BroadVision Marketing Blog

Guest Blogger: Ann Mullen

You have a product you want to sell. Putting it out on the street is not going to get it sold unless you are an ice cream man in the middle of July. Creating a website and writing blogs and more blogs about it aren’t going to get it sold either.

So if you have tried these methods without success or if you want to start selling your product, buckle up for a ride to your Target Market (no, not that Target).

Target market? What's that?

Your target market is the specific group of consumers that you want to aim your product or service towards. Don’t mind the preposition at the end of that sentence or the man behind the curtain.

Speaking of curtains, let’s say you want to sell curtains and draperies for fancy high-end living rooms. If you take your products to a gun store where people named Bubba and Billy Bob hang out, you have gone to the wrong target market. If you put your blog in this niche, you probably won’t get any bites either. You have to decide who you want to sell to.

Topics: target marketing, Jaco Grobbelaar BroadVision Marketing Petaluma CA, Marketing Principles

Today's marketing news comes from three completely different sources, but each has a good suggestion. Harvard Business review asks companies to decide what the point of their company is. After all, how can you brand and market a company without this information.

Manta, whose mini-articles are emailed to me daily suggested you check out Brandify.com to see how to use your branding, after you have a clue about the point of your company.

Topics: Marketing News, Jaco Grobbelaar BroadVision Marketing Petaluma CA, Social Media, Marketing Principles

I have been stumbling over the words “internal”, "inbound" and “outbound” for the last few weeks and it seemed that no one could explain why. I have finally figured this mystery out.

There are “internal, inbound and outbound links" and “inbound and outbound marketing”. Links and marketing are entirely different things with the some of the same words just made to trip people up.

Here are the tricks: Links refer to sites that are not on the current blog post. Marketing is about how we send out the message that we have a product or service for sale.

Internal, inbound and outbound links refer to links that are attached to a blog post.

• "Internal links" are links that go from one of your website pages to another of your own website pages. This week I learned that each blog post is a website page and you are more than welcome to link your current blog post to previous ones that are written along the same lines. You can also link to pages that tell about your website, your services, your contact information, in fact anything at all having to do with your website.

Topics: outbound marketing, inbound links, internal links, internal marketing, outbound links, Marketing Principles

by Robert Middleton, owner of Action Plan Marketing and Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing

Even after you've developed the foundation of your marketing, which includes understanding the game, maintaining the ideal marketing mindset, creating a powerful marketing message, materials, and strategies, you have one more important step towards marketing success.

And this step is creating a marketing action plan. You might think of this as a marketing blueprint, much like an architectural blueprint. This action plan is your step-by-step guide in implementing your marketing strategies.

Topics: Social Media

by Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing and Robert Middleton, owner of Action Plan Marketing

Once you are armed with the previously blogged marketing principles, you are ready to choose marketing strategies or activities that get your message out into the world and in front of prospective clients.

Let's revisit Marketing Ball. The marketing strategies you employ depend on where your prospects are located on the Marketing Ball model. Remember that the purpose is to move them around the bases. First are marketing activities to get prospects onto first base.

From stranger to affiliation to attention

Your first step in moving from home base to first is developing affiliations with those who could be possible clients. An affiliation is a connection between people. If you belong to an association or organization, you have an affiliation. If you went to the same college, you have an affiliation. If you belong to a church, you have an affiliation with all the other members.

Topics: Jaco Grobbelaar BroadVision Marketing Petaluma CA, Marketing Plan, Marketing strategy

by Robert Middleton, owner of Action Plan Marketing and Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing

Marketing actually has a language just like the game of baseball has a language. And the purpose of this language is to get attention, generate interest and motivate people to take action to find out more about our services.

If you understand this language and speak it fluently, you'll be more successful at moving prospects around the bases of Marketing Ball and ultimately turning them into clients.

The language of marketing is based on what we call "Marketing Syntax." Syntax is the order of things. Syntax creates meaning. For instance, the order of letters in a word give that word meaning and the order of words in a sentence give that sentence meaning.

We also discovered that the order in which you present marketing ideas determines the meaning the listener attaches to your message. In other words, if you deliver your marketing message in a certain order using marketing syntax, you'll get more attention and interest than if you use a different order.

Topics: Marketing Plan, BroadVision Marketing Petaluma CA, marketing ball game

by Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing and Robert Middleton, owner of Action Plan Marketing

If marketing is a struggle for professionals, it's not only because they don't understand the game of marketing, but also because they have a poor attitude about it. And this attitude, or what we prefer to call mindset, colors our approach to marketing and tends to result in our avoiding most marketing activities.

A marketing mindset is how we think about marketing. It's our attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, expectations, fears, fixed positions, assumptions, and limitations. You could say that our marketing mindset is the "water that we swim in."

The mindset affects us profoundly, but we don't see it because it's so close to us. Our actions are shaped by what we focus on, what we believe, what we think and what we assume. And if these beliefs, thoughts and assumptions are negative, we see marketing as something bad, something to be avoided.

Topics: BroadVision Marketing in Petaluma CA, Marketing Plan, marketing ball game

by Robert Middleton, owner of Action Plan Marketing and Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing

 

Master these Seven Principles and you'll grow your business. We will be covering them one at a time over this series of blogs.

If you are going to attract more clients to your professional service business, you must market those services. But you can't market haphazardly and expect consistent results. You must market according to proven principles. This article outlines those principles and gives you the keys to growing your business with less struggle and effort.

 

 

Topics: BroadVision Marketing, Petaluma CA, Marketing Plan, marketing ball game, Social Media

by Robert Middleton, owner of Action Plan Marketing and Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing

 

If you're a professional interested in attracting more clients, you want more than marketing theory, ideas and tips; you can read about those in hundreds of books. No, you want to build solid marketing skills you can use for a lifetime.

Here are the marketing skills that count. No matter what marketing strategy you use, from networking to speaking to eZines, to blogging, to video, trade shows, to collaboration, these are the core skills you'll use every single time. They are based on proven principles that have been time-tested with thousands of business owners and you'll have several breakthroughs in the following seven areas:

Topics: Robert Middleton, Petaluma CA. Jaco Grobbelaar, BroadVision Marketing in Petaluma CA, Marketing Plan, Marketing Principles