Marketing Means Knowing Your Position in the Market

A rule in marketing is you must connect your marketing message to the people who will want what you have to sell and who can afford your product or service.

You must know the position you want to occupy and develop your marketing message accordingly.

This became clear to me when I wrote online articles for a property management company in the San Gabriel Valley and they serviced the mid-market range. They offered rental units for a mid-range price. The buildings were older yet maintained well and professionally managed.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, knows this truth. A recent article in Businessweek focused on the lower priced smartphones flooding the world market. This would cut into Apple's business and ruin the future for the iPhone, iPad, and related Apple products.

The article quoted Cook and said he wasn't worried.

“There’s always a large junk part of the market,” he says. “We’re not in the junk business.” The upper end of the industry justifies its higher prices with greater value. “There’s a segment of the market that really wants a product that does a lot for them, and I want to compete like crazy for those customers,” he says. “I’m not going to lose sleep over that other market, because it’s just not who we are. Fortunately, both of these markets are so big, and there’s so many people that care and want a great experience from their phone or their tablet, that Apple can have a really good business.”

Click here to read the Bloomberg article on Apple.

Click here on my copywriting site, LA Content andCopywriting, for a fair market price and high value on copy for websites, social media posts, and online marketing needs.

Keep Your Marketing Message Simple

As a writer, I urge my clients to embrace a simple marketing message.

We may like to appear brilliant, but simple words placed together let others know who we are and what we do. I keep going back to the "Got Milk" campaign. Two mundane words combined with an image to produce phenomenal results.

That's why this Laundromat sign got my attention the other day.

There's nothing brilliant about the copy and yet it's clear and speaks to the prospective customer.

The copy is also well organized using the 3-frame design found on many websites today.

A reason this is useful is that it's at a busy intersection. Cars and busses zip constantly zip by and so the benefits have to stand out.

The same is true for the Internet today. Not too long ago, web designers used Flash animation all over websites and soon realized simple design gave the visitor a better experience.

The same is true for copy. Clear headlines and use of sub-heads let's people skim and gets attention before they click on to the next website or social media post.

One step I take to make simple copy for my clients is to list the benefits and the unique traits about the business.

This is part of the copy planning stage.

Click here to read more on planning.

Remember, a clear and simple marketing message is much more effective than trying to be clever and get convoluted.

3 Ways to Measure Return on Investment for Marketing Channels

Graph from B2B Marketing.net

Wondering if you're along not properly estimating the return on investment for specific marketing channels?

Your company has lots of company when measuring ROI.

B2B Marketing.net reports only 6 percent of companies can effectively measure marketing returns "all the time."

The data was generated by B2B marketing in conjunction with Circle Research.

77 percent of companies could measure ROI on occasion.

Local ROI Tracking

I've experienced this on a micro-level in my career while writing content and radio spots for a nonprofit organization and while working with businesses east of Los Angeles in Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley.

Tracking results is helpful, of course, but marketing in different channels means there is a co-mingling or entanglement of outlets.

I wrote a series of online articles and new web copy for a property management company with rental units throughout the San Gabriel Valley. The staff carefully tracked where every renter came from.

There were 2 renters who said they came from online but not the company's main website and they couldn't identify the exact outlet.

It may likely have come from one of the articles I wrote or a re-written portion of the web site.

The good news was the revenue was new and it came about 5 weeks into my stint with the company.

Information Overlap

A reason this may occur is people are looking for information quickly, especially online. They may not care about the source and probably what happened is the renters found one of my online articles through a search engine result, skimmed the content, and clicked on the link to the property management company's main site.

This would have led them to choose a specific apartment building in a specific city. By the time they arrived the property manager asked the source they would only have been able to say, "online somewhere."

We used Google analytics to track website traffic and the number of search terms people were using to find the apartments jumped up dramatically after I began the content marketing effort.

Here are 3 different ways to measure marketing activity:

Evaluate referral sources

This is especially helpful with professional business consultants or companies using Yelp.

Evaluate website traffic

Use an analytics program to determine the geographic location, online referral sources, and keywords entered to reach the main website.

Evaluate coded specials

Coded specials can work great on postcards or direct mailers and the use of a dedicated phone line can help measure, too.

Click here to access the original article onB2Bmarketing.net

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3 Reasons to Write a Book and Market Your Professional Services

I'm writing a book for a client who does management consulting and training and he's going to use the book as a calling card to show his expertise to the decision-makers at companies he approaches.

The book will be available in print and e-book format.

Benefits of writing a book to market your professional services are many:

Unique Qualities

You demonstrate your unique qualities and that's important in a crowded marketplace like Los Angeles. Just think how many management consultants exist in Los Angeles County and Orange County and the Inland Empire.

The consultant I'm working with wants a 110-page to 120-page book. Yours doesn't have to be that long.

Real estate agents can write up books that are 10 to 20 pages long to list what they know, why they love real estate, and demonstrate their knowledge of a local market.

Stories

Books are great ways to tell your company's story. Remember the adage "Facts tell and stories sell." Books let you package your informational knowledge and reach the audience with an emotional punch to demonstrate how you uniquely solved a problem.

Stories draw in the reader and if you're trying to teach principles or raise the prospect of changing a culture.

Lasting Message

Well-written books have a lasting message and show why you're passionate about your industry.

Books are also likely to get passed around and they should be written with your contact information to aid in word-of-mouth marketing.

You can also sell books and recoup some marketing costs or even produce another stream of income.