Marketing Kit for Dummies E-Book

Alexander Hiam

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 639

Beschreibung

The forms, letters, and other tools included in Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition enable readers to start a successful marketing program from the beginning. The expert tips and information presented in the book take some of the mystery out of marketing and explain, step-by-step, how to implement and execute a successful marketing strategy. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Leseprobe

Marketing Kit For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

What You’re Not to Read

Foolish Assumptions

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs

Part II: Advertising Management and Design

Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising

Part IV: Honing Your Marketing Skills

Part V: Sales and Service Success

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs

Chapter 1: Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing

Finding Your Marketing Zone

Pinpointing Your Top Three Sales and Marketing Tools

Adjusting for the Economic Cycle

Tightening up for tough times

Taking advantage of a growth economy

Marketing Smart to Avoid Costs and Risks

Strengthening Your Marketing Skill-Set

Design, copywriting, creativity, and more

Artful persuasion: Sales skills to the fore

Quick skill-building tricks and tips

Designing Your Marketing Program

Product

Price

Placement

Promotion

People

Profiting from the Five Ps

Exercising Your Marketing Imagination

Reframing Your Presentation

The Five-Minute Marketing Zone Plan

On the CD

Chapter 2: Crafting a Breakthrough Marketing Plan

Auditing Your Marketing Activities

Evaluating your marketing focus

Evaluating your marketing scope

Auditing your marketing activities

Analyzing your management and control

Checking your creativity

Using Audit Results to Focus Your Plan

Formatting Your Marketing Plan

Writing Your Marketing Plan the Easy Way

Using the marketing plan template

Gathering information before you start

The outline used in the planning template

Developing Your Marketing Strategy

Basing your strategies on your core brilliance

Deciding whether to adopt a new strategy or improve an old one

Choosing your strategy

Setting specific objectives for your strategies

Running Goal-Oriented Marketing Experiments

Planning Benchmarks for Marketing Communications

On the CD

Chapter 3: Cutting Costs and Boosting Impact

Taking a Look at Low-Cost and No-Cost Marketing Ideas

Transit advertising

Publicity

Viral marketing on MySpace or Facebook

Low-cost display ads in online communities

Text messages — a new viral marketing frontier?

The classic flier — tried, true, and free

The informational booklet or brochure

The informational Web page or blog

Pay-per-click advertising (keyword ads)

Widgets, gadgets, and the like

Word of mouth or referral marketing

Events, parties, and charity fundraisers

Better looking basics: Stationery, business cards, and brochures

Asking for the business

Harnessing the Power of Information

Exercising Creativity: Ideas Are Free!

Narrowing Your Focus to Cut Costs and Maximize Impact

Focusing your marketing message

Focusing your marketing program

On the CD

Part II: Advertising Management and Design

Chapter 4: Planning and Budgeting Ad Campaigns

A Practical Approach to Ad Budgets

Setting your ad budget

Planning your ad campaign

Adjusting the ad budget for a B2B plan

Tailoring Your Advertising Plan to a Specific Goal

Budgeting based on goals

Using an Advertising Objectives Worksheet

Preparing a month-by-month ad plan

Staying flexible throughout the year

On the CD

Chapter 5: Shortcuts to Great Ads

Following Do-It-Yourself Shortcuts

The tried-and-true visual appeal ad

Some basic ad templates

Creating Ad Concepts for Fun and Profit

The mood ad

The wisdom ad

Making an Impact by Using Visual Shortcuts

Using a beautiful landscape photo

Portraying an attractive person

Inserting a humorous cartoon

Giving Postcard Marketing a Try

Using Web Pages as Ads

On the CD

Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising

Chapter 6: Branding with Business Cards, Letterhead, and More

Who Are You? Establishing Brand Identity

Managing the Presentation of Your Brand Name

“Selling” Your Business Cards

Making a good overall impression

Deciding on design details

Who needs a printer when you have Word?

Designing Your Letterhead and Envelopes

Conveying your image through paper and print

Keeping visual control in faxes and e-mails

Maintaining Your Identity on the Web

On the CD

Chapter 7: Creating Eye-Catching Brochures, Catalogs, and Spec Sheets

Considering Your Needs

The simple one-page spec sheet or flier

The multipage brochure

Catalogs and booklets

Becoming a Brochure Wizard

Brochure design considerations

Paper characteristics

Layout tips

Copy or print?

Color

Artwork

Photography

Clip art and stock photography

Crop and fold marks

Making Digital Brochures

Captivating Catalogs

Design considerations

Benchmark catalogs for your reference

The list factor

Spectacular Spec Sheets

Formatting your spec sheet

Ensuring that your spec sheet is up to snuff

Marketing with Booklets and Books

On the CD

Chapter 8: Planning Coupons and Other Sales Promotions

The Importance of Profit

How Promotions Affect Sales

Planning Coupon Programs

The basics of coupon profitability analysis

Coupon profitability analysis step by step

Testing multiple scenarios

Learning from experience

Ah, but did it work?

Some Alternative Approaches to Sales Promotions

Offer free food

Give gifts

Offer rewards for repeat business

On the CD

Chapter 9: Spreading the Word with Newsletters

Why You Need a Newsletter

Examining the Elements of a Newsletter

Masthead and nameplate

Modules

Articles

Headers (like this one)

Type

Columns

Leading and kerning

Flow and readability

Size

Photos and artwork

Templates for Desktop Publishing

Measuring Your Success

Saving a Tree: Electronic Newsletters

E-mailing a Portable Document Format (PDF) attachment

E-mailing an HTML page

Sending hybrid e-mails

Blogs instead of newsletters?

Mailing a CD

A Few Thoughts on Logos

On the CD

Chapter 10: Taking Advantage of Publicity

Understanding and Using Publicity

Publicity versus advertising

Publicity versus public relations

When to hire a pro

Be newsworthy

Developing a Media Kit

Assembling your kit

What about using your Web page as a media kit?

What’s the hook?

The Press Release That’s Going to Get You Publicity

Getting a reporter to take notice

Making sure your release is “news ready”

Pitching Your Release to the Media

Including a cover letter

Don’t forget to follow up!

Dealing with rejection

Creating Your Mailing Lists

Finding the names for your list

Opting to buy a list instead

Going Online: Web Publicity Tools

Sending releases to your e-mail list

Using Web press release services

Multimedia e-releases

Keep e-releases short and sweet

On the CD

Part IV: Honing Your Marketing Skills

Chapter 11: The Customer Research Workshop

Talking to Your Customers

Auditing Your Customer Service

Performing a customer service review

Using the audit template

Surveying successfully

Analyzing the results

Using Experimentation as a Research Technique

On the CD

Chapter 12: The Creativity Workshop

Creativity’s Impact on the Five Ps

Product innovations

Pricing innovations

Placement innovations

Promotion innovations

People innovations

Being Creative but Also Practical

Harnessing your creativity for profit

Not getting carried away

Generating Creative Concepts

Revel in the irreverent

Force yourself to develop alternatives

Don’t overplan

Identify your personal barriers and enablers

Incubate

Break it down

Compete

Record more of your own ideas

Look hard at your assumptions

Talk to ten successful people

Managing Creative Projects and Teams

On the CD

Chapter 13: Writing Well for Marketing and Sales

Avoiding Power Words and Phrases

Writing Persuasively

If you don’t want to write yourself

Engaging and persuading your audience

Straight facts or a little drama

Hybrid ads: Have your cake and eat it, too

Getting Serious about Testing Your Copy

Checking your writing against screening criteria

Getting other people’s opinions

Creating options and picking a winner

Evaluating for High Involvement

Interpreting Your Ad Research to Select or Refine a Design

Designing for Stopping Power

Measuring stopping power

After you’ve gotten their attention

Applying Great Writing to Your Web Site

A Final Check: Auditing Your Marketing Communications

Create an Ad on Steroids

Obtaining and Using Customer Testimonials

Asking for testimonials

Asking for specific testimonials

Processing the testimonial

Using customer videos and photos

Explaining who the testimonial is from

On the CD

Part V: Sales and Service Success

Chapter 14: Mastering the Sales Process

Walking through the Sales Process

Getting the Most Out of Your Contacts

Gaining contacts

Utilizing your call center

Exploring need-discovery techniques

Making the Presentation

Asking for the Business

On the CD

Chapter 15: Closing the Sale

Relying on Practice, Not Talent, to Close the Sale

Realizing That Closes Aren’t Only for Salespeople

Mastering Closing Techniques

The direct close

The trial close

The wrap-up close

The process close

The analytical close

The sales promotion close

The relationship-building close

Something Stinks! Passing the Prospect’s Smell Test

Chapter 16: The Sales Success Workshop

Improving the Flow of High-Quality Leads

Beefing up your marketing program

Getting creative when you still need more leads

Using Sales Collateral to Help Win ’Em Over

Sticking with good collateral

Avoiding bad collateral

Overcoming Sales Setbacks

The bounce-back factor

Retrained for success

Taking a Flexible Approach

Adjusting Your Interpersonal Style

Accommodating the introverted customer

Accommodating the logical customer

Accommodating the creative, free-wheeling customer

On the CD

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Chapter 17: Ten Great Marketing Strategies

Go for Market Share Now — and Worry About Raising Profits Next Year

Sponsor a Community Event

Find the Right Trade Show

Update the Benefits You Emphasize in Your Marketing Communications

Reward Large Purchasers

Tell Your Customers How You’re Saving Energy and Materials

Allow Customers to Access You Easily

Introduce Products or Services at a High Price and Then Cut Price with Volume

Let Prospects Test You Out

Get Everyone Talking about You

Introduce a New Attraction Every Three Months

Chapter 18: Ten Ways to Make Marketing Pay

Print It Yourself

Do More PR

Use More Distributors

Give More Product Away

Edit

Eat Out More

Slash Unproductive Programs

Invest More in Your Stars

Stage Events

Control Product Costs

Chapter 19: Ten Ways to Market on the Web

Experiment with Virtual Brochures and Catalogs

Have a Well-Defined Objective

Use a Power Name

Be outrageous

Be clear

Be polymorphic

Give Away Great Content

Minimize Your Load Time

Create a Sense of Community

Hold Contests

Add a News Feature

Take Advantage of Links

Bid on Key Terms

Appendix: About the CD

Software

Chapter files

Marketing Kit For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Alexander Hiam

Marketing Kit For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2009 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Author

Alex Hiam is the best-selling author of Marketing For Dummies and The Portable MBA in Marketing, as well as numerous books on management and leadership. He is the founder of INSIGHTS for Training & Development, which provides management, customer service, and sales force training to client companies throughout the world. He also designs and publishes training materials and curricula used by the in-house training departments of many companies and government agencies. You can find descriptions of his firm’s marketing and sales products and services at www.insightsformarketing.com.

Alex gives keynote addresses on topics ranging from marketing for breakthrough performance to effective leadership in business to how to negotiate with sharks. He received his BA from Harvard, his MBA from U.C. Berkeley, and was a full-time faculty member of the U Mass Amherst business school when his children were younger. Now he devotes his time to consulting, speaking, and running his own firm, where he often gets the chance to apply the principles of “streetwise” marketing himself as well as write about them for his many readers.

Alex’s marketing-related consulting and training work includes leading product and branding brainstorm sessions, consulting on business and marketing planning, helping to motivate salespeople, and performing communications audits for clients. When not at work, Alex sails his ketch, the Blue Moon, throughout the waters off the East Coast of the United States.

Dedication

To the wonderful children who enrich my life and make me proud: Noelle, Eliot, Paul, and Sadie. And to Deirdre, the wonderful woman who makes it all worthwhile.

Author’s Acknowledgments

Thanks to my able staff and associates for all their contributions to this book and the Web site that supports it, especially to Stephanie Sousbies, who runs my business on a daily basis so that I don’t have to and can write books instead.

Also, I offer many thanks to the great team of editors who I have worked with on this and earlier editions over the years, including Kathy Welton. Special thanks to Kelly Ewing, who helped make this edition clear and readable. A book like this takes a surprisingly large team to produce — see the upcoming publisher’s acknowledgments for additional members of the team. My thanks to you all.

Finally, a word must be said about my readers. Thanks to all of you who have gotten in touch over the years to share your enthusiasm and great stories of marketing success! There are so many of you out there, working hard to bring about good results, often on a limited budget. Your creativity, hopefulness, and professionalism are the raw ingredients of great marketing. I hope your associates, employers, and customers appreciate all you do.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our online registration form located at http://dummies.custhelp.com. For other comments, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax [phone].

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development

Project Editor: Kelly Ewing

(Previous Edition: Christina Guthrie)

Acquisitions Editor: Stacy Kennedy

Assistant Editor: Erin Calligan Mooney

Editorial Program Coordinator: Joe Niesen

General Reviewer: Laurie Boyce

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Editorial Supervisor and Reprint Editor: Carmen Krikorian

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Cover Photos: ©Comstock Images

Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com)

Composition Services

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Layout and Graphics: Samantha Allen, Carl Byers, Melissa K. Jester, Christine Williams

Proofreaders: Laura L. Bowman, John Greenough, Caitie Kelly

Indexer: Broccoli Information Management

Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies

Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies

Kristin Ferguson-Wagstaffe, Product Development Director, Consumer Dummies

Ensley Eikenburg, Associate Publisher, Travel

Kelly Regan, Editorial Director, Travel

Publishing for Technology Dummies

Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher, Dummies Technology/General User

Composition Services

Gerry Fahey, Vice President of Production Services

Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services

Introduction

What can you do today to boost sales, attract new customers, and retain old customers? Well, for starters, you can read this book and make a commitment to work on your marketing program! In Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, I provide information, resources, and tools for the active marketer, salesperson, or manager. Furthermore, you get the benefit of an accompanying CD-ROM that’s chock-full of templates for making plans, sales projections, surveys, and coupon profitability analysis, to name just a few of the goodies I put on there for you.

About This Book

Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, covers a wide range of subjects and offers a lot of help to anyone in business, including

Simple, powerful templates and general rules for writing a marketing plan or ad campaign and budgeting your expenses

A collection of advertising templates, brochure templates, and even templates for letterhead and business cards

Insights on how to successfully close the sale through improved sales or marketing techniques

A mini-library of professional photographic images for cost-saving designs

Plenty of ideas, examples, tips, and templates to make your sales and marketing materials look great — and function well, too

Neat marketing software I created to help you do the chores of good marketing quickly and well

Plenty of hands-on tools and activities — many of which I borrowed from high-level corporate training events and workshops — to help you boost your own performance in sales and marketing

I wrote Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, for all of you who want to take responsibility for any aspect of sales or marketing in your organization — whether that organization is a small one-person operation, a large multinational corporation, or a public sector or nonprofit organization.

Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, focuses on helping readers communicate better with customers. Whether person-to-person, through a letter, the telephone, a brochure, a Web site, or any other medium, your customer communications play a vital role in the success of your business. I’ve cued up an immense amount of information, resources, and templates to help you improve your customer communications and your overall business image. Have a peek at the contents of the CD to see what I mean! (But be sure to use this valuable CD — just a peek won’t do — because using it correctly can make the difference between a profitable business and no business.)

Conventions Used in This Book

When reading this book, be aware of the following conventions:

Web sites and e-mail addresses appear in monofont to help them stand out.

Any information that’s helpful or interesting but not essential appears in sidebars, which are the gray-shaded boxes sprinkled throughout the book.

Whenever I introduce a new term, I italicize it.

CD files are numbered, with the first two digits designating the chapter they support and the next two digits indicating the order in which I refer to them in the chapter.

What You’re Not to Read

For those among you who just want to get down to business, you can safely skip the sidebars and still get all the info you need.

Foolish Assumptions

I hate to make assumptions about people I don’t know, but, dear reader, I did have to assume a few things about you when writing this book. Hopefully at least one of these assumptions applies to you:

You’re a marketer, salesperson, or at least someone interested in marketing.

Your business isn’t as successful as you’d like it to be, and you want to know how you can fix that.

You know what you need to do to improve your marketing program, but you want someone to walk you through the necessary planning and actions.

Or maybe you aren’t sure what to do; you need to do some planning or develop a winning strategy.

How This Book Is Organized

Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition, consists of 19 chapters and a CD-ROM that has examples, templates, forms, and software organized to support and extend each chapter’s coverage. Here’s how I organized all this great information.

Part I: Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs

Things go better when you have a plan in mind. In marketing, this plan can be as simple as a back-of-the-envelope program using the Five Ps (product, pricing, placement, promotions, and people), which I cover in Chapter 1. Or it can be as complex as a detailed, systematic audit of all marketing activities, followed by a carefully written plan and a spreadsheet-based budget to go with it. I cover all these options in Part I, and I include the templates needed to take the sting out of designing a good program that boosts sales and profits. In fact, this book’s planning templates are easier to use and more professional than any of the software programs I have evaluated — and those all cost a great deal more than this book.

Part II: Advertising Management and Design

Ads are often the key element of a marketing program, and in this part, I share insights, how-to tips, and tools to help you design winning ads for your campaign. Advertising needs to start with a good plan and affordable budget, which I cover in Chapter 4. Then you have to actually design hard-hitting ads that draw attention to your message and produce leads and sales. These challenges are covered in Chapter 5.

Part III: Power Alternatives to Advertising

Advertising is costly. In this part, I show you how to get your message across and generate leads and sales in creative ways that cost less than traditional advertising. Sometimes something as simple as a really well-designed business card is the secret to winning business and boosting sales. Newsletters, publicity, catalogs, logos and letterhead, and other marketing elements may also boost your sales. Check out this part if you want to save money on expensive advertising or just to make sure that you’re doing these essentials as well as you can.

Part IV: Honing Your Marketing Skills

Some important skills are involved in doing good marketing. For example, you need to do market research to find out what customers want and how to sell better than your competitors do. And communicating well is obviously important in marketing, so I cover writing in this part as well. The star of this section is that secret ingredient that transforms ordinary marketing into the stuff of brilliant breakthroughs: creativity. I include a chapter that shares many of the techniques and tools from my firm’s corporate creativity workshops to help you make sure that you get that special leverage that only creativity can provide.

Part V: Sales and Service Success

Sales and marketing: That’s what people usually say, separating these two intertwined activities in an artificial way. I don’t really know where selling stops and marketing begins. In every successful business I’ve seen, the two activities work hand in glove to signal new customers to the door, serve current customers, and thank past customers for their business in such a way that they feel good about coming back again. So this part on how to do great sales is an important complement to the other parts of the book. Use it to make sure that you’re finding and closing as many good leads as you possibly can. Or use it to diagnose or improve any sales process, because there’s often room for improved performance.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

This part covers several topics that may give you winning ideas for your marketing program. Take a look at the collection of winning marketing strategies in Chapter 17 — maybe one of them will work for you! I also cover ways to cut costs and increase the return of your marketing investment in this part. And last but definitely not least, I’ve collected simple ideas for using the Web to boost sales and leverage your marketing program.

And don’t overlook the Appendix, which explains how to use the CD, or the CD itself. It’s attached to the inside back cover of this book.

Icons Used in This Book

I occasionally use icons to flag certain passages. Here’s what the icons mean:

This icon points out good ideas and shortcuts to make your life as a marketer easier.

Any information that’s especially important and worth remembering gets this icon.

This icon points out mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. Whatever you do, don’t skip these paragraphs!

This icon highlights a method or approach that has been used successfully in real life.

When you see this icon, you know that an accompanying example, form, or spreadsheet is available on the CD that comes with this book.

Where to Go from Here

The beauty of this book is that you can skip to any section or chapter as you desire. You can certainly read the book from cover to cover, but you don’t have to. Start with whatever topic is most important to you and don’t forget to use the accompanying tools on the CD.

I encourage you to start using the ideas and tools from this book right away to improve your marketing and boost your sales. I also encourage you to tap into the supporting Web site, www.insightsformarketing.com, to take full advantage of all your resources as a reader of one of my books.

And if you want even more information and advice about marketing principles, check out my other book Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition (Wiley). You certainly don’t need both books, but they do complement one another nicely, and there is virtually no overlap in their contents.

Part I

Tools for Designing Great Marketing Programs

In this part . . .

Iequip you with tools and ideas for improving your marketing and boosting your sales. I also share the secret of successful marketers — how they find their marketing zone, the formula that makes it easy to produce growth and control marketing costs. Then I help you control your marketing costs and develop your marketing plans.

Need a marketing plan? Honestly, everybody does, but most people dread the challenge of creating one. Probably the best feature in this part is the template and instructions for preparing your own marketing plan in Chapter 2. I include a really cool set of templates: a Word file that you can customize for the text portion of your plan and Excel spreadsheet templates that you use for your sales projections and marketing budget. I must be out of my mind to give these things away (my competitors charge hundreds of dollars for template software like this), so take advantage of it before I come to my senses!

Chapter 1

Boosting Your Business with Great Marketing

In This Chapter

Finding the zone

Committing to low-risk, flexible marketing methods

Boosting your marketing skills

Examining the Five Ps: Product, price, placement, promotion, and people

Marketing with imagination

Reaching your marketing zone

Marketing can’t be reduced to formulas. Not completely. There is always a little magic in it. The magic comes from a mix of imagination, know-how, and experimentation. Gradually, as you work with these three powerful tools, you will develop your own formulas.

Did I say marketing can’t be reduced to formulas? That isn’t entirely true. Your marketing — the specific methods you develop to boost your sales and improve your profits — will eventually crystallize into a tried-and-true formula that works for you. But this formula will be unique to your business, and you can’t copy it from anyone else. In this chapter, I help you work on your formula — the formula that will put you in your marketing zone with reliable results from an efficient, effective marketing program.