper, Web Site Marketing Makeover, Meatier Marketing Copy and Freelance Writing for Magazines & Newspapers, a Book of the Month Club selection.Marcia’s articles have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, TWA Ambassador, USAir Magazine and Business 2.0. For eight years running, she served as an official site reviewer for the Webby Awards and has helped judge the Inc. Magazine Small Business Web Awards.She has been featured in Success Magazine, Entrepreneur, Home Office Computing, Working Woman, Women in Business, dozens of newspapers throughout the world and four times in the Sunday Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio.Her clients range from grizzled entrepreneurs to nervous newly self-employed professionals, from software publishers and ecommerce startups to media companies, associations and independent educational programs.Marcia Yudkin holds three Ivy League degrees, including a Ph.D. in the humanities.

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      Book preview

      Strategic Marketing - Marcia Yudkin

      Introduction

      As I was organizing the chapters of this book, an email arrived from someone who said he’d been receiving my newsletter for about three years, and the time had come to hire me. When was I available for a chat about what he needed?

      The same week, I advised a client who wants to build his national reputation as a medical expert that displaying little Google ads at his web site would make him seem either unsuccessful or greedy. He agreed with me that with the reputation, the higher fees and exciting opportunities he’d have would in the long run offset the near-term loss of ad income.

      These two incidents illustrate the challenges and payoffs of marketing strategy. When you set strategy for yourself or your organization, you take actions that may provide little immediate evidence that they’re working, yet nevertheless they eventually bring you the kind of business success you wanted.

      In this book, you learn the importance of planning for what you want and don’t want to do and have in your business. Your reward: clients you enjoy, fees that handsomely reward you and energy left over to appreciate the non-business side of your life.

      Discover too the dynamics of familiarity and trust, the principles of profit and a toolkit of marketing methods that re-engineer a trickle of sales into a torrent.

      The lessons apply whether you’re a wishing-was-busier solo practitioner, the harried owner of a mid-sized business or a seat-of-your-pants marketer at a sizable organization.

      The chapters originate in a weekly column, The Marketing Minute, that I’ve published since 1998. You can sign up for a free email subscription at http://www.yudkin.com/markmin.htm. I’ve added action steps to deepen your understanding of the principles involved and how to apply them.

      Contents

      Introduction

      Part I: Shaping Your Business

      Put Aside Commodity Fears

      Commodity? No, Opportunity.

      What About Average Joe and Jane?

      Avoid the Dismal Middle

      Mr. Bean’s Business Philosophy

      Marketing a Local Business

      Building a Non-Local Clientele

      Why Mentoring Produces Focus

      Part II: Choosing Clients

      Pursue Your Ideal Clients

      Attracting the Wrong Crowd?

      Identify Futile Efforts

      Slim Down Your Client List

      Pigeonhole Yourself, Part I

      Pigeonhole Yourself, Part II

      The Snowflake Principle

      Part III: The Dynamics of Trust

      Attract Business Via Your Reputation

      Truth or Lies?

      Nothing But the Truth

      Seek Influencers

      Target Trendsetters

      Indirectly Break Through the Pack

      Non-Disclosure Agreements: Caution

      Hold Certain Things Close to Your Chest

      Confidential Clients? Here’s What to Do

      Reflections on Refunds

      You’d Better Learn About the Law

      Part IV: Strategic Sales Boosters

      Follow Up for a Competitive Edge

      Simplify Decision Making

      Cross-Selling for Success

      From One-timers to Long-timers

      Attract or Chase?

      Harness Attraction

      A Customer Question is a Gift

      Fending Off Free Advice Seekers

      Cooperate With Competitors

      Tying in With a Cause

      The Best Giveaways

      Dancing the Old Two-Step

      The Two-Step Fills Your Dance Card

      Strategically Structure Options

      Be There at the Right Time

      Strategic Surveys Get You Noticed

      Become an Octopus

      The Bigfoot Strategy

      Part V: Stay in Touch, Stay in Touch

      Repetition is Required

      Why Persistence Pays

      Repeat Those Customer Contacts!

      Why Stay in Touch, Part 1

      Why Stay in Touch, Part 2

      Make New Customers, Keep the Old

      Only Reconnect

      Reactivating Customers

      Facilitate Delayed Purchases

      Part VI: Planning Marketing Wisely

      Time to Let Go?

      Strategic Opportunity Questions

      A Plan Cuts Suffering

      Plan Positively

      Assessing the Future

      Consult Your Crystal Ball

      Some Campaigns Last and Last

      Track Your Sales

      Establish Benchmarks

      Prevent Feast or Famine

      Low-volume Marketing Ideas

      Do-It-Once Marketing

      Your By the Way Assets

      Do People Shop for What You Sell?

      Part VII: Bound for Profit

      Constraints Can Help

      How Much Does Marketing Cost?

      Raise Prices Simply

      From Free to Fee

      Why Would They Pay?

      You Can Charge for Meetings

      Perceived Value Requires a Price

      Protect Your Marketing

      What Tip Behavior Teaches

      Recommended Books

      About the Author

      Part I: Shaping Your Business

      Put Aside Commodity Fears

      Coming to a mall near you, perhaps: a franchise charging one-third of your professional service fees.

      To many service providers, this scenario gets their hearts pounding with fear. When cut-rate competitors appear, they feel their livelihood is in jeopardy. Is it?

      According to an Associated Press story, traditional massage therapists have little reason to fear as a franchise called Massage Envy opens storefronts in malls offering no-frills therapeutic massages for a low monthly fee.

      Nearly a quarter of Massage Envy’s customers had never before had a paid massage. In this way, the franchise is actually increasing the overall market for the service, noted the article, quoting a customer who would never have ventured into a day spa or a massage therapy studio.

      Likewise, the very existence of low-cost providers helps reposition massage as an affordable indulgence rather than a luxury, encouraging more frequent usage.

      Massage therapists who can demonstrate their greater experience or specialty skills (massage for athletes, pregnant women, accident victims, etc.) can most easily maintain their fees in the face of mall-ization.

      Action Steps

      * In two columns on a sheet of paper, list all the advantages and disadvantages of buying what you sell from a commodity provider. Highlight two or more of the disadvantages on the list and make those factors your differentiators so your ideal customers overlook or even enjoy your higher prices.

      * Examine your marketing copy in the light of this question: Is it crystal clear how you differ from low-priced competition? If not, revamp how you describe your company so you highlight what buyers can’t get from the dime-a-dozen crowd.

      Commodity? No, Opportunity

      It’s become a commodity–you can’t charge what you used to.

      I’ve heard this lament countless times, usually in a glum, helpless tone of voice followed by, I guess it’s time to change careers.

      If you feel that the public shops only by price for what you sell and regards suppliers as interchangeable, look again. Almost always, you’ll see deficiencies in the way the commodity is packaged and delivered. And those point toward opportunities to serve ignored needs and rise above the slide toward ever-lower rates.

      For instance, the AARP organization chewed out the cell-phone industry for making devices that are too small for folks over 50 to use and offering incomprehensible contracts and too many dead zone surprises. The company that develops a senior-friendly product and service can quickly set

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