Would your sales increase if you got more leads, prospects, callers, or visitors coming to your business? Wouldn’t it be exciting if there were a way to achieve this while reducing your marketing costs at the same time? Well, there is a way and I’m going to share that with you right now.

Here it is. STOP spending money on advertising and promotions that do NOT produce profitable leads. Then take those dollars you were previously wasting and START investing them in advertising and promotions that DO produce profitable leads.

But exactly how can this be achieved? First, you need the type of hard data you get from Marketing Metrics Reports. To find out more about this, let’s look at a few simple examples.

Let’s assume you use a yellow pages ad, flyers, and radio ads to attract prospective customers.

If you spend $12,000 per year on yellow pages advertising and this gets you 600 leads per year, you can calculate the cost of each lead by dividing the cost of the advertising by the number of leads you get. $12,000 divided by 600 leads equals $20. In other words, each lead you get using this method costs you $20.

We call this $20 your ‘Lead Acquisition Cost’. Depending on the amount of your average sale, paying $20 for each lead could be tremendously profitable.

However, in our example, let’s assume that your yellow pages ad doesn’t work so well and you get only 60 leads per year while spending $12,000 on the advertising. In this example your Lead Acquisition Cost works out to $200. If your average sale is only $150 and your customers (on average) deal with you once every year, obviously a Lead Acquisition Cost of $200 is just not profitable.

To complete our example, we’ll assume your lead acquisition cost with flyers is $26 per lead and with radio ads it is $97 per lead.

When you have this information, you become aware that (in this example) you must eliminate your yellow pages advertising with its Lead Acquisition Cost of $200 per lead so you can afford to send out more flyers, which have a Lead Acquisition Cost of $26 per lead.

You would also let your radio advertising reps know they must produce dramatically better results right away or your radio ads will be eliminated as well.

From the above example, we can easily understand the lesson. To make profitable advertising decisions you need to know your EXACT Lead Acquisition Cost for EVERY form of advertising and promotion you use.

How do you track that? You create Marketing Metrics Reports. But before you do that, let’s consider a few more variables. Some types of advertising produce a greater percentage of ‘tire kickers’ and a smaller percentage of buyers. So we now see that our Marketing Metrics Reports should track not only the cost and number of leads produced by each type of advertising—they should also tell us how many of the leads from each advertising source became buyers.

When we have this information, we can calculate our ‘Customer Acquisition Cost’ or, in other words, the amount it costs us to ‘buy’ a customer using each different type of advertising.

Also, at this point we need to understand another marketing metrics term—Conversion Rate. Your Conversion Rate is simply the percentage of leads or prospects that actually buy something. You calculate this percentage by dividing the number of prospects who became customers through buying something by the total number of prospects you talked to.

It is critical to calculate the conversion rate for each individual salesperson as well as the conversion rate for your team as a whole. We’ll use an example to illustrate why knowing your conversion rate for each salesperson is so important.

Lets suppose you have 3 salespeople on staff. You calculated that 48% of the prospects who talked to Salesperson A actually bought something. This means that Salesperson A’s conversion rate is 48%. To continue with our example, lets assume that Salesperson B has a conversion rate of 33% and Salesperson C has a conversion rate of 24%.

Really think about what this means. Salesperson C uses up twice as many leads per sale as Salesperson A. Of course, this means when Salesperson C makes a sale, your profits are dramatically less than when Salesperson A sells something. Let’s plug some numbers into our example to see why profits are so strongly affected.

If the Customer Acquisition Cost per sale is $56 dollars for Salesperson A, then the Customer Acquisition Cost for Salesperson C is $112. This is because Salesperson C’s conversion rate is only half as good as Salesperson A’s. This high Customer Acquisition Cost (probably caused by Salesperson C’s poor sales skills) likely means that you lose money on every sale made by Salesperson C. It looks even worse when you calculate the lost gross profits on the potential sales Salesperson C failed to make.

In this example, your Marketing Metrics Reports have again served you well. You now know Salesperson C must improve his or her conversion rate (probably through additional sales training) or termination will be necessary.

Now let’s review how your Marketing Metrics Reports have helped you boost revenue and cut costs—in other words, made your business more profitable.

1. Your Marketing Metrics Reports have identified which forms of advertising and promotion are effective at generating leads and which are not. You know for sure exactly how much it costs to buy each lead using each different type of advertising.

2. Your Marketing Metrics Reports have helped you determine the relative quality of leads from each advertising source. You know which types of ads bring in the ‘tire kickers’ and which types of ads bring in buyers.

3. Your Marketing Metrics Reports have identified the conversion rate of each individual on your sales team as well as the conversion rate of your team as a whole. This gives you the information you need to implement ‘best practices’, focus your training efforts, and even decide which salespeople to replace if they fail to improve.

With this critical information in hand, you can make decisions that will quickly improve your bottom line. Of course, without this information some of your decisions and actions will be a blind gamble—not good if you are serious about maximizing your profits.

What do Marketing Metrics Reports look like? They are usually simple charts or spreadsheets where the type of information identified above can be easily entered. If you would like to see sample reports, e-mail the author and he will send you some. You can then modify the reports, making them perfect for use in your business.

Stephen Steckly helps with skills in marketing, sales, finance, operations, human resources, goal achievement, and leadership. He is the president of the business coaching and consulting firm, Profit Strategies Inc. E-mail stecklyss@yahoo.ca or click on http://www.profitableteambuilding.com

Mobile marketing is a type of marketing that is done throughout the world. It incorporates the use of the mobile phone to provide information, advertisements and other types of promotion. There is a great wealth of value in this type of product and service simply because of its ability to get right to the customer at the right time. By promoting in this manner, mobile marketing allows individuals to get just what they want when they need it. And, it allows businesses to reach their customers right on target.

Marketing is marketing. It is about finding the ways to reach consumers at the right time. It is a valuable tool that allows others to know who the company is, what they have to offer and why they should be taken advantage of. In the mobile industry, this is all very important.

The mobile phone has become something that people just do not leave their homes without. It is a tool that connects them with their friends and family, their boss, and even their favorite retailers. It allows them to correspond in emails and text messages and it allows them to stay connected to the rest of the world. In short, the mobile phone is something that everyone must have.

The combination of the mobile phone and marketing techniques can lead to increased sales and promotion as well as convenience and affordability. It works so well because of just what it is. It is a tool for consumers to stay in touch with just what they need and for businesses to provide for that need. Mobile marketing works well because it allows for the right action at the right time, period. There is no limit to what this type of marketing can promote or in what format. But, it is essential that those who plan to take advantage of these dollars to do so in a timely fashion before others get the jump start.

Sandy Baker is a well respected writer and recommends using mobile marketing, which creates and delivers the most innovative, consumer-friendly, useful and profitable mobile phone data applications to the market.

So, you know what a brand is. You know what makes up a brand and which parts of your company you might be able to exploit - I mean use, to define and manipulate your brand and the way you are perceived by the public. But, well, how?

The combination of a successfully developed brand and the implementation of a great marketing campaign will do wonders for your business. Think of the TV advertisements that stick in your mind - what makes it so? What have they done differently? If you make a list, you’ll notice that each and every one of them has taken advantage of creative and innovative ideas. It is not enough to only have a great logo, or great radio ads. The entire marketing package, when done properly, is your key to building your business into a wonderful success.

There are a great number of business tools that are widely accepted as forms of advertising. The key here is to put your brand on everything. That might not even mean to put your logo on everything (although in most cases it is advisable), but just to make sure that all of your business material fits in with the business image that you’ve already determined. For instance, if you have a particular corporate colour that’s fairly unique (that is, it’s not black), you can use that to your advantage by putting all of your correspondence in colour coded envelopes. If your brand is a particular scent or perfume, make sure you’re always wearing it when you meet with your potential suppliers or customers. Brand everything.

You should have two main ports of call, depending on your industry: your business card and your website. These are the first places your customers will look for your information. If your brand isn’t apparent through these two mediums, you’re probably in a bit of marketing trouble. Stop reading, find a brand developer (I know one you could use! ho ho) and have them redone. Right now. No excuses.

You should use your logo, or some manifestation of it, on your business card. Your business card is your little personal identity that people can carry about with them. A piece of you is written in to your business card. Work on it and work on it until it’s exactly right, or you’ll regret it as soon as it comes back from the printers. You should be proud to hand your business card over - it’s even better if people go "oooh" when they see it. Aim for "oooh".

With regards to your website, above all else it should be nice looking and easy to navigate. It really need not be flashy, but chances are that people will be keener to take an interest in it if it’s not ugly. So if you have an ugly website, you’ll want to fix that too. It doesn’t need to be beautiful, but it needs to be inoffensive. If you want to do it yourself, there are tens of thousands of tutorials out there on web design that you might find useful. Otherwise, employing a web designer or developer to create an effective site for you is your best bet. Just make sure you check out their previous work, to make sure they can actually provide what you need. Web designers seem to be a dime a dozen these days, and it can make it difficult to choose one that is actually skilled!

Now go away and come back when you’ve got your business cards and web site sorted out. I’ll wait here.

Once you have your initial points of contact sorted out, you can look at everything else. There are so many options for marketing your product or service, I couldn’t possibly cover them all, even if I wrote a book about it. So let’s talk options and examples. I’ll use myself as an example, then I can disguise brainstorming as writing an article, and feel accomplished afterwards.

The most obvious form of marketing seems to be print advertising. Print advertising is available through different mediums: magazines, newspapers, letterbox drops, flyers, brochures, annoying bits of paper under people’s windscreen wipers.

There are benefits to all of these, depending on who your target audience is and how much you want to spend. For instance, a quarter page colour ad in a magazine might cost you $1500, but it might also give you more opportunity to target your specific audience (if, for example, you were a brand developer, you could advertise in a start-up company magazine). Obviously the benefit here versus in a newspaper is the specific audience reading the magazine. But the newspaper might only cost you a couple of hundred dollars, so there is benefit in that.

Letterbox drops are fairly inexpensive to develop (especially if you do the photocopying and dropping yourself), but you might find that the majority of people just throw your flyer out. And then the people who do actually read your flyer might not be interested, which can make it a big waste of time. On the other hand, if you have a low-sales, high-profit sort of business with big mark-ups, even a few sales from your drop may make it profitable, so it could well be worth the time and money you put into it.

Brochures allow you to display your full range of products, but they’re expensive to produce and like letterbox drops, a lot of people just throw them in the bin - at $4 a pop, that’s nothing to laugh at. If you stick your flyer up at your local supermarket, it will probably only cost you 20 cents for the photocopy, but it may be detrimental to your professionalism. Annoying bits of paper under the windscreen wipers are, well, annoying, and should probably be reserved for door to door salesmen.

It’s not just about advertising though, of course. As I’ve discussed previously, your brand is made up of so many more components than just advertising material. Get creative with your marketing - when you sell a product, add your own personal flair to it. Make sure your packaging material has your logo on it. When you’re out and about, wear a t-shirt or earrings in the colour of your company. If you do these sorts of things often enough, people will start to take notice. Every minute of the day is an opportunity to have your brand recognised.

Do you feel more positively about companies that are active in the community, or with charities? How would involvement in a campaign such as donating a percentage of your profits to a non-profit organisation reflect on your brand? Consider that if you sell children’s clothing, for example, donating part of each sale to SIDS & Kids may well encourage parents to think of your business as being concerned about children and involved in the community. And of course, you get a good feeling from it, and SIDS & Kids will benefit as well. Everyone wins.

Take advantage of free marketing opportunities. I recently purchased a book called Marketing Without Money (it’s not a bad book, worth a read!), and for irony’s sake put my business stickers on the front and back of it, with a little blurb about what I do. When people on the bus take an interest in what I am reading, they’ll also see an advertisement for my firm. Take your business cards everywhere and give them out at every opportunity, even if you don’t give them out during necessarily business-related conversations.

Make sure you’re well presented as often as you can be. I know we all have those days when our nose is a bit stuffy and we just want to roll out of bed and to the supermarket in our trackies to buy chocolate, but if you can give an air of sophistication and "I took the time to be presentable, because I care about my business image", that will have a profound effect on anyone you happen to speak to. You can never be certain of when a business opportunity might arise - give yourself the best chance of making a good impression when it does.

Consider sign writing for your car, which is fairly inexpensive and can be very effective. People might not pull you over to talk about your company, but if you do a fair bit of driving in your local community and you have a well-developed logo, you will generate a sense of familiarity. Then complement your car campaign with a well designed logo in the Yellow Pages or in your local community directory. When your potential clients go in search of a provider, you will be able to trigger their memories and invoke that same sense of familiarity in them - they will choose you, not someone they’re completely in the dark about.

The key marketing features you should be conscious of, then, are:

Anna Spargo-Ryan is the Principal of Australian brand development agency Anna Clements. They specialise in brand consultancy, identity design, web development and copywriting. Visit their website at http://www.annaclements.com.au/

Most business owners don’t realize the importance of using a simple business card to generate tons of customers. It simply does not matter what kind of business you are in, you have to utilize this primitive business technique in order to grow your business fast.

The three main mistakes people make when marketing with business cards are:

1. Not having a business card.

2. Being stingy and only giving out one card per person.

3. Not giving a card to every person they come into contact with.

Not having thousands of business cards at your disposal at all times is not only stupid it is a crime against your business. If an employee of yours stole as much money from you as you lose from not utilizing business cards, they would go to prison for a long time. With today’s super low cost business card printing prices there is no reason not to have business cards and an abundance of them for that matter.

I started my professional concrete cutting service business with absolutely no capital and grossed almost $400,000 in my first eight months of business. My only means of advertising was business cards. As many of you already know, it can sometimes take up to an entire year to get your ad placed into your local yellow page directory and it can be quite costly to a new business. The following are techniques that I used to generate tons of business from business cards and I believe that these same techniques can benefit any type of business.

1. I started with an eye catching logo and had a design that really said “this guy is a pro.” It is worth the modest initial investment to get your cards designed right.

2. I kept my message “short and sweet.” I have seen way too many people over do it with tons of bulleted text that cause confusion with the reader. I do concrete cutting and a few other services that relate to it but my business cards say only “Concrete Cutting.”

3. I ordered my cards in quantities of 5000 at a time. Too often do I see new business owners print cards off of their computer and literally “ration” them off.

4. I never gave out a single card! I always handed out at least five at a time and sometimes more. I still look at my business cards as “lottery tickets.” The first job I get from the batch pays for all of them so the rest can pay off huge. If they get thrown in the trash – Who cares? There are thousands more where those came from.

5. Any time I would meet someone in the construction trades I would hand them a stack of cards. I hand them to people that are standing next to me in line at the Home Depot or that are pumping gas across from me at the fuel pumps. I get questions like “What are these for?” or “What do you want me to do with these?” and I just simply say “You may not need my services now but when you do, you’ll know who to call.” At the same time I am thinking “I don’t care what you do with them, they were basically free and the fact of the matter is that I get hundreds of calls from people that say “Remember Me?” “I met you at the Exxon Station or at parent teacher’s night.” Or “John Smith gave me your card and said I should call you” yet I have never heard of John Smith. Or “I’ve got your business card on my desk and I don’t know where it came from but I need your services.” I simply hand tons of my business cards out to people and the calls roll in.

6. I buy a mailing list of contractors from a list broker and I simply put three business cards in an envelope and mail a thousand envelopes at a time. I do not put an expensive brochure or a flyer, I simply put three business cards in and I get hundreds of calls and referrals from the mailing,

I now get hundreds and hundreds of calls from my existing customers and my yellow page ads but I still use business cards more than I ever have. I now have five trucks and seven employees and giving out business cards in the same fashion as I have described above is part of their job description. They have all seen the power of business cards and that business cards ensure each of our survival and actually gives them a good feeling knowing that they got a specific customer. If I contact a new customer and they happen to mention that one of my men did not give them a stack of business cards then I immediately contact the employee, ask them if it is true and explain to them that it is part of their job, then I hand them a big box of business cards and tell them not to let it happen again, ever.

© Copyright 2005 Affordable Concrete Cutting, Inc.

About the Author: Robert Short is a professional concrete cutter, seasoned article writer and an expert on search engine optimization and linking. He is responsible for ranking our local service company’s website at number one on all major search engines for more than a dozen keyword terms. Our website now generates as much revenue as our main service business. Visit our website for more articles on linking and webmaster resources http://www.affordableconcretecutting.com/construction_seo.html

Advertising space on the web has typically been sold by the banner and by the click. Now, thanks to a hot new concept called pixel marketing, it’s being sold by the pixel. That’s right. Just when you thought there was nothing left to sell, the web has profitably parceled into blocks of pixels that advertisers are snapping up to promote their brands.

Here’s how pixel marketing works. Pages are made up of pixel grids, typically of one million pixels which generally sell from 50 cents to $1 each. An advertiser who buys blocks of these pixels can design an image which will be displayed on them, and will link visitors to a corresponding website.

The idea for pixel marketing is credited to Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from Wiltshire, England, who developed The MillionDollarHomepage.com to raise funds for his university education. Tew launched the site on August 26, 2005. Within three days of the launch, with no marketing budget, Tew sold his first 20 x 20 pixel block. Motivated, he put out a press release. Two weeks later, he had made enough money to pay for his first year at university. He has now made more than half a million dollars.

In his Million Dollar Blog from August 26, Tew wrote, “I thought, this could be something crazy enough to work! Because I think people like crazy/quirky ideas. If this captures people’s imaginations and people check out the site, then the pixels on the homepage will have value — and people will buy them … The way I see it though: I’ve got nothing to lose by trying. And I’m sure it’ll be fun.”

It turned out to be fun and very profitable. In no time, pixel marketing began catching on like wildfire.

“Watch out, it could be the next most prominent event since Google Adsense,” writes UK marketing consultant Julie Vernon in her article “What is Pixel Promotion All About?”

But could pixel marketing pose a serious threat to Google Adsense? It’s still too early to predict the growth of this intriguing new form of marketing.

“Driving this new medium is the notion that pay per click costs too much,” writes George Hubka in his article “What is Pixel Advertising?” “If you had 10 clicks a day at 10 cents each, in one year it would cost you $365! Take that out 5 years and you are talking about over $1800! The reality is that often clicks cost a lot more than 10 cents each, which translates to a whole lot more money. People have been reported paying more than $50 a click.”

Not only are pixel ads cheaper than banners and Adsense, many site owners have sworn to keep their sites live for several years so advertisers get long-range results and pay less for it.

Right now, it’s fascinating to watch this new type of marketing vehicle in its infancy. What will pixel marketing ultimately become when it grows up? It’s anyone’s guess but it should be fun to watch it grow.

Keith Tomlinson is the President of Excalibur Communications, the company that created TheBeerHomepage.com Pixel Marketing web portal. Besides web marketing and development Excalibur provides value added 1-800 lead generation, tracking and conference call services to a wide range of clientele through North America. Visit http://www.thebeerhomepage.com to find out more about this exciting and fun new way of advertising.

Real Estate Marketing slogans arouses interest in your audience and can be the vehicle that helps establish your "name brand" and invigorate your real estate career.

A good, well crafted slogan can propel your business in quantum leaps, while a poorly considered one can be as effective as none at all. Real estate marketing slogans can work equally well online and offline, but they must be good enough to appeal to mass, targeted audiences.

Consequently, agents work hard and long for the right words to coin the right phrases, for the perfect slogans. After all, their slogans may be powerful or aspiring enough to define their careers.

Realtor Alert! Real estate marketing slogans don’t have to be over intellectualized to create huge "brand names." Catchy and clever works every time.

For example, Century 21, ERA, & Coldwell Banker are national and/or regional real estate companies whose corporate names serve as their "real estate marketing slogans". Examples of some gigantic, non-real estate companies are Xerox, IBM, Pepsi and Coke.

Successful Realtors know the importance of using real estate marketing slogans to create "name brands", but when conjuring up a slogan for yourself why not something as simple as your name.

If Mike, Bill and Hillary can pull it off you can, too. Of Course you know who I mean, which epitomizes the power of a name.

Creating A Slogan!

Now, I can go to the yellow pages, write down a bunch of real estate marketing slogans and throw a bunch of them at you to jump start your creative juices, but you can do that yourself.

A more constructive approach in creating your own slogan is to make a list of 10 slogans that reflect who you are, what niche real estate market you want to be known for, and your interests and personality in general.

Use the yellow Real Estate Agents section of your local yellow pages to get ideas, then strive for phrases that uniquely characterize you.

Imagine being the Madonna, or "leave the driving to us" of the real estate industry.

Is it possible? Absolutely, but you’ll have to create a slogan first! Then you’ll need to use and publicize it every opportunity you get; in your ads, on your business cards, letter head, website, vanity car tag, etc.

Don’t expect instant success right out of the gate. It’ll take a while, but you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish in a year or so. And if you have a real estate marketing system that reaches a minimum of 10 prospects a day the numbers can quickly add up in your favor.

10 contacts a day x 20 days a month = 200 contacts a month

200 contacts a month x 12 months a year = 2,400 contacts a year

Without too much effort you can passively market your slogan to a minimum of 2,400 prospects a year.

I wonder what impact having your marketing slogan on your car would have?

No matter where you live, or what market you’re in you’re missing out on massive amounts of free marketing if you don’t have a car tag of some kind advertising the fact that you’re a Realtor.

And what about advertising your slogan through the penny, nickel and dime publications? Think cheap advertising, high visibility, and lots of readers of your slogan to drive business opportunities your way.

So, create your own unique, real estate marketing slogan; then publicize it heavily; freely and/or inexpensively, but heavily.

Can you see the impact that this might have on your real estate marketing results? I can!

Lanard Perry is the author of "Farming Expired Listings." Learn how to average 1 or more listings a week. Visit http://www.farmingexpiredlistings.com and http://www.real-estate-marketing-talk.com for more business building ideas.

Who holds a conference in December anyway? But, since it was a paid speaking engagement, I decided what the heck.

I should have had a clue as to how things would go when I sat on the runway with an engine light malfunction for two hours. Consequently, I missed my dinner engagement when that turned a 90-minute flight into one that lasted four hours. Remember when airlines distributed snacks? Forget it. We got free head phones for a flight too short for a movie. Who can eat headphones anyway?

That’s another reason missing the dinner engagement was problematic. I was starving. No matter how dog-tired or otherwise out of sorts are when you arrive, you should maximize your travel schedule every night with appointments. Here are some tips to help you do that.

1) Remember, you are supposed to fly into an event the night before so you can be there first thing for the registration networking.

2) This is the time you can catch speakers who are only there for a day or an hour or two to give their presentation. Almost everyone appears for their free breakfast (in my case there wasn’t one).

3) In most events, there are scheduled breaks to catch up to people you want to meet but if someone is on a tight schedule, leave the room and catch them on the way out. This is not the time for lengthy conversations. Use your elevator speech, exchange cards and tell them you will follow up.

After a few speeches, we finally had lunch.

4) Plan to sit with someone different at every meal and don’t monopolize any one person’s attention. If you are ambitious, suggest introductions at the table, a 30-second sound bite introduction and a card exchange. That way even if you don’t get to speak with that person you can use the luncheon as a point of reference later.

5) Make notes on the back of every business card about what you discussed. It helps to have a non-business point of reference when you contact this person later.

6) Don’t spend your time selling. Discussions should include a little business but your real objective is to establish a personal bond with this person, so that they remember you and will respond when you contact them later on.

7) Make it your goal to meet every speaker and attendee. I know this is a lofty challenge especially if you can’t really see a connection, but you never know how someone could refer you to exactly the RIGHT person.

8) Always introduce yourself to the staff and meeting personnel even if you are not a speaker. They can be important people influencing the decisions on when to suggest new speakers for future events. IMPORTANT: Fill out the evaluation forms and mention that you are willing to be quoted or contacted in the future. Again, this bond building good will thing you are trying to establish.

9) If you really liked a speaker’s presentation, offer to write a testimonial. No sucking up here. This needs to be legitimate. Conversely, if you are speaker and someone likes your stuff ask them to write you a testimonial. Trade Secret: Offer to write it for them and then send it to them for approval. This always works! If you wait for them to do it, you will probably never get it.

10) Another trade secret is never to send in your speech ahead of time. Always offer it free to attendees before you begin. Just ask them to leave you a card with their email address. Get It? Now they know you and you know them as opposed to waiting for someone to contact you.

To get back to my speech: I was scheduled for last on the second day of the conference. This is notoriously the worst spot, but in this case attendees were waiting to hear "If You Package It, Will She Buy?" by yours truly. Everyone stayed to the end even though we all scrambled to get to outgoing flights on time.

NOTE: How to create an elevator speech; How to make most of those first 30 seconds or less; How to use networking to build your business; How to speak your way to fame and fortune; are all included in the Packaging Yourself Workbook Order now @ http://www.packaginguniversity.com/pkgustorefront.htm

To subscribe to the personal branding e-zine "Packaging Yourself" email me @ pkgcoach@aol.com

Why Become A Motorsports Sponsor?

A company can benefit from motorsports sponsorship in many ways, such as:

1. Driving Sales

Sponsorship geared towards driving sales can be an extremely effective promotional tool. Many successful companies use motorsports sponsorship to stimulate consumer interest, which in turn, generates sales. Sponsorship also drives traffic to their web sites and increases online purchasing. This contributes to a significant rise in overall sales volume as well.

2. Heightening Visibility and Creating Positive Publicity

Motorsports sponsorship provides wide exposure in broadcast, print and electronic media. This exposure creates positive publicity and heightens visibility of your company’s products and services. The various media covering a racing event usually include sponsor names and/or photos. Additionally, the media coverage you often receive as a sponsor would prove too expensive if purchased outright, assuming it was even available. Motorsports sponsorship often generates publicity that could not have been bought.

3. Enhancing Image and Shaping Consumer Attitudes

Companies are often looking to improve how they are perceived by a particular audience. One way of achieving this goal is by becoming affiliated with well-liked sports personalities. Professional auto racing is the largest spectator sport in the world and reaches a consumer market that crosses all boundaries of age, race and gender. Sponsoring a racing driver is an excellent way to shape the buying attitudes of this vast demographic and will help to generate a positive reaction towards your company and its products and services.

4. Differentiating from Competitors

The mere act of sponsoring a racing driver or team, especially an exclusive sponsorship, is a significant way to create competitor differentiation. Your company name can stand out head and shoulders above the competition. Motorsports sponsorship is a powerful weapon against a competitor with a larger advertising budget. Sponsorship allows smaller companies to compete with their industry giants and consumers often perceive sponsorship in a positive way. Using motorsports sponsorship will give you a decided edge over your competition.

5. Enhancing Business, Consumer and Employee Relations

Sponsorships that offer hospitality allow companies the chance to entertain key customers and solidify business relationships. Using sponsorship in connection with a consumer rewards program increases goodwill and customer retention. Companies that use motorsports sponsorship as part of their employee reward and incentive programs experience increased productivity. Treating employees to a fun day of racing excitement is an excellent way to boost morale and to thank them for their hard work.

Summary

Motorsports sponsorship is a powerful, cost-effective marketing opportunity. The enormous international appeal of auto racing, combined with careful planning, can elevate your company to new heights of success.

For more detailed information about motorsports marketing and motorsports sponsorship, please visit www.topspeedracer.com

Copyright © Louis Albornoz. All rights reserved.

Louis "Topspeed" Albornoz is a professional race car driver and a freelance writer. His official website has money saving offers for motorists, an interactive weekly column and useful information on motorsports marketing and motorsports sponsorship. To learn more, please visit: http://www.topspeedracer.com

In the digital age, companies that want to stay ahead need the tools to do so. Mobile marketing is one of those tools. This method of advertising allows businesses to connect to those that they need to, effectively. It allows the organization to spend messages to mobile phones to promote a product or a service. It also for them to tell their targeted audience that the store parking lot they just pulled into has something on sale. Or, it allows them to know that today is the last day for the lowest price of the seasons. Mobile marketing works for several reasons.

Convenience

Let’s face it. We are all working on finding the best way to accomplish all that we need to in the fastest, most convenient way. Mobile marketing allows individuals to receive the information they need to reach their goals, when they need it. It is convenient because it allows for not external needs. They don’t have to get online to see the ad. They don’t have to have the radio on a specific channel either. They don’t have to watch the television commercials to hear it. They get the information on their mobile phone. How many people that you know don’t take their phone with them?

Get It To The Right Audience

Mobile marketing is targeted advertising. You don’t find yourself pushing a new electronic gadget on the senior citizen that doesn’t know how to send an email. Because there is an activation process, the marketing goes to those who it will work for, those who are interested in the products and services available. There are few other mediums that can do that.

Personal Touch

The personal nature of mobile marketing also is effective for this type of advertising. The message is sent directly to them, not to a board range of people. This personal nature is quite effective at making them click and buy.

Mobile marketing is an excellent type of marketing that we can count on seeing more of down the road. Because of how well it works, more and more companies are getting it that this is the marketing of the future. Why waste money, precious advertising dollars on a ‘maybe they will see it’ type of advertising? Mobile marketing is fast becoming the advertising medium.

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All businesses have to have some sort or other logo of their own. This logo is the media wherein they introduce themselves to their clients. It is a known fact that visual processing is a very important way of gathering information as a good design is always remembered for ages. Keeping this in mind, most of the multinational companies spend millions of dollars on the development of their logo and any other branding material they need.

There are some logo design tips that ensure that the logo design becomes a successful logo for your business. Have you ever noted that most of the greatest logos around are simple? This is because it is then easier to remember and recognize a simple logo than to identify a complicated logo design. The typeface of the logo design too makes a lot of difference in the success of the logo. Make your logo design using vector graphics as these graphics can be easily resized without suffering any loss of details and image quality and take lesser memory capacity in the computer.

However, it is better if you employ a specialized logo design firm to help you in creating your logo design, than you trying to do it yourself. This is because they know how to produce a better logo than you can, and actually, a logo design is not always very costly! Remember, the successful logo has to be one that is able to communicate your image well to the market. It should work well not only in color, but in black and white too as forms and faxes are all in black and white, should be able to draw a second glance from your potential clients and should work well both in large and small formats as in a t-shirt and a business card!

It is always good to spend time going through business cards and letterheads from other companies before meeting your logo designer, to decide what you may need in your logo. When thinking of your logo design, keep your target market in mind, and what designs may keep their attention and respect. Have an idea of the material you intend to use the logo on like forms and brochures. The paper of the logo design also goes to your image as paper is not only seen, but can also be felt. The color you use in the logo affects your logo design as the colors you use send different messages to people.

Make your logo design as unique as possible as it increases the likelihood of getting a trademark protection. Make sure you check up with the trademark lawyer to ensure you do not run into the risk of infringing another company’s trademark symbol or logo. If you run a small business, you may not be keen in investing in enlisting the services of a logo designer. In such cases, you should try to use some high quality royalty free clip art, combined with a suitable typeface for your company name. However, clip arts do not give the effect a custom logo gives, as they can be easily duplicated or stolen

Thomson Chemmanoor a professional Logo Builder who owns and operates the follow websites http://www.articlenetworks.com and http://www.logodesignexpert.com To know more details visit these websites.