Why Are Brochures Important For Sales and Marketing?
For most businesses, marketing is an important function that is necessary in order for the business to grow and compete. In the past, word of mouth was enough for any company to succeed. However, as the volume of noise consumers were faced with grew, so did the need for companies to do more, say more, and reach out further to each client and potential client.
Companies now know that business promotion is as essential as their business structure and their employees. As businesses are faced with competition both online and off, they are forced to reach consumers by using offline tactics to complement and support their online marketing goals. For years marketers have successfully used brochures to work in both their online and offline sales and marketing efforts. In short:
Brochures inform: Marketing brochures are an excellent way to communicate everything from ‘what is your business?’ and ‘what does it do?’ to ‘why you do things the way you do’ as well as the rather commonly found ‘contact information’ like email addresses and website location. Brochures are the foundation of any well-planned marketing campaign and provide your customers with a tangible document that communicates your most pertinent information in a colorful, glossy, well-designed, and informative piece of collateral.
Brochures are cost-effective and results-oriented: For a small business which lacks the resources to deploy mainstream media campaigns, brochures can be an incredibly cost-effective and results-oriented method of marketing one’s business. While the unit cost of producing a brochure decreases as the number being printed increases, the costs are still a very low compared to even a one day’s worth of ad placements in a newspaper or on television.
Brochures are too well-designed to be discarded: Ever wondered why so much emphasis is placed on designing a brochure? One of the reasons is certainly to make it look good (which goes without saying), but also to ensure that they aren’t hastily thrown into the trash can or recycling bin. The higher the quality that is perceived in brochure printing, the more likely it is that a consumer will read it before discarding. When was the last time you ripped a high-quality brochure apart and threw it into the waste paper basket without at least glancing at its contents?
Brochures are durable and long lasting: You probably read the daily newspaper just once and then you might never read it again. On rare occasions, you might take another peek at it, if you had a compelling reason for doing so. Television ads run for mere seconds and often miss the bulk of their intended target audience. In comparison, a brochure’s lifespan is much longer, increasing the chance that it will be read again and again.
Brochures help build and sustain a brand: There are many important attributes of an effective brochure, including paper type (coated or uncoated?), content, format size, design, color selection, and overall print quality. Combined, all of these attributes help define your product or service in the eyes of prospective customers, as well as build brand awareness for your offering. Conversely, a poorly designed and executed brochure will reflect negatively on your business, and may in fact have the opposite effect of a well-designed, high-quality brochure. By careful planning and execution, you can produce an effective brochure that will help ensure the success of your product or service.
Despite the popularity of other more expensive forms of advertising and marketing, brochures are still on of the most important and cost-effective ways to promote your products and services.
2 Step Direct-marketing: Your Secret Weapon to Boosting Income Direct Selling Home Parties Even in a Recession!
Would you like to increase your home based business profits by 50% without increasing your marketing budget?
Direct sales opportunity, with the current economic and market situations as they are, is fast gaining ground and popularity as an alternative source of income. Any direct sales consultant with a home business, you know that marketing is a fundamental to building any successful direct sales home party business. Where many a home party plans business owner stumble, struggle and fail is not knowing to whom they are marketing and how to market both online and offline!
You see the common urge in the mlm direct marketing industry is to try and crumb something down the throat of a would be customer.
When you get a potential customer, many will do an immediate sales pitch. It is unfortunately premature and turns people off! A better method, that any direct sales marketing guru will tell you and a business best practice is the 2 step direct marketing.
Simply put, 2 step direct sales marketing is based on giving something away for free, or at low cost, with the purpose of getting something back in return. Of course that something is a sale, but beyond that is the relationship. The idea here is to start small and build. You want to obliterate concerns before you sell them anything – this is what is termed as pre-selling.
Step 1: Give away something, time, free samples, free demos, a free report, free session of coaching or consulting.
Step 2: Get their contact information and permission to market to them. This is called dripping information. No hard sells please. In this phase you are building rapport and trust. Why? So that you can begin to exert your influence. Ever heard of the phrase Jump! How high? Good, that is the power you will command if your engage in the 2 step process!
So here is the psychology behind it You get a visitor to your site or meet a potential customer/business builder.
What you want to do is get their
1.Attention
2.Permission
3.Interact
4.Trust
5.Influence
You want to craft an irresistible offer, to raise the fever pitch if you will.. In doing so you will get their attention and in effect raise anticipation.
If you place and ad in a paper, mail out a postcard or have a website, the best way to get attention is an irresistible headline. For example
How To Have “Killer” Sex
At Any Age… Even If
You Don’t Deserve It!
I have a feeling that got your attention and you are headed to google search to figure out if the book exists. At the time of this writing, I have not yet ascertained the validity nor the existence of the book.
Your attention getting message must be compelling create a compelling giving just enough information about the product to get the prospect to take some sort of action. Invoke curiosity….
Direct Sales Training Tip : Use the useful but incomplete rule…don’t give it all always. You now what they say, why buy the cow if you can milk it for free?
2. Call to action: There is no point in crafting an irresistible offer only to drop the ball. People like sheep, must be led every step of the way.
A call to action is the desired action you would like the potential prospect, client or customer to make. For example Click Here To Order. Limitted Time Offer. While Supplies Last. Get Your Free Copy Today!
The purpose of the call to action is an exchange of information. You are capitalizing on their desire to get their hands on what you have in return for their name, phone number, email address and where possible a physical mailing address! This is called getting people to raise their hand for information. This is the essence of permission marketing, a term that is associated with Seth Godin, Marketing Demi-god!
Those who raise their hands for information become very hot direct sales leads. These are great business opportunity prospects and an excellent way to build a list.
As every direct sales representative or home party consultant knows, the “fortune is in the follow-up!” Once the information exchange that was initiated by you is done and you have provided them with the requested information don’t stop there. Now you get into the direct sales marketing relational capital area of things! You all know of the dismal statistics
“95% OF PEOPLE FAIL WHEN THEY START A BUSINESS WITHOUT A SYSTEM.
95% PERCENT OF PEOPLE ARE SUCCESSFUL WHEN THEY START A BUSINESS WITH A SYSTEM! “
- Entrepreneur Magazine
This is a direct result of lack of follow up and follow through!
Contrary to popular opinion, the money is not in the list. If you haven’t heard this before “the money is in the follow-up” so continually follow up. Once you have permission to market to people set up an email marketing campaign! If you don’t have an autoresponder, get one, this is the easiest way to follow up. Send them an email as often as necessary to create a relationship and remind them of your backend product. Don’t just do hard selling here. I am a strong proponent of direct mail efforts with a combination of email marketing!
2 step direct – marketing method is a time tested marketing method and will produce targeted prospects for your home based business. The idea here is work smarter not harder!
All Change in Japan
A recent Australian government paper which examined the future of Japan made the point that the GDP of the Kanto region alone (the area around Tokyo and Yokohama) amounted to more than the combined GDP of Indonesia and Thailand. The GDP of Aichi prefecture in central Japan represents almost 3% of total world GDP. The late 1990’s witnessed an explosion in the number of foreign companies moving into and upgrading their presence in Japan. Clearly Japan remains a force to be reckoned with – even taking into account the growing economic and political importance of China.
First glimmer of change
What we see shaping up in Japan now is significant historical change – the emergence of a country which must, if it is to survive, become truly international in its cultural, economic, political and business life. The evidence is beginning to show: long-overdue deregulation of key business sectors, most notably the financial sector, plus the need to cast beyond Japan’s shores for greater foreign investment and know-how, means that Japanese companies are coming to the realisation that without deeper and closer ties with non-Japanese partners, the future of the country will remain bleak.
Organisations such as Merrill Lynch are examples of overseas companies now entering the Japanese market with renewed vigour: from an historical perspective, this key trend is an excellent example of what the Japanese call “gaiatsu” – or pressure from outside. The past shows that without external stimuli – such as that of China in the 6th century, the United States in 1853 and the Allied Occupation of Japan following the end of the war in the Pacific – nothing of momentous significance happens in Japan. Maintaining the status quo fits the Japanese societal preference for harmony but at the same time, it can cause complacency and stagnation – as we have witnessed in Japan for close on a decade. All of this is set to change – and the changes will undoubtedly gather pace.
What does this mean for non-Japanese working with the Japanese inside and outside Japan? Firstly, the potential for increased and closer co-operation has never been greater. Foreign companies setting up or enhancing their presence in Japan will face the challenges of importing new management concepts to replace those Japanese methods which have served the country well but which have no place in the global market of the 21st century. How is this going to be done?
Secondly, non-Japanese multinationals will need to examine how their Japanese partner companies can better fit a more global context. How do you get your Japanese colleagues to buy into and contribute to global business strategies? Thirdly, faced with difficult market conditions at home, Japanese companies which moved their operations abroad in the 80’s and 90’s will find themselves demanding more of their overseas affiliates. They will have to ask the questions: How can we get more out of our people – Japanese and non-Japanese? How can we make cultural differences a positive rather than a negative factor?
There are no simple answers but perhaps the starting point has to be mutual understanding between Japanese and non-Japanese partners, not only of the obvious cultural differences but perhaps more crucially, differences in business methodology. Many Japanese and non-Japanese business people believe that the best way forward is for the Japanese to buy into a kind of Euro-American business culture built on anglophone, MBA-oriented precepts. I believe that this approach is crucially flawed. Firstly, many “internationally-minded” Japanese tend to equate the attainment of an international perspective with achieving fluency in English. Non-Japanese who work with this kind of person are lulled into a false sense of security: they mistake an American accent for biculturalism. Add to this the fact that many fluent English speakers amongst the Japanese are facilitators rather than decision-makers and you have a cultural timebomb just waiting to go off. You expect things to be done the way you requested them; your Japanese counterpart gives you the impression that they can carry out your requests – but at the end of the day, the monoglot Japanese bosses – the real decision-makers – shoot down the proposal. Result: a potentially dangerous mismatch of expectations.
What are the real issues?
Most Japanese companies with the notable exception of a few, are still locked into a mindset which tells them that conflict – born of cultural misunderstanding – is something that requires “gaman” (perseverance in the hope that something miraculous will happen to solve the problem). They emphasise the need to be self-reliant: they do not want the help of outsiders to solve their internal human resource difficulties. Non-Japanese business people are less inclined to disregard the cultural differences, although many think that a good book on Japanese business etiquette – describing how to hand over one’s business card with two hands, how one should not blow one’s nose into a handkerchief in public and how to hold a pair of chopsticks – will suffice. Quite clearly, both Japanese and non-Japanese business people working together now – and into the 21st century – need to spend time on getting into the real issues of working practices, of managing multi-cultural groups and of creating cultural synergies. This will mean the difference between achieving lacklustre and truly outstanding results.
Original article at www.intercultural-training.co.uk