Archive | Strategies

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Everything You’ve Ever Learned About Marketing Is Wrong

Posted on 05 September 2009 by Jerry Suhrstedt

By Rich Harshaw

Everything you’ve ever learned about marketing and advertising is WRONG. Everything you’ve ever heard everything you’ve ever tried, everything you’ve ever done, it’s all WRONG.

Hello, my name is Rich Harshaw; I’m the CEO of Y2Marketing, the nation’s leading marketing consulting and fulfillment agency. What I want to do in this series of articles is teach you a system for innovating and marketing your company to a point that it’s instantly evident that you’re the obvious choice to do business with. I want to show you how to make those advantages of doing business with your company so obvious to your prospects and customers that they quickly and easily draw this one simple conclusion: “I would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone else but you…regardless of price.”

Let’s say that you own a moving company… and you spend $3,000 a month in the Yellow Pages for a full-page ad, and that ad generates an average of 70 calls per month. Is that good? Is that bad? Well, it depends….but, let me ask you this: What if you could take that same full page ad that costs $3,000 a month, and by just changing what it says, and how it says it–now, instead of getting 70 calls a month, you could generate an average of 955 calls a month…and the average quality of the prospect was quantifiably BETTER? Let’s say you owned that moving company. Would you be excited about that? 955 better qualified calls a month instead of 70? If not, we need to take your pulse and see if you are ALIVE! That’s what’s called getting more results–making more money–for the same time, the same money, and the same effort spent.

Or let’s say you’re the CEO of an up and coming bank that is trying to get a stronger foothold into the small business loan market. Let’s say you’ve got 22 retail locations supported by $370,000 a month in total marketing and advertising expenses for the small business loan program, including heavy telemarketing, direct mail, newspaper, and some radio and television…. as well as various brochures and collateral at each sales office. What if you’re that CEO, and despite spending a fortune on advertising and marketing, your efforts to generate leads and subsequently close loans are losing money and is actually getting worse as time goes by?

What if you could change the message being communicated in your marketing and advertising and in all of those brochures and other collateral materials, and by doing so you could increase the number of leads generated by 465%, increase the quality of those leads, and therefore increase your closing ratio from a paltry 8% to a healthy 31%? Not by changing the amount of money being spent on the program, not by hiring some expensive celebrity to say he gets his loans from you, not by doing anything substantially different than you’re doing now…. Just by changing what you’re saying in your marketing so that it WORKS BETTER.

Whether you spend $3,000 a month, $370,000 a month, or $3,000,000 a month on marketing, I’m going to show you how to use the “Monopolize Your Marketplace” system to leverage what you’re already doing and get those kinds of results for YOUR business by changing the way you do all of your marketing and advertising, including advertisements in all media, brochures, websites, trade shows, signage and everything else. I’m not talking about radical changes that are “creative” or strange or weird or anything else.

The process for getting these kinds of results is very systematic, and anyone with a strong business background can figure it out. But simply put, my purpose is to show you how to change your marketing and advertising, and allow you to leverage your marketing momentum. Just like the moving company and the bank in the examples, and just like the dozens of examples I’m going to give you in this series of articles. The result is you make more money for the same time, money, and effort expended.

Most companies simply don’t know how to do this. Some companies know their marketing could use some help and that it’s under leveraged, and as a result, they’re looking for solutions. Maybe that’s you. But there’s a larger group, a group that doesn’t really understand the untapped potential that lies in their marketing. They spend some money on marketing or advertising, get some results, make some money, and then decide that whatever results they’re getting are probably about as good as it gets… and figure that there’s not much they can do about it.

They figure that the 70 calls a month on the $3,000 ad is about what you ought to get for a $3,000 ad; they never imagined that 955 calls were even possible. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you just understand what you’re going to learn on this program, if you understand how to run what we call the marketing equation on a consistent basis, then you’ll always get predictable, consistent, and inevitably huge results every time you do anything called “marketing.”

The system is based on unchanging principles of human nature that dictate that people always want to make the best buying decision possible and therefore marketing’s job–your job–is NOT to YAK incessantly about how great you are or how low your prices are–but rather, your job is to simply facilitate the prospect’s decision making process, and allow them to feel like they’re in CONTROL of the decision, based on having enough quantity and quality of information. The system is truly a breakthrough in marketing and advertising, yet it’s simple and easy to understand. We have thousands of client successes to prove that it works literally every time it’s implemented, regardless of what kind of business or industry you’re in.

We compete head to head with marketing consultancies and large traditional advertising agencies who grub money from their clients with no accountability for results. These agencies hate our guts because we expose their ineptitude and reveal our results-getting processes to our clients so they can evaluate for themselves… just like we’re going to do on this program… and then we show them step-by-step how to make more money every time they run an ad, produce a brochure, create a website, show up at a trade show, send a sales person out in the field, or any other sales-generating activities. The ad agencies hate us so bad because we threaten their very existence; they even call us the “anti-agency.”

So how can I say that everything you’ve ever learned is WRONG? How can I accuse you, without ever having met you, of leaving huge untapped profits on the table that are easily and readily available just by doing what I’m about to share with you? How can I say, in essence, that you don’t know what you’re talking about marketing-wise–even given the fact that there’s a good chance that you’ve been doing marketing for 10 or 20 or 40 years–and you’ve been getting what most people would consider good results that whole time?

Well, I’m not going to answer that question right now….in fact, I’m going to let you answer that question for yourself as you read this series of articles; If I do my job, then I think that answer will become self-evident. But I’ll make you a promise right now: This is not hype, it’s not the same old stuff you’ve heard a million times repackaged…even though that’s what all the so-called marketing gurus and ad agencies would like for you to think. And even if you do think it’s the same old stuff, I’m going to give you some evaluations later on to prove to you, quantifiably, that it isn’t. Anybody who’s claiming we’re using the same old formulas and processes should be producing marketing and advertising that looks like ours does, works like ours does, and most importantly, makes money like ours does. They should have a specified set of rules and formulas and strategies that can systematically be applied to any kind of business across the board. They should provide a set of evaluations that will allow anyone to instantly and objectively judge and rate their own marketing and predict the success of a marketing campaign before spending any money. And guess what? Nobody does. That’s right, nobody. This information is exactly what you’ve needed and been looking for to take your business to the next level of profitability and success.

Rich Harshaw is the founder of the Monopolize Your Marketplace system and CEO of Y2Marketing Business Marketing Strategies

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Marketing Strategy – College Textbook

Posted on 27 August 2009 by Jerry Suhrstedt

When creating a formal, written marketing plan, your marketing strategy will become the meat & potatoes from which you will generate new business without wasting precious capital.  Marketing strategy is the process that allows your organization to use its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. While marketing strategy should be centered on the key concept that customer satisfaction is the main goal.

Key to Your General Corporate Strategy

Marketing strategy is a method of focusing your company’s energies and resources on a course of action which will lead to sales growth and dominance of a targeted market niche. A marketing strategy combines product development, promotion, distribution, pricing, relationship management and other elements; identifies the firm’s marketing goals, and explains how they will be achieved, ideally within a given timeframe.

Marketing strategy determines your target market segments, positioning, marketing mix, and allocation of resources whether it be capital or human. It is most effective when it is an integral component of overall company strategy, defining how your organization will successfully engage customers, prospects, and competitors in your particular market.

Corporate business plan strategies, corporate missions, and corporate goals.  As your customer constitutes the source of your firms’ revenue, marketing strategy is closely linked with the entire sales process.

Below is some basic theory to chew on.

  • Target Audience
  • Proposition/Key Element
  • Implementation
  • Tactics and actions

A marketing strategy should serve as the foundation of a marketing plan. A marketing plan contains a set of specific actions required to successfully implement a marketing strategy and helps to paint a picture for which your target audience is, and how to communicate a message that they want to hear.

Here’s an example of a marketing strategy: “Use a low cost product to attract prospects. Once our company, via our low cost product, has established a relationship with prospect, our organization will begin to sell additional, higher-margin products and services that enhance the prospect’s interaction with the low-cost product or service.”  Walmart would be a great example of this strategy.  Once they get you in the door with “advertised loss leaders”, they then introduce to the consumer higher margin products.

A strategy consists of a well thought out series of tactics, i.e. advertising, public relations, and referrals to make a marketing plan effective and actually generate results. Marketing strategies serve as the fundamental foundation of marketing plans designed to fill market needs and reach marketing objectives. Plans and objectives are generally tested for measurable results in order to achieve overall goals.

A marketing strategy integrates an company’s marketing goals, policies, and action plans (tactics) into a comprehensive whole. Similarly, the various strands of the strategy, which might include advertising, channel marketing, internet marketing, promotion and public relations can be orchestrated.  Many companies flow a strategy throughout an organization, by creating strategy tactics (advertising, public relations, referrals) that then become strategy goals for the next level. Each level is expected to take that strategy goal and develop a set of tactics to achieve that goal. This is why it is very important to create each strategy goal measurable, utilizing a given set of metrics.

Types of Strategies

Marketing strategies may differ depending on the unique situation of the individual business. However there are a number of ways of categorizing some generic strategies. A brief description of the most common categorizing schemes is presented below:

Strategies based on market dominance – In this scheme, firms are classified based on their market share or dominance of an industry. Typically there are three types of market dominance strategies:

  • Leader
  • Challenger
  • Follower
  • Product differentiation
  • Market segmentation

Innovation strategies – This deals with the firm’s rate of the new product development and business model innovation.  It asks whether the company is on the cutting edge of technology and business innovation.

There are three types of Innovation Strategies:

  • Pioneers
  • Close followers
  • Late followers

Growth strategies – In this scheme we ask the question, “How should the firm grow?”.  There are a number of different ways of answering that question, but the most common gives four answers:

  • Horizontal integration
  • Vertical integration
  • Diversification
  • Intensification

Believe it or not, when it comes to Marketing Strategies we have not even scratched the surface but what we have mentioned are some basics that are most commonly used.  Most of our information was compiled from severals sources including Wikipedia from which you can find a plethora of “college textbook” marketing concepts.

While it is good to read and understand these fundamental concepts, at Heavy Guerrilla we feel that a more practical, easy-to-understand approach actually produces better results.

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How Will You Grow Your Small Business This Year, This Month, Starting Today?

Posted on 26 August 2009 by Jerry Suhrstedt

Get to know the Heavy Guerrilla System.

The Heavy Guerrilla Marketing System – A step-by-step self guided road map for creating the ultimate small business marketing system.  Follow our system and you can create a powerful marketing plan that brings stunning marketing results.

Heavy Guerrilla Marketing Coaching is tailored to meet the needs of any size business or professional services provider. Services include complete one on one, personalized Heavy Guerrilla Marketing Coaching, Heavy Guerrilla Digital Technology Coaching, Heavy Guerrilla Power Marketing Groups, and individual Heavy Guerrilla Distance Coaching.

Heavy Guerrilla Small Business Workshops are available with Jerry Suhrstedt available to present small business marketing workshops, seminars and keynotes to groups and associations. Jerry has over 22 years experience in advanced marketing strategies, and a true sixth sense for what your business needs.

Heavy Guerrilla marketing brings a wealth of expertise with marketing systems for any industry, with in-depth experience in:

  • Residential Home Building
  • Residential Remodeling
  • Sporting Goods
  • Apparel & Soft goods
  • Inline Skate Market
  • Roller Skate Market
  • Roller Rink Industry
  • Ice Speedskating
  • Real Estate
  • Automobile Industry
  • Manufacturing
  • New Product Branding & Launch
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