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If you’re a smaller residential service company, chances are you create your own fliers and marketing materials. It’s likely you create your own business cards and order your invoices and time cards from a company that also offers t-shirts, baseball caps, and embroidered name tag button-down shirts. It’s affordable. You get to have the appearance of a legitimate company and no one selling you pricey services and telling you how your message needs to sound to your clients. Certainly, these things are important for you to stay in control of your costs and your reputation.

Or is it?

If it’s all you’ve got, think again. All of those things do agree with your service van that you’re in business, but does it say, “I’m the only one who will treat you fairly and you should deal with me because I can give you the best service and product, guaranteed.”

Whether you realize it or not, the time you spend coming up with ways to cut marketing costs may very well be the slow death of your company. You may not agree, but if I’m right, ‘lone-wolf’ marketing is far more expensive than using a professional with an eye for detail and a flair for the right words and strategies.

There are many cost-saving methods of getting your message to your potential clients. This blog is dedicated to teaching small companies how to market effectively at reduced costs. Don’t get the idea, however, that you’re better off with a half-hearted, single-minded approach. No, what we advocate is that you learn new, aggressive strategies being used by professionals now with the understanding we impart to you through this blog, and have the polishing done by experts who care about your holistic success. Do what you can do well, outsource the rest.

The difference is clearly financial – but it’s more than that. Consider what Dan Kennedy teaches in No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs (NO BS): if you are in business to be a restaurant owner, caterer, pool service owner, electrician, or plumber, your services doing that are what make your business valuable. Although necessary, the time you spend marketing brings less value to your company than doing what you get paid to do. You will get more bang for your buck when you hire someone to help you bring that quality to the table. Each part of your business should be handled by the people who handle that part most effectively.

Say you’re a florist, for example. You own a brick and mortar shop on the corner and business between holidays is slow. Maybe you employ three others who do various things, like delivery, floral arrangements, and bookkeeping. Between all of your employees and yourself, you’re capable of handling large volumes of business because each can play a part in floral arrangement as well, as long as the finished product is inspected, approved, and re-arranged as necessary by the experts who know this stuff.

Stay with me here.

In another instance, an electrical service has been in business for almost two decades. You hire the electricians who go out on the job, you estimate the large projects, oversee and troubleshoot, and ultimately hold the responsibility for the job being done correctly. Say you manage a team of six, each with their own service vans. You’ve probably got an office manager and receptionist who handle the phones, scheduling, and payroll.

In each of these scenarios, each member of the team brings value to their position. Each player has a financial value in the company and a direct interest in their particular part. They get paid first. Overall company performance and income for the business owner is based on everything above that overhead.

Is the best use of company dollars to pay the delivery driver to answer the phones, or the florist to make deliveries? The best way to utilize electrical technicians isn’t to schedule team members, or do the payroll. Your company makes more when you can charge hourly for skilled work on the job, right? Of course. The right people need to be bringing the money in. It wouldn’t pay the bills to spend company money like that.

What is your dollar value per hour? What do you have to bring in for your company to show profit? If you are doing all of your own marketing, you’re not making money doing what you do best. Time is money. If marketing is what you do best, why not do that for a living? If you only promote your company with limited skill-set, and not for a living, aren’t you short-changing yourself?

There are plenty of things you can do for yourself, don’t get me wrong, but pay for the professional advice and outsource the things that may be taking away from your bottom line. Those same hours are worth more when the right people are on the right job. In the long run, you DO pay for marketing, and you may be paying far more than you can afford when it doesn’t bring in the desired results. Go through our Do-It-Yourself pages, check out our Small Business Acceleration Packages, and look at our Services page for a la carte options our company provides to augment or overhaul your current strategy. Need more information? Call or email us today and see how we can help you get the most out of your marketing dollar.

Can what you say or write about your product, service, or message really influence a response from your customer? Can you inspire a reaction?

Are you a parent? Maybe you’ve noticed a response from your child that you didn’t see coming, but later realized was a direct response to a marketing message. We’re always being incited to respond, and kids are infamously receptive. No doubt you recognize these attempts on you and your children:

• RT this
• Sugared cereal on child’s level at grocery store
• Buy one, get 1/2 off of the next item
• Sign here for additional warranty (authorizing additional charge)

How Can This Work For You?

This type of marketing has been around since marketing began, but few small businesses take advantage of this tool for add on sales. It’s surprising how often we’re not encouraging a reaction. Not every response from your customer will be a sale, this time, but every attempt you make at a dialog is an investment successful companies know will eventually return positive results. So what responses would you like to encourage?

• Do you want your message to ‘go viral?’
• Do you want comments and feedback?
• Do you want your potential customer to purchase?
• Are you working on a larger sale from a previous customer?
• Are you testing an offer to check the response rate?
• Do you want more customers?

All these questions and many more can be answered by simply asking the uncomfortable. And actually, success often requires taking your comfortable self out of your comfort zone and doing the uncomfortable. In this case, I want you to think about what it is you want your reader, potential client, or previous customer to do, and then go about the business of encouraging that response.

That’s actually as simple as adding text to the bottom of your email campaign, newsletter, blog, or direct mail. You know the average, “contact us today,” message, (which is important because it really needs to be instructed), but how can you specifically target the response you’re after?

First of all, you’ll need to make sure your potential client enjoyed hearing from you. Are you adding tidbits to your regular messages that they enjoy? Is your tone pleasant, and do you offer what your readers are after? Do you offer a free anything? (freebies = good)

Once you’re convinced that your customer is looking forward to hearing from you, it’s reasonably certain that you’re conditioning that response. You must be doing something right. How would you ever know? You’re going to have to ask and use some tracking to see if your investment is yielding favorable results. In my next post I’ll go over some simple ways that you can influence customer response to find out information, add to your client list, and sell your product or service to an otherwise lethargic customer.

How many times have you received the neighbor’s mail, or direct mail advertisements that had absolutely nothing to do with your interests or needs? With mail so easy to get wrong, why not make sure your direct mail campaign hits the nail on the head? It’s time to clean up your list.

You may think it doesn’t matter so much, after all, how much direct mail comes to ‘Occupant,’ anyway? Depending on your market, it may not matter at all. But I would be willing to bet you that your campaign would fare much better if you knew that what you were promoting was going to people who could actually use your promotion.

• Take a good look at your holiday promotion lists, and start vetting:
• Businesses no longer operating
• Names and addresses that have not responded in the last 4 promotions
• Direct competition (I mean, why bother spending money on them?)

Replace those with:

• New businesses in the same area
• New addresses that didn’t exist before due to construction
• Customers you know you can serve. Ask yourself who you’ve thought about including but have neglected to reach.

Now go forward and let the world know what you do is important to them, and that you’ve got them on your mind this holiday season. Happy Holidays!

Photo Credit: florian on Flickr

Related Posts:
What’s Your Holiday Offer?
Five Search Marketing Tips For The Holidays
Is Your Customer Database Up to Date?

If you notice that things look a little off on this site today, that would be because we’re in the middle of site maintenance and a remodel. We’re kicking it up a notch – fixing some behind-the-scene problems we’re having with our theme, improving the design, adding new service offerings and a portfolio of our team’s work.

Be sure to check back soon or better yet, subscribe to our blog’s feed to see the new and improved Zero To Sixty Marketing Web site.

MacroMosquito by Wendy on Flickr

Last weekend, on a routine check of our copy productivity, Shari and I were going over analytics and realized that an unusually high number of republishing had occurred on a lesser known article I’d submitted to Ezines before Christmas.

We had been supplying content for our pet project on http://educationalhobbiesblog.com, and bringing awareness to our work through our favorite article directory, EzineArticles.com. One thing we enjoy about that medium is the ability to offer our work publicly, and then retain the credit for researching and writing the piece when it’s republished by another content provider, whether news magazine or blog site. It’s good for our company to have our names associated with our published works, and this is one of the methods we offer our customers who are looking for blog and website traffic building through social media. Many companies don’t have the time to market their expertise through copy the way we can for them.

Some submissions are more effective than others, and we learn from each scenario what better to do next time, and repeat effective strategies. I believe that’s called business marketing! We always walk away with information, one way or another. We sure learned a thing or two this past weekend.

Although several months had passed, and we were well overdue for our quarterly check, we decided to check up on the articles and see if they had been published elsewhere. Not expecting much due to our more pressing projects this first quarter, we were pretty amazed to find it had been republished 238 times. That’s darn good for a pre-Christmas article discussing the buying trends of remote control hobbies! It didn’t make sense, and it didn’t take long to figure out why.

Apparently a guy by the name of Ronald Eapen decided to take my article, slough off the title, use my topic sentence as the new title, and republish my article under his name, taking all the credit for himself. This man then superlinked the material to his easy money making scheme which was totally content unrelated. 238 times he had submitted that article to every known reputable and otherwise article directory and linked back to a page containing otherwise unrelated content and offered yet another link to his easy money scheme.

Every article was heavily endowed with every social bookmarking plugin and affiliate link you could think of. And he’s been making money off my content for the past three months, giving me no credit or kickback for my word-for-word duplication.

People, I clearly copyrighted that work under Zero To Sixty Marketing!

We spent several hours tracking my article from directory to directory, demanding credit and compensation. We also learned who we will consider credible article submission directories for the future! After sending him personal comments on every article that was set up for comments, I remembered we had a friend in the copyright infringement business. Its clearly time to talk to him!

GoArticles promptly removed the content and sent us email confirmation. That was pretty cool. Soon we’ll know who else was willing to comply with copyright law.

Long and short of it, make sure you are being vigilant about protecting your work. It’s not bad to have your work republished all over, that’s pretty much the goal when you’re building you’re reputation. Thing is, you’re reputation is shot when a disreputable person uses it for spamming and the promise of easy money for his customers. If I hadn’t copyrighted my work like this:

Copyright 2009, Zero To Sixty Marketing, LLC, Susan Hamilton
All Rights Reserved

or even just used the word Copyright, the year, and name, I wouldn’t have had the legal right to demand that my name be associated with my work, my work remain unchanged, and compensation for monies earned. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever see a dime. This was small potatoes. But he had everything in place to be well on his way to monetizing my work under his name. Totally uncool.

To recap: beware of bloodsucking plagiarists.

Photo Credit: Wendy on Flickr

Related Article: One Minute With Plagiarism

It is a cold and blustery Saturday morning, so it is a good time to catch up on some of the things I’ve been meaning to get done. One such item is catching up on reading through a few of the trade publications that came in this week’s mail.

As I was thumbing through one particular publication something familiar struck me. On a recent trip to somewhere we needed to go, my wife and partner commented about a billboard advertisement. It created a little conversation about how much has changed in the past few weeks, but after looking through a few trade publications and magazines it suddenly sparked an important thought.

Is it Time-Sensitive?

Many messages we wish to convey to our customers are time-sensitive. Our business environment is always changing and lately it changes with each blink of an eye. Let’s look at the one that sparked this particular post…gasoline prices.

Current Events are … Current!

The billboard and the ads in the magazines were centered on gasoline prices being at all time highs. In a print media there is a lead time between when the ad is conceived and when it is presented to the consumer. The same thing goes for billboards.

Factor In Lag Time For Print Media

In this particular case, both are touting the high price of gasoline. Although this was a major concern just a few weeks ago, in the blink of an eye prices are nearing record lows by comparison. Gas was over four dollars a gallon; now it is just under two dollars (in Neenah, Wisconsin) so the message has lost a great portion of its intended impact. Sure, it serves as a reminder of what the prices were, but for the most part consumers live in the present. If the message wasn’t written to be a reminder, it too will lose its impact towards the market it was intended to reach.

Timing is everything. Remember that print media of any kind has a lag factor associated with it. Broadcast media is nearly instant. New media (Twitter, Facebook, all forms of social media) message can be updated with just a few keystrokes or even by cell phone. Make sure you consider the timeliness of your message before selecting your media venue.

We’re not your typical marketing company, so maybe it makes sense that we’re launching a Web site backwards … publishing it first, finishing it later. Sometimes you just “gotta’ do what you gotta’ do!”

We launched Zero To Sixty Marketing LLC with projects in-hand. No time to waste on start-up tasks … it was full-speed ahead right out of the starting gate!

Who or What is Zero To Sixty Marketing, anyway?

We’re a team of independent business owners, working together to help small and medium-sized businesses attract more customers. You might think of us as a virtual marketing firm. (You may as well … that’s what we’re calling ourselves!)

Why Virtual?

There are two main reasons we chose a virtual business model.

1. It allows us to offer you affordable prices. We have less overhead, so we pass our savings on to you. In fact, you get the power of a working with an agency, but at freelance rates.
2. Every last one of us are free spirits and (don’t let this scare you, but) we do our best creative thinking and planning outside of an office!

We’re also a cohesive team. We come together for brainstorming and strategizing. You just can’t do that stuff alone! Then we go our separate ways to get the work done.

It works. It’s efficient. And you get the best of both worlds.

In the days to come, we’ll introduce each of our team members, reveal a few details about our plans, and begin posting useful articles to this blog. We’ll also be building the remainder of this site behind the scenes. If any of this sounds interesting or helpful to you, we hope you’ll subscribe to and/or bookmark this blog.