Marketing Guides

Archive for June, 2009

It Is All About The Numbers Your Closing Rate

There is a popular misconception held primarily by the financial managers accountants and bookkeepers of the world that marketing professionals can not add. They believe marketers simply treat numbers as graphic elements selecting a number which looks pretty with no basis in fact.

But the truth Good marketing is all about the numbers. If you develop marketing without paying attention to the numbers what you end up with is Award Winning Advertising which doesnt sell product.

Good marketing requires a thorough understanding of the numbers which drive your business. And one of the most important numbers is your closing rate!

Know Your Closing Percentage

If you are face to face with a legitimate prospect how often do you walk away with the sale? That percentage 10 20 or 50 is your closing rate. It is a benchmark measuring the performance of marketing activities. Translation: The Closing Rate measures how effective all the elements of your marketing process including sales skills are working.

Why should you care about your closing rate? A business with a high Closing Rate is less dependent on advertising to drive traffic. When you are closing well you need fewer leads to generate sales.

Begin by Monitoring your Closing Rate
Initially you may have to guess at this number. Over time this measure becomes more precise as you track and compare proposals and sales. If you have multiple sales people monitor individual closing rates to see who is more effective. Also look at lead sources; are you more likely to close a lead from a direct mail promotion or the yellow pages. Over time these trends and patterns will direct changes in your marketing.

Improving your Closing Rate
What if your closing rate is too low? There are several factors which can contribute to a low closing rate including misdirected advertising investment or improper sales techniques.

Misdirected advertising Examine the quality of leads being generated from a particular media. Are you attracting serious customers or price shoppers? Not all leads are good leads and watching your results will help you determine if money is being spent well.

For example local radio stations offer desirable rates on specific programs or time slots. Magazines newspapers and other publications will offer discounts on ads in specific sections or on certain days. Be wary of these discounts! If your target customer does not read the publication or listen to the program you are wasting money on unqualified traffic.

Improper sales techniques Low conversion rate may also be indicative of poor sales presentations or proposals. Improve you “Closing Rate” by analyzing the sales process.

Do you ask potential customers probing questions and then really listen to their answers? Are you presenting a solution to the customer’s needs or a standard pitch designed to be a “onesizefitsall” solution?

Invite someone to ride with you on a sales call and give you feedback. They will see things which you miss in the heat of the sale!

Monitoring your closing rate is an ongoing process not a one time event. But the payoff the ability to make more intelligent marketing decisions and improve your sales ratio are well worth the effort!

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;A 20year veteran of corporate America Lorraine Ball teaches business owners across the country how to use creativity and

planning achieve exceptional results. An accomplished marketer she has won regional and national communication awards. Her articles on marketing networking and business development have been featured in Contracting Business New York Forum and ACHR news. Her books The Entrepreneurs Notebook and Confessions of a Networking Junkie are popular resource for business owners across the country. Active in the Indianapolis business community Lorraine is the President of Rainmakers and a member of the Board of Directors for the Network of Women in Business. Her monthly networking newsletter Business Notes from Roundpeg is distributed to more than 4000 local professionals and her blog www.indybiz.com is rapidly becoming a must read for local business owners. Lorraine holds an MBA from the University of Texas and a BA from Queens College City University of NY. She has been on the faculty of University of Indianapolis Marion College and the Indiana Institute of Technology. Today as the founder of Roundpeg she helps business owners find a Starting Point for growth and change.

Internet Marketing Business – All About Building Links

A great number Internet business owners especially those who do not have a whole lot of online marketing experience have the idea that getting an enormous amount of links for their sites is a correct strategy. That’s not exactly a hundred percent true because link building when done incorrectly can damage your rankings. There are many several ways to build back links to your sites and so far the advantages of article marketing far outweighs other link building methods.

Some site owners create links by posting their sites to thousands of web directories. With such a large number of links on the Internet it’s almost a sure thing for search engines to locate your links and crawl your sites. But that’s worth noticing. There are very little benefits that’s worth mentioning. Other internet marketers prefer to post on forums and blogs to get a ton of links.

This is a much better link building method because it allows the owner to network with others on the online. Human beings will see reply to the chat see the links and click through to see what your online blog has to offer. This is a time consuming process. It takes a lot of time to post on forums and blogs and it takes even more time for other webmasters to never forget you and your online sites. The knowledgeable Online marketers usually choose article marketing over all other link building methods for a few unique reasons. First article marketing allows them to get their marketing messages out there super fast.

By creating quality articles they let the readers have a preview of the goods that they have to share. If readers want to ask more questions they can always visit the links in the author resource boxes and visit the author’s site. Besides highly targeted traffic and higher search engine rankings this method is also very scalable. There’s a cumulative effect as more and more articles get submitted and approved by the article directories. If done regularly over some months readers will eventually learn to believe the authors more as can see for themselves the commitment and dedication that’s displayed by the article marketers.

It’s almost like having your very own website or blog for communications purposes except that now you have hundreds of avenues. Article marketers know how to implement this method to shape other’s perception of them as the authority in their field. Needless to say those who are not into article marketing will lose out in the long term because the Internet is all about traffic.

As these articles get indexed by the search engines and syndicated to hundreds of other sites the publishers will get constantly growing traffic. With a constant stream of traffic attracted to their websites guess who is going to crush the market in the long run? It doesn’t take a PhD to answer that question. If you have not looked into article marketing yet I highly recommend that you think about using this method without further ado. Do it for some time. Write and distribute one or two articles each day and if you don’t see some much desired results you can always junk the idea. But chances are you’re more likely to do more of article marketing once you see the immeasurable benefits.

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How To Write An Effective Article Summary For Article Marketing
When a visitor first comes across an article on a website the first thing he sees is the article title. If it’s something that he is interested in he will proceed to read the rest of the entire article. That’s the assumption that many inexperienced internet marketers have. However I’m afraid that assumption is incorrect.

That is because many article directories publish article summaries along with the rest of the article texts. The article summary is usually just below the title which is what the visitor will see next right after the article title. At this stage the visitor is still looking to scan for a little bit more information before making the decision to read the rest of the article. After all reading an entire three to five hundred word article will take up much more time than just reading a few sentences.

So your article summary has to be really effective to draw the visitor in to read what you have to say. Otherwise you’ve lost the reader or a potential customer. Now most article summaries are really just short one or two sentences paragraphs. In fact almost all article directories put a limit on how many characters you can use the in the article summary. So your job as an article marketer is to come up with the most effective one or two sentences for your article summary. Here’s how you can differentiate between a good and a bad article summary.

A good summary provides the essence of what the article is about. It is not the first two sentences of the article. That is the wrong way of doing it. If your article is about planting purple elephants then you have to put that in to catch the attention of the visitor. Or you can simply state forcefully how your article is going to be useful to the reader. Take a look at these examples.

Sentence 1: “I walked to the train station.”

Sentence 2: “You can observe how the purple elephants are growing at the train station.”

Sentence 2 is definitely much more revealing that sentence 1 and certainly more interesting. It also lets the reader know what the article is about. Sentence 1 sounds more like the first sentence of an article which I mentioned earlier is not the right thing to do. For sure sentence 2 will draw more eyeballs and readers.

Finally you can always end your article summary with a question. A question will always beg the reader to read more so as to find the answer. If your question is an interesting one your reader will most certainly want to finish reading the rest of the article.

By implementing these simple tips you would have become a much better article marketer than most. Print this out take the advice to heart take action and enjoy the fruits of your own labor.

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