by Chris Waszczak | Aug 22, 2019 | B2B Outsourced Sales, B2B Sales, B2B Telemarketing, Lead Generation, Outsourced Inside Sales, Outsourced Sales, Telemarketing Services
Welcome to SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales, the most strategically biased B2B Marketing Agency, telemarketing services, telemarketing companies (sales agency) and digital marketing companies, serving Orange County, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and the Pacific Northwest (Bend, Portland, Seattle). We gladly serve California and all 50 United States!
For years now, we’ve heard “Content is King,” with the result that myriad businesses have dumped considerable time and money into “Content Marketing.” Indeed, good content is key to a successful marketing strategy; the problem is that now, “everyone” is doing it! The marketplace is cluttered with a dizzying, ubiquitous cloud of great content, diluting the efficacy of any particular business’s efforts to be noticed.
Content may be king, but without engagement, there is no kingdom to rule! What is engagement, you may ask? It is what the “Wizard of Ads,” Roy H. Williams refers to as being more interesting than the thought currently occupying someone’s mind. Engaging your audience means, first of all, being impossible to ignore so that you can get their attention above all the competing voices, and then most importantly, making an impact on their emotions. All decisions are emotional, and the logical mind justifies the decision.
Here are three steps to engaging your audience so that your awesome content (a given these days) has a chance of leading you to sales conversions:
- Get Attention: No, we’re not talking about the “sad little attention getters,” as Williams calls them—all caps, bright colors, loud noises; we’re not talking about cheap interrupters most people will despise. What you need are relevant messages communicated in a way that’s very different than how your competitors are communicating. Geico brought slapstick humor into car insurance, Old Spice upped the ante ad ridiculum to catapult a musty old brand to dominance. To break the cognitive filters every human being’s mind on the planet puts up to protect them from information overload, you absolutely have to stand out. Go against the grain—and, by the way, avoid clichés like, “go against the grain!”
- Inspire: Not every ad has to be a tearjerker, or a goose-bump generator; you can also inspire laughter, anger—any number of emotions. The important thing is that you do inspire emotion in your audience. If you can cultivate the right response, you’re 75% of the way to the sale.
- Engage with your audience: Know your audience, speak their language, and then interact with them. It is essential for any business to make their audience feel important, listened to, understood. All politics aside, Gillette reported an $8 billion loss, mainly due to their recent “toxic masculinity” ads. Without taking sides on the issue, and from a purely marketing standpoint, offending your base (mainly men) is not a good idea. Uphold your principles and beliefs privately; when it comes to your company, serve your audience as a trusted brand that accepts them for who they are. Gillette has tried to foist change upon their audience, but the result was that their audience changed brands!
Is Content Marketing still relevant? Is content still king? Yes to both. However, making your content engaging gains devoted followers for the king!
Call SalesFish today and our high-touch, dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals, and the marketing and sales tactics best suited to your specific needs. And, yes, we will also advise you on the best A.I. tools that actually work and complement the real people in your business!
Stay tuned for more relevant content on creating world-class digital marketing strategies and B2B telemarketing sales strategies. We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales thank you for joining us in our commitment to unwavering strategic planning, B2B brand marketing and B2B sales execution.
Call today and our “high-touch” dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals to tailor our marketing and sales tactics to your specific needs.
SalesFish Net of Sales Services:
- B2B Direct Sales, Channel Sales and Marketing Strategies
- On-Site B2B Presentation, Negotiation and Sales
- B2B Telemarketing and B2B Telesales Services
- Cold Calls and Appointment Setting
- Online Presentations and Webinars
- Product Awareness and Announcement Calls
- Primary Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Surveys
- Experiential Event Marketing
- Pre and Post-Event Calls
- Audience Acquisition, Exhibit Sales and Sponsorship Sales
by Chris Waszczak | Aug 6, 2019 | B2B Sales, B2B Telemarketing, Lead Generation, Outsourced Sales, Telemarketing Services
Welcome to SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales, the most strategically biased B2B Marketing Agency, telemarketing services, telemarketing companies (sales agency) and digital marketing companies, serving Orange County, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and the Pacific Northwest (Bend, Portland, Seattle). We gladly serve California and all 50 United States!
In nature, as in business, there is an invisible web of energy containing intricate and often surprising connections between seemingly unrelated parts. Science, for example, is discovering numerous amazing interactions between plants in local communities. If one plant is attacked, it secretes various chemical messengers through the soil and air to help neighboring plants prepare and defend themselves.
Connections like these, often unnoticed by the average person, help members of a community thrive because of energy and information from various sources. Others may languish if they are not involved in enough local synergistic energy exchange. The same can occur in the digital world, which has a huge impact on the ability of your business to thrive and sustain momentum.
How well are you leveraging your interconnections and communications in the digital realm?
National businesses with huge budgets and nationwide connections sometimes intimidate local businesses. But, at the local level, the advantage can be gained by the little guy—for who has a better sense of the local community than a local business?
Local businesses can leverage their unique community insights and networks in order to generate valuable search traffic, and build brand visibility in their communities. One of the very best ways to do this is through high-quality content tailored to powerfully impact local search engine results and follower engagement.
Many businesses miss out on easy opportunities to develop valuable content and recognition based on their participation in or sponsorship of community events. A local bike shop could blog about and share on social media their sponsorship of a triathlon with hashtags included. The post could discuss how the bike shop can help with training for a triathlon, due to their various championships in bicycle racing, training expertise, and cutting-edge equipment. After the event, the blog could display pictures of participants, perhaps mentioning that some of them have gotten coaching by the shop in cutting-edge interval training.
Local business owners tend to get involved in local causes and organizations, and blogs and social sharing are great ways to promote this involvement. For instance, the bicycle shop may be advocating for a bike path that would make it easier for clients to avoid traffic and get to the store more safely when riding their bikes. A blog post focusing on an upcoming meeting in a local neighborhood can not only help raise awareness for the cause, but it can also raise the profile for the bicycle shop by capturing searches related to the local bike path. Promoting events can extend audience awareness of a local business by leveraging locally trending topics on various social media. This gives your local content the opportunity to be exposed to the extended network of your clients and customers, reinforcing your brand’s relevance in the interconnected digital community.
Call SalesFish today and our high-touch, dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals, and the marketing and sales tactics best suited to your specific needs. And, yes, we will also advise you on the best A.I. tools that actually work and complement the real people in your business!
Stay tuned for more relevant content on creating world-class digital marketing strategies and B2B telemarketing sales strategies. We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales thank you for joining us in our commitment to unwavering strategic planning, B2B brand marketing and B2B sales execution.
Call today and our “high-touch” dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals to tailor our marketing and sales tactics to your specific needs.
SalesFish Net of Sales Services:
- B2B Direct Sales, Channel Sales and Marketing Strategies
- On-Site B2B Presentation, Negotiation and Sales
- B2B Telemarketing and B2B Telesales Services
- Cold Calls and Appointment Setting
- Online Presentations and Webinars
- Product Awareness and Announcement Calls
- Primary Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Surveys
- Experiential Event Marketing
- Pre and Post-Event Calls
- Audience Acquisition, Exhibit Sales and Sponsorship Sales
by Chris Waszczak | Jul 31, 2019 | B2B Sales, Brand Marketing, Digital Marketing, Lead Generation
Welcome to SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales, the most strategically biased B2B Marketing Agency, telemarketing services, telemarketing companies (sales agency) and digital marketing companies, serving Orange County, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and the Pacific Northwest (Bend, Portland, Seattle). We gladly serve California and all 50 United States!
There are right and wrong ways to go about marketing, and the pitfalls are many. A lot can be learned by seeing how not to manage your marketing. This original blog series weaves together an entertaining story that will help you navigate 21st-Century marketing with a view from “the dark side,” as “Screwtape” teaches his apprentice “Wormwood” via email how to sabotage your marketing. Enjoy…
PART FIVE
To: Wormwood
From: Screwtape
Subject: Home Wrecker
My dear Wormwood,
Do you know how to be a “home wrecker?” Ah, it’s not what you think. We’ve mastered the art of interpersonal conflict and infidelity, but that’s not your area of assignment. I’m talking here about the ubiquitous home page of the Patient’s website.
The home page is often the first impression, that critical influencer that (to our great glee) so many people take for granted. Let me walk you through some of the best ways to wreck the patient’s home page!
1) Make it about him
It’s a great temptation to start this conversation by talking about oneself: your services, your reputation, how long you have been in business. Keep the patient under the delusion that this is the best foot to put forward, and it’s sure to boot the website visitor right off the page—bounce!
Under no circumstances can you allow the Patient to come to the realization that the best way to start any conversation is talking about the person on the other end.
2) Don’t get to the point
Rambling narratives are always best. Long stories about what you’re interested in (throw in a football story), droning on about your history, detailed explanations of how you operate—all of these are gold. Making the reader wait to even figure out what the heck you can do for them is what we’re after.
3) Leave them hanging
I’ve saved the best for last. It’s something I’ve seen so many times, and it’s delicious! Even if the Patient writes an excellent home page, focused on the audience, clearly explaining their value proposition, all hope is not lost. Try to get the Patient to provide no next step, no “call to action.” With no lead-in to the “sales funnel,” the reader gets a nice read, but nowhere to go to stay engaged. That’s pure gold!
Wreck on!
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
P.S. If you fail to wreck the home page, the about page is usually an easy kill (insert evil laugh here).
Stay tuned for more relevant content on creating world-class digital marketing strategies and B2B telemarketing sales strategies. We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales thank you for joining us in our commitment to unwavering strategic planning, B2B brand marketing and B2B sales execution.
Call today and our “high-touch” dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals to tailor our marketing and sales tactics to your specific needs.
SalesFish Net of Sales Services:
- B2B Direct Sales, Channel Sales and Marketing Strategies
- On-Site B2B Presentation, Negotiation and Sales
- B2B Telemarketing and B2B Telesales Services
- Cold Calls and Appointment Setting
- Online Presentations and Webinars
- Product Awareness and Announcement Calls
- Primary Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Surveys
- Experiential Event Marketing
- Pre and Post-Event Calls
- Audience Acquisition, Exhibit Sales and Sponsorship Sales
by Chris Waszczak | Apr 24, 2019 | B2B Sales, B2B Telemarketing, Lead Generation, Outsourced Inside Sales, Outsourced Sales, Telemarketing Services
Welcome to SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales, the most strategically biased B2B Marketing Agency, telemarketing services, telemarketing companies (sales agency) and digital marketing companies, serving Orange County, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and the Pacific Northwest (Bend, Portland, Seattle). We gladly serve California and all 50 United States!
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat…We have before us many long months of toil and struggle. Our policy is to wage war with all our might, with all the strength that God can give us…however long and hard the road may be.” Winston Churchill
Our man, Winston, aka “Winnie” was no pushover Pooh looking for easy honey. Sure, Hitler totally rocked the reverse alley-oop Shaquille O’Neal slam dunks with his “Blitzkrieg” Shock and Awe warfare, but Churchill was a team player who consistently toed up to the line and hit the free throws.
Adolf Hitler put his trust in industry and technology—Even with the war all but lost, the Nazis resorted to the V-Rocket as a tenuous last hope “miracle weapon.” Winston, by contrast, depended on the fortitude of the stalwart British and her allies; he was a master content marketer, a wordsmith who knew how to motivate with powerful language. The pen, it seems, was mightier than the Panzer.
This is an object lesson for the business owner. There is no angle, gimmick or technological silver bullet that will bring easy money.
According to the “Wizard of Ads,” Roy H. Williams, “Vision, passion, faith, tenacity, perseverance, sacrifice…are part of a time-tested formula for success that’s difficult to teach and painful to learn…If you simply want someone to walk into your world and say a few magic words and make everything better, you need a friend to pinch you, slap you, or shake you by the shoulders, because you’re dreaming.”
The only power we have as ad consultants,” says Williams, “is the ability to help the client tell his story as convincingly as possible…we must have the client’s cooperation in helping us define his unique selling proposition. Too often, though, the client simply says, ‘Just bring more customers through the door. If you bring ‘em in, we can sell ‘em. What we need is more traffic.’ Gee, what a great idea. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop,” says Good to Great author, Jim Collins. “There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment.”
Maybe you have been going from one marketing tactic to another, hoping to find the one that will finally propel your business forward. Stop it, old chap. Think bulldog: Long-term strategy, consistent and powerful messaging and an unwavering belief in your mission.
Call SalesFish today and our high-touch, dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals, and the marketing and sales tactics best suited to your specific needs. And, yes, we will also advise you on the best A.I. tools that actually work and complement the real people in your business!
Stay tuned for more relevant content on creating world-class digital marketing strategies and B2B telemarketing sales strategies. We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales thank you for joining us in our commitment to unwavering strategic planning, B2B brand marketing and B2B sales execution.
Call today and our “high-touch” dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals to tailor our marketing and sales tactics to your specific needs.
SalesFish Net of Sales Services:
- B2B Direct Sales, Channel Sales and Marketing Strategies
- On-Site B2B Presentation, Negotiation and Sales
- B2B Telemarketing and B2B Telesales Services
- Cold Calls and Appointment Setting
- Online Presentations and Webinars
- Product Awareness and Announcement Calls
- Primary Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Surveys
- Experiential Event Marketing
- Pre and Post-Event Calls
- Audience Acquisition, Exhibit Sales and Sponsorship Sales
by Chris Waszczak | Apr 18, 2019 | B2B Sales, B2B Telemarketing, Lead Generation, Outsourced Sales, Telemarketing Services
Welcome to SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales, the most strategically biased B2B Marketing Agency, telemarketing services, telemarketing companies (sales agency) and digital marketing companies, serving Orange County, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and the Pacific Northwest (Bend, Portland, Seattle). We gladly serve California and all 50 United States!
Well, how about that! You’ve been attending all the local networking events you can, and someone you met just became your first client!
Marketing tools are essential, but good, old-fashioned elbow rubbing is important too. If there’s any marketing tool that mimics and reinforces networking and word-of-mouth marketing, it’s Social Media—the online version of schmoozing! You just learned at a marketing workshop that there is a difference between Social Media Marketing and Social Media Networking. You bring the following list home from the workshop, and it gives you the basis for a Plan:
1) What is your GOAL? Why do you have Social Media and what do you want out of it? Realistic expectations: Brand awareness, increased search engine value, long-term community connection, insight into customer minds, competitive analysis. Unrealistic: Dramatic sales increases, benefits from casual or occasional use, a “silver bullet” effect.
2) How will you ENGAGE and EDUCATE your audience? What are you going to talk about besides yourself, your products and your services? If you’re trying to use Social Media to push a sales message, don’t bother. People are looking for interaction, entertainment and information relevant to their lives. Plan to share content they will find useful and informative.
3) What VOICE will you employ? Do you want to be funny, serious, speak in a pirate accent (arrr…)? Choose a tone and personality that fits with your business and your target demographic. Just because you’re a “serious” business doesn’t mean your Facebook voice has to be. Think AFLAC and GEICO—NOT boring (and that’s the point).
4) How FREQUENTLY will you post? Set up a spreadsheet that shows dates and content you plan to post. How often you post relates to the size of your business and your following, but you should be providing new content at least a few times a week, or you will lose connection.
5) Who are you going to CONNECT with and SUPPORT? It’s better to focus on making deep connections with a few target businesses than shallow connections with a multitude. Make a target list, and then be consistent about commenting on their pages, sharing their content and developing your online relationship.
6) How will you INTEGRATE Social with your other media? This is a topic all to itself, but you need to make sure that all of your marketing is connected. One simple example: Be sure to include your social media contacts in your traditional ads (TV, radio, print, direct mail), and sometimes provide an incentive for “Liking” or “Following” you.
Call SalesFish today and our high-touch, dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals, and the marketing and sales tactics best suited to your specific needs. And, yes, we will also advise you on the best A.I. tools that actually work and complement the real people in your business!
Stay tuned for more relevant content on creating world-class digital marketing strategies and B2B telemarketing sales strategies. We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales thank you for joining us in our commitment to unwavering strategic planning, B2B brand marketing and B2B sales execution.
Call today and our “high-touch” dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals to tailor our marketing and sales tactics to your specific needs.
SalesFish Net of Sales Services:
- B2B Direct Sales, Channel Sales and Marketing Strategies
- On-Site B2B Presentation, Negotiation and Sales
- B2B Telemarketing and B2B Telesales Services
- Cold Calls and Appointment Setting
- Online Presentations and Webinars
- Product Awareness and Announcement Calls
- Primary Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Surveys
- Experiential Event Marketing
- Pre and Post-Event Calls
- Audience Acquisition, Exhibit Sales and Sponsorship Sales
by Chris Waszczak | Apr 9, 2019 | B2B Sales, B2B Telemarketing, Brand Marketing, Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Outsourced Sales
Welcome to SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales, the most strategically biased B2B Marketing Agency, telemarketing services, telemarketing companies (sales agency) and digital marketing companies, serving Orange County, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento and the Pacific Northwest (Bend, Portland, Seattle). We gladly serve California and all 50 United States!
What comes to mind when you see an image of the Nazi swastika, or Coca-Cola bottle? Chances are, those symbols elicit fairly strong associations in both your heart and mind. What you’ve just experienced is a “brand.” So, why do we have these reactions? Because we’re human. We all think, we’re all hardwired to reason, discern, and make choices, but more importantly, we all FEEL. And, when bombarded daily with a litany of messages and choices all screaming for our attention, our minds side-step the melee, and our hearts respond to the messages which resonate most with our ideas about ourselves.
Your brand, and how you communicate it, is paramount to your business success. Your brand identity accounts for 50% or more of a company’s market value, according to marketing Guru and author Peter Fisk. Your brand is who you are as a unique business–as a culture, and is symbolized by your logo, company name and tagline. It is what makes you different and worth a second look. In simplest terms, however, a brand is not what YOU say your company is, it’s what your audiences THINK and FEEL you to be. A brand is embodied in an amalgam of perceptions, feelings, impressions–a gut reaction that people have formulated about a particular product, service, or organization. Your internal brand may be quality service, but a Microsoft clip art “logo” will not engender this feeling or perception.
There is, however, a difference between branding and a brand. Quite simply, a brand is reactive–your audience’s perception of you. Branding is proactive–encompassing all of the actions your organization undertakes to influence those audience perceptions. Branding efforts seek to create an appropriate, overarching voice, a personality; that voice is communicated through symbols such as logo, tagline and company name, extending to advertising and marketing strategies, customer service and personal contact–collectively known as “touchpoints.”
To be effective, branding symbols and touchpoints must correspond to and resonate with target audience(s). Your branding messages must accentuate what makes you and your offerings different and unique in comparison your competitors’ messaging (the power of “different”). With so little time to make a first impression, it is essential to communicate your message in a concise, clearly articulated manner that helps your audience “see” themselves in the brand. This is one most effectively by expressing benefits as opposed to features, descriptions of services, or some wonderful quality our businesses or we possess. (Your mugshot means little to people; what you can do for them–how you can solve their problem, or satisfy their needs–means everything.)
The fine balance of branding is making an emotional impact upon your audiences, through benefits important to them, while communicating your essence with skill and subtlety (showing, not telling). To do all of this with a symbol, a few words and brief messages is challenging, but when it’s done right, you will get noticed!
Call SalesFish today and our high-touch, dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals, and the marketing and sales tactics best suited to your specific needs. And, yes, we will also advise you on the best A.I. tools that actually work and complement the real people in your business!
Stay tuned for more relevant content on creating world-class digital marketing strategies and B2B telemarketing sales strategies. We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales thank you for joining us in our commitment to unwavering strategic planning, B2B brand marketing and B2B sales execution.
Call today and our “high-touch” dedicated team will assist you in assessing your strategic sales goals to tailor our marketing and sales tactics to your specific needs.
SalesFish Net of Sales Services:
- B2B Direct Sales, Channel Sales and Marketing Strategies
- On-Site B2B Presentation, Negotiation and Sales
- B2B Telemarketing and B2B Telesales Services
- Cold Calls and Appointment Setting
- Online Presentations and Webinars
- Product Awareness and Announcement Calls
- Primary Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Surveys
- Experiential Event Marketing
- Pre and Post-Event Calls
- Audience Acquisition, Exhibit Sales and Sponsorship Sales
