One of the best strategies for gaining an edge over your competition and increasing the value of your business to prospects and customers is to write a report. It is also one of the most cost effective ways to promote your business and your expertise. You can write reports on anything relating to your business that will be of benefit to your prospects and customers. For example, you could write a report on how to get the best use of your product, or how your product or service can increase productivity by 35%. Reports dont have to twenty five pages, they can be as little as four to eight pages. Make it as long as it needs to be. To be effective your report needs to be at least four pages long. Anything shorter than four pages comes across as hokey and superficial. Reports are powerful marketing tools. You can have your free report on your Web site for people to download when they subscribe to your newsletter or buy something from your site. You can use them just as effectively off-line as well. Offer your free reports in your print advertising, give them to your salespeople, and mention them in your radio and television commercials. When youre writing your reports give a detailed explanation of the benefits and uses of your product or service. Talk about why your business is unique. Describe how it will make your prospects life better. Cite some uses for your products or service that your customers may not have realized. Then contact a dozen or so of your customers, and ask them what they feel are the best uses for your product or service. Ask them how it saves them money, makes them money, makes their time more efficient, or gives them more success. If you interview a dozen customers, you may get nine different answers. With some of the interviews, you may want to edit their answers to only one or two paragraphs. With others, you may use a whole page. The point to keep in mind is that you want to showcase the best and most innovative ways your customers are using your product or benefiting from your service. This is a powerful technique because you are writing in real emotion-filled words how people feel about your product or service. This will connect with the reader, your prospective customer, and move him or her to action. Writing a report will give you and your salespeople the most convincing list of sales points and benefits youve ever had. The material in your report wont be what you want to tell people about your product or service, rather, it will be from your actual customers and what they care about. Your reports will also give you a higher appreciation for the value your product or service, or company brings to someones life. Perhaps, the single most important benefit of writing a report is that it will give you a better idea of who your customers are and what they really value. If youre not a good writer and not very comfortable writing a report, there are some excellent software programs that make it very easy to write a report that looks professionally done. Or you could hire a free-lance writer to put your report together for you. Writing a report is a valuable tool no matter how long youve been in business. They are great marketing tools and it doesnt take a lot of sweat or anxiety to write a report. The most important reason to write reports is that youll have a volume of beneficial information for your prospects. Copyright2006 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. |
