Introduction

How This Book Helps
Your Business

It must sometimes seem like you are being hit from every side; whether it's big-box retailers, internet competition, skyrocketing overhead, or a glut of competing businesses, the pressures push you up against the wall. What you desperately need is a war chest of proven ideas, strategies, and tactics that will help your business not only survive but really prosper! That is whatStreet Fighter Marketing Solutionsis all about.

In the current hypercompetitive, advertising-polluted environment, you pay more and get less for your marketing dollar, which means that it costs you more to attract customers than ever before. Yet you are likely putting the majority of your marketing dollars into some form of local mass advertising. You might use your daily newspaper or other print media; local broadcast or cable television; radio; billboards or other outdoor media; and, most likely, you're in the yellow pages. Each one of these traditional advertising media has suffered an erosion of its effectiveness. This downward trend coupled with the ever-increasing proliferation of marketing choices is likely to continue.

Realizing that your local mass media has lost some of its muscle, you've probably experimented with other forms of marketing, such as the internet, direct mail, telemarketing, sponsorships, local neighborhood marketing, event promotions, PR, and even handing out pens, coffee cups, T-shirts, and can cozies with your logo on them. Despite all this investment in your marketing, you've probably not been happy with your results.

There is a solution. It's a marketing approach that looks at traditional advertising media through different eyes. It also makes use of alternative methods of marketing and advertising to help you beef up your results. This new approach was not developed in an ivory tower at any major university or mega ad agency. It's a product of the street -- not Wall Street, but Main Street. It's called Street Fighter Marketing.

Street Fighter Marketing, or Street Fighting, for short, isanyefficient, measurable, and low-cost delivery method of an effective message that influences a buying decision culminating in a sale. In some respects, Street Fighting turns marketing back a half century or more to a time when marketing was less inefficient, costly, and confusing. To overcome the increasing inefficiencies of modern marketing, the boundaries between all of these related subsets of marketing (advertising, promotions, public relations, sponsorships, direct mail, sales, and so forth) must become blurred.

You've no doubt heard the term "one-to-one marketing," which is a good first step. But the Street Fighter approach is more aggressive and suggests a totally integrated, individualized approach to attracting and keeping customers. Street Fighter Marketing is the next generation of marketing, developed to combat the deluge of marketing pollution that gets between you and your customers. This is a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, grassroots, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners type of approach that can more accurately be called One-On-One Marketing.

Street Fighter Marketing Solutionsprovides you with a detailed examination of numerous advertising and other marketing tactics. First you'll explore the current and future problems; the reasons that traditional advertising media just isn't giving you the bang for your buck it once did. Then you'll learn solutions to the problem; how to modify, mold, and manipulate traditional advertising methods while supplementing or supplanting them with alternative, novel, and lower-cost/higherreward marketing techniques. In this way, you will become less dependent on the media but still have it available in your arsenal when the numbers makes sense. You will reach this position by applying your newfound tactical skills in an innovative strategic way that helps you develop the ideal combinations and applications of advertising for your business. The end result is to create a marketing program that costs you much less per each generated transaction. In short, to deliver you more results with your marketing money.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Slutsky

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Excerpted from Street Fighter Marketing Solutions: How One-on-One Marketing Will Help You Overcome the Sales Challenges of Modern-Day Business by Jeff Slutsky
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.