Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Are You Too Busy To Advertise Your Business?

By Ann Rusnak

Time management plays a critical role in the survival and success of your business. Managing your time effectively makes it easier for you to consistently market your business...and generate the profits essential for growth.

Everything you do to make your target audience aware of your product or service is marketing. You must convince your target market that you have what they want or need. You want to develop a strategy where all activities follow the path of least resistance for closing the sale.

With the daily grind of routine business operations, entrepreneurs put marketing on the back burner.

Manage Your Time for Better Marketing and Sales using These 5 Strategies:

1. Clearly define your target market. Identify your ideal client, what he or she looks like and acts like. Write down their description in full detail. This is time well spent because it will simplify your marketing efforts.

2. The sales funnel is a great tool in effectively using your marketing time. Comparing the sales process to a funnel, a prospect starts at the top of the funnel (the widest part) and then works through a system to reach the narrow part where they become a customer. By using the sales funnel, you can gauge your marketing activities and quantify your prospects at each stage of the process. Create your sales funnel and define the activities needed to keep it full.

3. Using the law of accumulation, tiny efforts start slow but compound to growth and momentum.

Set aside just 15 minutes a day for activities that will keep your sales funnel full. In a week, you'll invest one hour and fifteen minutes on marketing. In a month, you will invest five strong hours to marketing your business. A little time every day will produce great results. Over a period of months, you will consistently add to your sales funnel and form a large body of work.

4. Another strategy to keep the sales funnel full is follow up, it is integral to sales functions and regular scheduled attention.

5. Not all marketing actions are created equal. Do the 20% that brings the greatest results. When you consistently devote time to market your business, you begin to discover patterns. Some will produce better results with less effort and time than other activities. Blocking 30 minutes every week to review your marketing efforts can speed passage through your sales funnel.

NOTE: Don't confuse advertising with marketing. Your marketing plan should include some advertising. Marketing discovers what your client wants and you give it to them...provided it doesn't fall into the realm of illegal; immoral; or fattening!

Your marketing reviews should consist of tracking, testing, and reviewing what works best for your business.

Let's imaging that you spent 30 minutes a week on one activity and 30 minutes on something else, then you tracked your results. Say, you discover one of these produces 20% more sales, which should you devote your marketing time to?

Don't let "busyness" take over and squeeze out your time for marketing your business. Focus on your top marketing activities each week to keeping your sales funnel full and improve your bottom line. - 16890

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