One of the most important assets you have is your current customers. It’s much less expensive to keep your current customers and turn them into repeat customers than it is to go out and find more customers. This is not to say you should not keep marketing to find new customers, but you should do all you can to nurture the existing relationship you have with current customers in order to increase sales. Here are seven ways to achieve that. 1. Offer Early Bird Sales on New Products – When you know that you’re planning the release of a new product, tease your current customers along the way about the…

A data feed is a file that contains relevant information about all a merchant’s products and services such as: * Name * Price * Page URL * Image URL * Description * Category * And more A publisher can put the data feed on their website using specialized code to “feed” the products onto the website for their audience to purchase. Inside the code, each category is generally separated by a | (pipe). Each line of code (if you used Notepad) would look like this: Name|Price Page|URL Image|URL Description|Category|More || Use two pipes to indicate an empty field and the end of the line. You don’t have to create the…

Put simply, multi-channel marketing is getting the message out about your products and services through many different methods. The goal of multi-channel marketing is to get the information into the hands of as many of your audience as possible. How many channels you use will depend on the ways in which you sell your products as well as where your audience is located. The different ways you can market and sell products today include: * Retail * Web paged * Social media * Mobile commerce * Call centers * Catalogs (online and off) * And more… The benefits of multi-channel marketing are many, the main one being that your audience…

Outsourcing is an important part of running a business efficiently, and it can grow and become more profitable over time. After all, you don’t expect a CEO to do everything on their own; instead they have assistants and experts to do a lot of work for them. This is what makes them look amazing – their ability to pick and choose amazing experts to put on their team and motivate them to get work done. 1. Do More in Less Time – If it takes you two hours a day to go through emails that someone else could deal with, and this is especially true of customer service email, then…

There are three types of exposure available to marketers, namely “owned,” “paid” and “earned.” They are all important to the success of your business, but none is more important than earned media. Earned media is the best exposure you can hope for, and while you do not pay for it, and you cannot control it, you do earn it through your actions. Earned media is a far more trusted form of promotion than any other type of promotion because it is seen as truth. Types of Earned Media 1. Social media – Someone posts about reading your eBook and how awesome and helpful it is to them, and shares a…

Writing controversial blog posts can boost your blog numbers into the stratosphere, but sometimes not in a way that you’d like. For this reason, it’s important to properly consider the type of blog post that you want to write. You need to ensure that the topic fits neatly into your niche, that you care about it, that you hold a controversial opinion and that you can back up your reasoning with facts. Strong opinion pieces have been used in media for many years. Think back to the op-ed section of your local newspaper. Many op-ed pieces are written to provoke, to get people talking, and to bring a controversial opinion…

The best way to get strategy versus plan straight is to realize that you need to develop goals (strategy) before you can create a plan of action to reach those goals. First you come up with the strategy and goals, and then using the goals you will create the plan. They go together and you need both to be successful when marketing your business. Here’s an example: Marketing strategy: Increase email subscribers in order to market XYZ product Marketing plan: Create and promote a freebie report targeted toward a specific audience for the purposes of increasing email list subscriptions. You have to know what you want do before you can…

Many large corporations use focus groups to create new products and services. They also use focus groups to improve on products and services that they already offer. Typically someone records the responses from a variety of individuals who have agreed to participate in the research. The responses might be in the form of a group discussion, a survey filled out during and after participation or after the use of a product or service, or via one-on-one interviewing. Know the Purpose of Your Focus Group Each focus group should have a particular purpose. Knowing the purpose in advance will help you design the questions asked, as well as put focus on…

According to Pinterest demographic data, almost 70 percent of their users are women between the ages of 25 and 34, and about half of them have children. Pinterest users spend about 15 minutes using the service every single day. Pinterest users share a variety of “pins” and create pin boards or collections to share with others. The pins that get the most shares are visually pleasing and often shopping related. How Do They Use Pinterest? Men and women use Pinterest for the same reasons – to get ideas, to make wish lists or “vision boards”, and to keep track of resources they might want to look at later. But, women…

The more you learn about marketing, the better you’re going to become at it – provided you know how to take what you learn and turn it into a system. Every time you do something you will become better if you know how to evaluate success. Here’s how to create more efficient marketing systems. 1. Understand Your Audience – Never think you know your audience enough. As time moves forward your audience changes and becomes more educated. Even if your audience consists of “newbies” to whatever your niche is, the newbies of tomorrow will be more educated than the newbies of today. Keep studying them, and keep getting to know…