The Ten Commandments of MARKETING

Never break these rules, or it will cost you a fortune!

1. If you are not skilled at marketing, employ someone who is - fast!

2. Never advertise your brand. Advertising sales people will try to convince you to buy advertising to increase the awareness of your brand with customers. This is complete rubbish. If you can't make accountable sales from your advertising - don't do it.

3. Always buy advertising at a discount, but never buy discounted advertising. If you do decide to advertise don't do it because you get a call from an ad sales person with a 'bargain'. Instead decide where you want to advertise and then negotiate the best deal you can to get it discounted, especially if it is your first time in that magazine or journal. Haggle.

4. Always know how much to spend on advertising. Many people overspend or underspend. You should only advertise where the cost of getting a new customer is less than the value of that customer to you on the first and subsequent purchases.

5. Always have a back-end sale (a sale in addition to the product you initially sold the customer). If you are going to spend money to attract a customer you must have something else to sell them.

6. Always know the lifetime value of your customer. At first this will be hard, but as time goes on you should know what a new customer is worth to your business over their expected period of buying from you.

7. Always know your cost of customer acquisition. If you advertise to attract new customers you must divide the cost of your advertising by the number of resulting new customers to arrive at your cost of acquisition per customer.

8. Always have a database. If you don't keep your customers' details on a database, how do you know who they are?

9. Always look for no-cost or low-cost promotions. There are many opportunities to get advertising for free or at low cost - look at these first before you spend money on adverts.

10. ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a USP-a unique selling promise.