Deciphering Marketing Lingo: Whats the Difference between a USP, Single Message and a Tagline?

Maybe you’ve heard these different marketing terms, maybe you haven’t. Either way, let me help to clarify the difference between them, because you should have all three if you want to market successfully. And knowing what they are may be your first step to accomplishing all three for your business.

Unique Selling Proposition

A unique selling proposition, sometimes referred to as a USP, is the one thing that is unique and valuable about your business, product or service? And it must be unique and valuable to your prospects or ideal clients, not just to you.

Secret of Strategy - Part 1

A step-by-step guide to creating a growth strategy based on your current situation and future possibilities.

I’ll bet you think you already have a strategy.

And well you may, but strategy as a concept is just like love: much used and little understood. Many businesses (and that includes small entrepreneurs, large corporations, non-profits, community organizations, governments, NGOs?the works) neither know what strategy really is, nor how to get one.

Do Not Consider Running the Same Yellow Page Ad until You Read This

Grant Businesses have a love-hate relationship with the Yellow Page directory On the one hand, business owners know they need to be there - even though everyone they compete against is there, too. They rightly fear their ad won’t get noticed. That’s why questions like, “How big should it be?” become important (along with up-grades that jack up an ad’s cost).

Send Postcards To Save Money and Cut Through E-mail Clutter

Use your computer to send personalized color postcards in quantities of 1 to 1,000.

Print on demand postcards are here. You can quickly, easily, and economically use your computer to prepare and address color postcards that will arrive in your prospect’s morning mail!

Postal mail is growing in importance as the volume of e-mail steadily increases.

Testing Your Way To Prosperity

I have always enjoyed talking to a Realtor friend of mine about his Father-in-laws business. His business is Gold Mining and he has been involved in it full time for nearly his whole life. My friend has a good relationship with his Father-in-law and often spends time helping him in this business and has learned a lot about prospecting and mining and the other facets of this extremely risky industry.

Defining Moment

Do you know your audiences? I mean really know them. I’ve just been working on a project for a client to help him position his financial planning business and to determine who his key audiences are.

Common traits and common media habits are a couple of the characteristics we uncovered.

Postcard Marketing Done Right

Say it with a post card. A well designed, colorful, high impact postcard in the mail box of your prospect is your best ticket to a new customer. For your existing customer, a marketing campaign which includes frequent post cards is the perfect start to new sales - this is one of the key small business marketing strategies.

Simplicity In Marketing

In a world that is spinning out of control; with consumers being bombarded with hundreds of advertising messages per day in a variety of mediums, it is imperative to develop an understanding of the consumer’s thinking to develop an edge in advertising.

Consumer’s get confused with excessive stimulus. Consumer’s also become very selective in their perceptive processes given the amount of advertising to which they are exposed.

Your Marketing Message

Your message is first among your weapons in the battle of perceptions.

Your message allows you to accomplish many things. Your message can educate the masses, convert the non-believers or separate the wheat from the chaff. But not all three.

Your first clue to your message comes from where in the Awareness Scale? your target sits.

Beyond Fear And Greed: Emotions That Sell

Fear and Greed. The stock-in-trade of sales. Appeal to them, and your success is assured. But isn’t there more to life than those two emotions?

Yes, there is. And your marketing would do well to expand its emotional horizons! Let’s take a look at a few of the other response-generating feelings:

Curiosity: "What never? ever to eat on an airplane!" That headline is from the super-successful sales letter for Bottom Line newsletter subscriptions.