Last night’s episode of The Apprentice taught viewers yet another lesson on marketing. Although not a new lesson, this one was powerful.

During the early phases of the task, Summer was in charge of contacting several restaurants to offer them Sam’s Club Memberships. She called a whopping one restaurant, leaving her team with little to work with. Although the team could have made many improvements in their performance, their lack of exposure had a serious impact on the overall outcome.

The lesson learned here is:
Your consumer has to know you are there in order to buy from you.

So no matter what industry your company is in, the bottom line is that you need exposure. You consumers can only buy from you if they know you exist and the only way for that to happen is if you are actively marketing your business.

If you want your business to be successful you have to stop giving your customers what they want and start giving them what they need. We have been conditioned to believe that the customer is always right and while there is a certain amount of truth in that statement, there is also a certain amount of error in it.

Let’s say that you own a lawn equipment store and a customer wants to buy a 21-inch, push lawn mower to maintain his 9 acre tract of land. You could easily sell him the mower he wants and be done with it. After all, he is the customer. Unfortunately, doing so would not only be a disservice to him, but would also negatively affect your business when he tells people about the salesman that sold him a 21-inch mower to maintain his 9 acres ? regardless of the fact that it was his choice to do so.

As business owners, consultants and advisors, it is our job to ensure that our customers are getting what they need, not just what they want. It may be more difficult at first, but in the long run, your customers will remember that you chose a more difficult path to help them rather than the path of least resistance to help yourself.

It probably seems really confusing. When you first started your business, you did a little marketing and got some new business from it. Then you increased your marketing which in turn, increased your sales. But lately, even though you have been spending more than ever on your marketing, your sales seem to be dipping lower and lower. How could that possibly happen?

The answer is pretty simple. People have become busier than ever before so they aren’t spending as much time in front of a TV, and when they are, they’ve eliminated the commercials with TiVo. The internet has enabled them to get their news without picking up a newspaper and file sharing (despite being illegal) allows them to hear the songs they want to without hearing any commercials. The combination of a busier lifestyle and advances in technology have made it more difficult to reach consumers, and when you are able to reach them, you have to compete with hundreds of other companies that are bombarding the same consumer wit their message.

So what is the solution? Be where you competitors aren’t. If your marketing isn’t as effective as you’d like it to be then you need to figure out how you can reach your consumer in ways that other companies are not or can not. As a financial planner, you could offer free monthly seminars for clients and prospects. If you are a physical trainer, you could broadcast a weekly Podcast offering diet and exercise tips. The owner of a auto shop might send out a seasonal newsletter that gives consumers tips for maintaining their vehicles. Your options are only limited by your imagination.

If you’ve ever had any full color marketing materials printed then you probably know that the price for a particular job can vary quite a bit from one printing company to another. As the end user who just handles the finished product, this may not make much sense and as a result, it?s common for clients to see a price for a large quantity print job and expect the same cost per piece when ordering a few hundred pieces. Understanding what factors can affect the price of full color printing will help you to plan your marketing more effectively while making it easier to deal with your marketing firm, printer or graphic designer.

• A large portion of the price of full color printing is in the set up, which requires a considerable amount of work even with today’s technology. Before a print job can even be started, all of the files need to be checked to ensure that they are all in the proper format and color mode and that all of the necessary fonts are available. Then the plates that transfer the ink to the paper must be created, and four-color printing requires four different plates (one each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black). The next step is to put these plates on the press and run paper through it until each of the plates have achieved the proper ink coverage, at which point the press operator will adjust the alignment of each plate. It’s only after all of these steps have been completed that your print job can begin. Because the set up is the largest factor in the price of a print job, you will often see negligible price differences between various quantities.
• The way a print job is set up can make a tremendous difference in price as well. For example, rather than running an individual print job on an 11″ x 17″ sheet of paper, a printer may run several jobs on a much larger sheet of paper to save on the set up costs, and then cut each individual job from that large sheet. This is called “gang running” a print job and can help to save a lot of money, but usually requires more time because the sheet must be full before printing and must be cut after printing.
• The type of full color printing will also impact the price. While you can have your print job printed digitally in small quantities, your cost per unit will be much higher than the more cost effective offset printing. This is because rather than using ink and plates to put an image on paper, digital printing uses toner which is considerably more expensive.

There are some ways to get the best of both worlds however. For example, if you have a brochure that contains frequently changing information, you could have shells printed which would contain only the information that will remain the same, and then digitally print the information that changes through a local quick printer such as Kinkos or Sir Speedy, or even print them on your own laser printer if the document will fit.

All business owners would love to have a flood of new business coming through their doors but there is one simple thing that you need to make sure we can do before you spend any money on marketing to tell your clients or customers they should do business with you.

Make sure you can follow through on your word.

Sure, it’s great to have a deluge of new business but what good is it when many of them leave unhappy? When that happens, it’s not the end of the story because most of them will tell friends and family about their dissatisfaction. The long term damage can be substantial and can often leave you in a weaker position down the road than if you had not done any marketing at all.

Make the most of your marketing budget by ensuring that the new business you generate becomes repeat business instead of detracting from future business.

You’ve finally got your web site up and running and you’ve been handing out business cards to anyone who will listen to you. Now you’re ready to move up to the next level and one of the most cost effective ways to do that is with postcards. Unlike other printed media like a brochure or sales letter, postcards let you put your message right in front of your prospect with nothing to open or read through. Even though you are starting off with a natural advantage, you can get even more out of your next campaign by ensuring that you use a clear and powerful call to action. Instead of trying to tell your prospects everything about your company, focus on one message that they will remember. You will see far more results that way.

The term “marketing company” can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To further complicate things, after agreeing on what the term means you still have to find the right marketing company to suit your needs. Some specialize in helping small businesses while others will only work with huge multi-million dollar corporations. Some may focus on particular industries and others may focus on a single aspect of marketing such as SEO or web site design. In any case, there are some things that are common to pretty much every marketing company.

• Expertise - A marketing company knows how to help you get the most from your marketing budget. By hiring them for their services you can generate more revenue because you won’t have to learn what works and what doesn’t. It may seem attractive to have your nephew design your web site because he will do it for $500 but unfortunately, doing so probably won’t present a professional image of your company nor will it increase your sales.
• Contacts - They can help you to save a lot of time and money on your marketing because they already know where to go or who to call to make things happen. If you need your company vehicles wrapped to promote your business, they can tell you who is the most reliable and cost effective, or in some cases, handle it for you.
• Manpower - One of the benefits that a marketing company can provide is that they can usually create more powerful marketing materials in a shorter time frame. This allows you to leverage your time more effectively and create a more successful business.
• Technology - When you handle your own marketing you usually have to get by with what you have. Marketing companies are able to be far more productive and flexible, in part, because they have access to technical resources that most people don’t have.

These are just a few of the benefits that you can expect to receive from a professional marketing company. Additionally, there are probably hundreds of benefits specific to a particular company depending on their specialty. The bottom line is that you are putting someone with the proper expertise in charge of generating new business for your company so that you can focus on your area of expertise, and ultimately, become more successful and more profitable.

The blogosphere has continued to grow at an unbelievable rate, doubling in size every 5.5 months according to Technorati’s most recent ” State of the Blogosphere ” report by David Sifry. At this rate, a new blog is created every second. Additionally, 2.7 million bloggers update their existing blogs at least weekly.

Viral marketing is a term that describes a form of marketing that grows exponentially, much like a virus. Examples of this can be seen in Hotmail? and Napster? who’s early (and very passionate) users told people about the service, who in turn told more people about the service. This continued, resulting in explosive growth for both of these companies.

For a marketing technique to grow with viral characteristics it has to be something that people would be willing, or more importantly, passionate about telling other people about. It can take the form of humor, as seen in the rapid exposure created by JibJab’s animated movies , controversy as seen in the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, or even by providing a free service as seen in Google’s Blogger , a free blog hosting service.