Freebie Marketing

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There are many ways to make a brand or a shop famous. However the easiest way to become popular is by giving discounts and bargains to the customers. This is a step that is taken by most companies when they are introduced in the market. Of course, there is no one that is going to buy your product just because you are selling it. There is a chain of thought process that governs the purchase of a certain utility before it is actually sold. Therefore you need to make sure that your customers know your product and you know your customers. Only then will you be able to serve your customers better and you can make sure that you get good sales in return.

There are plenty of ways that you can make your product famous. However, the best ways to do this till date is give out free stuff. This is a common practice that has lasted for years. The customers get a taste of what you are selling. You can also make sure that you know your customers from the feedback that you get from them from your free samples. If your product is really good then you can guarantee that your customers will soon be paying money to purchase the product from you.

There are many that fluctuate in quality when initiating such offers. However this is only going to bring you temporary profit. If you are going to deteriorate in the promise that you make with your free samples then the customers will slowly start to leave your product. Therefore you should always make sure that you keep up to the quality of the product that you have initially promised your customers with. What is even better is if you increase the quality of the product that is paid for. This will encourage your customers to pay for the product that is better than the product that is being offered for free that is already very good. This way giving out free samples will bring you more customers in. The profits as such are balanced in such a way that you do not have to worry about the loss of the free samples.

Free samples are loved all over the world and giving out free stuff is always the fastest way to get noticed. Therefore if it is your shop that you have opened up, give out a few free samples for the customers to build up. DreamWalk is an example of such a marketing strategy in which treasure hunts is used to give away stuff for free.

Practical Article Marketing Tips - 7 Ways to Improve Your Resource Box For More Traffic & Profit

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Article Marketing is a great way to pull in the traffic and profits, when you have a strategically crafted Resource Box. Most people mess this up, and that is why I am offering 7 tips in this article on how to get more traffic and profit from your Article Resource Box.

Before I get started, for the beginners out there, the Resource Box is the section at the end of every article where you are encouraged to invite your reader to learn more from you by clicking on links back to your websites and blogs.

Just to make sure you understand the power of this, just one of these carefully crafted is responsible for almost half of the members in my list community.

7 Tips for a More Powerful Resource Box

1) It's not about you - The biggest mistake I see people make is believing the Resource Box is all about them.

Nope.

It's all about your reader and prospect, and what is in it for them. This is the mindset that you must adopt and keep when you craft this part of your article

2) Anti-hype - Avoid any hype. This is the quickest way to turn away high quality prospects. Giving the impression that you think they have to get this now or they will never be successful is a great way to get rejected.

3) Invitational language - While this is a call to action, you want to use "invitational language" For example, "And now I'd like to invite you to claim your Free Instant Access to..." beats the heck out of "watch this video before we decide to take it down." Yeah, right.

4) The trade - Invite your reader/prospect to an opt-in page where they can trade their email address for more good information from you. Make it a compelling offer full of clear benefits to your prospect. This is a good trade for both of you.

5) Flow - The Resource Box is the next paragraph in your article. So it should flow right out of your article. Don't do anything to stop the flow. The easiest way to make it flow is to begin with the word "and."

6) Invite - Using the invitational language mentioned above, invite your reader to take the action you want them to take. Make sure it is the next logical step for them to get more great information from you.

7) Brand - Remember when I said this is not about you? The only time you should mention your name or brand is at the very end, and then only so the prospect can pair the great stuff they are about to get from you with your name and brand.

Here's an example of how to use these 7 tips. I encourage you to model this and check it out to get your Free Resource Box Template.

And now I would like to invite you to claim your Free Instant Access to one of my prospect pulling Resource Box Templates when you visit http://www.ResourceBoxTemplates.com

You'll get a "fill in the blanks" template for creating a powerful Resource Box that you can use right away!

From Jeff Herring - The Article Marketing Guy & The Resource Box Course

Marketing - Target Marketing or Mass Marketing?

Mass marketing versus target marketing, which one will you use? I suggest integrating both. Target marketing simply explained is marketing to an audience more likely to be receptive to your marketing messages. Understanding and evaluating a key market for your goods or services and successfully launching an advertising campaign requires acquiring data through various sources and segmenting these sources into refined data that can then become your target market.

Many starting businesses focus on mass advertising strategies hoping to catch as many customers as possible but working in this fashion can put a strain on your budget and ultimately waste money that could have better well spent on increasing customer satisfaction or expanding your business. There is nothing wrong with mass advertising, what is wrong is advertising to the masses without understanding the mass you are advertising to. I don't care if it is a branding campaign, there must be some focus and discipline, even in a large branding campaign.

Creating an ideal market for you to advertise to will require the understanding of some key elements in marketing. One of the most important elements is demography. Demographic data is very important in finding particular information within a geographic region such as gender, age, income, religion, race, etc. Through the harvesting of this data you can better understand what types of marketing message will work or not in reference to what you are selling.

Consumer's might perceive certain advertisements differently and some advertisements may even insult them. Certain audiences can be turned off by a particular message, make sure that you don't offend who you might want as a customer in the future.

If you were to be advertising in BZ City through a mass advertisement you would use demographic information to see how your product might reflect on the majority of the people living there first and what type of advertising messages will be better received. How much of the particular market might actually find value in your goods or services can be determined almost entirely through demographic research.

1.) What you want to do first is research the regional demographic data for your campaign.

2.) Segment the largest percentages into the top two of each demographic trait.

3.) From there start thinking on how your product can benefit each group positively and what their perceptions might be of your goods or services.

4.) Now start to brainstorm what types of advertising and what messages would appeal most to the seniority of these groups.

NOTE: This may require psycho graphic data to be appended to the demographic data for better evaluation of behavior.

5.) Study case studies for marketing for your demographic market to get an idea of what you may be up against.

6.) Now cram all that data together and see how you can create a compelling and inspirational advertisement for your product to all the top two demographic groups in one message. Is it possible? Let the idea stew for a while, you might be surprised.

HINT: This same demographic information can now help you figure out what medias and what media niches will work for your campaign. Ingenuity and creativity will always be fundamental, just make sure it is backed with some hard fact data. Good luck.

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Marketing To Today's Women

TV viewers have made the show a ratings hit, in part because the glimpse of office politics and domestic roles are so out-of-date by today's standards. The time capsule that we watch on Sunday nights serves as an entertaining yet insightful history lesson of how women were treated and/or diminished by the very Madison Avenue executives who hoped to make the products they represented more successful.

Since those days, the concept of marketing to women has taken a dramatic U-turn. Perhaps the most obvious "breakout" ad campaign of this decade was launched by Unilever's "Dove Mandate" in 2002. With the help of the Ogilvy ad agency, Dove began focusing on "Real Beauty" after a global study showed women in 10 countries (from the Netherlands to Brazil) didn't identify with the air-brushed, perfect-looking models used in most ads.

The tall, slim, blonde models that historically populated the advertising pages and TV commercials simply no longer spoke to female consumers. Based on Ogilvy's findings, Dove launched the "Campaign for Real Beauty," featuring "average-looking" non-models to market its products. The campaign was so successful that in the U.K., Dove's products enjoyed a 700 percent sales increase.

And in a move that would have seemed impossible during the Mad Men era, 50 year-old comedienne Ellen DeGeneres has been chosen to represent CoverGirl Cosmetics. Esi Bracey, a vice president of Procter & Gamble, recently told The New York Times that DeGeneres, like fellow CoverGirl rep Queen Latifah, will appeal to shoppers who are "looking not so much for a role model as a woman they can relate to both physically and emotionally."

One of the first successful ad campaigns targeted toward women was Betty Crocker, who was created in 1921 as a "friend to homemakers" for General Mills. Over the past 75 years there have been seven versions of Betty Crocker: from the original rendering in 1936 which was a composite of the women working in the company's Home Service Department, to a more professional-looking woman in 1980, to a more multicultural, ethnic icon in 1996. As General Mills evolved, so did Betty Crocker. By giving her a personality and a face that has been on store shelves and in home pantries for decades, General Mills used the "human connection" to create one of the most successful marketing tools ever.

But in the era of TiVo and gender equality, marketing to women has changed almost beyond recognition. Here are a few guidelines that today's advertisers should keep in mind as they market their products to women:

• Women business owners spend $1.5 trillion on business purchases.
  


• In today's world, age is less important than life stage, e.g., 60 year-old women are dating, 50 year-olds are starting new careers, and 40 year-olds are having children.
  


• Women purchase (or influence the purchase of) 85 percent of all consumer goods, including automobiles, investments and computers, which were traditionally viewed as male-domain items.
  


• Advertising that makes a woman feel uncomfortable about her looks or health will have a hard time reaching an audience willing to purchase its product.

In today's challenging economy, firms hoping to successfully market their goods to women need to remember that the "old school" version of advertising, in which people, places, and things were enviably perfect, simply doesn't work any more. Smart advertisers recognize they need to both broaden the demographic of those they hope to reach, and update their medium to convey the message.

Best selling author Connie Glaser is one of the country's leading experts on gender communication and women's leadership issues. Her recently published book, GenderTalk Works, provides an upbeat guide to bridging the gender gap at work. A popular keynote speaker at corporate events, she can be reached at http://www.connieglaser.com