If you are in the credit repair business, you may have at one time or another expressed interest in purchasing credit repair leads.

Credit repair leads can be provided in many different ways. Such as referrals, a toll-free number allowing for people to contact you that may need your assistance, and a web site for people to visit to familiarize themselves with your company and educate themselves about credit repair and the services you can provide them with.

Along these lines of leads, you may have considered purchasing credit repair leads from an internet company.

This isn’t such a bad idea if you are looking for an alternative lead source for credit repair.

The benefits . . .

The benefit of purchasing credit repair leads from an internet company is that the person that needs the credit repair came to a site and found an on line form to fill out specifically to acquire credit repair from a credit repair company.

The customer already understands that they will be contacted from somebody in the credit repair industry and they are waiting for a phone call.

If this is the first marketing article you are reading, go find some other more basic articles that I have written and then come back. This data is for the intermediate to advanced marketers.

I want to go over a three-step outline for your marketing which are:

1) Surveys

2) Getting Attention

3) Postage

Marketing surveys save you from flying blind in your business marketing strategies and are the best way to find out what you should be offering, to whom and how. When you don’t really know what to put in your direct mail marketing it’s because you haven’t done your research.

In order to get the response you would like on your direct mail marketing campaign, one area you need to look at is whether or not you are using a survey to find out what to say to your public. You may immediately answer “No – I don’t survey.” But truthfully, it’s very possible you do and just don’t realize it….read on.

You know your market quite well because you already sell to them. You’re unwittingly surveying all the time. Take this example:

An optometrist has an optical boutique. He knows that the biggest market for his eyewear are women from the ages of 40 to 65 years old. How does he know that? His women’s frame inventory is constantly being restocked fives times more than his men’s frame stock or even children’s. And the types of women’s frames are ones compatible with no-line bifocals. Interesting! Let’s look at what else this optometrist knows. He knows that these women pay a higher price point for their eyewear because the products he keeps reordering are from the more upscale designers so these women probably have more discretionary income. That is what I mean by surveying unwittingly.

Now let’s take an example where you are sure you have no data:

You are a mortgage broker and you don’t know what to say to people to get them to refinance their property, yet this is the area you specialize in. You assume that the best deal will attract more customers. You conduct a marketing survey, or get a marketing survey conducted for you that asks people indirectly for their attitudes and emotions concerning refinancing and what would be the advantages and disadvantages. You find the majority of people would like to refinance but think it is a very complicated procedure and so they never try. From this information you are able to determine what the tone and message of your advertising should take.

So, what should your promotion say? How about “We’ll take the hassle out of refinancing for you. Find out how.” You will get a response. You could send out thousands of promotional pieces telling your prospects that you can get them the lowest rate, but that isn’t their concern. Their concern is that it’s too complicated. Do you see how you could miss? A survey is the answer.

It is smart business to design a survey (or have one designed) to send out to your past customers that will keep you in the know, and not in the dark.

Now let’s go into the next logical sequence of how to break the first barrier of getting attention, so the “button” you found from your survey hits them before they throw away your promotion before ever even reading it.

Ditch the Envelopes!

The most common question that is asked when dealing with direct mail is “How do I get their attention?” This is a major problem because, no matter what you do to them, most envelopes look basically the same. Print on them in color, make a window, stamp it urgent – your customers have seen all these tricks before. They get thrown away before they’re even opened. They can tell from the outside that it is a sales pitch and they just get rid of it. This causes you to lose sales because of assumptions made before you even try to get your message across, when if you had the chance to let the customer know what you were offering they might have gone for it. Plain and simple, the easiest way to get around this is by using postcards.

Many people go from site to site on the Internet,and
never realize what they ‘re dealing with! To truly understand you must take brief step back,and look from another angle. Ask yourself why the teacher would not let you look on the smart kid’s paper during that test in high school,that would have been too easy right? Well imagine sitting beside the smartest kid in the world,and the teacher says “oh go ahead look all you want” . Remember how we use to envy “Captain Kirk” he could ask that computer anything he wanted ,and it would give him the answer. Well “WAKE UP”you’re there ! In most cases they don’t speak out audibly but its still the same results. Knowledge is Power,and ,power out ranks money,power control money, and knowledge controls money.

Who hasn’t let a typo slip by or misspelled the CEO’s name or printed the wrong phone number somewhere? Those marketing mistakes don’t warrant an article. In fact, just one word of how-to-fix-it advice is sufficient: proofread!

Here are a few more important marketing mistakes that just about every business manager out there makes, along with a recommended fix that will help you attract more business and get better results from your marketing, regardless of how big or small your marketing budget is.

Mistake #1: We think that marketing is something we ‘do’.

“We need to do some marketing.” It’s the first thing you think when you need to boost business. Problem is, when you think of marketing as something you ‘do’, you’re usually thinking about publicity, direct mail, flyers, email, ads and promotion. Marketing is much more than merely promotion, and it’s rarely a quick fix.

The real fix is to expand your definition of marketing. Instead of thinking of it as something you ‘do’, think of marketing as anything that helps or hinders the sale or use of your product or service. This includes: your location, the attitudes of the person who answers the phone, your name, pricing, policies, proposals, personality and more.

Before you write a promotional word, do a ‘help or hinder’ once-over. Make a list of what’s helping you attract business and what’s getting in the way. Figure out what obstacles you can quickly fix or remove? What ‘helps’ can you enhance or spotlight? Until the help-or-hinder homework is done, working on promotion is premature.