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Business Development Ideas
from JMB Communications
JMB has been formulating and executing highly effective and efficient marketing communications, PR, and Web content programs and strategies for high-profile companies since 1990. Our top six consultants bring you more than 120 years of collective marketing experience and expertise. Regardless of the size of your budget or the scope of your objectives, we can help you get where you want to go. Call us at 1-508-830-3456; you'll quickly find that it will pay you to do business with JMB....
Despite the fact that the stock market may be fitfully starting to turn around, promotional budgets are still very conservative. Nonetheless, here are a few ideas for inexpensively promoting your business to both current and prospective customers:
1. Magazine Articles. Many magazines have been hit hard by two+ years of low advertising budgets. If you have any advertising dollars at all, NOW is the time to re-launch ad placements -- for two very good reasons. (We'll get to magazine articles in a second.)
First, the primary consequence of good advertising can be increased "mindshare" over time in an expanding market -- always a desirable objective.
Second and equally important, it's easier to get the attention of editors if you're an advertiser -- especially now, when some very good magazines are still struggling. See where in their editorial calendars your stories serve their editorial needs. Offer suggestions; the editors may well be more receptive than you expect. If you have information or photography that can help the magazine tell a story it plans to tell anyway, you're doing them a favor by getting in touch.
If the magazine accepts submitted articles, go that route -- but remember to orient the article to the magazine's readers, giving them information that can help them operate more effectively, more efficiently, and with better productivity and/or quality. We continue to write directly for three magazines and we create a significant number of magazine articles every year directly on behalf of clients. Why not try it?
2. Trade Show Promotions. We're seeing a return to "high profile" trade show marketing especially by companies that have been relatively passive in recent years. Again, the objective is mindshare in an expanding market. Example: one client gave away a Vespa motor scooter each day for three consecutive days at a California show, getting enormous attention for its breakthrough new semiconductor fabrication products. We did sales promotion for the giveaways and we're doing the literature hierarchy for the new products. Although business travel is still down, Trade Shows that are within several hundred miles of related businesses are getting good attendance. They continue to be a great place for marketing products particularly if you can sell productivity as a key benefit. JMB can help you get attention for your products in show preview magazines, on the trade show floor, in post-show roundups, and through well-written, customer-focused followup mailings to prospects and customers.
3. Customer-focused books. A high-profile investment manager client of ours who has seen everything in his 35-year career decided -- right in the middle of this financial market tumult -- to write about how people can better manage their investment strategies no matter what the markets are doing. Unlike TV's financial talking heads, my client has been walking the walk, not just talking the talk. As a long-time reporter focused on his objectives, I'm helping to organize the book as well as editing and polishing it and searching for a good literary agent. How can YOU help your customers, clients, or patients? The answers might just be something you can package as a marketable product.
4. To-the-point Email Customer Newsletters. Snail-mail newsletters work very well but they are expensive to produce and mail, and HTML email often arrives unintelligible. By contrast, text emails focused on helping customers achieve their objectives are well received. If you don't have a customer email list, enlist the help of your staff or sales people to establish one; such newsletters work. Include hyperlinks to relevant articles on your website, and you can merchandise useful information -- and your abilities -- to a receptive audience. (We know how to do these right, so call us when you want results.)
5. Meaty Information on Your Website. Today, websites should do more than simply describe features and benefits. They should be a place where customers / prospects can interact with information that will help them be more productive with your products or services. They should answer support questions, for example -- quickly and intelligibly. We strategize / write / edit Web content and can help you respond better to your customers.
6. Customer Case Studies / Testimonials. We always advocate these for one very simple reason -- customers are your best sales people. In many of the magazine articles we write, customers talk about how certain products enable them to achieve better results and/or better productivity/profits. Standalone customer testimonials let customers tell prospects why they should buy your products. We always look for metrics like faster time to market, reduced waste, reduced energy/water consumption, etc., and we try to specifically quantify those metrics. You can use testimonials on your website, print them for use as preapproach vehicles, leave-behinds, or mail response pieces, or you can use them in ads or as part of your own magazine articles. We've done thousands of these over the last 30 years; let us do yours!
7. More on Leveraging Customer Email: Customers welcome email which brings them information that makes it easier for them to do their jobs. Many customers login to their office email accounts at home, at night, after leaving the craziness of the day, which gives them a bit more time to focus on things that help them. Concisely written, useful information that's devoid of hype and fluff is valued. What info will help your customers, clients, prospects, or patients? Package it periodically and give it to them! When you have new products or services, sell the productivity increases or operating cost decreases or convenience or simple creature comforts those products deliver -- and do it by email in addition to the normal routes. It works.
8. Print Newsletter BRCs: Oddly enough, our objective is always to get FEW BRC (Business Reply Card) replies to print newsletters -- and here's why. First...we always include Business Reply Cards with print newsletters, to enable recipients to request info on specific featured items. We also provide email and Web addresses so they can respond that way, for faster access to answers. And we supply phone numbers. It's a matter of "interest escalation" -- if what you're selling (and what we're writing) is hot enough, they'll toss the BRCs and call or email you for more info. We just give them the options. You know just as well as we do that you must make it as easy as possible for people to do business with you. Just seeing a BRC with your newsletter makes readers think in terms of responding. Offer them benefits -- or tangible, useful items -- and they will...preferably in a hurry, by email or phone.
9. A Different Angle on Testimonials: A client we spoke to recently said that one of his clients told him, "You guys are great. I wish I had heard of you a long time ago." (Our job is to get your message to prospects like that.) Put your sales people in "marketing/PR mode": when somebody tells them how great your company is, harvest that attitude and leverage it. You need NOT ask them if you can interview them for a full-blown 2000-word case study or testimonial -- perhaps a paragraph with the "kernel" of their thoughts will do it for you. But DO leverage it. As always, prospects today rely on what their contemporaries recommend far more than on what YOU say about your products. Let your customers do more of your selling....
10. CALL JMB Communications at 1-508-830-3456. Isn't it time we helped YOU?
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