Entrepreneurship Tips — Marketing

You cannot grow a company without some investment in sales and/or marketing. The question is really your time versus capital and which would generate the best results (ROI, speed, quality of leads, etc.).  If your business model and products are sound, you should likely raise some capital, as it will be needed for more than marketing.  It is nearly impossible to build a significant business without some capital and/or sweat equity invested.  You cannot create something out of nothing.Social media allows unpaid marketing and is the most obvious strategy. This can be time-consuming but is also rapid to measure and...

What gets most early-stage companies in trouble is the areas that they just don't understand, that they don't know enough about.  In other words, the biggest problem is that they don't know what they don't know.  Nearly every failed company will say they ran out of cash, couldn't raise enough capital, or just did not get the sales they expected quickly enough. But these situations are generally the effect, not the cause. Generally speaking,  other problems that the company or entrepreneur does not understand very well are usually the root cause. This situation is actually far more dangerous than just...

10 Keys To Copy That Sells! By Alexandria K. Brown, "The E-zine Queen" Whether you're selling a product or service, the 10 tips below are your keys to writing great copy that communicates and persuades ... to get results! These guidelines can apply to Web copy, e-mail, sales letters, brochures, direct mail, and more. As long as your goal is to elicit a reaction from your reader, you've come to the right place.1. Be reader-centered, not writer-centered.Many ads, brochures, and Websites talk endlessly on and on about how great their products and companies are. Hello? Customer, anyone? Think of your...

Using Competitive Landscape Maps as a Positioning Tool Developing a Competitive Landscape Map ("CLM") is a very important early step in developing your market entry strategy and getting other people to understand it. There may be several of these maps (see samples below) charting different market variables that are significant to customers in that market. There should almost always be one that uses quality and price as the X and Y-axis. Additional maps will look at other key dimensions, significant in that space to customers, or dimensions may be major product differences. Sufficient competitive intelligence should be done on each...

How to Increase Sales Without Spending More Ask marketing people what a company should do to increase sales, and most of them will probably say that you've got to spend more money on advertising. Or they'll come up with equally expensive, complicated strategies that they think will capture new prospects. However, the reality is that very few companies obtain really good conversion results from prospect names they have already generated.  Most of those leads go to waste. The conclusion is inescapable: the route to dramatically improved sales is properly optimizing your marketing and sales process. What usually happens within a...