12 Activities to Improve Your Marketing NOW

by Alex Goldfayn on November 2, 2012

If you execute just one or two of these, your marketing will improve.?

If you can work on a handful of them, your business will improve,?and you will improve.?

1. Allocate 15 minutes to call one customer per day. Ask them how they think, feel, and use your product or service. Ask a lot of follow up questions. Dig in to what they say. Understand the emotion behind their feelings. This becomes your very best and most powerful marketing language.?
2. Simplify one paragraph (or page) on your Web site. Literally sit down and rewrite it, making it simpler, in 20 minutes or less.?
3. Hire somebody to create lists of prospective customers for you.?
4. Create a marketing vehicle that will deliver value to your market and prospective customers regularly. I write a short-form Monday newsletter that has more than 20,000 subscribers. Many of my new engagements come from these readers.?
5. Call one journalist key to your business today. Tomorrow call another. Go about the process of building relationships with them. Press releases are useless. Relationships are priceless.?
6. Write. Think. Create intellectual property. It doesn?t take long. My newest book, Evangelist Marketing, was basically written in 30 minutes per day or less, on my blog, one idea at a time.?
7. Speaking of ideas, give yourself a structure to have one idea every day. It doesn?t have to be world-changing. It doesn?t even have to be great. But it does need to be an idea. A blog are equally effective environments for this.?
8. Implement some kind of tracking system (I don?t care if it?s a high-tech expensive CRM or a yellow legal pad) so you know the following:?
   • The marketing activities you?re engaging in and the results of each.
   • A calendar of marketing activities.
   • The prospective customers you?re communicating with.
   • Your sales pipeline broken down as simply as possible.
9. Understand that the best marketing is not made up of pitches or selling points. It?s made up of value. Start thinking about your marketing as an opportunity to demonstrate your value to prospective customers. Which means you need two things: a list of prospective customers (number 3 above) and powerful value to demonstrate (number 6).
10. Start a lot. If you?re finding yourself avoiding a marketing related effort ? say, picking up the phone, or writing ? start?something marketing related. Anything. The more you start, the more you?ll execute.?
11. Let the energy of success ? or failure ? propel you to additional activity. This one comes from my friend, the Internet strategist Chad Barr. If you have a win, use the good feelings to put additional marketing out into the world. If you?ve had a failure, follow it up immediately with positive marketing effort.?
12. Good marketing is nothing more complicated than a series of good habits. The best way I know to learn a new habit is to give it 30 minutes per day. Allocate 30 minutes per day for various marketing activities. You can repeat the same action daily, or mix it up, with a different effort each day of the week. There?s also nothing stopping you from having multiple 30-minute segments allocated to marketing every day. Simplify it down to 30 minutes per day, it?ll be difficult to avoid doing it.?

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About Alex Goldfayn

Alex Goldfayn is CEO of the Evangelist Marketing Institute, which increases client revenue through powerful marketing and strategy consulting, advising and coaching. His clients include TiVo, Logitech, T-Mobile, Solar Universe, and a large number of startups and mid-market firms. Subscribe to Alex's powerful, practical and free short-form weekly newsletter here (it never takes longer than 60 seconds to read!).

Source: http://www.consumerevangelists.com/12-activities-to-improve-your-marketing-now/

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