But when it comes to the future of marketing, rarely do you hear of the medium that has over 6 times as many users as Facebook, and open rates that are unheard of in email marketing.

Mobile marketing.

If you’ve ever seen anyone stress about forgetting their mobile phone, or just how addicted people have become to their iPhones and their Blackberrys, you’ll understand what a huge opportunity there is in mobile marketing.

While Facebook is all the rage in social media marketing circles with 600 million users, there are over 4 billion users worldwide with a mobile phone. And as email marketers strive for 40-50% and better open rates, statistics have shown SMS marketing to have open rates as high as 94%!

Mobile marketing with SMS is cheap, immediate, and can have a profound impact on your business. By building a list of subscribers who want what you have to offer, you can improve your business with techniques such as:

• Boosting sales during slow days by blasting a special offer to your SMS,
• Reducing appointment no-shows by sending reminders to your customers,
• Building your customer base by running special SMS promotions, and
• Attracting new business with special offers that can be forwarded around family and friends,

SMS marketing can be a fine line however – too few messages and you won’t realise the profits that you perhaps should, but too many messages will quickly turn your customers against you and to your competitors!

Make sure your customers opt in to your mobile list and are aware what they will receive from you, and treat the chance to market to their mobile phone as a privilege, not a right. Done well, mobile marketing could give you the head start on your competition that your business can thrive on!

If you don’t know where to start and would like further information on how mobile marketing could benefit your business, please contact me.

Think of your website as a salesperson working for you 24 hours a day.

However, having a website is only half the battle. Whether you have one or not, I’m going to show you 7 ways to make your website stand out from your competitors, provide value to your visitors, and sell more stuff.

Purpose

When someone visits your website, what do you want them to do? Do you want them to call you, sign up to your newsletter or email list, or even make a purchase through your website? Be clear to yourself, and clear to your visitors.

Build credibility

Credibility has two components – expertise, and trustworthiness. You want to use your website to position you and your business as experts, and you want to build trust. To do this, try a few of these ideas:

• List a local phone number and address
• Display Credit Card logos (methods of payments accepted) – in the prospects mind you have been approved by 3rd party vendors who have spent millions developing their credibility, and they have approved YOU.
• Local business chamber or group logos
• Testimonials from happy customers – splash these all over your site – they build trustworthiness and social proof
• Pictures of you and your business – put a face to the name
• Post your hours of operation
• List any awards you or your business has won
• Use video

Contact Info

Put your contact info on every page. I’ve seen sites where they don’t list their contact info. Hard to believe, but it’s true. At the very least, put your phone number and email address on every page. And if you want or need to, put your address on every page as well.

And don’t skip the every page part. When people are surfing the web, their attention span is very short and they can easily get off your page at the click of a button. So make it easy for them to find your info and get in touch with you. Don’t make them click around to just one page that lists your info. Put your contact info on every page!

Don’t Use Flash

Flash is animated pictures, fancy slideshows, etc. These are the things web designers LOVE to use. But they slow down the load time of the page. And remember what I said, people have a very short attention span when surfing the web. If your site takes too long to load, some people will leave.

Call To Action

You want to have some form of call to action on your site. You need to give your visitors a reason to contact you. Offer them some sort of discount if they mention a website coupon, give them something free, or anything else you can think of to get them to call you and not your competitor.

Track Visitors

Did you know that you can track all of the traffic that your website gets? You can see where your visitors are coming from, how long they stayed on your site, what pages they were on, and much more.

One of the best tools out there for tracking all of that is Google Analytics and it’s free. All you do is copy and paste a code onto the page you want to track, and away it goes. You can find Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics

Capture Visitors Information

Most businesses can benefit from capturing the name and email addresses of the people visiting their site. What you do is put an opt in form on your website. People put in their name and email address into the opt in form and it gets sent to you. The best way to do this is to offer something in exchange for their contact info. Like some sort of free report, discount, etc.

Ask yourself, would it be beneficial to you if you had a list of names and email addresses you could email whenever you wanted? I hope you realize how powerful this is. You can stay in contact with your list whenever you want. If you want to drum up some business, email your list and offer them something.

Another reason you should be capturing their contact info. Some people come to your site and for whatever reason they just aren’t ready to buy. So, if you get their email address, you can follow up with them. So when they are ready to buy they will buy from you since you have been in contact with them.

So there you go – 7 steps to a website which will put you way ahead of your competition. Hopefully you already have a few integrated into your current website (you do have a website don’t you?). Take the time to implement all the steps and your website will be transformed from just a billboard into a skilled selling machine.

If you want to be really successful in business, then you need a reason for people to do business with you over everyone else out there. You need to differentiate your business from the rest.

The best way to do that? You need a Unique Selling Proposition – a USP.

A USP is a distinct and appealing idea that sets you and your business favorably apart from every other generic competitor.

You need to be able to tell your customers why they should do business with you. If you can’t – one of your competitors will.

Here’s a great video that illustrates the power of a good USP. This guy gets pulled out of the crowd and explains how business is going poorly. Within 10 minutes of brainstorming, he has locked on a great USP, the crowd is ready to do business with him, and he is ready to turn his business around.

Could you do this for your own business? Are you ready to start telling people why they should do business with you?

If you want your customers to do business with you again – you need to be reminding them!

A letter I got in the mail the other day caught my eye – it was from a car mechanic who has got their ‘customer reminding system’ down pat. Being from a car mechanic caught me by surprise. I would expect a follow up letter from the more ‘white-collar’ businesses, such as the letters I get from my mortgage broker, or the follow up offers I get from all sorts of banks.

But it’s not something I would expect from my car mechanic – and I wonder if it’s even more powerful as a result.

Here’s a little background on my history with this mechanic. I gave them a shot a while back when they were down the road from my place – my regular mechanic had relocated into town, and the ability to just drop my car down the road for a service is what won me over. They did a great job, and provided me with more information on my car than my regular mechanic, but I didn’t really intend going back.

About 5 months later, I get a letter from my new mechanic reminding me my car is due for a service soon. This is something I’ve never got from my regular mechanic, and I’m usually pretty slack getting my car serviced. I was planning on going back to my regular mechanic, but this new mechanic has got me – they’re making it easy for me to do business with them.

So one letter = a service they wouldn’t have otherwise got.

Anyway, since that last service I’ve moved suburbs. True to form, I got another reminder letter – if I hadn’t have got my car fixed up a couple of weeks before they might have got me again. So this time it didn’t work, but if circumstances were different, it might have.

The process wasn’t finished there, however. A week before my service was ‘due’, I got another reminder letter. I got another letter a few days after my service was ‘due’, reminding me again, as well as telling me a few reasons why it is important my car gets serviced regularly. If I were thinking of missing a service – this letter would have made me think twice.

Finally, the letter that prompted me to post turned up the other day. It briefly said we noticed I haven’t brought my car in for a while, and offered me a $25 discount if I came in within the next 7 days. If I was holding off on a service because I was short on cash, well this letter might have got me in.

I think this latest letter is probably the last in their sequence, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Either way, this mailing sequence has already got this mechanic one extra service from me, and if I hadn’t have moved, I’m pretty sure they would have locked me in as a customer for a long time.

Let’s take a quick look at the situations where they’ve set themselves up to make an extra sale:

• If their customers forget their upcoming service – they remind them,
• If their customers are holding off on a service because they’re short on cash – the discount might sway them, and
• If their customers are thinking where to go for their next service – the letters can keep the mechanic in their customers minds.

What are you doing in your business to remind your customers to do business with you?