Attract Sponsors and Advertisers

What do I mean by a sponsorship? It is any way to combine recognition with providing access to desirable prospects and customers for someone who, or an organization that, makes a payment or otherwise subsidizes an activity. Sponsorships are more important than ever because they help marketers avoid being lost in advertising clutter by providing higher visibility and prestige to the sponsor. When a sponsor pays you, that’s income to offset costs you cannot otherwise reduce. The effect is similar to simply reducing costs.

As the primary benefit, sponsors are usually looking for access to attractive prospects for their offerings. In many cases, your prospects and customers are also highly appealing for other companies and nonprofit organizations, making them interested in sponsoring your activities.

In other cases, almost all offerings will be sold to sponsors who, in turn, directly provide the offerings to their prospects and customers. For instance, golf tournaments are often staged to provide funds for charity. Sponsors are given access to special venues at the tournaments and provided with most of the tickets for the events to distribute to customers and prospects. Sponsors also receive lots of visibility in the event’s promotions. The prestige of sponsorship is increased over the company conducting such an event just for itself by improving the quality of the competing golfers, the amount of media coverage, and the number of attendees.

In another variation, a sponsor may be a supplier seeking recognition that provides a lower price for its offerings in exchange for the sponsorship. An example can be found on the computer I am using to prepare this lesson. The machine has a seal on it that says “Intel Core™ Duo inside™,” indicating what brand and kind of microprocessor I have. In exchange for this recognition, Intel slices its microprocessor prices by about 5 percent to its computer-manufacturer customers.

Another way sponsorships are structured is through paying for “objective” measurements and rankings. Those who want to be evaluated pay a fee, which pays for the ranking process. The organization making the rankings distributes awards among those who sponsored the contest. The winners use the results to tout their superiority over competitors in press releases, interviews, and advertising.

You may not have thought much about how your marketing activities and offerings could benefit from encouraging sponsorships. Now is a good time to remove such blinders. Companies are more interested than ever before in sponsorships to replace more expensive and less productive marketing programs. You can cash in to make cost breakthroughs when you help such organizations to meet their needs through helpful sponsorships of your high-quality activities and offerings.

Now, how is advertising different from a sponsorship? Where a sponsor obtains recognition for making an activity or offering possible along with privileged access to prospects and customers in exchange for a payment, advertisers are solely purchasing the right to put their commercial messages in front of prospects through some form of media that you provide.

We’ve all seen television advertising. At regular intervals in the regular programming, short commercial messages are inserted. Companies pay large fees for such time slots in addition to covering their own costs for producing the messages. The fee paid relates to the number of people who will see the message and their potential value as customers for the advertiser.

The same concept generally applies to magazines and newspapers. All or part of a printed page offers the opportunity to attract the eyes of readers. Because the whole publication may not be read, the assumed benefit is considered to be less than the overall readership. In addition, television advertising provides the opportunity to create more emotion… which, in turn, can be translated into making a bigger and more lasting impression with more people.

Advertising is also sold for placement on commercial vehicles such as taxis and trucks. More recently, some companies have been paying to display advertising on personal vehicles. Such exposure is often cheaper than renting billboard space and may offend fewer people who are concerned about cluttering the sides of roads.

With the advent of the Internet, advertising possibilities expanded. Initially, advertisers were encouraged to buy so-called banner ads that took up a big space near the top of the screen and said little. Most advertisers found that such ads weren’t worth much in terms of adding profitable sales.

Yahoo, Google, and others found that carrying commercial messages with some relevance to those reading the online page worked better for encouraging purchases from advertisers. Rather than advertisers paying to reach people who merely see the ad, payments for such ads are tied to how many people click on the ad to reach a site where there is a more extensive commercial message or an offering can be purchased. This media approach was intended to be similar to paying for attracting someone to a store where he or she could buy an offering. Accomplishing the latter was worth quite a lot more than simply exposing the name and offering of the advertiser to more eyeballs.

Through Web 2.0, Web sites can become communities where people spend many hours a day. On such sites, the advertising revenues can be a vast multiple of the cost of providing the site… assuming that enough visitors are attracted who post and view videos and photos, exchange opinions, share ideas, and interact in other ways. As an example, a student of mine developed a very sophisticated social networking site of this sort for families at a software cost of less than $3,000, yet the advertising potential of her site was several million dollars a year.

If you don’t have such a site now, you can inexpensively develop one that can become a major source of cost-reducing advertising revenue by using software designers and programmers who are based where pay rates are inexpensive. While working on the site, you can speak with your developers at no cost over Skype or another Voice-over-Internet-Protocol service. Naturally, you can have as many sites as you want… as long as each one serves a different purpose and attracts enough visitors to more than cover its costs through advertising revenues.

If you hold gatherings of customers and prospects and don’t have sponsors for such gatherings, you can also sell advertising to place on the materials that you share with attendees. In many cases, your advertisers will also market your gathering to their prospects and customers, and you may attract a lot more potential customers to attend. When that happens, you gain direct cost savings for your marketing in addition to the advertising subsidy.

You can provide videos on your Web site as well and sell time slots on such videos to advertisers. Such online advertising opportunities have become popular with truck and automobile manufacturers

Guide To Attraction Marketing

Fascination promoting another and new expression would it say it isn’t? Without a doubt it is, on the grounds that fascination showcasing is another technique for advancing and organizing the web based advertising wander. Fascination advertising is an arrangement in which business visionaries need to center their showcasing endeavors to target exact gathering of forthcoming customers.

Fascination Marketing likewise incorporates offering such planned customers with significant data, so that such customers can return to business visionaries to ask about the prospect and join the group as merchants. This kind of promoting is altogether different from all other conventional techniques for advertising.

Fascination advertising really draws in imminent clients who are anxious to perceive what a business person is putting forth and along these lines, turns into a part. Subsequently, one of the most ideal approaches to exceed expectations in online business is by fascination showcasing.

Requirement For Attraction Marketing And it’s Working:

What lead business visionaries to accompany this new type of showcasing arrangement? In system showcasing, a part needs to pitch the items to clients and in addition persuade them or different clients to join the wander. Customary advertising incorporates making a rundown of potential clients (who are not commendable by any stretch of the imagination) and pursuing them down to join your essential business in system showcasing.

Potential in the Financial Services Sector

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is an emerging area of growth in the financial services sector that involves outsourcing of an entire business process – such as treasury, back office or transaction services.  Given the increasingly competitive marketplace, BPO offers tremendous benefits to financial institutions in terms of reduced costs, enhanced performance and ability to access superior expertise and industry best practices, and devoting scarce human resources to core businesses.

Some of the prominent trends in financial services sector include:
• Shift from product-centric to customer-centric strategies.
• Increasing virtualization.
• Reducing margins and increasing focus on efficiency and cost cutting measures.
• Movement from back-office core banking functionality as a strategic differentiator to application integration

In light of these trends, finance BPO is becoming increasingly important in financial services and several BPO models are emerging in this sector. Some of the critical issues to be addressed in this regard include taxation, regulation, ownership structure and presence of a cultural fit.

There is a huge spectrum of outsourcing solutions ranging from transaction processing to credit underwriting that can be applied in the banking and financial service sectors. The end result of these outsourcing solutions will be leaner, faster, more flexible and ultimately more competitive financial service providers.

The banking and financial services sector is witnessing a concerted move towards business process outsourcing (BPO) as a strategic option. This industry is ideally suited for outsourcing, given large transaction volume, structured decision-making and reliance on rule-set processes. Outsourcing in this domain has shifted along the complexity and maturity spectrums from transaction processing to true business transformation. Corporations are progressively acknowledging the potential benefits from BPO in this segment and identifying road maps for process reengineering that will contribute to greater profitability.

Social Marketing Success

Social marketing success is measured by the benefits of the marketing campaigns to the society rather than the financial gain or increase in sales. Social marketing seeks to educate the society on certain issues and suggesting solutions to societal problems, and not entirely promoting certain goods or services. Funds spent on social marketing cannot be recovered in financial terms, but in terms of making the lives of people better.

To ensure your social marketing success, it is important to define the aims of your campaign. What do you wish to gain from this marketing? A reduction in the number of motor accidents is increasing awareness of road safety regulations or any other. The aims must be specific enough and numeric values attached if possible; that is the only way to measure the success of the marketing successfully. For instance, the aim could be reducing road accidents by 15% by the end of the year, by doing this we can measure at the end of the year if this has been successful or not.

After defining the aims of the social marketing, you need to identify your audience. What age group should the audience encompass? Which media will be more appropriate in reaching them? The methods that will work for young people may not work for the elderly. If the audience is online, then the internet will do but if not, another method has to be found to get the message to them.

The approach to the marketing will depend on the audience. If the audiences are online and are part of social networking groups, then perhaps Facebook or twitter will be a good medium. If they love to watch photos, then you could create your campaigns as photos and tag them in. You could also use banner adverts and Google Adwords for the elderly internet users who are not part of social networking sites.

The Basics of Business Record Keeping

Keeping good records yourself, no matter how unpleasant it may seem, will minimize the costs of paying an accountant and allow you more control of your financial information and operations. Maintaining good records can also help you avoid headaches at tax time by keeping track of your receipts and other records throughout the year. This can help you remember the various transactions you made during the year so you can properly document and maximize your tax deductions.

Normally, tax records should be kept for three years, but some documents – records relating to a home purchase or sale, stock transactions, IRA and business or rental property – should be kept longer.

Good record keeping not only enables the IRS to evaluate your business activity through original and supporting documents, but it also gives you the information you need to properly manage and grow your business.

You can keep track of your business transactions by writing them down, usually in books such as journals or ledgers or by typing them into a computer software program. It’s best to choose a system that’s simple, yet can be changed to meet your needs in the future. An accounting system should show your income and expenses and can be easily understood, especially by you. If you have more than one business, it’s best to keep completely separate books for each type of business activity.

The two basic types of bookkeeping methods are single entry and double-entry systems. Whether you choose to keep a written ledger or use computer software, record only the information that needs to be documented.

Invoice Factoring Can Save Your Business

Invoice factoring is the basic practice of selling invoices to financial factoring companies for the purpose of receiving money right away. Smaller companies often fall into the financial trap of not having available resources and therefore sell their invoices to financial agencies in order to gain working capital. This practice does not require the business to swallow more debt and in fact operates in an opposite manner. Small businesses that don’t utilize the financial tool of accounts receivable factoring acquire more debt by waiting for the accounts receivables to be paid.

Invoice factoring is typically used as a measure to avoid falling further into debt. Without this effective financial management tool many businesses have to adopt more loans or alternatively, put up more collateral for existing loans. Invoice factoring is available at a minimal fee, which makes it an attractive substitute to assuming more debt. In fact, accounts receivable factoring fees are usually set up by way of discount and these rates differ from individual company to company. The great advantage to this type of liquidation is that there are no interest fees to pay and the result is most often better profit margins.

There are many financial companies that offer invoice factoring services. The individual agencies will set up a company with the right set of accounts receivable factoring parameters. After the professionals from the invoice factoring agency assess the individual situation, they will set up the receivables to be factored and proceed accordingly.

Financial agencies that offer accounts receivable factoring are located worldwide and support every industry under the sun. Even truck drivers can sell their invoices to an invoice factoring financial service to free up capital fast. One of the most attractive aspects to an accounts receivable factoring agency is that they customize the service to each business’s individual requirements.