May 23 2009
Mirror Mirror on the wall
Mirror, Mirror on the wall,
What kind of marketer is coming to call?
The way you go about marketing yourself, and your products, will have a big impact on the way your customers, and potential customers, will view you.
If you come over with a brash, agressive sales pitch, your customers will, rightly or wrongly, assume that you are brash and pushy too. Likewise if you are too timid and appologetic with your marketing, your customers will assume that you are too.
So, you need to decide what kind of image do you want to convey to your customers, and what kind of image are you actually conveying with your marketing material? If you are using a pre-formatted sales copy, then you are stuck with the company image – which is fine if that is the image you feel is appropriate to you, but disasterous if you do not. Remember, you may respond well to one style of marketing, but this may not be the image you wish to project.
Using your own material will give you far more control over what you are saying, and how you are saying it – plus it will help you differentiate yourself from other people promoting the same company – branding YOU and not the COMPANY ie.
Now you do not need to throw away everything that you have been given, often the material will contain useful information and if nothing else will act as a clue to what the company sees as its best selling points. Use the material as a starting point, and adapt it to suit you and your marketing methods. If the company has a long sales page and you are promoting it on Traffic Exchanges, especially one like Traffic-Splash, where your actual exposure is going to be a few seconds if you are lucky, then take 2 or 3 key points (or things that make the company/product stand out) and Highlight them in a splash page. If you do not know how to make splash pages, or do not have the time, then get someone to do it for you. If you want a free splashpage maker, with hosting and built in tracker, the ADKreator is a great solution. Alternatively consider an independent Web Design provider, such as HawkinzWeb Designs
Once you have identified your style, adapt it to the medium you are going to be promoting in:-
if you are sending out emails, you want to have a snappy, attention grabbing subject line that is still accurate (nothing more frustrating than mis-leading subject lines) Put the Key point you want to emphasise in the first paragraph.
if you are promoting on Traffic Exchanges or Paid to Read/Click then the simple fact of life is that most people will be viewing several pages at once, so you need again to get their attention FAST, splash pages are good for this – they are short and to the point. You can use either as a lead capture page, or as a lead-in page to your main sales page. Your initial page needs to be attention grabbing and ‘different’ to the run-of-the-mill pages they normally see.
Remember YOU are are what your customers SEE on the internet, so make sure your IMAGE says what you want it to be saying.