Blending sales and marketing

Entrepreneur.com has some tips on how you can effectively blend your sales and marketing:

1. Develop an overall marketing umbrella that establishes your brand and trumpets the value it provides.

2. If your organization creates this umbrella, be sure you understand it and find the angle in it that you want to base your sales approach on.

3. Make sure that all of the marketing tools and initiatives at your disposal or that you invest in are structured to capture customers. For example, if you have a website, what do you do to drive traffic to it? Most sites are forbidden planets hardly anyone visits. And once you drive traffic to your online destination, offer a reason for visitors to leave their e-mail addresses or other contact information. On my site, visitors sign up for my blog and they are part of our family for life.

4. Contact every lead that arrives at your website, visits your stores or stops by your trade show booth. It amazes me how often companies of all sizes spend thousands of dollars to attend trade shows, collect fishbowls full of leads and then wait weeks to contact them--if they contact them at all.

Keys to Neuromarketing

Christophe Morin, co-author of Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer's Brain, believes that most purchase decisions are made subconsciously, in the nether regions of the mind he calls the primal brain, areas where basic fight-or-flight instincts kick in. According to Morin, we buy out of fear.

Here are six keys to neuromarketing:

1. We're self-centered: Nothing triggers self-centered action like a transaction. "People are completely egocentric and all they want is something that will create a difference in their lives, eliminate pain and possibly bring them more pleasure," Morin says.

2. We crave contrast: "The bottom line is, on any given day, we will receive about 10,000 ad messages, and only the ones that are huge contrasts will get any attention," he says.

3. We're naturally lazy: Abstract advertising and marketing won't get through. Keep it simple, but strong. "Most companies tend to create abstract messages and use too many words," Morin says. "Reading is much more a function of the 'new brain.' We recommend that, of course, companies use a lot of concrete visuals."

4. We like stories: Advertising and marketing with strong beginnings and ends create anchor points that we latch onto, so Morin advises entrepreneurs to sum up and recap their strongest selling points at the end of any promotional material. "The brain has a natural tendency to pay attention at the beginning and end of anything," he says.

5. We're visual: Appealing video and graphic presentations can make the difference at cash registers where price and reason can't. "We process and make decisions visually, without being aware of them," Morin says. "Only later do we rationalize decisions we made."

6. Emotion trumps reason: Give us the right emotion to ride on, and we'll buy what you're selling. "When we experience an emotion," he says, "it creates a chemical change in our brain, hormones flood our brain and change the speeds with which neurons connect, and it's through those connections we memorize. We don't remember anything if there isn't an emotion attached to that experience."

Branding tips from Entrepreneur.com

John Williams of Entrepreneur.com offers some basic marketing tips for your company.

1. Go for simplicity and lack of clutter. (Think Apple, the master of simplicity in branding.)
2. Create or demand a clean, well-balanced graphic design.
3. Use one or two basic colors that go well together, not a hodgepodge.
4. Choose one font and stick with it. You can express almost anything by using variations within a single font family: size, weight (boldness), italics, etc. If you really must, choose a second font for major headlines. But first try it with one font.
5. Coordinate a single look--design, colors, etc.--across everything you do, including your logo, website, brochures, ads and signage.

Finally some good news and advice

Gerry Bavaro of Search Insider says not to worry, you WILL weather this storm.

He also warns against cutting your search engine spending.

Email marketing in the recession

Elie Ashery has some good tips for email marketing in the current economy.

It's Time for a Template Change
If you've been using the same templates for your newsletters or product displays for the past couple of years, now is the perfect time for a change (even if you're not voting for Barak Obama). Cutting through the clutter is difficult and subscriber eyes get immune to repetitive patters. By simply changing your template with a few bright colors, you can easily add new life to your email program and wake up tired eyes.

Nurture Your Leads Until Their Budgets Comes Back
If you company has a long sales cycle, it just got longer. If you haven't created an automated program to follow up with your cold and lukewarm leads, now is the time to implement one. Remaining top of mind during bad times will pay dividends when the economy turns.

Be Trigger-Happy
Triggered email based on subscriber behavior allows your marketing to be dead on (all puns intended) providing sales supportive information exactly when your subscribers express interest. At a time when maintaining sales are most important, focus triggered emails on the hard sell when interest is at its peak — and maybe couple it with an incentive.

Be a Data Hog
As much as you think you know your subscribers, you don't know enough. Landing pages and surveys help to gather additional information about your subscribers that can be used to better personalize your campaigns. Any advanced email marketer will tell you that data is the main driver behind truly successful email marketing.

Continue to Keep Your Volume at Tolerable Levels
During these hard economic times, you might feel pressure to blindly increase your volume from corporate management or industry peers. Try not to fall into this trap by embracing a herd mentality; rather, make a good effort to evaluate the risks and benefits involved in increasing your volume. Higher volume usually equates to higher attrition rates — not necessarily higher sales. If you have not offered your subscribers a volume limits program, now is the time to implement one. Allow your subscribers to choose how often they want to receive your communications. Maybe they don't want to hear from you every week; perhaps twice a month works better for them. Providing choice always provides a good opportunity to build a closer relationship with your subscribers.