Securities Market Line

Your passive income streams are products that your customers buy. These are teleseminars, ebooks, manuals, lessons, web site memberships and many others. In addition to having great products, however, you also need to get buyers to purchase them. Without buyers you will not have streams of income – you will have products, but no revenue.

This is why it is extremely important to keep working on creating your products, while having a working marketing plan for promoting them. Here are just a few marketing ideas that I have shared with my clients. Use them to turn your products into passive income streams:

- Do market research before creating a new product. All of us have had product ideas that we loved. However, you don’t need to love you product – your customers do. If they don’t love them, or need it, no one is going to buy them. Save yourself time – do some informal (or formal!) market research before starting a new product. Your research will show whether your product will be the next or whether it is time to move on to the next idea.

MarketingSalad.com, for example, was a response to many of my clients and potential clients who wanted to participate in online business coaching, but at much lower rates than I charge for one on one training.

- Have a marketing plan in place before the product is ready. Even if your market research shows that your clients need the new product, think how you will promote beyond your clients. Start marketing before the product is ready; this will create the needed buzz to sell more products.

- Keep marketing the product after it is done. Many times a business owner launches a new ebook, sends out a press release, posts about it in the newsletter, and moves on to the next product. Once you have a product, you have put your time into it; now you need to leverage the time spent and promote the product as much as you can. Your clients need to hear about a product 7 times on average, before making a purchase, so keep up your marketing to bring in more sales. Read the rest of this entry »

The famous marketing management author, Philip Kotler defines marketing as an art. Yes, it is an art. With n number of businesses and marketing bodies running actively in the market, the real art is to create a unique selling proposition (USP) which makes your business stand out from the rest. Speaking specifically in terms of B2C marketing strategies, the target market consists of consumers who may or may not be familiar with the business techniques and principles and will be more focused on getting good products at a lower price. Therefore, one needs to keep the consumer point of view as the base while building B2C marketing strategies.

What is B2C Marketing?

By definition, B2C Marketing can be defined as the business that provides goods and/or services to a consumer based market. Some B2C marketing examples include retail consumer oriented online marketing, as well as otherwise, discount shopping outlets, etc. This marketing term ‘B2C’ is very rarely used these days but definitely played a significant role in the rapid growth and development of e-commerce in the late 20th century. Later when the capital markets went down, many B2C marketing companies transformed into a business to business marketing (B2B) company.

Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing

Although both kinds are involved in selling goods or providing services, the difference lies in the basic motive. Let us discuss the basic differences between the two:

• As the term suggests, B2B marketing is the business which sells goods or provides services to other businesses. Whereas B2C marketing is when a business provides goods and services to consumer market.
• When it comes to B2C marketing strategies, your base should be consumer oriented. You need to emphasize more on the benefits and features of the products or services you are dealing with, whereas in B2B marketing strategies are build on a more profit oriented and detailed logic.
• The B2C marketing strategies are based on emotional decisions based on the consumers as you deal with different human beings having different expectations are priorities when it comes to purchasing the products. In B2B marketing, the strategies are based on pure knowledge and logic. There is very less or no personal emotion involved between the buyer and the seller as both the parties involved are businesses and look for their organizational benefits.
• In B2C marketing, where the end consumer are mostly household consumers, the main focus is on the benefit of the product to the consumer, they would be more interested in knowing how useful will the product or service be to them when it comes to using it personally. Whereas in B2B marketing,the focus is on the knowledge and detailed information as to how will the goods or services be beneficial to the business when it comes to saving money, resources and their time. Read the rest of this entry »

What is Promotional Marketing?
Promotional marketing is a business tool that is designed to pull customers to buy the products of a company. Generally, promotional marketing is carried out by companies to launch their products or attract more potential customers. Before devising any strategy for promotional marketing, firms must ensure that they allocate a budget to the promotional marketing and set a target that gives them maximum return on the invested money. Read more on successful marketing strategies.

Promotion Strategies
There are basically two promotion strategies; the push strategy and the pull strategy. According to the push strategy, the marketers give generous discounts and benefits to the customers, so that, the sales can be increased drastically. One of the most successful strategies, the method of giving discounts is often successful for most of the firms. In the push strategy, main focus is on reducing costs of the advertising. The other strategy, the pull strategy minimizes the use of different channels and the major focus is on advertising the product. It’s goal is to create a potential market for the products of the firm.

Marketing Promotion Methods #1 Advertising
Advertising is an expensive method of promotional marketing, wherein, the products are made to reach a large number of people. For example, by using electronic media, TV, radio, press and outdoor hoardings, advertisers target the audience and try to create an impact on customers. Read more on promotional advertising.

Marketing Promotion Methods #2 Personal Selling
One of the oldest ways of direct marketing promotion is to sell the products by direct interaction between the seller and buyer. It is believed to be the most difficult form of marketing, as it requires skills of persuasion and excellent communication skills. Read more on sales negotiation training.

Marketing Promotion Methods #3: Contests Read the rest of this entry »

Niche markets offer a great way to target specific clients and build a marketing strategy. The problem is that when we think about niche markets, we typically think about specializing in one particular product or service. It is important to remember that niche markets also mean targeting one particular industry or type of client.

Being a Generalist in a Niche Market

Niche market and generalist are not mutually exclusive terms. While you shouldn’t try to be all things to all people, you can provide general services to one type of client. This is where the two strategies intersect particularly well for the computer consultant first starting out. Develop your niche market by marketing yourself as the general point of contact for just a select group of clients.

When you’re just starting out it’s really important that you don’t invest dozens and dozens of hours and thousands of dollars in classes, certifications, tests and prep work. You need to be developing contacts to get paying contacts rather than contriving a niche market. Use the skills you have right now to get those clients. And if you already have a specialized skill set, you don’t want to commit to a very narrow niche market before you have a good handle on how profitable that niche is.

Once you see that your paying clients have some common threads and you can anticipate a common set of needs, that is when you should think about further developing a niche market. Get the clients first, then look for trends and opportunities for niche markets.

The Bottom Line on Niche Markets Read the rest of this entry »