by Chris Waszczak | Dec 28, 2017 | 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!
You might be missing out—big time! If you’re not blogging, you are letting a great opportunity pass you by.
The word “blog” is short for “Web log,” and it is in essence a website or part of a website that you can add to and edit easily and that, usually, readers can respond to.
Getting started is relatively easy. According to marketing expert Michael Fleischner, in his blog article Internet Marketing Secrets, “There are a number of platforms available that offer free blog services. Sites like Blogger and WordPress only require a brief registration and set up. Once you determine a theme for your blog and a template, you’re ready to begin posting. Posts are entries you make on your blog that are published instantly.”
Better yet, you can add a blog page to your website, or if you already have a blog but aren’t posting regularly, SalesFish can provide you with excellent, SEO-keyword-optimized blogs, white-labeled for your brand.
Some bloggers post blogs each and every day, others once a week. Regardless of how frequently you post to your blog, content can be focused on a specific theme or random topics. The most popular blogs focus on a specific niche and provide valuable information, content, and commentary that encourage interaction with blog followers. If you’re new to blogging, start small and be consistent. Use as much original content as possible.
A few of the benefits of blogs to your business include:
- Well-written blogs establish their writers as experts in their field without giving the impression that they are selling. Ads don’t have this kind of power.
- Your blog can be integrated with your social media, making them much more appealing and substantial.
- Your blog can improve your search engine rankings. Include specific keywords in your entries that you seek to optimize for.
- Your blog may be picked up by other sites/blogs and give you more exposure.
If you are not a writer, we can supply you with a good one to ghost write your blogs for you. Poorly-written blogs will do your business more harm than good. Make sure that you are consistently putting new content on your blog and responding to posts others put on your blog.
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 | Dec 12, 2017 | 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 EIGHT:
To: Wormwood
From: Screwtape
Subject: URGENT: Selling Without Selling
My dear Wormwood,
Red alert! The Patient is near to stumbling upon a weapon that could prove disastrous for your budding career as an agent of business sabotage. I need not mention the penalties, should you allow this to happen!
There has been some talk in his earshot of, “selling without selling.” You may ask, as an amateur saboteur what exactly that means. Is it not a contradiction of terms?
It is, but it isn’t. In fact, it is genius that could spell disaster for our cause. You see, most businesses are so focused on selling that they sound like they’re selling; their ads look like sales ads. They do not seem to understand that people today are turned off by sales—they don’t like feeling as if they’re being sold too. This is particularly true of the “Millennial” generation, which is very sensitive to anything they don’t feel to be genuine. (In their youthful idealism, they want to think that business is about more than gaining a buck! Unfortunately, the businesses that believe there’s more to the world than just making money often do better than if they were purely motivated by wealth—and we hate that! It’s so much easier for us to manipulate the materialistic!)
I digress… If you want to see examples of selling without selling, they are all around us; the results have been phenomenally and disgustingly successful.
Just watch the humorous Old Spice commercials with Terry Crews and Isaiah Mustafa. Their ads have won awards, like the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial. Even worse, they have catapulted Old Spice from a stagnant brand to the hottest products in their market. People snatch that stuff up like a starving man at a free buffet. They do it because they’re entertained, because they share these ads with their friends—not because they’ve been pitched in a straight-on manner.
Another example? Well, KFC recently did something brilliant that made waves across social media. Their Twitter account only followed 11 people: six guys named “Herb” and five of the “Spice Girls.” One of their followers cracked the code that they follow “11 Herbs and Spices.” KFC sent the guy a custom painting of him riding piggy-back on Colonel Sanders—the thing went viral and even got picked up by the Media. (By the way, character-based advertising is another dangerous strategy I intend to discuss with you soon.)
Study these examples, as well as the ad campaigns of Geico, Nike, and the ads for the recent Marvel superhero movies, among others. If your Patient figures out that he can sell more by doing less selling, your cause is “toast,” and so are you! I say this with the utmost sincerity.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
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 | Dec 6, 2017 | 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! Enjoy this new blog series…
Have you heard of “Geofencing?” If you haven’t, you need to know the basics.
Geofencing allows you to set up a “virtual fence” around any physical location, using GPS coordinates to define exactly where you want to target customers. This Geofence can be set to run all the time, or set to only run certain times of the day or week.
Once a target prospect or customer enters your Geofence, you are set up to “capture” them via their smartphone or other device’s GPS. It’s a powerful way to generate an audience based on proximity. Once you capture a potential customer, you can target them with ads for up to 30 days. Marketing experts recommend serving no more than eight impressions per day to your captured audience(s).
As you might expect, you can then track and evaluate who sees your ad, where they saw it, who comes into your business, and who converts to a website visit.
Geofencing is a unique way to capture top-of-the-funnel prospects by reaching them at the places they physically visit, as well as where they spend time online. It allows you to target your defined demographic(s) and location(s).
The results of a Geofencing campaign can be compared to a well-performing display ad or retargeting campaign, but you reach your audience much differently with Geofencing. You can’t target general display ads to hit your audience in locations they frequent most, or the times they are most interested in what you have to offer.
Every business, location, and industry can vary quite a bit, so you’ll have to determine Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) for your campaigns. Some Geofencing campaigns will get a $10 CPA while other may be $100 CPA, partly depending on how well-targeted Geofencing locations are.
There are a lot of factors to consider to optimize your Return on Advertising Investment (ROAI), and we can help you put together a solid plan. A Geofence that contains 80% of your target demographic will likely perform better than another area (or timeframe) containing 50% target of your target. You can’t know for sure, though, till you test your markets and analyze the results.
Focus on testing a few areas with a modest budget and comparing results before you really dive in. Since Geofencing has a lot of factors to consider and evaluate, testing just one area won’t give you the depth of information you need to make the best decisions on where to spend your money, nor on how effective this strategy is compared to AdWords, display ads, retargeting and others.
Much like serving ads on Facebook, targeting the right demographic and the locations they frequent most will be key.
SalesFish can set up a solid Geofencing plan to round out your marketing and sales portfolio and reach potential customers in a whole new way!
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 | Nov 7, 2017 | B2B Sales, Brand Marketing, Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Uncategorized
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 SEVEN:
To: Wormwood
From: Screwtape
Subject: Ads that SUCK
My dear Wormwood,
Ah, yes—we’ve now come to one of my favorite missives: How to make ads that suck! In our ongoing battle to prevent the Patient from prospering, we can prevail upon him to produce the sort of advertising that will make him invisible. Most side-slappingly hilarious of all? We can make him think his atrocious ads are something special (and when they produce the expected meager results, we will convince him that advertising doesn’t work.)
So, my minion of mayhem, here is a primer on how to make ads that suck:
- Make sure you stay “safe.” The steadiest road to “suckitude” is to never pass the competition by deviating from the well-worn rut. It feels safe to have your ads look and feel like everyone else’s. I mean, shouldn’t a real estate ad look like a real estate ad? The truth we must never let the Patient discover is that safe ads are the most dangerous kind to his ROI. Safe ads are invisible and do not distinguish one from the competition. At some point, a car insurance company made the move into the fast lane with ads featuring humorous characters, and the result was that Geico became a household name. The other insurance companies are still trying to catch up, but will forever be followers now that Geico has blazed a new trail. Old Spice put the pedal to the metal with a series of ridiculously hyperbolic ads that effectively tripled their sales in short order, and moved them from a musty, old-guy’s product to the most happening name in their market.
- You’re paying for the ad space, so pack in as much as possible. Print ads that look like a mini brochure, video and radio ads that present a yard sale of features. Have the Patient pack it in like a big city bus ride to Sucksville. Nothing makes people flip the page, scroll up the thumb, hit the mute more than information overload. In reality, the brilliance is most often in brevity, and the greatest impact comes from simplicity. One core message conveyed through humor, shocking fact, tear-jerking seriousness or other emotionally-impacting techniques will get attention—and the purpose of ads is to grab attention, not to inform!
- Try it for a little while, then pull it if it’s not performing. Don’t allow the Patient to define what “performance” means. Convince him that if people aren’t lined up at the door after running an ad for a week, then it must not be working. Get him thinking that the only thing that matters is short-term revenue resulting directly from the ad. If he should have the confidence to be patient as a brilliant ad campaign unfolds, then we risk him getting long-term results most companies only dream of. Most radically successful ad campaigns must be run and repeated long enough to catch fire and capture the imagination. They must have time to break through filters (which often takes repetition) and then generate buzz by early adopters. People cannot help but become fans of great ads, and once they start talking about their favorites, the flood gates open.
- Talk about yourself. Too many small businesses owners want to see themselves on the camera—a fact we love! Talking about yourself and/or all the wonderful services you offer is like, as Roy H. Williams puts it, like making people watch home movies of your most recent vacation. In today’s sophisticated digital-media environment, nobody cares about you; they want to see themselves in your ads. It’s a cold, hard truth we can portray to the Patient as selfish and narcissistic on the part of his audience, and blind him to the fact that, by putting himself first, he’s playing the self-centered card perfectly. We know it’s only after you put your audience first that they will turn their attention to you…but let’s not let that get out, shall we?
There are many other ways to make ads that suck, but this is enough for now. You’re a mere apprentice and I know your capacity for such things is limited. Besides, I’m waiting to see how you handle convincing the Patient to walk into these four traps first.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
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 | Oct 31, 2017 | 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!
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” David Ogilvy, The “Father of Advertising”
There’s magic in marketing. You can turn strangers into sales, or you can make them disappear. You will do one of these, and it’s obvious which trick you’d like to perform on a regular basis.
If you want to convert crowds into customers, then pay attention to one of the greatest techniques of magic there is. To paraphrase Earnest Hemmingway, “All you have to do is sit down at a [keyboard] and open a vein.” It doesn’t matter what medium you’re working in—print, TV, social media, AdWords, YouTube videos—the Headline is paramount. Start with a brilliant headline, and—presto!—your ad, Web copy, video or whatever is all but done.
Let’s let the headlines do the talking and share a few of the best, shall we?
Apple
Absolute power corrupts.
Enjoy.
Chevrolet Corvette
They don’t write songs about Volvos.
Diesel
Smart has the plans, stupid has the stories.
Durex
To all those who use our competitors’ products:
Happy Father’s Day.
The Health Education Council
No.
Still the most effective form of birth control.
Guinness Beer
Gu_ _ _ess who?
Harley Davidson
Somewhere on an airplane a man is trying to rip open a small bag of peanuts.
Horst Salons
Where the women you hate have their hair done.
Jack Daniel’s
Hand crafted actually has more to do with the heart.
Mercedes Benz
Men talk about women, sports and cars.
Women talk about men inside sports cars.
Ricola Cough Drops
“You (cough) look good’
Make sure good news sounds like good news.
Porsche
What a dog feels when the leash breaks.
The Lung Association
For more information on lung cancer, keep smoking
Swiss Life
She’s my
everything
went wrong.
(For all life’s twists and turns, flexible financial plans).
Wonderbra
You have 918 915 friend requests.
Great headlines like these can do some very heavy lifting. Some of the best can stand alone on a blank background or with a complementary image. Really, simple ads with a strong, engaging message are almost always more effective than informational or promotional ads.
Next time you’re thinking of launching an ad or ad campaign, before you do anything else, spend a day or two (at least) coming up with a list of clever headlines. Then set it all aside and carry a notebook and pen around with you so that you can write down the actually brilliant ideas that will come bubbling up from the conscious mind. You’ll probably find that the first list you generated wasn’t nearly as good as you thought—certainly nothing like “that” idea that wakes you up in the middle of the night, you know..it will be the same one that keeps your audience from falling asleep!
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 | Sep 13, 2017 | B2B Sales, Brand Marketing, Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Outsourced Inside 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!
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 SIX:
To: Wormwood
From: Screwtape
Subject: Why We Love “Good Enough”
My dear Wormwood,
Our mission to destroy the success of the aspiring businessperson continues, as do your lessons on the most effective tactics. I call this next one the “Good Enough Deception.”
You see, my dear Wormwood, to many, marketing is akin to going to the dentist—painful but necessary. Many a CEO winces at the marketing budget line item because they see marketing as a “soft” area of operations. Creativity, to them is “fluff”; operations and finances are the important things. So, when it comes to getting their marketing done, they are only interested in good enough to get by. They don’t get it, and that give our cause a real boost!
The following are some ways we can use the Good Enough Deception to hasten your Patient’s downfall:
- Cut off creativity: In today’s “attention economy,” being different and radically creative to stand apart from all the other competitive voices is crucial. But convince your patient that creative strategy is a waste of time. Have him cut short the creative process and stifle creativity with the CEO’s get-to-the point view of life. (Skip the gift wrapping, the card and flowers. How romantic.)
- Give impossible deadlines: Have the Patient want it, and want it now. That will ensure that the creative “right brain”—from whence comes the level of creativity that catapults brands and sells out products—has no chance to develop true brilliance. The left brain sucks at creativity, and unrealistic deadlines put it in the driver’s seat to Mediocrity City.
- Hire Low: Advertising legend David Ogilvy gave this advice: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” Tempt your Patient into the disastrous decision to hire based on cost, rather than quality. Why get a senior marketing professional, when you can hand the work off to an amateur, a family member, or even a student.
- Micromanage: Ogilvy also said to, “Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.” True creatives worth their salt do best with a long leash, so convince your patient to control the process. It will feel like the safe thing to do, but of course it’s the worst way to manage.
I could go on, and perhaps we will discuss more tactics in the future. But we can sum up the beauty of the Good Enough Deception with one simple sentence: “We got our marketing done.”
You and I know, Wormwood, that marketing is never “done,” but let’s just keep that our little secret, shall we?
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
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
