The Edge Marketing

One of the most rewarding, inexpensive, under-used, and effective methods of marketing is to tie in your marketing efforts with the efforts of others.

The cost of acquiring a new client or customer is enormous. The average business will spend thousands of dollars in marketing, sales, and advertising to build goodwill and develop loyal clients or customers. Most businesses spend their marketing dollars to reach a large audience, and yet they're only going to get a small fraction of this audience.

By tying in with other businesses you can eliminate a lot of expense, time, and inefficiency in prospecting, and spend the majority of your valuable time and money on people who are ready to buy.

You can do this by developing a tie-in relationship with another business that has already spent the time, effort, and marketing to attract the same customers who you would like to have.

This type of relationship is beneficial for both your business and the business you are tying in with. It works like this, company A either controls, owns, or has developed client lists that company B wants to utilize to buy its products or services.

To create a tie-in relationship with another indvidual or company you need to identify all similar businesses, professionals, organizations, and even competitors who are in a position to control (or enjoy a favorable relationship with) viable prospects for your product or service.

Naturally this works best if both your businesses are in some way complimentary. But this is not necessary. The most important thing is for each of you to help cut marketing costs for the other while at the same time increasing your marketing.

The best way to do this is to approach each targeted business to allow you to act as the beneficiary and solicit the host's customers in return for a share of the resulting profits. Once this is done, there are three things you should do to maximize the profit for you and the host:

* Get the owner of the host company to write a letter of endrosement recommending your business and specific product or service to their customers. In return, the host receives a generous share of the profits from the deal.

* Get the host company to continually promote all your products or services to their customers even after the host has sold all the products or services they can.

* Get the host company to let you offer their products or services to your customers on a profit-sharing basis.

You will discover a whole world of tie-in possibilities by simply walking the commercial business streets in your community. You'll find many other tie-in possibilities by looking on the internet, in the Yellow Pages, the local newspapers, or by watching television.

As you might expect, the deeper the tie-ins, the greater the greater chance there is for profit. Having someone put a pile of your brochures on their counter or putting an affiliate banner on their Web site is one thing. But having them actually recommend your business is much stronger.

Every one ends up gaining in a tie-in relationship: the customer learns of a new place to buy whatever you sell, you gain, and the host business gains. Most importantly is that all this gain takes place at a much reduced marketing cost for both businesses.

All contents Copyright(c)2005 Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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