English is often seen as the Internet’s ‘lingua franca,’ but the truth is that most of the world’s population speaks no English at all – and even 85% of those who do speak English as a second language won’t buy from an English-only website, according to a study by the market research group Common Sense Advisory.

With Internet usage increasing rapidly throughout the world – China alone has almost 400 million users, according to Internet World Stats – there are clearly vast potential markets that remain unavailable to anyone sticking with a monolingual approach.

Marketing to a multilingual audience online requires a well-thought out strategy – below are a few tips on how to succeed.

Translate and research your keywords

There are various ways to translate your content, such as adding a machine translation widget (like Google Translate) or inline code, or employing the professional translation services of a native speaker of your target language. The last option is likely to yield the best results, but even if you use machine translation, you should never directly translate your keywords. Popular local search terms might include English-appropriations, regional variations or colloquialisms, and keyword research should be carried out separately for each target country, both by using translators, and by analysing keyword data.

In-country domains

Hosting your localized sites on country code top-level domains (e.g. .jp for Japan or .nl for the Netherlands) will boost your rankings on both Google’s local search engines and any local competitors. Try to ensure that the site is also hosted on a server located in that country, as this will also help your site appear more locally relevant.

Link locations count

To boost your rankings, you’ll want incoming links that are not only relevant to your content, but also located in your target country. This will mean targeting high Alexa-rated sites located within that country and could involve, for example, posting comments on Japanese online media to provide links to your own Japanese site.

Same language, different usage

The same language can have many regional variations. The Spanish spoken in Spain is different from that used in Mexico, while U.S. and UK English have many variations in vocabulary, and especially in colloquialisms. You might not consider it worth the expense and effort of setting up separate localized sites for countries that share a common language, but at the very least, you should ensure that the content you use makes sense to speakers of each version of the language by having native speakers check it for errors. You certainly don’t want to fall on your fanny and make a faux pas here (and if you’re not aware of what that would mean in the UK, check out this guide to British slang).

Google doesn’t reign supreme everywhere

Google remains the single most popular search engine worldwide, but local competitors are dominant in some markets. In China for example it’s Baidu, while Seznam is the most commonly used search engine in the Czech Republic. Don’t neglect Google, but do focus your efforts on the dominant search engine for each target market.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global translation agency and localization specialists Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 120 employees spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over thirty million words for businesses in every industry sector and their projected turnover for 2010 is $9m.

First mover advantage is great, except when it’s not. If your product is truly innovative, your biggest challenge is likely to be explaining what, exactly, your product is, what its benefits are, and why anyone should buy it. Below are stories of three revolutionary technologies that faced these problems, and lessons for overcoming them.

What is it?

In 1994, Stanford University Credit Union began offering true online banking services to its members. They had the benefit of a tech-savvy customer base; Stanford University was an Internet pioneer, and credit union members (university staff and students) already used email extensively. They were able to make the analogy that it was like ATM banking, with which their customers were already familiar, but over the Internet, instead of at a dedicated machine. The questions from credit union members were practical: would it be secure? Would it be reliable?

But for most people used to traditional banking (writing checks, standing in line to talk with a teller, etc.), “online financial services,” as it was called then, was a bit of a puzzle. Jim Bruene at NetBanker describes the public discussion of online banking as follows:

1994 to 1997: Sounds good, but what is it?
1998 to 1999: All things online are great
2000 to 2002: All things online are over-hyped
2003 to 2006: Is it really secure?
2007 to ???: Protecting the earth and yourself

Despite the rapid spread of Internet usage, it took several years before the general populace even had a basic concept of what “online banking” meant.

What benefits does it offer?

The 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee introduced some amazing new products, from boxed milk to Cherry Coke. It also offered the public their first sight of a touchscreen, with 33 televisions covered with the new transparent touch-sensitive panels from Elographics. Sure, it was cool, but what was it for?

It wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that touch screens found their first widespread practical use, in point of sale (POS) systems in restaurants. And it would be another decade before Microsoft’s and Apple’s new graphics-oriented approaches brought touch screens into the hands of the general populace. In and of itself, this technology wasn’t useful. It was only as it was combined with other devices, applications, and data-processing needs that touch screens found their market.

Why would anyone want it?

In 1972, Andreas Pavel invented the first portable, personal music player. He called it the Stereobelt. He approached several electronics manufacturers about his invention, but none of these companies felt the public would ever wear headphones in public for listening to music.

Seven years later, Sony made a huge success of the Walkman, selling it on the same benefit Pavel had touted. As one amateur historian puts it, “the Walkman was not promoted to professional journalists, like most portable tape recorders were at the time; it was promoted to ordinary consumers. It was a music player first and foremost; it had no record function.”

Sony also bypassed the traditional press and technology reviewers, taking the device straight to the public in the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo, and hiring young people to demo it for their peers.

Apparently, the early 1970s manufacturers’ fears about headphones were justified, but Sony was able to counter this negative impression by letting people try the Walkman out for themselves, and hear the sound quality produced. Headphones haven’t been a stumbling block since.

Lesson 1: Use analogies

When you can’t say your product is “like X, only better,” you need to find a meaningful analogy. For online banking, the analogies were to other processes with which their customers were already familiar: touch-tone phone banking and ATMs. As those two technologies became more widespread, so did the ease of making that analogy.

Lesson 2: Make it tactile

Touchscreens, despite lacking immediate practical applications, had an instant “Wow” factor simply from being tactile. Sony did its most effective marketing simply by getting headphones on ears.

What if it’s an abstraction?

Products and services that deal with abstractions like data processing or providing bandwidth benefit from intuitive visual metaphors. Think of “cloud computing.” And don’t forget the power of new media: if a picture is worth a thousand words, a well-done video can be worth a million:

Lesson 3: Pursue partnerships

Elographics, on their own, had a novelty. Once they were able to link touch screens to sophisticated computing devices, software, and marketing, they had a powerhouse.

Not every company can offer a complete solution, especially if the “problem” doesn’t yet exist. If your cool new gadget is a technological wonder, make sure your tech guys are going to gadget conferences and seeing what other emerging technology can work with it. If you offer a service that might complement, rather than compete with, another company’s offering, talk to them about bundling.

Lesson 4: Ignore traditional marketing methods

Sony ignored the skepticism of the traditional technology reviewers and took their product directly to the trendsetting public in the high-profile consumption center of Japan. With an innovative product or service, your product launch is aiming for the early adopters. Remember that finding and gaining the interest of this group takes different methods than those used to sustain a product once it’s mainstream. Early adopters buy other innovative products, and visit cutting edge websites. Find them where they are.

Another great example: Devo goes corporate

“DEVO, the 80′s avante-garde band, is releasing its first album in 20 years. The ironically brilliant marketing campaign for the album is to paint DEVO, which has always espoused the idea of  “de-evolution,” as a corporation. DEVO, Inc. plans to use “corporate” marketing strategies to promote itself, including focus groups, hiring an ad agency, crowd sourcing, Twitter, YouTube and even Chatroulette.”

As DEVO might say, when a (marketing) problem comes along, you must whip it.

Sara Prentice Manela
Editor
Palo Alto Software, Inc.

When it comes to your business or product, the amount of heat you apply to your publicity campaign can be the difference between success and failure. Too much publicity heat and you’ll get burned; not enough publicity heat and your campaign won’t be “well done” (I know, enough of the heat references already.). Believe it or not, parallels drawn between publicity and heat/fire can help you determine the right temperature for your PR campaign.

I like to think of publicity campaigns in three publicity degree categories:

1. Flash Fire Publicity
2. Controlled-Burn Publicity
3. Firefighting Publicity

Each has its proper time and place – and can be used accordingly to benefit your business.

FLASH FIRE PUBLICITY:
This type of publicity ignites a quick and sometimes short-lived media-interest blast for a venture. It is most often used for pitches that may have a relatively short shelf life. You’ve heard of the phrase “15 minutes of fame” – in keeping with the theme of this article we’ll call it the “15 minutes of FLAME.” This type of publicity campaign generates almost immediate media placements and can burn itself out after just a few weeks. But, given the right tending, it can also be the precursor to a more extensive, lengthy campaign – that, of course, all depends on your publicity goals and your PR staff’s ability to reach those goals. Flash fire publicity is many times tied to a particular date, time period or current event.

For example, remember the recent stories about the increased number of injuries resulting from scooter accidents? A client of mine was in the final stages of developing a scooter safety product when the report came out. We quickly tied up our loose ends and launched our campaign right after the Consumer Product Safety Commission released their report to the media. Our pitch proved to be a great media interest vehicle and generated a number of immediate stories in newspapers and TV news affiliates in the U.S. & Canada. (this campaign has now progressed to the “controlled-burn publicity” phase described below). Perhaps it could be likened to cooking. Flash fire publicity can be seen as the quick, high-heat searing that is done to prepare the food for further cooking — that of course can be followed by differing temperatures to get the food/job “well done.”

CONTROLLED-BURN PUBLICITY:
More directed, even-tempered publicity heat is applied in the “controlled-burn” campaign. The controlled-burn is more methodical and lends itself well to product/website launches designed to generate a continual flow of sales or traffic over a long period of time. It’s much like the common practice of burning prairies and pastureland done by conservation or wildlife workers. The fires are started deliberately, meticulously, and burn slowly over a long time span. These controlled fires cover a large area of land and by the time they are complete, the field is more manageable, fertile, and ultimately more prosperous.

The same principle holds true in a publicity campaign. Creating controlled media exposure and placements (newspaper/magazine stories; broadcast stories/interviews) over a long period of time helps strengthen a business/product’s roots in the marketplace. The controlled, long-term exposure leads to increased brand recognition, consumer awareness and acceptance – all without placing a single ad. Spreading the media placements out over a number of months helps prevent against the flash of multiple, simultaneous media stories and the subsequent “wall of fire” consumer response that may inundate your sales fulfillment capabilities for a short time. By being in control of your publicity temperature, you can effectively stoke the fire OR contain the flames to create as much publicity as your business can accommodate at any given time.

Some publicity campaigns are a series of flash fire pitches, while others incorporate a combination of flash fire and controlled-burn tactics. The key is to create that initial spark of interest for the media, and keep the embers glowing over the next several months/years by fanning the fire with periodic newsworthy media releases and pitches.

FIREFIGHTING PR:
Hopefully your PR specialist will never have to use this element of publicity for your venture or business. Firefighting PR is a reactive publicity campaign that is implemented when something bad has happened or is about to happen in your business – product recall, employee layoffs, earnings shortfall, etc. It is very difficult to give general advice on this type of publicity because each situation must be handled very carefully, taking present AND future implications into consideration. Regardless of the situation one thing is certain – truthful, forthright media relations are best to douse the flames. One thing that hurt a tire company recently is that they spent the first few weeks of a PR crisis pointing fingers at others before finally taking at least partial responsibility. The quicker the problem is recognized, acknowledged and resolved, the quicker you can begin applying the previously mentioned publicity practices to generate more positive publicity for the next several months.

The success of your venture’s publicity campaign depends on your PR department/specialist’s “fire watch” expertise — knowing when/how to ignite the fire, fan the flames, or extinguish the blaze. Here’s hoping the perfect “publicity heat” leads to some “cold cash” for your business.

About the Author

Todd Brabender is the President of Spread The News Public Relations, Inc. His business specializes in generating media exposure and publicity for innovative products, businesses, experts and ventures.
http://www.spreadthenewspr.com
todd@spreadthenewspr.com
(785)842-8909

If you are not including misspelled search terms in your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) process you are missing out on connecting with many potential customers.

It is no secret that the Internet has created our enormous global market. Customers, speaking any of thousands of languages, from every nation can make purchases online from a marketplace where everyone can be an international vendor. Understandably, most small- and medium-sized e-merchants can’t afford to build their Web stores in dozens of parallel pages to handle dozens or hundreds of languages. But they can make their main sites more efficient by using SEO tools to cast a broader net and reel in customers who misspell keyword search terms. In our case, we want to catch those customers who seek our business-planning software products, but speak English as a second language, or don’t speak English at all.

As just one example, how many ways can you misspell restaurant? Recent visitors to our sites who were searching  for sample business plans for eating establishments used these misspellings (and others as well) in their searches:

• restaraunt
• restauraunt
• restaurent
• resteraunt
• restruant
• restrunt
• resturant
• restuarant

Not getting any results, they also tried the plurals of these not-words by adding s and es as well. Maybe these were merely sloppy typing errors, or perhaps the searchers really did not know the correct spelling. (Sorry, claiming that since restaurant is a French word, and so, is difficult to spell in English is a specious argument, since much of American English came from so many other languages.)

With so many gazillion e-merchants out there, search engine optimization is essential to our success and survival. We must use every opportunity, every tool, every search to entice, suggest, direct, link, and otherwise bring potential customers in to our websites where we can sell them our products and services.

The developers, webmasters, and editors of our websites collect, track, and analyze all these bad searches. Then we add the misspellings into keyword fields and other code, behind-the-website-scenes, so that from now on anyone who makes an attempt to search on our sites with any of those misspellings will still  receive a list of free restaurant business sample plans.

I am saddened though, to think how our facilitation of successful Internet searches is enabling birth-tongue English-speaking people to slip into illiteracy. Effective SEO is proactively driving down the lowest common denominator in vocabulary and language usage skills. Internet users are becoming less literate every day, and we are enabling them to do it. They don’t need to know how to spell correctly to generate a successful Internet search. Anything that is a close approximation of a word will do.

And truly, from the retail business standpoint I can’t say this is wrong. Sad yes, but not wrong.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

One of the greatest fears that people have is public speaking — people would rather deal with snakes, spiders, even death than have to get up and speak to an audience.

It’s too bad, because one of the best business-building tactics is to demonstrate your knowledge to a receptive audience. It pays to be able to speak well in public, and of course it helps if you have a little charm as well.

Public speaking is particularly effective if your business has a service or consulting component (actually if you are not selling services along with products you may be missing a high-margin bet). People like to be educated rather than sold, so if you are an expert in, say, interior decorating or adventure tours, you could hold a seminar entitled, “The Ten Interior Decorating Improvements that Increase Your Home’s Value Most” or “Planning an Adventure You’ll Remember for the Rest of Your Life.” Retail shop owners can offer in-store demos or hands-on workshops like the ones you see at Home Depot and the other “big box” stores.

Naturally you won’t have time to provide all the secrets you have learned about your subject in these sessions; after all, this is your business and you don’t want to make yourself redundant. But if you carefully plan an interesting agenda that informs, educates, and whets the appetite of the attendees, you’ll likely get some inquiries on using your services — not everyone wants to do it themselves!

And what’s more, you will have identified yourself to people who are obviously interested in what you provide; otherwise, why would they even come? If you want to make sure they’re the right people, identify who should attend. You could say something like, “if you are thinking of selling your home in the next six months, this seminar is for you.” Or, “if you have never been on an adventure vacation, this is the seminar for you.”

But whatever you do, be sure to plan your program and do a few practice run-throughs. You’ll need to see how much time it will take – count on it taking longer than planned. Make sure there’s two-way communication with the audience; ask for questions from time to time.

Have some handouts, like a sheet of “tips and tricks,” insider techniques that you use to do what you do. Or give samples of your product.

If you’re going to do this more than once, ask for feedback and hand out a survey form at the end to ask how you did or what could be added.

And if you’re really serious about building business, hold a drawing for a small prize of some kind, and in doing so, get everyone’s name and contact info. Put a check box on the entry form asking if they’d like more information from you. If they say “yes,” you have permission to market to them in the future.

Public speaking can open a lot of doors. Try it and see.

About the Author

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

Web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca

blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

By Varju Luceno of Global Office Partners

One-way, top-down communication does not work as well as in former days. Today, companies must create conversations with customers and deliver useful content at the moment their prospects, clients or constituents need it. Many firms will need to reinvent their marketing year-to-year.

Marketers can’t push products on people. They have to think like journalists and create a dialogue with their audience to earn a prospect’s trust. Free or low-cost applications such as blogs and podcasts, in addition to social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, have changed the old rules. In addition, free social networking applications can be used for managing your company’s reputation, conducting market research, monitoring your competitors’ efforts and collaborating with your colleagues. Twitter can also serve as a platform for your company’s customer service.

Ideal clients can now be reached with targeted messages that cost a fraction of the old expensive advertising campaigns. In addition, social media marketing and PR efforts often allow instant feedback and measurable results, so businesses can immediately see which marketing strategies are working for them and which ones are not.

Online marketing these days is not about flashy websites. More than ever, companies need to provide useful information to help customers make their purchasing decisions. Websites cannot be stale – content needs to be fresh and reactions of the visitors should be measured and analyzed, so that the content can be continuously improved.

Your company may have to invest in some “digital assets” such as a video camera or podcasting equipment, as now you can create and control your own media within the communities you are part of. Observe, research and listen carefully before you create your company’s social media strategy. Improve your social media marketing skills or find an expert to assist you. New Web-based applications to support social media marketing are developed and released all the time. Find someone who can evaluate these tools for you and make relevant suggestions.

How can a small business efficiently keep track of its goals, social media marketing efforts, measure related data and improve its marketing? The answer is in creating a marketing SYSTEM for your company. Re-evaluate your marketing strategies if you are not getting desired results. Work on a new marketing plan, document your efforts and create a marketing calendar.

Here’s how to get started:

• State your marketing goals for the year – describe how your company will reach these goals
• Know your ideal clients, their needs, wants and where to reach them
• Write or polish your core message to resonate with your target audience – test your message
• Develop educational marketing materials in formats that your ideal clients will appreciate
• Establish your lead generation strategy
• Develop and describe your education (sales) process
• Create a process for monitoring and evaluating your marketing efforts

Be consistent in your marketing activities; follow your system and your efforts will pay off.

About the Author

Varju Luceno is the owner of Global Office Partners – a marketing firm that focuses on the needs of professional service businesses. Varju is also a global marketer, blogger and writer on small-business and technology related topics, and a certified Duct Tape Marketing Coach. She earned her MBA in marketing from the University of Montana in Missoula.

Web: globalofficepartners.com
Blog: outsourcemiracle.com
Twitter.com/varjuluceno

By Fiona Friesen, president and founder of Glue

No matter what stage your business is at, you can benefit from a marketing kit. What’s a marketing kit, you ask? A portion of the Duct Tape Marketing system founded by John Jantsch, a marketing kit is the foundation of your corporate messaging. It’s a flexible and in-depth package consisting of separate pages of information that are interchangeable depending on your audience. You can pick and choose from your marketing kit to easily create all kinds of things your business needs, such as a website, brochures and direct mail pieces. Here are five ways your business can benefit from a marketing kit.

1) It keeps your marketing efforts consistent

A marketing kit is your one-stop-shop for content that will come in handy in your marketing strategy, such as FAQs, Remarkable Difference Summary, and Ideal Clients. Some of this information is for internal reference, while some is for the world at large. Whoever your audience, using information from a single source means that everything you create will carry the same tone and voice. This is ideal for building brand awareness and trust.

2) It tells customers why they need you

Each component of a marketing kit is directed sharply away from fluffy jargon and focuses only on facts that your client can really use. It tells them, quickly, that you know their frustrations and why they can trust you to help. Marketing kits also help you stand out from the crowd by showing your prospective clients that you’re a real person who loves what you’re doing. These are all factors that anyone would find appealing, especially prospects.

3) It keeps you on track

What’s your process? What’s your unique difference? A marketing kit can tell you. It contains everything your clients will want to know about your operations, your motivations and your results. Gone are the days of conflicting intentions and veering wildly off-course into bad marketing decisions. Knowing exactly what your business is all about will help you capture your unique positioning.

4) It keeps you flexible

A marketing kit comprises several pages of information that are separate from one another and usually printed on standard office printers. This makes it easy to update if things change, like you add a service or a customer gives you a testimonial. You can also mix and match the contents depending on which potential client will be receiving the information. This results in a perfectly customized package of information for each client, which is more than can be said for a generic brochure.

5) It saves you time

How much of your time is spent re-inventing the wheel when it comes to your marketing materials? With a marketing kit, everything you’ll need to follow up with a lead is right there. You no longer need to rewrite bios, search through files for case studies or ask past clients for testimonials – again. Simply refer to your marketing kit for all you need. Then, spend your saved time doing what you do best – making your clients happy!

Fiona Friesen is a certified Duct Tape Marketing Coach located in Calgary, AB, Canada. As president and founder of Glue, Fiona cares about client success – and it shows. She loves taking her clients’ marketing headaches away with a custom-tailored, systematic Duct Tape Marketing program. Her clients love their increased sales, higher productivity, and true customer connections.

By Joe Dager, Business901

Are your projects flowing smoothly? Are you assigning responsibilities, deadlines and tasks, but it is just a headache to keep up? A likely problem is that tasks are not getting handed off well or at the right time to others. Another problem may be that everyone’s priorities seem all mixed up, and one or two people or departments seem to be an enormous bottleneck. A project management system is not a cure-all, but it certainly is a start.

In marketing, I’m always amazed at the lack of formalized project management systems. Most marketers resist the idea, misunderstanding the role of detailed planning for marketing projects. They assume that the purpose of a detailed plan is the same as it would be for other repetitive activities like manufacturing. The purpose of a project plan in marketing is to coordinate many of the uncertain activities that happen. And possibly more importantly, a good project plan will coordinate the activities of your resource requirements. Not everything will be predictable, but if we can make even some of the unpredictable predictable, we will increase the likelihood of success.

Within a project plan, we can establish overall and individual process metrics. We will need metrics to produce information quickly. The value of these types of metrics is that they will allow you to take action during a project where and when you can still influence its success. Measurability is perhaps the most important feature of the project plan.

Project management covers all aspects of planning: coordinating activities and resources and forming a baseline from which to manage the project. This gives everyone involved the same reference point. Once a schedule is completed, it should be posted or made available to all stakeholders of the project. Constant updating should appear and be visible to all parties.

It is very easy for a team to want to jump straight in, generate a schedule and get on with the project. There is more to project planning than this. A project plan is an active document, and should be used to manage the process. A schedule is the translation of the project plan into individual tasks, identifying durations, responsibilities, start and finish dates, resources, flow and milestones.

Everyone knows we cannot do enough planning, but it’s the time factor that prevents us, right? How much time does it really take to plan? From my experience you should use a baseline of around 5% of your project’s time in planning. So if you have a project that will consume 400 hours, that would be 20 hours. Do you think that is unreasonable? Do you believe that a plan would produce fewer negative consequences, or less than 20 hours of non-productive, reactive activities, putting out fires?

Now, what happens if planning takes longer? You need to treat your planning process like any other process. Using a standard methodology, such as Lean Six Sigma and the toolset that it employs, will allow you the opportunity to get the most out of your planning cycle. It will improve your planning process, removing the waste that you have accumulated in it. I have found most companies actually enjoy planning, the collaboration and decision-making that take place during it. What everyone doesn’t like is the waste in planning, so get rid of it!

The first thing you can do is plan the planning process. Take 5% of your planning time to improve your planning. Set objectives, milestones, create key performance indicators and, most of all, create a standard work plan. After doing this a few times, planning will become very easy, intuitive and more productive. Consider that if you significantly improve your planning process, you will stop fighting such an uphill battle and create considerable down-flow opportunities of greater savings. Try it!

About the Author

Business901.com provides direction in areas such as Lean Six Sigma Marketing and the Duct Tape Marketing System. Business901 has designed their services and product offerings so that they are implementable systems that work in the real, not enough time, not enough people world we operate in. We provide tools that simplify the marketing process, not complicate it. Joe Dager, President of Business901, is a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Coach and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.

By Joe Constantino of Business Marketing Solutions

In my experience, one of the biggest mysteries surrounding marketing is the lack of understanding by many business owners about what marketing is actually supposed to do, or its purpose. I have been asked this purpose question so many times that I have actually devised a very simple test to determine if a business owner is utilizing their marketing efforts in the most productive way.

So, here’s the million-dollar question: what is the purpose of marketing?

Marketing’s purpose is actually three-fold.

The first purpose of marketing is to capture the attention of your target market. It’s impossible to market to anyone until you can get them to listen to your messages.

The second purpose is to give your target market the hope that, by reading or listening to your marketing piece, it will give them enough information to facilitate their making the best decision possible when buying whatever you sell.

The third purpose of marketing is to lower their risk in taking the next step in the buying process so that you can further educate the prospect about what you do.

So, did you pass the test?

If your marketing isn’t doing these three things, then you’re not getting all you should be from your marketing efforts. And you’re probably not turning as many prospects into customers as you should be.

It’s really pretty simple.

All you have to do, as the business owner, is figure out what is important to your prospects, educate them about what constitutes the best deal in your industry, show them quantifiable proof that you actually provide that best deal, in terms of price and value, and communicate to your target in a way that they will pay attention to you, believe you, and take action on your offers.

But, here’s the problem. Many companies don’t give the consumer what they want. Instead of using marketing as an educational tool to facilitate the decision-making process, build a case for why they should choose your company, and give the customer a low-risk offer, most companies create marketing messages that basically say “buy it from us for no good reason and now, or we don’t have anything for you.” That’s why your prospects resist your marketing efforts.

Here’s a simple method to improve your marketing:

Get attention – with benefit-promising headlines

Educate your customers and prospects with messages that show them what they need to know about your product or service and why you can deliver this better than anyone else in the industry.

Provide a low-risk way for them to try you with a free trial, 100% money-back guarantee, free whitepaper, etc.

By understanding and applying the three purposes of marketing, you will earn more customers and generate more revenue for your business.

About the Author…

Joe Costantino is owner of Business Marketing Success in Boston, a marketing company that helps professional service firms learn how to effectively market their businesses with a step-by-step marketing system. He is also a certified Duct Tape Marketing Coach and East Coast Regional Guide assisting in recruitment and training of new Duct Tape Marketing coaches. Joe also provides keynotes, seminars and workshops on a number of marketing topics. You can learn more about Joe at www.businessmarketingsuccess.com or by email at joe@businessmarketingsuccess.com

English has a certain something, a  je ne sais quoi, which makes it such a creative language for presenting your marketing message. It has a sponge-like ability to absorb and use words and phrases from other languages. And we quickly adopt these loan words into our daily usage, and adapt them to our advertising.

We regularly use nouns from other languages to improve the image of the same items in our product or services offerings. Pomme de terre frites, (or simply pomme frites) appears on fancy menus instead of French fries. Grande and Vente make our cappuccinos and caffè Americanos taste far better (and cost more) than simple big cups of coffee.

Atelier (a workshop or studio) is a popular addition to the store names of artists, or specialty shops or boutiques (to use one French word to describe another French word [wink]).

We use abbreviations such as R.S.V.P. instead of spelling out répondez s’il vous plaît, when please respond is just as succinct and stalwart.

When applying for a job we’ll prepare a summary of our accomplishments and call it a résumé, unless it is a job in academia, in which case that summary might be called curriculum vitae.

Our business plan financials are often labeled pro forma (in advance, or as a matter of form).

Your physician’s protégé may give you a pro bono prognosis and prescribe a placebo and wish you prosit. Geshundheit!

Can you tell the difference between ad lib., au-h2o, ca., circ., ebit, e.g., et al., etc., i.e., ibid., lsmft, v., vs., viz, v.s. or v.v.? Can you spell out all these abbreviations?

It is so easy for us to read over, past or through these foreign words that are emigrating into English. Many times we simply make a guess on the meaning, based on the context of the sentence, because we are too busy, or too lazy, to look them up. But then many of us compound the error. We incorporate them into our own marketing writing, advertising, and branding efforts, still without knowing what we are actually saying.

So, what can you do? Obviously the first thing to do is use your dictionary. There is the old standby, the printed book (our Documentation team has six different editions from different publishers). There are plenty of online dictionaries as well. Google or Yahoo! search and you get a plethora of links. Bookmark your favorites and return to them often.

There are a couple free translators on the Internet as well, such as SDL Free Translation.com and Babel Fish, though they don’t translate Latin.

And, here are two good reference books I’ll recommend to you.

Latin for the Illiterati: Exorcizing the Ghosts of a Dead Language by Jon R Stone. Over 5,000 entries of Latin words and phrases that turn up regularly in modern English.

Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases edited by Jennifer Speake. Covers 8,000 words and phrases from over 40 languages.

Give your marketing message that certain indefinable quality (je ne sais quoi ) of worldliness when you drop in phrases from other languages. No faux pas.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software, Inc.