Every entrepreneur deeply desires to be in the place where prospects are seeking them out.  This place is truly “marketing heaven.”  Many don’t get there because they don’t understand and implement some very basic principles about marketing.  It’s sometimes easy to forget that marketing is a process, not an event. 

Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the Guerilla Marketing series, captures these principles well in the following list.  Run your business by the concepts they represent and you’ll be in marketing heaven! 

1. COMMITMENT: A mediocre marketing program with commitment will always prove more profitable than a brilliant marketing program without commitment.

2. INVESTMENT: Marketing is not an expense, but an investment.  One of the best – if you do it right.

3. CONSISTENT: It takes a while for prospects to trust you.  If you change your marketing, media and identity, you’re hard to trust.  Stay the course with your plan.

4. CONFIDENT: In a nationwide test to determine why people buy, price came in fifth, selection fourth, service third, quality second, and, in first place – people said they patronize businesses in which they are confident.

5. PATIENT: Unless you are patient with your marketing, it will be difficult to practice commitment, view marketing as an investment, be consistent, and make prospects confident.

6. ASSORTMENT: Great marketers know that individual marketing weapons rarely work on their own.  But marketing combinations do work.  Use a wide assortment of marketing tools to win clients.

7. CONVENIENT: Although time is not money, it is far more valuable today.  Be easy to do business with and run your business for the convenience of your clients, not yourself.

8. SUBSEQUENT: The real profits come after you’ve made the sale, in the form of repeat business and referrals.  Poor marketers think marketing ends when the sale is made.  Great marketers know that’s when marketing begins.

9. AMAZEMENT: There are elements of your business that you take for granted, but your prospects would be amazed if they knew the details.  Be sure your marketing always reflects that amazement.  It’s always there.

10. MEASUREMENT:  You can actually double your profits just by measuring your marketing results.  Some strategies hit bulls-eyes.  Others miss the mark.   Unless you measure, you won’t know which is which.

11. INVOLVEMENT:  This describes the relationship between you and your client.  You prove your involvement by following up;  they prove theirs by patronizing and recommending you.

12. DEPENDENT:  There’s so much marketing power in cooperating with other businesses (rather than competing with them).  By marketing them, they will market you in return.  Be dependent to market more.

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© 2004  David C. Miller.  All Rights Reserved.

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