How To Market Your Company

1. How To Market Your Company Commercial Food Equipment Service Association Marketing Seminar, Fall Conference 2005 Exposing Yourself! Bringing Visibility To Your Company

2. Marketing Do’s and Don’ts 3 Keys to Successful Marketing • A Good Product or Service • A Marketing Plan • Money for Advertising 3 Marketing No-No’s! • Don’t promise anything you can’t deliver • Over advertising can drain your budget. Start small and build up to bigger things • When promoting, do not repeat ads that others have already used

3. Ideas For Marketing Through Advertising • Choose methods according to cost, targeting and response. • Obtain a Media Kit from perspective publications, detailing the types of display advertising available, the cost and the readership profile and circulation. • Research the publication before committing to the ad space. • Keep your ad consistent in each publication, initially. This will cause people to begin to recognize your logo and tag-line.

4. Good Marketing Through Advertising • Clearly define your product or service up front! • Give precise reasons why anyone would be interested in your product or service; Is it better, cheaper, faster or what? • Keep the message or ad simple, colorful and clean. • Refer to the reader as 'you' and use the second person ('you', 'your' and 'yours' etc) in the description of what your business does for the customer. • Why should people be interested if your offering proposition is no different from your competition? You must try to emphasize what makes your service special.

5. Example of Advertising That Works! Very clever and very effective. One of the most original advertisements I've seen in a long time. They certainly did a good job of showing you what exactly could happen if your identity was stolen - someone could buy a leather corset with your name, scary! The reason this works is because it takes a very real and growing problem and brings humor into it in an "opposite effect" way. These commercials are classics.

6. Example of Advertising That Works This couple has to live in a really tiny house for a year because they are spending too much money on insurance. It seems you can't sit through a commercial break these days without seeing a new pitch for the auto insurer, Geico. Why are Geico ads all over your television? The answer is more about the product than the marketing. These ads are funny and original, so they get our attention and that’s the point.

7. Bad Marketing Through Advertising • Ads that are not clearly defining what you are advertising. • Blurry, out of focus or illegible ads. • Too many graphics or none at all. • Avoid cluttering the ad with fancy images, colors and backgrounds. Make it easy to read. • Do not be tempted to devote 50% of the space to a striking picture or a quote from Shakespeare. The biggest part of the ad must be your main benefit statement.

8. Example of Ads That Don’t Work The Spot: It's morning. Birds are chirping. A man wakes up in his bed … and discovers he's not alone! next to him on the mattress there is some sort of royal personage: a king, clad in burgundy robes and a crown. But the king's head appears to be made of plastic and is perhaps three times too large for his body. together. What’s the point? Does this make you hungry for Burger King?

9. Example of Ads That Don’t Work Bad Andy!!! A creation brought to us by the Muppet crew. Bad Andy's gimmick was to be really evil so that the pizzas would sound so good. He'd screw up some of the things going around in Dominos, and then the staff would give 30 second long speeches on why certain functions were so important, like how their heat bags kept the pizzas warm. Bad Andy was a sales killer. After a few months, Dominos found themselves in a rut, and were forced to dump the puppet for the "Get The Door, It's Dominos“ slogan. Much better!

10. Ideas for Printed Efforts Printed material is just as important today as it was before the Internet. With sp*a*m getting out of hand, it’s a wise choice to rev up, update or create printed material. • Ads • Catalogs • Direct mail • Press releases • Letters • Brochures • Tip sheets • Comment Cards • Leave Behind Brochures • Line Cards

11. Good Printed Materials • The first and most important principle is: always pretest materials on the target audience before mass producing. • Simplify the illustrations and avoid extraneous details. When possible, present only one message per page. • In general, objects should be in scale and in context. Enlargement of detail may have a negative effect on understanding the message. • People look at printed material in different ways, especially people who are not used to reading ads. We learn to read words from left to right and probably "read" pictures on a page that way, too.

12. Example of A Good Printed Ad Great Example of an ad. It’s clear, clean and to the point! Services are listed to the right and the colors work well together!

13. Example of A Good Printed Ad Example of how black and white can work! This ad is clean, clear and very informative. Services are listed and it’s visually pleasing.

14. Bad Printed Materials • Credibility can be lost if your material includes careless mistakes or omits vital information. • Mailing a marketing piece weeks after your first contact is too late. When opportunity knocks, be ready. Timing is everything. • Using outdated materials: rates, addresses, phone numbers, contact names, email addresses, etc… • Avoid unusual angles, drawings and poor lighting.

15. Example of “ A Bad Printed Ad” Words are going in every direction in this ad. Don't you think it makes it hard to read? Where do you start? Ironically, like most of the bad ads we see, it also fails to mention any customer benefits.

16. Example of “A Bad Printed Ad” "In case you haven't heard..."? Poor headline. Doesn't deliver a powerful benefit to the reader.  It doesn't even bother to mention any of the symptoms of hearing problems. I mean, really... how many people see an ad and say "Gee, I wonder if I have hearing problems?”

17. Ideas for Using the WebWeb-Casts • Consider web-casts because of its convenience and global reach. • Keep web-casts short and to the point. • Deliver valuable information that is tied to your target market's key concerns. • Make it very easy to register and to attend. • Talk to a few prospects to bounce ideas on topics, cost, venues, etc. • Tie the seminar together with a respected industry expert.

18. Good Internet Marketing • Have a clear and consistent navigation throughout the site. • Have a site map with links to as many pages as possible for those people that don't want to search through the site to find what they are looking for. • Make sure you have a phone number on every page as well as a contact page with multiple ways for your customers to contact you. • Use a clear layout, clear fonts and clear language. Do not distract the reader from the text by overlaying images or using fancy fonts. Use simple language, avoid complicated words and keep enough space around the text to attract attention.

19. Bad Internet Marketing • Check for broken links! This drives traffic away from your site faster than anything else. • Avoid the use of wild colors and large fonts. • Don’t neglect your website and allow it to advertise things like outdated specials! Keep your site fresh with changing content, especially on the home page. • Don't use tons of fancy scripting, Macromedia Flash, applets, etc. unless you don't want people to go through your site. This all takes time to load. • Don’t use an unreliable server that crashes all the time! Nothing could be worse than this!

20. The Most Important Step! If you don’t swing the bat you can’t hit the home run! If you don't buy a ticket, you can't win the lottery. Implementationis the most important stage in your marketing plan!

21. Where to Begin • Effective marketing implementation starts with managing your marketing activities. • Measuring and control are parts of good management. • Using a simple chart to monitor your initiatives will increase your implementation effectiveness.

22. Make it Happen • The heart of the implementation of a marketing plan is the execution. That is, the actual "doing" of the planned marketing activities. Initiatives don't get completed by stating them on paper. They require action, management and follow up.

23. Successful marketing Implementation Requires: • Effective and efficient coordination of activities, who's doing what and by when. • Deflection of distractions or objections by focusing on the tasks at hand and determining where your time is best spent. • Attention to detail. • Staying on top of "who's doing what.” Never assume someone else is doing something. It's that simple.

24. SuccessfulMarketing Implementation Requires: • Elimination of procrastination. No waiting allowed. If it's good enough to do later, it's good enough to do now. There's no time like now to further your marketing efforts. • Over-delivery and under-promising. Delighting your prospects and customers will turn your marketing efforts into sales dollars. • Doing what you do best and outsourcing or delegating the rest. Unless you have more than 24 hours in a day, you can't do it all and you certainly can't do it all well.