Free works in headlines, it works in copy, it works in testimonials, and it works in offers and calls to action.

Sometimes it’s the most basic of changes that produce the most astonishing results. Like when I talked a daily-fee golf course into advertising FREE golf for a month during their slow, early-spring season. They built a database of 9,857 prospects in

30 days! Then, armed with all those golfers’ emails, they went on to dominate their market!

FREE removes risks and adds value while increasing readership and response. What can you do with this most magical of words to increase your results?

Use “FREE” with a liberal sprinkling of the word “YOU” whenever you can in print ads. Beware: This doesn’t work in emails as FREE often triggers the spam filter. 

This form of marketing is ideal for high-priced products or services with a long decision time. It’s ideal for professional ser- vices, real estate, schools, memberships, and high-end products of all kinds.

For example, say someone inquires about your golf real estate development in Florida.

Let’s look at what happens next.

1. Email goes out thanking the prospects for filling in the form and promising to send them more info in the mail (which you send via snail mail).
2. Email goes out with the highlights of the community and tells the prospect that there is so much to tell that you will be in touch with more info shortly.
3. Now you start to send emails about just one aspect of the community at a time. In this one you talk about the quality of the golf course.
4. In this one, you highlight fishing, bird watching, and nature.
5. In this one, talk about the nearby beaches and boating opportunities.
6. In this one, talk up the pool, spa, and health and fit- ness facilities in the development.
7. In this one, tell your prospects how friendly the neighbors will be. Include lots of testimonials from existing residents!
8. In this one, wax poetic about the beautiful Florida weather especially in the winter!
9. In this one, describe the social aspects of the golf, tennis, and community clubhouse.
10. In this one, highlight the new models you have com- ing online or the opportunities in re-sales.
11. In this one, showcase the shopping, concerts, and local culture.
12. In this one, tell them you are astonished you have not had the opportunity to meet them personally yet and ask if they are still interested? If they are, start a new campaign.

Emails are set to go weekly for the first few weeks, then change to monthly after the fourth or fifth. They can, of course, be personalized using our Pied Piper technology. If the prospect does not fish, then you skip that email and send, instead, one about the local art scene because that’s what they said they enjoyed in the survey.

Each email ends with a strong call to ACTION to get the prospect to actually visit the development! The difference in response between following up in this manner or following up in the traditional manner with a couple of letters and the odd phone call is staggering!

How Much Is Too Much Follow-Up?

Most people are very worried about following up in this fashion and they always ask how much is too much? There is no perfect answer to this question, but I’ll say this: If someone is truly interested in your product or service, they will more than likely be glad you stayed in constant touch. If they are not, then they will click unsubscribe or let you know they are no longer interested!

 You will lose far more money by NOT following up repeat- edly than you ever will by overkill!

To see examples of real e-bolt campaigns for a variety of products and services read www.CunninglyCleverMarketingBook.com

 Make your follow up to all leads automatic, personalized, and relentless! 

Legendary Marketing is a Tampa / Orlando based, full service ad agency that specializes in high-quality lead generation.

Educate Your Customers. Your content must be of value and timely to your customers. if you are a florist, tell your readers what flowers they should be planting at this time of year. if you are a chef, tell your readers how to cook great food, pair wines, or invest in the right vintages. The more valuable your content, the more people will read it and pass it along to others, thus growing your list and your following.

Engage Your Customers. be controversial, ask for opinions, tips, stories, pictures, feedback, and participation. let your followers enter to win free prizes, discounts, and insider specials reserved only for them.

Entertain Your Customers. You MUST entertain your readers

If your communications do each of these three e’s, your readers will not mind that you have inserted a promotion or ad within the copy, just as they see in magazines. On the other hand, if all you do is bombard them with discount offers week after week without providing any of the above value, your lists and readership will shrink rapidly.

These three concepts are the mantras for social media. The basic idea is that you should communicate with customers and form a relationship with prospects and customers before trying to sell anything.

Educate, engage, and entertain your readers with your social media. Then, and only then, try to sell them something. 

Need to know more about social media?
http://www.legendarygolfmarketing.com/public/Social_Media_Guide_Page.cfm

Legendary Marketing is a Tampa/Orlando full service ad agency  specializing in results driven social media, online and print marketing campaigns!

The site was getting huge traffic — 30,000 visitors a month — not because we were doing anything to promote it but because there really weren’t that many sites to visit!

I took NO advantage whatsoever of this traffic. I didn’t capture visitors’ names, I had no booking engine, and I didn’t have a shopping cart. Nor did I change the content to get people to come back. Therefore I provided one-time information to hundreds of thousands of people without making a dime in actual cash or finding out who these people really were!

Sadly, even today, this is how the majority of websites still operate because business owners, CEOs, and even marketing managers don’t understand what the true purpose of their web- sites should be!

Your website should be the absolute foundation of all your marketing activities, the command-and-control center of every- thing you do in the name of marketing. Every campaign whether online or offline should be built around your website and be aimed at driving prospects and customers to your website to capture their interest in a product or service you offer and report in detail on how they got there!

Think about your website:

• It is the only employee you have who never calls in sick. It books business, sells products, and answers questions 24 hours a day.
• It’s the only marketing you have that can send instant and personalized responses to prospective customers at 3 am on a Sunday morning by using pre-programmed autoresponders and follow-up letters.
• It’s the only marketing you have that can collect detailed information on prospects while you sleep by using dynamic request forms.
• It’s the only marketing you can do that incrementally lowers your future marketing costs with almost every visit to your website.

There is no more important marketing tool at your business than your website. Yet most businesses, even large ones, are content to trade style for substance rather than make the com- mitment to building worldclass websites with back-end tools that increase business faster than the national debt.

Even where businesses have made substantial investments with ad agencies or web design companies, they almost always miss the mark. While these vendors understand the technology and design aspects, they DO NOT understand the marketing aspects of a truly great website.

Anyone over 12 years old can design a good-looking website in about 4 hours! And don’t let anyone fool you, any decent web team can duplicate the look and feel of any website in the world you happen to like, in about 8 hours.

Design is the easy part of the web business, the part anyone can do! (However, a great many designs are counterproductive to using your site to get response.) It’s the capability to collect data on the front end and the functionality to respond and report on the back end that REALLY count!

Your website cannot just be pretty, it has to be a marketing machine with a sophisticated back end to be an effective tool; 98% are not!

Make your website the foundation of your entire marketing plan. Everything from capturing leads to reporting on ads should revolve around your website! 

Check to see how effective your website is with this special report http://www.facebook.com/LegendaryMarketing/app_370678866286188

You must have a realistic budget to get serious marketing results.

This means…

• You cannot set a marketing budget based on a percent- age of your gross or net.
• You cannot set a marketing budget based on what your competition does or “industry averages.”
• Nor can you all do what you can afford or, as many businesses do, simply pull a number out of your head.

Based on thousands of conversations, I think the majority of business owners must throw darts to determine their budgets!

The only way you can set the right marketing budget is to reverse engineer exactly what you want to happen.

The step-by-step process outlined here will allow you to look at budgeting and meeting budgeting goals in a powerful new way a way that directly connects everything you do in the name of marketing to a specific and tangible result.

A great many business owners must really like fantasy movies; they want to sell 50 real-estate lots with a $20,000 budget! Or they want a 20% increase in product sales with a budget that’s based on 5% of last year’s miserable gross!

You cannot increase business by spending less on marketing, although you don’t always have to spend more to get the results you want. Often it’s just a case of spending where the response is greatest and NOT spending where there is no direct or tangible return.

If you want to sell 100 lots, 100 products, or 100 hours of your service you cannot do it by arbitrarily picking a number for your marketing budget. You have to ask: How many leads must you generate to sell 100 lots?

To answer that question, you need to know what percentage of leads your salespeople close.

If you expect the salesperson to sell one out of five prospects, that means you need to generate 500 leads to sell 100 lots.

So how many leads does your $4,000 glossy ad bring in seven or eight? Not enough. Perhaps you should look at direct mail.

At a 1% rate of response you will need to send 50,000 letters to generate 500 leads. At a 2% response rate, it’s 25,000 letters, envelopes, stamps, and time. Let’s say the mailings come to $25,000, or a dollar apiece, when all is said and done.

This is $10,000 more than the proposed budget and you still have no idea if the salesperson you just hired can actually sell a drunk a beer! All you have done so far is generate the number of leads needed to sell 100 lots. However, this is a step taken only by about 0.1% of businesses.

I’m not saying you have to spend more, just that you have to have a realistic plan. Put a number on every piece of marketing you do with a cost and an estimate of how many leads each medium will generate.

Billboards
Yellow Pages
Website
Social media
Direct Mail
Radio
TV
Referrals
Telemarketing

This year it might be a guess, but next year you will know for will be able to do a budget that matches leads to sales.

Brilliant!

The only logical way to determine an effective marketing budget is to work it backwards from your sales goal. How many leads will it take to reach that goal and how much will it cost to generate that many leads?

Any other way of budgeting is pure fantasy!

 Read http://www.cunninglyclevermarketingbook.com/

1. Make re-opting in a strong and never-ending part of your online marketing. Contests, pdf downloads, and special offers are not there just to grow your list, they are also there to maintain it. We now offer our partners new promotions every month or so to help with this process. From complimentary vacations at top golf resorts to exclusive content, we are always looking for new ways to get customers to re-opt in and update their data. YOU MUST DO THE SAME at least quarterly to keep your data fresh.
2. Send only those offers that are of interest to that person. Don’t send offers for fishing vacations to people who don’t fish or wine tasting to people who don’t drink. If you have the right back-end, like Marketing Commander, it will sort your contact point data automatically to send email offers only to those people most likely to respond based on their answers to your questions. This increases response rates dramatically and decreases opt-outs. With our resort partners, we set up email blasts based on the activities the guests have told us they enjoy through web surveys and contests. If you said snowmobiling was something you enjoy, come November, you’d receive the first of five preprogrammed campaigns.
3. Set up a dedicated email server, not one that is shared with anyone else. That way you won’t get blocked for their mistakes. ISPs block IP numbers, not individual businesses. If someone using your email service is spamming, you all get blocked!
4. Remove all bounced and bad emails at once. The more you bounce bad emails, the more likely you are to be blocked. Very few companies spend any time maintaining their lists so 60% of the emails they have are bad to begin with. Therefore, they are getting false reports. Get your list clean so you can really see what your open rates are! They may be better than you think, it’s just that your list may be worse than you think.
5. Run all your emails through a spam filter before you send them. That way you can catch words that trigger your email to be diverted to spam folders, like “FREE”!
6. Ask your readers to put you on their personal safe lists
7. Make sure your website provider is white listed with all the top ISPs. We are, but it still does not stop you from getting blocked, it only helps.
8. Never import unknown lists into your database. Now more than ever your lists have to be opt in! If you are going to use lists you have acquired, use a different list server than the one you usually do!
9. Use direct mail at least four times a year to reach your database with an offer that encourages them to re-sign up on your website, giving you their latest email and information. Snail mail addresses stay current far longer than emails (and they’ll forward better). Many people are very frustrated with the fact that a large percentage of their emails are no good, but they overlook the fact that a huge percentage of the postal addresses they have collected from their website are good. DO NOT miss the opportunity to use direct mail. The mailing lists you have collected from your website will produce SUPERIOR results to any other form of marketing if you send them the right offer.
10. Pay careful attention to your subject line: The success of your email will live and die on it!

Subscribe to these ten commandments of email marketing to boost your response rates. 

http://www.cunninglyclevermarketingbook.com/ 

• Stop advertising to build your brand.
• Stop advertising to keep “top of the mind” awareness.
• Stop advertising to build your image.
• Stop advertising to feed your owner’s ego.
• Stop advertising price points or specials.
• Stop running coupons(unless redeemed on your website).
• Stop advertising new products or services.
• Stop advertising because all your competition does. Instead:
• Start advertising.
• Keep advertising.
•  And ONLY advertise to build your database of quality leads.

Make every ad a reason to register on your website or call a toll-free number. Get prospects to put their hands up and say, “YES, I am interested in your product or service,” by giving you their names, phone numbers, and emails, and whatever data you need to segment your leads into groups for future sales.

Use your print ads solely to create leads by driving people to your website or getting them to call your 800 number. You will find it an astonishingly more effective strategy than whatever you are doing now!

Plus, once you have their info, or at least their email address, you can follow up forever almost free! 

Need more great tips on improving your marketing performance? Then visit http://www.cunninglyclevermarketingbook.com/

NO. Let me repeat that, NO!

Sure, creativity helps. But very often, in an effort to be creative, people ignore the basics of human nature. The end result of their efforts is a campaign that is called cute, funny, or creative, and might even win an award, but the ad BOMBS where it counts, in actually increasing YOUR RESPONSE!

Great movies are the result of great scripts, very often formulaic scripts. So, too, are most bestselling books and great sales letters, letters which ALL start with great headlines.

You can borrow winning headlines from other industries and adapt them to your needs. Some of the world’s best headlines still pull responses 50 years or more after their creation. They can do this because while the world changes quickly, people do not. People today have the same basic vanities, desires, motivations, fears, and hopes as their parents and their parents’ parents, albeit with more money to satisfy them!

In writing headlines, never forget that people are emotional, irrational beings who respond to their wants and needs, not yours!

 The 12 Proven Ways to Write Cunningly Clever Headlines

1. The Benefit Headline — Be Slim: Lose 20 lbs in Two Weeks
2. The Offer Headline — Buy Now, Get One Free
3. The Discount Headline — Save 40%
4. The News-Style Headline — New Homes Selling Fast!
5. The Bonus Headline — Free Shipping
6. The Testimonial Headline — This Product Works,
7. The How-To Headline — How to Get a Date Tonight
8. The Secrets Headline — 7 Secrets to Growing Flowers
9. The Guarantee Headline — Money Back If Not Happy!
10. The Question Headline — What Happens If You Die?
11. The Shocking Headline — Man Makes Millions in Bed!
12. Headlines with Free in Them! — Free Beer Until 8 pm!

 Just like movie scripts, books, and comedians’ gags, certain formulas for headlines have been proven to work. Use them! 

Need more great tips on improving your marketing performance? Then visit WWW.CunninglyCleverMarketingBook.com 

Imagine….

A totally custom digital marketing program, with a world-class website, email, print ads and social media program that won’t cost you a penny unless it works!

No set up fees (Normally $5,000)

No monthly fees (full service normally costs $997 a month)

No account management fees

Not even hosting fees…

You pay for performance only!

            Google works on a pay per click basis as does Facebook, in fact the whole world is moving towards this model.  Now you can enjoy the same type of pay for performance in the golf industry!

 Pay ONLY for the outings, membership and banquet leads our efforts generate

Pay ONLY if we grow your database

 Pay ONLY if we increase your fan base

 Otherwise you pay us nothing!

Service Includes:

• Dedicated account rep ie: http://lmgmc.com/company/staff-bios/elizabeth-clason-bio with weekly planning and review calls.
• World-class custom Pied Piper website ie: http://waikoloabeachgolf.com/
• Unlimited e-blasts and awesome features ie: http://piedpipersolutions.com/products/email/
• Viral marketing tools  http://piedpipersolutions.com/products/viral-promotions
• Custom outings website with video infomercial ie http://golfoakharbor.com/outings/golf-outings) We can also do the same for weddings and memberships
• Full Social Media Program with Facebook and Twitter, posts daily
• Premium landing page promotions every 6 weeks ie http://www.facebook.com/pages/Oak-Harbor-Golf-Course/423762023571?sk=app_214187812016034
• Awesome CRM
• All supporting print ads, flyers and booklets

Client Pays For Performance ONLY!

Pay for performance not promises!

Call now first ten clubs only 352-266-2099

Ignore this fact at your peril.

Contrary to popular belief, not all great salespeople, speakers, or leaders start with strong communication skills. Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest orator of the twentieth century, stuttered badly as a child and took speech therapy even as an adult. During one of his early performances at the podium he was so afraid that he actually passed out!

Great movies, no matter how good the performances of actors and actresses, are always based on great scripts!

Great comedians always have great gag writers!

Great speakers always have great speechwriters!

All of the great performers are backed by painstaking practice, tweaking, testing, and repetition until the lines flow to the audience smoothly and effortlessly from the tongue!

Many people think that giving a great sales presentation requires a gift of gab or a certain type of personality. Not so! Great presentations are in fact the product of planning, practice, and refinement. Like great performances on stage and screen, the best sales presentations are honed and tweaked over time. Sometimes the addition of a single line, testimonial, or disclosure can mean a huge jump in sales success. This is why testing should always be part of your presentation until you get it just right!

No matter how long you have been in the game, you can always improve your results by refining your sales presentation.

Type your presentation out, then look for areas where it could be made more impactful just as if you were writing a movie script! Then read it out loud—if you stumble over an awkward passage, you’ll know it needs further fine tuning. This is a cunningly clever way to improve your sales presentations that few people will do, thus giving YOU who will do it an even greater edge!

Great sales presentations are always the result of great planning, scripting, practice, and repetition!

Sales, scripting, manuals and training is another way that Legendary Marketing produces greater results than other agencies. We understand that if your marketing doesn’t help increase your sales… it doesn’t help you!