Boost business with hot marketing trends: marketing tactics, like hemlines, change over the years. Use these tips to stay in touch with customers

Art Business News, Feb, 2003 by Lynn Fey

For many, marketing is about creativity, sizzle and the next round of Super Bowl ads. However, it's important to remember that in marketing, unlike art, creativity for the sake of creativity often stands in the way of good business sense.

Listed below are a few marketing tips and trends for the next few years. They may not be glamorous or have a lot of sizzle, but they work. And for small business owners, the best sizzle a marketing program can have shows up in a healthy and profitable bottom-line.

Take a look to see how many of these you are already doing and in which areas you may have room to grow.

1. Grow business with your current customers. An existing customer is potentially five times more profitable than a new customer, so it makes sense to focus your marketing energy on retaining and cultivating a loyal base to promote cross-selling and up-selling.

Customer loyalty is your goal--not just customer satisfaction. In marketing terms, that means segmenting your current customer base and focusing your marketing dollars on those existing targets who can deliver the highest margin now and in the future.

2. Shape your business brand. For many small business owners, the temptation to sneer is hard to control when hearing the word "branding." They think branding is "fluffy thinking" they don't have time for. They roll their eyes, sigh and talk about what they could achieve if they had even a fraction of a big corporation's budget.

But branding is not advertising. It's bigger than that. And the good news for small businesses is that your brand is already there. It's in your employees, their experience and conduct; in the products you sell and their qualities; in your name, your logo and your marketing.

So you already have a brand, but you may not be utilizing it. Or it may not be what you want it to be. In either case, the essence of your brand guides your future decisions, so if it's not where you want it to be, now is the time to change. Once your brand is in place, it all boils down to communication: getting the brand message across.

At the end of the day, branding is about staying ahead of your competition. It develops a high degree of loyalty, and this loyalty leads to growth and profitability.

3. Build word-of-mouth marketing. What if I told you that you could build your business year in and year out, regardless of fluctuations in the economy or the activities of your competition? Well you can, using word-of-mouth marketing.

According to Ivan Misner, co-author of the bestseller Masters of Networking, "Word-of-mouth marketing is truly the world's best-known marketing secret."

Now you're probably wondering how can something be "best known" and a "secret" at the same time. Misner explained, "Practically everyone knows how important word-of-mouth marketing is, yet almost no one truly understands how to build their business through word-of-mouth."

We all know the damage an unhappy customer can cause by talking to dozens of people about his bad experience. Good customer service helps reduce negative word-of-mouth, and it brings in new customers over the long-term; however, it may not happen as quickly as you would like.

Misner suggested three things to help you more effectively increase your business through positive word-of-mouth:

* Diversify your networks. Be visible and active in the community by participating in various networking groups and/or professional associations.

* Develop your contact spheres. Contact Spheres are businesses that are symbiotic and noncompetitive to you. For example: a lawyer, an accountant, a financial planner and a banker. All of them have clients with overlapping needs. They can all work with and refer each other easily. Another good example: a florist, a photographer, a travel agent, a jeweler and a framer. A wedding referral to one of them becomes a referral for all of them.

* Word-of-mouth is more about farming than it is about hunting. According to Misner, building your business through word of mouth is about cultivating relationships with people who get to know and trust you. People do business with people they have confidence in. Misner explained, "It's not what you know or who you know, it's how well you know them that counts." If you go into this process remembering and understanding this one key point, you will have a better opportunity to build you business through word of mouth.

4. Maximize your marketing efforts. Make the most of your marketing dollars by carrying every marketing initiative through to its fullest potential.

For example, if you donate a framed piece to a charity auction, be sure to attend the auction and ask to be recognized as a sponsor in the program, in any public relations efforts or with a personal introduction at the event.

Set up a table, if appropriate, and hand out information about your shop. Ask for a listing of all attendees and mail a letter thanking them for their involvement and offering an incentive for them to visit your stop.

If an article is written about your business or if you are quoted in an article, find ways for more people to read it. Use it as a direct-mail piece to existing customers, reference the piece in your store's newsletter and frame and hang the article in your shop.