How to make your business more interesting

Here's some good news for you this week.

The majority of small business owners are generally inept when it comes to marketing and promoting themselves.

So why exactly is that good news, you might ask?

Because despite the fact that most small business owners are senseless at selling, crap at copywriting and goofs at guerrilla marketing, this doesn't mean that you have to be as well.

If you can learn a few simple but effective and highly practical marketing techniques and tactics that will work no matter what small business you're in, you could be in with a great chance to clean up in your sector.

In fact the opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurial upstarts like you is to home in on, and take advantage of, the biggest and most common area of weakness in your competitors' attempts at marketing themselves.

Which is the fact that their marketing messages and sales copy just bore their customers to tears.

Most small firms' marketing messages send their customers to sleep instead of stirring any interest or desire to find out more about their products and services.

So how can you turn this into an opportunity, then? Let's start by asking you a simple question.

Do you think your business, and your products and services, are interesting to your customers and prospects?

Of course you do.

But are you letting them know how interesting your products and services are?

Probably not, if most of you are being completely honest.

The secret to gaining a marketing edge over your competitors is to produce marketing messages and sales copy that articulate your message in an interesting, educational, informative, useful, newsworthy and, above all, factual way.

Don't hang back with this task either, because the devil, as always, is in the detail. The old advertising adage still applies today - the more you tell, the more you sell.

If you went to a dating agency to find yourself a new partner (or just a date), do you think you'd have any success at pulling by only letting people know your name, your age, and that you're of "average build".

Or would you increase your chances if you could tell them absolutely everything about why someone should want a date with a humorous, well-travelled, ambitious, red wine-drinking, sweet-toothed, hillwalking, trombone-playing, opera-hating, specialist trampoline-testing, telly addict and raconteur like you?

Pretty simple, isn't it?

And the same applies to promoting your business. Here are a few tips to help you approach this in a different way to how you're probably doing it now.

• Don't be boring. Educate your prospects about the various ways they will gain an advantage from doing business with you.
• Don't use hyped-up sales blather. Just stick to the facts, the benefits and the value they will get from you.
• Don't ramble - impress with every sentence.
• Make it emotional. Think like you're at that dating agency.
• Make sure they can see or hear your message. Are you driving it home?
• Tell them every single reason why they should be using your service.

Give this a try by looking at it in the light of the marketing messages you have previously written and have been attempting to put across up until now.

Does your message pull and will it help you to score? Or is it just a dull, lame and boring turnoff?

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