The Week Ahead February 15-19 2010

Monday: Only Real People are working (President’s Day)
Tuesday:
Wednesday: January Housing Starts
Thursday: Weekly initial jobless claims, January Producers Price Index, January Leading Economic Indicators
Friday: January Consumer Price Index

If our government and its workers cared about us, they would be working today just like I am. Making America a great country as it works to achieve its true destiny of freedom for all people.

Looking at some nice statics this week as people put their heads in the sand. Don’t play ostrich. Get your head out of the sand. Keep your head up and your eyes open. As they unroll the pricing indexes and economic indicators keep an eye on your targeted industries.

Larson Notes & Satire: I just don’t understand the world. We lose jobs and the unemployment rate goes down? China tightens credit on its industrial machine and our stock market goes down. Come on people this is weird. A less productive China, a higher cost of money in China should make it better for the rest of the word to compete, yes? If China’s industrial costs go up and ours stays the same we should not only compete better but sell more? Right? If China were to realign its yen with the rest of the world’s currency making the Yen cost more and thus Chinese goods more expensive that should be good, yes? I guess there is too much blonde in the grey hair of mine.

The focused industries we are looking to add clients in for the month are Advertising Specialties, Trade Show Booth Builder, Sign Shop, a Graphic Design Studio, and Printers both small and mid-sized.

We are still looking for sales persons in all areas except




the Great Plains States.
If interested give us a call at 847-991-0488.




Howard’s out of office public schedule for the week:
Monday:
Tuesday: Running Training 6:15am,
Wednesday:
Thursday: Running Training 6:15am
Friday:
Saturday: Marathon Training 6:15am
Sunday:

Trade show schedule:
> March 14-16 2010 Internal Home and Housewares Show, McCormick Place, Chicago
> April 26-29 NA2010: The North American Material Handling & Logistics Show: I-X Center, Cleveland OH
> May 12-13, 2010 OrthoTec Conference Orthopaedic Capital Center at Grace College Winona Lake (Warsaw), IN (Registered but not committed to going yet)
> June 8-10, 2010 EastPack 2010 Jacob K Javits Convention Center New York NY FL (Registered but not committed to going yet)
> June 23, Destination Showcase Conference & Expo; Donald E. Stevens Convention Center, Rosemont IL


Time slots still available to meet & talk over coffee.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates
http://businesswarfare.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://teamcircle.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://www.businessiibusiness.com/profile/HowardLarson

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

P.P.S. An American Company, marketing American Companies! Call or email to get an appointment to pick my brain (a $125.00 value) for 30 minutes.

2010 Investment Into Social Media Marketing

Is this the year of the Social Media Marketer, the year when it becomes respectable to be involved in SM?

66% of marketers say they will invest in Social Media Marketing in 2010.

Yet 4 out of 10 say that it is somewhat of very difficult to coordinate between digital and direct marketing agencies:

36% - neutral
30% - Somewhat difficult
13% - Somewhat easy
9% - Very easy
8% - Very difficult
4% - Single agency

21% Will increase the portion of their Direct Marketing budget spent on digital, interactive, or social medial marketing by more than 30% this year.

16% - No increase
23% - 5-10% more
21% - 10-20% more
19% - 20-30% more
21% - 30% or more


Larson Notes & Satire: So who you going to call? Ghost Busters? Social Media is somewhat of a walk in the dark. Post and find what your reach is. Some sites work for a business others down. It all depends on the general membership of the site and your friends and follows. There are no die hard rules to follow. Jump in and get you feet wet or stay on shore and all dry or get someone to do your splash in the water for you. Your choice


Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates
http://businesswarfare.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://teamcircle.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://www.businessiibusiness.com/profile/HowardLarson

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

P.P.S. An American Company, marketing American Companies! Call or email to get an appointment to pick my brain (a $125.00 value) for 30 minutes.

Prediction For Social Media For 2010?

In browsing though a bunch of articles on SM, I am looking at a few directions SM can be going for 2010.

1) Corporations Attack! Yes it will happen. Big companies will be invading our turf. They have been nipping the edges trying to get a handle on what SM is and might be able to do. They have dabbled in SM marketing and all, but the time has come for the big boys to put in some real muscle, money and time. Corporate efforts will become much more programmatic and strategic for 2010.

2) Social Business Gets Serious! Social networking companies are going to be moving into more entertainment and revenue generating venues. Yes we all need to make money, somehow

3) Companies will create Social Media Policies! and they might actually enforce them. You can expect your company to more formalize its views on SM and the rules of engagement of all its employees.

4) Social Media becomes people’s lifeline! Forget the cigarette break or the water cooler time. IN 2010 people will be taking social media breaks instead. If you can keep your company in the forefront you can and will be able to engage these 15 minute people.

5) E-mail Looses Favor! Sharing is not longer an e-mail thing. While we use to share things though email more and more people will be sharing through networks such as twitter and Facebook.

6) Social Media looks less social. People will start to pull back on the SM practices and become more exclusive as to how their network is.

Larson Notes & Satire: Is this the year (or half year) that SM comes of age to marketing? Your call but I’m in it, I’m working it. And I’m cashing in on the time I have invested in learning it.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates
http://businesswarfare.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://teamcircle.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://www.businessiibusiness.com/profile/HowardLarson

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

P.P.S. Yes we write blogs for selected companies. Should we be writing yours? Call or email us today.

Biggest Sales Secret You Could Be Using

You need more sales prospects? You need more customers? We all do don’t we? So how do you find those prize prospects? Where to you go to get your sales team the best matches to make presentations to?

RESEARCH!

There are 4 kinds of research you need to be doing to propel your sales to the next level.

1) Research your victories. In order to get what you got (the good things) you need to be able to do it again. What kind of company is it? How big? What problems did you answer and solve? What moved it forward and what caused road blocks?

2) Research your losses. Unless you want to make the same mistakes again look over your loosed deals. Why were you not able to close it? What could you have done better?

3) Research your no decisions. When you’re looking everything over, don’t forget to look at when people made a no decision to buy. This way you can avoid the unnecessary expense to chasing after no-deals.

4) Research your non-starters. Examine the areas where companies did a deal with your competition and not you. Find out why your company was not even in the running for the project. Why where you left out of the bidding process.

Larson Notes & Satire: You can only learn a certain amount of information from the f2f opportunities. Each time you can take something out of your victories and defeats. By studding the information you can you will only make yourself better. Want we want to achieve is going from peak to peak, not valley to valley.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates
http://businesswarfare.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://teamcircle.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://www.businessiibusiness.com/profile/HowardLarson

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

P.P.S. Yes we write blogs for selected companies. Should we be writing yours? Call or email us today.

Pay For Clicks? I’m Just Not Sure.

To be seen, To be found. Yes as in Horton Hears a Who” “I am here, I am here’ I am here!”

I got a letter from last week. Pinned it up on my bulletin board to take a good hard look at it. $100 to try AdWords! Should I? Could I? Free! No risk! No obligation! All those great words to use in a targeted direct mailer. Redeem now and use by January 31 or it goes down to $75.00. Opps its February 3rd. Wow expiration date! Now I have till March 31st, (My 2nd cousin 3 times removed birthday {When your Scandinavian you are expected to know all your family down to your 8th cousin 10 times removed and be able to recite their names frontwards and backwards}

So here I am down to only $75 free Google dollars for AdWord advertising. When a study came across my desk reporting that the rate of click fraud, the practice a program or computer script imitating a person to click on a web advertisement among normal clicks, rose to 15.3% during the 4th quarter. Ouch. If I was to pay in real money that would be 15 dollars and 30 cents of old Uncle Howie’s money being “stolen”. Click fraud was 14.1% in the 3rd quarter but if there is any good news in this, click fraud was down from a year ago when it was running at 17.1% in the last quarter of 2008. The click rater fraud was at 12.7% in the 2nd quarter of 2009 and 13.8% in the 1st quarter.

Larson Notes & Satire: Yes I might just use this google coupon? That’s right MIGHT. If the search engines like google, bing, and yahoo don’t figure this out, as to how to combat looses this large why do it? Or are we the buyer/advertiser just suppose to accept this as a justifiable loss? If the ROI can accept the loss is this an acceptable place to market yourself.

IN all advertising there is loss, Direct mail the pieces go right in the bucket. Email auto delete, in telemarketing hang-ups. But fraud? In a search to get more information on ROI pay for click going back to the 6th page there is little on this topic except companies saying give us your money and we can go do a good job.

Note to self: Figure out an acceptable loss in an ROI on a pay for click campaign

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates
http://businesswarfare.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://teamcircle.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://www.businessiibusiness.com/profile/HowardLarson

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

P.P.S. Yes we write blogs for selected companies. Should we be writing yours? Call or email us today.

Making & Keeping Your Online Brand

For many businesses the creating of your brand and maintaining it is a skill that is lacking and can be difficult to learn let alone implement. To many a brand is simply a name a symbol or something easily distinguishable to help people identify with the product r service. Now while that is true, a brand can be and is much much more. It can be what defines the company. It can be the identity that customers recognize whey they see it, subliminally. It can be the comfort factor to your customers.

Now, no one can tell you what your brand should be, what is should include, what if should be defined as, but there is a framework to understanding a b rand’s importance to your bottom line and how you can help your business achieve the kind of business and market share to your most important customers and prospects as you start to put a more formal brand identity in place.

As seen in some marketing studies, during a recession some companies have learned that cutting brand oriented advertising only resulted in lower sales and lower profits. Even worse, performance continued to lag with the recovery came about. The reason that a brand is supported by a well designed advertising campaign is that users are more likely to be convinced to pay for products that bring comfort. Branding is that, it is comfort in what you know. On the other side of the coin, branding is about expectations. People expect to get what they have always gotten from a certain product or service. These qualities are what make it special. Unique. Sought after. Not only does branding tell what the buyer is getting in name alone, but brings a sense of confidence.

As you create your brands profile you need to be sensitive to what makes it unique, important and different to the end customer. It does make any difference what you think.

So how do you do Brand Creation?

1: Identify the human side and the unique personality of your product or service. Who are tin influences and advocates of your product and how does that impact your products image. (Do I hear a need for a focus group?)

2: Find the values in your brand and what they stand for. Its history, the stories, the people. Might even be worth a few interviews.

3: Find the emotional benefits to your brand. Yes this is going away from pain and going towards pleasure part to sales and marketing, Very strong emotional pull. (Does this call for a survey?)

4: Find the core beliefs in your product. As you start to collect your information and data create the kind of Mission statement that really defines your product as to what it is and what you what it to stand for.

5: Take your mission statement and refine it down into a core 1 line statement. This becomes the slogan of your brand. Its core benefits and beliefs

6: Now take all this good stuff and use it to influence the identity of your brand where ever you can, Online, print, mail, brochures, salespeople, etc.

Part 2: Maintaining your Brand

Now that you have it, how do you keep it?

1: Are you unique, in color, logo etc. You need to stand out (once your there) so you are NOT confused with anyone else, competition or anyone else.

2: Is your material being used consistently all across and in your current sales and marketing attack? Review and get in line with yourself.

3: Is your “material” be it print or electronic, memorial? Does it stand out from the crowd? Are there other things that could be used to tie your name and message together in a deep way for your target audience?

4: Is your material all understandable? Watch your words. Too much jargon can make or break you.

5: Is your material honest and truthful of do you stretch the facts a bit? Keep it on target and don’t over step your bounds on claims. Let your “fans” do that for you.

6: Is the material professional? You might need to hire a pro here, not the kid down the street.


Larson Notes & Satire: You are already out there marketing and selling stuff. Now it’s time to get serious. Get real with your company and yourself. If you’re playing games you get games. If you are for real, look and act like a professional, here, there everywhere both in your advertising and marking and yes, your personal stature and presence. You too are part of your company’s brand.



Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates
http://businesswarfare.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://teamcircle.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://www.businessiibusiness.com/profile/HowardLarson

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

P.P.S. Yes we write blogs for selected companies. Should we be writing yours? Call or email us today.

The Week Ahead February 2-5, 2010

Monday: December personal spending,
Tuesday: January vehicle sales
Wednesday: January ISM services index
Thursday: Weekly initial jobless claims
Friday: January employment report, December consumer credit

Wasn’t last week’s numbers nice? The fastest in more than 6 years at a 5.7% increase in gross domestic product as factories finally started getting orders to fill up depleted inventories. Keep in mind that the economy is still healing. We are not out of the woods nor will we be anytime soon. Unlike past rebounds where business was the lead in the recovery, i.e. in 1981 1st quarter inventory building accounted for over 74% of growth but then the economy contracted and there was a drop in inventory and the economy fall into a 2nd more server recessing in 1981 into 1982 with unemployment hitting 10.8% . So are we looking at a double dip recession this time? Economist say the possibility is low. US consumer’s confidence shows an improvement even with the employment rate going up. And companies expanded this moth a the fastest pace in more than 4 years as orders increased and consumer spending rose at a 2% pace. Your guess is as good as mine.


Larson Notes & Satire: If I were you I would be working really hard on market share. Orders will not be a robust as past orders from the same customers. To keep even you will need more customers. Keep an eye out to Washington as they debate adding more funds to stimulate grown. If I were the government I would not be helping banks with funding to give out LOANS to small businesses but rather give out GRANTS to small businesses to create new jobs.

Side note if you are made at all the big banks and their huge bonuses move your accounts to your community bank, which is secure. Point is that the big banks that got bailed out and everyone seems to be mad at did in fact GROW at over 9% last year. If you’re angry at their huge bonuses the only place to really make a statement is to move YOUR account.

The focused industries we are looking to add clients in for the month are Advertising Specialties, Trade Show Booth Builder, Sign Shop, a Graphic Design Studio, and Printers both small and mid-sized.

We are still looking for sales persons in all areas except

the Great Plains States.
If interested give us a call at 847-991-0488.


Howard’s out of office public schedule for the week:
Monday: Tuesday: Running Training 6:15am,
Wednesday: Thursday: Running Training 6:15am
Friday: Saturday: Marathon Training 6:15am
Sunday:

Trade show schedule:
> February 9-11, 2010 Medical Design & Manufacturing West, Anaheim Convention center Anaheim CA (Registered but not committed to going yet)

> March 14-16 2010 Internal Home and Housewares Show, McCormick Place, Chicago
> May 12-13, 2010 OrthoTec Conference Orthopaedic Capital Center at Grace College Winona Lake (Warsaw), IN (Registered but not committed to going yet)
> June 8-10, 2010 EastPack 2010 Jacob K Javits Convention Center New York NY FL (Registered but not committed to going yet)


Time slots still available to meet & talk over coffee.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com
http://member.merchantcircle.com/larsonassociates
http://businesswarfare.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://teamcircle.ning.com/profile/HowardLarson
http://www.businessiibusiness.com/profile/HowardLarson

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

P.P.S. An American Company, marketing American Companies! Call or email to get an appointment to pick my brain (a $125.00 value) for 30 minutes.