Avoid wasting your limited marketing dollars

Avoid wasting your limited marketing dollars on an expensive image-advertising campaign that won't affect short-term results. Instead, let the quality of your response materials and Web site do the job of enhancing your company's image.

Rather than doing less-effective "shotgun" mailings to rented lists, consider repeat mailings targeted at known prospects (such as past inquirers).

If you don't have your own e-mail lists to market to, consider renting e-mail lists from publishers or placing ads in other targeted e-newsletters or e-zines. These can be very economical ways to reach your market and generate a quick response.

Edit your releases with the magazine's editorial focus, style and readers in mind and you'll increase the chance the publication or Web site will publish your information.

Web sites

A few cost-effective changes can dramatically improve your corporate Web site's marketing return on investment. To increase inquiries from your Web site's visitors, Make offers or calls-to-action on every page. Work with other organizations to link your site to their sites, increasing the number of visitors to yours. Register your web site with search engines, selecting keywords carefully so your site will appear in the search results for your intended audience. Post articles and case studies on your site, then register those individual web pages with the search engines.

Strategy

7. Determine the "pain" your products and services address
8. Determine the "pain relief" your company can provide
9. Determine your company's competitive advantages and how best to articulate them
10. Determine the best companies and contacts to target with your lead generation efforts

Testimonial ads are king

Talk first person with the reader

Use words in your copy like "you" and "your" to focus on the readers' needs rather than boasting about how good "we" and "our" products or services are. For example, the statement "You will get the work done 25% quicker" is much stronger than "Our product is 25% faster than the competition."

The best way to boost direct mail response is to have a strong offer—that is, a targeted offer that will entice prospects to respond.

Successful direct mail marketers understand that campaign success relies on the list and the offer. Determine why you're mailing to people, and then ensure that your list and offer support your objective. Your response rate will be much higher in terms of "qualified" inquiries.

, it is much better to have in the database 10 individuals at each of 1,000 companies than to have one individual at 10,000 firms.

If you need additional demographic information about the contacts' or companies' industry, size, etc. for your direct marketing solutions, check with some of the business database companies like Dunn & Bradstreet (www.dnb.com) or InfoUSA.com (www.infousa.com). Or contact the publishers of the trade magazines you advertise in. They usually offer database services to their advertisers.

All leads and business cards go into your CRM system ASAP

Think about offers you can make that will entice visitors to identify and qualify themselves. Can you create a free guide for selecting your kinds of products or services? Can you offer a white paper that explains how their kind of operation is successfully using your product or service to solve problems? If so, use it as bait for having your visitors share their names, titles, company names and contact information.

Email

If you have email addresses for your prospects and customers, but they haven't expressed interest in hearing from your company by email, be sure to politely ask their permission before starting a campaign. I recommend that you ask them how they prefer to be contacted. By email? Fax? Snail mail? Telephone?

Directories

Print directories are handy, and online directories are always up to date. Most directory publishers are publishing both, frequently offering you exposure in both mediums for the same price. Keep in mind that directories are often where buyers look when they are seeking new suppliers and have immediate needs.

Web site

• The size of organizations your company serves? large? medium? small?
• The geographies you serve? local areas? states? countries? regions of the world?
• Explain why your company is a better choice than the competition?
• Address your prospective customers' needs from their point of view?
• Did you include the more popular keywords and phrases in your
• URLs?
• Page titles?
• Headlines?
• Body copy?
• Text links?
• Are you loading your text before your graphics and Flash animations in the source code of your various web pages?
• Are you giving your graphics file names that include relevant keywords?

         Are you including keywords and phrases in <alt> tags for each of your graphics?

• Have you included a site map on your home page, pointing to all of your site's individual pages?
• Does your site map include lots of keywords and phrases in the page links and descriptive copy for each page of your Web site?

Add privacy

• Have you included a link to your Web site in every appropriate online directory you can find?
• Adding new pages to your site that include in-depth content related to the most popular relevant keywords and phrases?
• Consider using pay-per-click ads as a temporary solution while you work to optimize your Web site for organic searching.

First, I believe you should focus on optimizing your website for visitors, helping them move from awareness to consideration to inquiry to purchase, before you worry about search engine optimization (SEO). Learn more at Millennium Group Access Control