What stage are you in starting your business? Are you just getting started or have you been in business for a while and have exhausted your warm market and are looking for alternative ways of marketing your products or opportunity? In these next series of posts, I will share some low cost ideas of marketing your products and opportunity to potential customers and partners. This post will address the use of promotional tools such as testimonials, research studies and article reprints to grow your business.
As you develop your business plan, it is important to include the different tools and marketing resources that you will use to spread the word of the benefits of your product and opportunity to potential customers and partners. There are a number of different promotional tools that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy to build your business. Today, I will share some ideas on how you can use testimonials, research studies and article reprints as marketing tools.
Testimonials
Testimonials are customer’s reviews and feedback of a product or service that they have used and have had positive results. Positive feedback from others not only provides education about the benefits that product, but also provides third party validation for its use. How many times have you purchased a product based on word of mouth and positive reviews?
These tools are great because they also cost nothing to acquire. Most companies provide testimonials that you can use or you can build your own collection of testimonials by asking current customers about their experience with that product or service. Chose the best testimonials to include in your own marketing handouts. Use these testimonials as follow up tools to continue to educate on the benefits of the product or service and to connect and network people with similar experiences to share their stories and insights.
Research Studies
Depending on the product, the use research studies as tools builds buyer confidence and trusts. Providing links to abstracts and publications on studies performed by Universities and research facilities provides another form of validation. Automating the setup to notify you of new studies is pretty easy to do. To set up, select key words for your product. Use search tools such as Google alert and Pubmed (National Library of Medicine resource. For medicinal products) to search and notify you of new research related to your keywords. In addition, the National Institute of Health has a website called CRISP that publishes any new clinical trial on any medicinal or device products. Having these alerts set up will notify you via email of any studies published with your selected keywords.
Article Reprints
Articles about your product or industry also make great marketing pieces. These articles can be featured in journals, trade magazines, online resources etc. When including extracts of these articles in your marketing pieces, be sure to give proper credit to the article’s author and media source.
The search for new updated articles can also be updated using tools such as Google News Alert When properly setup, Google will automatically alert and email you when there are news articles containing keywords related to your topic or industry that show up online.
Regardless of which promotional tool you use, organize these resources by creating folders or files to collect and include in your marketing pieces. Use these marketing pieces as hand outs, online and as educational resources to build your business.
How have you used these tools to market your business?
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