When you think of marketing, what comes to mind?  Chances are the first thing that popped into your head was advertising:  print ads in magazines or newspapers…tv commercials…pop-up ads on the Google search engine.

They may be entertaining, they may be informative, or they may be just plain annoying…but there is no denying, advertising plays an important part in getting products or services in front of their target audiences.

However, a good marketing campaign goes way beyond advertising. What exactly is marketing?

As defined in the Startup Guide to Guerrilla Marketing:

Marketing is everything you do to promote your business, from the moment you conceive of it, to the point at which customers buy your product or service and begin to patronize your business on a regular basis.  The key words to remember are “everything” and “regular basis.”  Marketing is all contact that you or anyone within your organization has with anyone outside of your organization.

Some of the key elements of a traditional marketing campaign include branding, advertising, and public relations…and they are all important.

But there are many other marketing strategies that can make the goal of reaching your target audience easier and less expensive.  In fact, the advent of the world wide web actually makes it possible for the “little guy” to compete with huge corporations in the global marketplace.

Today we are going to look at some of these alternative marketing models and what they have to offer to the small entrepreneurial business.

Guerrilla Marketing

What is guerrilla marketing?  The Startup Guide to Guerrilla Marketing sums it up this way:

Guerilla marketing means going after conventional goals using unconventional means.  It means that in marketing, your main investments should be time, energy, imagination, and information — not money.  If you want to invest money, that’s cool, but you don’t really have to if you don’t want to.

Sounds good, right?  But how do you accomplish that?

In place of money, guerrilla marketers invest time, energy, imagination and information in their marketing.  They take advantage of easy ways to grow profits, rather than simply trying to increase sales.  For example, a great guerrilla tactic is to increase the size of each transaction by offering “extras” like service contracts, extra technology, deluxe versions and companion items on sale.

Guerrilla marketers also understand the importance of growing geometrically, in three directions at once.  In addition to trying to find more customers, they focus on more profitable transactions, more regular transactions, and referral transactions from their existing clientele.  One of their key tools is follow-up…something larger businesses tend to neglect.   There are lots of ways to stay in touch with your customers: automated e-mails, postcards, and phone calls, to name just a few.   And with the new technology, most of this can be put on auto-pilot.

Guerrilla marketers understand that their long-term profits will come from relationships rather than one-time sales.  They turn the usual sales monologue into a dialogue by sending potential customers free e-books, newsletters or articles, asking them to respond to surveys, keeping in touch on Facebook and other social networking sites, or the latest hot fad, tweeting on Twitter.

Fusion marketing (aka cross-promotion) is another great guerrilla marketing strategy.  This simply means teaming up with a business that sells complementary (or non-competitive) products or services.  For example, a retail store could team up with a local restaurant to hand out coupons to one another’s services.  Or a massage therapist could partner with a company that sells nutritional products.  The possibilities are limited only by your time and imagination.

Perhaps the most important aspect of guerrilla marketing is its emphasis on combinations.  Rather than just advertising, setting up a website, or running a PR campaign, guerrilla marketers come up with a plan that capitalizes on employing all three strategies in tandem.

There is so much more I could say about guerrilla marketing, but we don’t have room in this short post.  If you really want the details, I highly recommend that you buy Startup Guide to Guerrilla Marketing: A Simple Battle Plan for First-Time Marketers by Jay and Jeannie Levinson.  They cover everything from soup to nuts, including the creation of a seven-sentence guerrilla marketing plan that will keep you focused on your goals.

Internet Marketing

Chances are, you’ve all heard of somebody who has made millions of dollars working at home all day doing internet marketing.

The world wide web has opened up the possibility for one person working from a tiny home office to generate massive income.  And it can work for practically any kind of business, from the neighborhood dentist to the virtual seller of  “information products.”  Because of its speed and efficiency, the internet has become the primary method for doing research, making purchasing decisions, and even entertainment.  It has practically replaced the Yellow Pages and many other forms of print advertising.

Internet marketers all tend to use the same tools.  So why are some so successful while others struggle for years without generating any real income?    The secret is in the system and sequencing of steps required to build the right kind of web presence, get traffic to it, and convert that traffic to actual sales.

This is such a complex subject that you could devote an entire website to it.  That is why I am introducing you to my mentor, Tracy Repchuk, the Millionaire Marketing Maven.

Tracy didn’t invent internet marketing. What she did was to study the best-known internet marketing gurus and figure out the path they followed from the first idea to the final sale.

Then she packaged it all together into her fabulous book, 31 Days to Millionaire Marketing Miracles.

If you’re serious about internet marketing, I strongly encourage you to buy Tracy’s book. Most of the ideas that I am sharing here came from her.

Here is just a brief list of the topics Tracy covers in her book:

• How to choose a profitable niche
• The four websites every business should have
• Powerful branding strategies
• How to build a list
• Strategies for generating free traffic to your website or blog
• Staying in touch with autoresponders
• Creating a product to market
• How to benefit from affiliate programs and joint ventures
• Setting up a marketing funnel

Obviously, we can’t cover all of that in one blog post.  That’s why I recommend that you buy the book.

If you just want to dip your toes into the water, you could start with a free ebook, Creating Wealth, 7 Steps to an Online Income.  It will give you lots of creative ideas about how to make money online.

Attraction Marketing or Magnetic Sponsoring

One special form of internet marketing is called “attraction marketing” or “magnetic sponsorship.”  Initially created to help people in network marketing businesses attract “leads” or “prospects,” attraction marketing actually has something to offer for most any kind of business.

The basic theory of attraction marketing is that “teaching sells.”  The best way to attract prospective customers, clients or prospects to your business is by teaching them how to do something.  That is not so different from what good guerrilla marketers already know.  But an entire industry has been build around the concept of attraction marketing.

The two most renowned gurus of attraction marketing are Ann Sieg, author of the Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto, and Mike Dillard, author of Magnetic Sponsoring.  Both have created entire systems around their books, and I personally work with both systems in my businesses.  I highly recommend that you download their free reports by clicking the links, and see which one resonates with your business and your style.

Together with Mike Klingler, Ann Sieg has created a free online course called Renegade University.  It contains videos that show you step-by-step how to get started with attraction marketing.  You watch the video, and in another browser window, follow the instructions to complete the task at hand.  If you like this approach, you can graduate to their paid membership site, Renegade Professional.  This is the most complete library of internet marketing tools I have ever seen, and they are adding more every day.  From Renegade Professional, I learned how to create my first blog, write an ezine article, submit a “lens” to Squidoo, and much more.  This resource is geared toward all kinds of businesses, not jut network marketers.

Mike Dillard’s Magnetic Sponsoring system is geared specifically to network marketers.  His explanation of how “attraction” works is based on notions of leadership:

1. People have a subconscious attraction to others who convey leadership qualities and have a high level of personal value
2.  If you want to make it big in networking, (or anything in life), you must learn to convey those qualities, and eventually become a leader with value to offer others.

If  you sign up with Magnetic Sponsoring, you will be a part of his free magnetic sponsoring lead generation and affiliate system.  This could give you access to a stream of potential prospects who are looking for a great network marketing opportunity.  Just one word of advice, this is a highly competitive field, so be sure that you have something of value to offer to your fellow network marketers. If you do, this could be just the right system to propel you to success.

Soft Sell Marketing

Do you ever have a squeamish feeling when you read marketing materials that seem to be screaming at you to “BUY NOW“…”LIMITED QUANTITIES“…”KILLER LEADS“…messages designed to compel you to act quickly or be left behind.

Do you ever feel guilty when you try to promote your product or service…even if you know it would be good for the person you are talking to?

Do you think that “selling” is a dirty word, synonymous with sleazy used car salesmen or door-to-door magazine peddlers?

If so, soft sell marketing is for you.  Created by a husband and wife therapist team, Judith Sherven and Jim Sniechowski, soft sell marketing is aimed at service businesses and professionals who are more focused on serving people than on making money.

In their book, The Heart of Marketing: Love Your Customers and They Will Love You Back, Judith and Jim emphasize the value of service, heart-to-heart connections and the spiritual nature of serving others.  At the same time, they support the idea that you are in business to be commercially successful.  In their words:

We present the principle that Selling is Spiritual Service with the intent to heal the split that soft sell marketers feel between their desire to be of service and their need to be paid, and paid well for what they do.  Care-givers, whose lives are grounded in heart-to-heart connection, have historically been viewed as those who should work without ambition for money, because it was thought that money would corrupt the value of tending to those in need.

We repudiate that notion and point to the validity and social value inherent in soft sell marketers’ ambitions to generate money as it ranks second but equal to their concern for the well-being of their customers and clients.

So what is the difference between soft-sell and hard-sell marketing? One way to think of it is the difference between an invitation and a command.

Both kinds of marketing are trying to lead the potential customer to buy.  After all, that is the purpose of marketing.

But in soft-sell marketing, you are making a genuine connection with the reader.  As you establish a relationship, you guide the reader through the benefits you have to offer.    Then you trust them to decide for themselves whether or not your product is the answer they have been looking for.

Another variation of soft-sell marketing is conscious marketing. This is selling done with the conscious intention of providing authentic service or products, only to people who will really benefit from them, and only when the time is right for them.

If this approach resonates with you, I highly recommend that you read The Heart of  Marketing to give you some concrete suggestions about how to write “soft-sell” copy.