As you know everyone absolutely love news stories, especially ones that involve huge celebrities.  (Remember the news coverage on the Michael Jackson death?)  As the famous marketer Robert Collier said "You must enter into the conversation already happening in your customers mind…"  

With news stories like this you can take advantage of what people are already talking about and slide your marketing message right in with what they are already thinking about.

No, I'm not saying compare your business with the Tiger Woods situation… that can be a sticky situation since many people are opposed with what is going on with it.

Let me give you an example of how you could take advantage of current events.

1)  Use it in your headline for a marketing piece to grab your customers attention as I have here.  An example is I recommended a car insurance company that I advise to use the headline "If Tiger Woods Had Gone With XXX Auto Insurance, He Would Have Gotten _____".

2)  Create a unique package/offer or rename one of your existing offers to relate with the headline.

3)  Make a story that ties your offer in with the news event.

4)  Email and snail mail this offer to new or existing customers but most definitely talk about it on your website and blog.  This can create word of mouth and could go viral on the Internet.  Other advantages is it can boast your SEO and search engine marketing greatly.

These tips obviously can be applied to any news event.  The closer it relates to your potential customers the better.

Some other recent examples you could have used was Twilight: The New Moon, The Balloon Boy, or the recent snow storms.

The main point of all of this is DON'T BE BORING in your marketing!  Find a reason to contact your customers and build relationships!

Have a profitable week.

John Barry

Barry Real Marketing

(281) 627-8828

Hope you enjoyed your Halloween…now its time to
really get to work. Only 2 months left until the NEW YEAR!
Things have been hectic around here.

Helping other businesses stay afloat in these
tough times is my specialty and has been keeping
me busy.

If your interested in learning more about how I
can help you give me a call, I have some openings
and giving away Two (2) FR*EE 30 day trials away.

Well let's get to today's subject.

What business are you really in?

Insurance business, plumbing business,
real estate business…???

The real business that all of us need
to be in is MARKETING our "Insurance business,
plumbing business, real estate business…"

Isn't it true that without customers
you have no business?

Without a business, you lose out, your employees lose
and your customers lose!

So why is it that you aren't doing anything
to bring in more customers?

You know your customers love your products
and services, but you just need more of them.

You need to learn or find someone who can help
with your marketing.

In these times you can't just give your money to
the yellow page ad salesman and tell him to
create an ad (who uses the yellow pages still anyways?)

Look at the newspapers! They are going out of business.
You know why? Cause businesses know advertising there is
not profitable when you don't have the proper marketing knowledge

They haven't learned the skills to bring in customers.

Your job as a business owner is to get the cash
register to ring.

You need to be studying marketing and strategies
that are going to bring you a constant stream of
customers or at least know the basics so you know you
aren't getting scammed out of you money
when you do hire someone to do your marketing.

Stay tuned and I will be sending you important emails
that will tell you the most common marketing mistakes
of business owners, give you great tips for online
and offline that will start making you money.

In the mean time, this week's homework is to
send me an email at john@barryrealmarketing.com
to let me know what marketing challenges you are
currently facing.

Secondly, you need to study all my posts on my blog
at www.barryrealmarketing.com
There are many great lessons that will get you started.

Have a profitable week,

John Barry
Barry Real Marketing
www.barryrealmarketing.com
(281) 627-8828

P.S. Give me a call @ (281)627-8828 if you would
like to discuss how I can help you get more
customers online. I'm giving away a 30 day FR*EE
trial of my services, just send me an email.
 

In this Case Study I this company had no website and absolutely zero rankings on Google. Within 30 days, I was able to capture the majority of the 1st page of Google.

What is Google Domination?

To start most SEO companies take 1 keyword and 1 page and rank them on Google. One listing on the first page of Google is nice, but getting 3-6 or more listings on Google is total domination.

Dominating Google listings also helps build the clients site as an authority site and drive more traffic while kicking competitors off the first page.

Watch this video to see how many rankings I got for them and then you decide if this would help your business.

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a great weekend. I definitely did. If anyone knows how to make good sushi pllllease let me know. I made some with a friend and it didn’t turn out that good, but it was a grrreat time. Its always good to spend quality time with people you care about

Now back to our lessons. In the last lesson, I talked about your most valuable assests in your business is your current customer list. They truly are your life line in business and it is your job to continue to keep them happy and coming back.

Another way your existing customers benefits you and continues to feed you is by giving you referrals and its your job to “stimulate” those.

I’m sure you know about “word of mouth advertising” and that it is one of the most powerful forms of marketing. When you say talk about how your business or service is so great, people will always have their doubts, but if someone that doesn’t have a vested interest in it says something positive, those comments go a long way towards motivating a prospect to action.

Don’t you wish there was something you could do to motivate your customers to refer you and your business on a consistent basis to get you predictable results?

Well, hopefully you guessed there is and its really not difficult. Your first step if you aren’t already is to ask! Simply ask, “Do you know of anyone else who would be interested in receiving the same great service or product I provided you?” Make sure to add in some benefits of doing business with you.

Not only should you ask for the referral but you should also create a system; a referral system.
One of the easiest ways is to create a rewards program for when customers refer you. For example, you can tell your customers that for every 5th referral, they will get a FREE service or bonus item or discount. I know, many of these ideas are basic but you would be surprised how great they work. Remember, you aren’t here to reinvent the wheel. You need to IMPLEMENT what works.

There are many ways to keep your customers referring you, but a simple way is to write them a simple thank you note for the referral. This does a couple things for you, it reminds them you are there but at the same time let’s them know you are keeping track and appreciate their efforts. Big dumb corporations would never be able to give the personal touches like you can.

Another simple way I used to spark referrals in my restaurant was to give customers a couple simple business cards that offered a free appetizer. They pretty much said “Here’s a gift from a friend” and then had a spot for their name. This almost guaranteed the customer was at least going to tell someone about my business but also incentivize their friend to come in.

Again, I showed you how your existing customers can be those golden nuggets for your business and that if you take care of them, those nuggets will keep growing. Now remember, they are the most important and you should not neglect them, but your next tips will be about some powerful techniques on how to attract NEW customers.

And please leave any comments below on what you have been reading or any problems you are facing now with your current marketing.

I’m out,
John Barry
The Local Online Marketing Guru
Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/realjohnbarry

Now let’s continue our 1st lesson.

I left off telling you to create packages of your services or goods. Put them together in 3-4 different levels. Obviously starting with less in “entry level package” all the way up to your all inclusive premium package.

The next step with this is to always have something to offer your customer. Offer a followup product or service immediately and like I mentioned before, make sure its so good that they wouldn’t go anywhere else.

Your goal is that once they buy from you one time, they will be off the market for your product/service from anyone else. No price shopping, no looking around forever.

The third thing you can do to maximize your relationships with your current customers is to deploy a customer loyalty program. Popularized by the airline industry, you reward customers for their purchases from you, helping you build a wall around your customers and preventing them from going anywhere else. Not only does a loyalty program give you the opportunity to “reward” your best customers but allows you to build a better realtionship with them also.

A loyalty program can be simple or as complicated as you want. To get started quickly and easily is do get small punch cards made like many restuarants do. After each purchase you stamp the card and after so many purchases, give the customer a premium that would motivate the customer to continue doing business with you until they get it.

This also gives you a great opportunity to continue to keep selling to them!

Remember, your goal as a business owner is to sell your service to others that want and need it. By taking advantage of your existing customers, you’re doing just that, but at a cost that’s considerably LESS than what it costs to sell to a brand new customer.

In order to grow you business, once you have created a process to continually sell to your existing customers, it is now time to turn your attention to finding new customers.

Now that I’ve shown you how you can IMMEDIATELY boost your business from the most important customer, in my following tip I will show you how to take find NEW customers effectively at low costs.

Until next time,
John Barry
Local Online Marketing Guru

As promised I’m back with the first installment of my seven part series on how to dominate your market

place no matter what business you are in. Most of these tips aren’t earth shattering new techniques. Hopefully you know all of them but as with most things you learn you must implement them in to your business, especially with the so called “Recession” upon us. All of these “tips” are easy to implement and have been proven time and time again. The best p

art is you can implement this immediately and see immediate results.

This first tip gets overlooked often by too many companies no matter the size, big and small. Luckily, this principle can have a HUGE return on the little time required to invest in it.

Maybe you know this already and have choosen to ignore it, but it costs you exponentially more money to attract a new customer than you would trying to convince someone that’s already a customer to use your service again. In fact its 20x’s more!

Wouldn’t you say your existing customer base is the MOST IMPORTANT assest in your business?!!?

Its not your hard working staff, your newest high tech equipment, or anything else you have in your business. Its your list of people who have previously done business with you. NOTHING else is as important to you as that.

Regrettably, most businesses don’t do nearly as well as they should because they focus all their resources on trying to entince new customers to try their services instead of trying to sell more to their existing customers.

Now, I’m not saying you should not be out looking for new customers, but that once they are your customer, you need to do ANYTHING you can to keep them as a customer and continue to sell to them again and again and again.

Well, what can you do to maximize your relationship with current customers?

First and foremost, you need to make sure you are providing good service or a good product. Undoubtedly, doing a poor job with both of these will have customers leaving you left and right. Not only are you losing them as a customer with future business but you are losing the valuable refferals you could have gained.

Second way to lock them in and to get more money is by creating packages of services or goods. Offering different levels of service or putting mutiple items together will create larger transactions but can also keep a customer for a longer period of time.

An easy way is to put your items or services into a good, better, best package obviously with prices to correspond.

Wow! I’m getting kind of hungry and I haven’t even made it 3/4 of the way with this one tip! I’m going to go eat

and shower and will try to wrap this up on Saturday. If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to my blog because I will be giving away a lot more FREE content on how to Dominate Your Marketplace No Matter what Business you are in. Until next time.

John Barry
The Marketing Guy

Follow me on twitter : Click Here