Your Questions About Direct Marketing Strategies

Jere answers:

I firmly believe that direct sales (cold and warm calling) are terrific ways to reach people. They are free and time after time I’m able to generate sales this way. I would augment any marketing with 5-10 calls per day to people introducing yourself. Make a note of who is potentially interested and continue to follow up with them.

Some good sales resources: Top 25 Habits of Successful sales people, millerheiman.com and salesguy.org.

Jere answers:

Direct marketing (also called relationship marketng or targeted marketing) is 1. The most practical; 2. The most productive,3. The most cost-efficient marketing tool you can use. You might want to check out this blog [word-jobber.blogspot.com] for a slew of useful marketing strategies you can adapt to your needs.

Jere answers:

Marketing is about the product or service (product management, product life-cycle, product differentiation); the promotion of that product or service (personal selling, direct marketing, advertising, public relations, social media), the pricing (developing price strategies that fit)and the distribution (who to sell to and how to get it to market – i.e. Are you in the retail business – selling through storefronts?).

If you’re starting out, you might want to look product management. It gives you a good opportunity to focus on the product or service and learn how to match the product or service with the market (customers). I do recommend taking some marketing classes or programs.

Jere answers:

You can find a firm to handle your social media for as little as $500 a month. However, what you might want to do is create an E-Marketing Plan. This would distill your company’s brand, set forth your objectives, and allow you to allocate resources in an organizeed and tactical way. . It would be also serve as an emergency manual when you have to make tough decisions at critical junctures. Much better than develop strategies ad hoc, as the need arises. Sure, you can jot your ideas down on a napkin over lunch and run with it, but these “let’s put on a show” ideas are seldom sustainable in the long run. It takes good tried-and-true business practices to succeed in business..
Also, there are a lot of good ideas out there: learn to cherry-pick and adapt to your own needs.
Typical of free idea sources is word-jobber.blogspot.com. While this site limits itself to direct marketing, it’s pretty shrewd. Best of all: there’s a new idea every Monday, just in time for a long week.

Jere answers:

Find out what type of audience (genre? Kids? Adults?) you want to direct your promotion to then design the marketing strategy to that audience