101 Marketing Strategies

101 marketing strategies? Surely there are more than 101 marketing strategies to build a small business? More important than that, though, is why should you believe me that these are the best?

Good questions!

On my current bookshelf are books with such titles as "2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success", "201 Super Sales Tips", "Sell Yourself - 501 Ways to Get Them to Buy from You", "22 Immutable Laws of Marketing", "101 Ways to Promote Yourself", "The 12 Cliches of Selling and Why They Work", and "50 Rules to Keep a Client Happy"!

That's a total of 3,126 small business marketing strategies (assuming no overlap!).

And these are just on my top shelf!

How do we make any sense out of these? How do we know which of these 101 marketing strategies works best for us and our small business? Where do we start?

Just for the record...

I've built several successful small businesses and have found that these 101 marketing strategies are the most highly effective, repeatable, low (or no) cost strategies that work all the time, regardless of what kind of small business we have.

As long as we have at least one customer, we can build a business from there. And if we are just beginning and don't even have our first customer, these ideas and concepts can get us started.

Here is a brief rundown of the businesses I've built successfully

• Insurance - life and health

• Investments: mutual funds, limited partnerships, unit investment trusts

• Money management services as an Investment Advisor

• Network marketing (MLM) three different times successfully

• Replacement windows sales consultant

• Industrial chemicals regional sales manager

• Windshield repair service company founder and operator

• Professional speaker

By using a number of these 101 marketing strategies, I've built these successful businesses (two of which I've sold for a nice profit). And so I know that these work. I've seen it happen over and over again. I guarantee that these 101 marketing strategies will work for you and for your small business as well.

And so it really doesn't matter what kind of small business we have. As long as we have, or want more, customers, these 101 small business marketing strategies will work.

What is a customer?

This question brings me to a critically important point: customers are people! And people are predictable! In general, people make decisions in the same way, they are affected by events in the same way, they respond to certain strategies in the same way, and they can be reached and touched and influenced in the same way.

And so, whether we have 1 or 101 or 1001 customers, if we are looking to grow and expand our customer base, these are the small business marketing strategies that work!

What (or who) is our target market?

The key to which of these 101 marketing strategies to use is knowing who our target market is. Once we know that, then we can (and must!) focus in on that market.

Peter Drucker put it this way:

"What business am I in?" "What exactly is it that I'm about?" Answering these questions is the first step on the road to success.

Here are some indications that we may not be focused:

1. We have multiple business cards, one for each of our different business activities
2. We have deliberately chosen a generic or generalized "catch all" business name that doesn't say what we do so we can use it for everything that we do
3. When we are asked what we do, we don't know how to answer
4. People don't seem to take us or our business seriously
5. We can't describe briefly what it is that we do
6. Our customers rarely refer other clients to us
7. When someone asks what we do, we might respond, "I do lots of things", or "What do you need done?"
8. People have trouble explaining what we do to others
9. Others might say that they can't keep up with all the things we're doing
10. Our business card includes a list of things that other people are doing as a full-time business
11. We have difficulty articulating what we do in a single sentence

How strong is our "why"?

The final step before investigating which of these 101 marketing strategies would work best for our business is to discover our "why":

• Why are we going through this?
• Why do we think this is a good idea?
• Why do we think we can compete successfully in our market?
• Why is our business "special", or even "unique"?

Why our WHY is so important

Building a business is hard work. Often it is thankless. It is lonely. It will be frustrating.

It also is worth it!

When I started out in the life insurance business, my "why" was sitting at home waiting for me: my beloved wife Mary, and our newborn son, Russ. And I was scared!

I'd spent six years (and many thousands of dollars of my father's money) at an expensive Ivy League school, and I had nothing to show for it but a couple of pieces of paper! These pieces of paper showed that I had successfully passed a series of examinations. But they didn't prepare me in any way for the life insurance business.

I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of disappointing my family. I was afraid of disappointing my mother and father. And I was afraid of disappointing myself.

There was a moment, about the middle of the third year of my business, when I came face to face with my "why". At that moment, I determined to make this thing work. There was a fork in the road (there always is a fork in the road!), and I simply decided then and there to keep on keeping on. It was my "why" that made that happen.

And that was when I began trying, testing, sampling, experimenting with and then employing various ideas that eventually became the best 101 marketing strategies I've ever used in gaining and keeping customers.

It wasn't easy, but the rewards, financial and personal, were worth it.

Here is my gift to you, from Calvin Coolidge:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.

Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.

Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

The slogan "press on" has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race.

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