This ever revolving world we live in does not only rotate on its axis, but every move we make is based on our financial capabilities. Admittedly, money is important in our daily life. From buying our basic commodities to looking for capital for a business and paying off loans and other mortgages, money is the much needed commodity.At times, we find it hard to come up with a lump sum for a certain purchase price such as that for a dream house and lot, car, property and business. This is where we turn to other options for coming up with the amount. This is where finance loans come in.Sources of LoansThere is a lot of money making generating revenues where you can acquire your financial loan. Every source will best suit your specific business need. You may approach your relatives, friends, parents for a fast loan. Some go to banks, financial institutions that offer loans, credit cards, investors and government agencies that lend money to businesses.It does not matter if you are merely starting a business or merely looking for additional capital as you expand an already existing one. All of the above-mentioned sources provide you with the money that you need to operate your business. What is very important if you are a businessman is that you have planned, projected how much money you are willing to put up in your business and the return of investment you are expecting to get. Business foresight is the key to effectively pay off your loan and in the end, reap the profits from all your hard work!Kinds of Financial LoansDebt finance and equity finance are the two kinds of financial loans known in the world of financing. Debt finance covers loans acquired by means of credit cards and bank loans. In other words, it is money loaned to you in aid of your business or mortgage. On the other hand, equity finance is an amount invested in some business like a stockholder. In this case, no repayment is necessary, only losing certain rights within the company or giving up some degree of control in the business.In getting a loan through debt financing, it is important to note that knowing how much you have borrowed and how much can you pay in monthly payments is crucial when operating a business or paying your property.Tips in Acquiring LoansIt is best that you will be able to determine what kind of business you will be putting up, or what kind of house you will be purchasing. This way, you will be able to calculate an estimate for the payments.Borrow only from a reputable bank, financial institution of lending firm whose credibility has been tested and proven through years of experience. Also, be on the lookout for companies who can best help you in this aspect. Watch the news, read the papers, and better yet consult the internet regarding these financial institutions.If you have friends who have acquired financial loans in the past, do not hesitate to ask for their opinion and experience. This way, you will have a broader concept on acquiring loans for your business and personal needs. GP

I like to think I’m a pretty good marketer of my professional services.After all, I’ve been at it for 34 years, read hundreds of marketing books, thousands of articles and studied with the very best marketing gurus.But marketing is still challenging for me and the majority of independent professionals. If it weren’t, we’d all have more clients than we could serve, they’d be paying us high fees, and we’d never having to worry where our next clients would come from.And we wouldn’t need the thousands of marketing coaches and consultants like me offering services of all kinds to help you attract more clients.So, why is marketing so challenging?There are many marketing challenges, however, if you look at marketing closely, there are actually only three big challenges that give us the most trouble.Learn how to meet those challenges and your marketing will become more successful, easier, and fun.Here are those three marketing challenges:Challenge #1. Clearly communicating the value of what you are offering. Someone will not buy your services if they don’t see the real value to them. Your message can’t be vague or confusing; it must be clear and beneficial.One way to zero in on the value of your service is to define the top three attributes your service possesses. One or two is not enough; five or six tends to dilute your message.So, for instance, a sales training company might want to emphasize that their training is guaranteed to increase sales, improve sales confidence quickly, and can be delivered virtually in 45-minute online modules.That’s easy to understand and obviously beneficial. That kind of clear and valuable message is likely to generate attention, interest, and response.Seems simple, but not so easy to do. In my experience with thousands of independent professionals, their messages tend to be vague, not specific, and weak in terms of value.And if that value is not clear, prospects won’t respond.Taking the time to work on your message, fine-tune it, and test it until it gets a favorable response is one of the most important things you can possibly do in your business.To succeed at this task you must get inside the heads of your ideal clients and ask what they want the most, what problems they struggle with frequently, what isn’t working for them, and what could make their jobs easier and more productive.Jaynie L. Smith of Smart Advantage consulting says that 90% of companies don’t really know what their clients value the most. No wonder marketing messages are so bad.You can improve your marketing messages by reading and research (ask Google), sending questionnaires to your clients (Survey Monkey), or conducting a virtual focus group (via Zoom Video). Ultimately, you want to find out their biggest challenges and what they value the most.When you have that marketing intelligence, it will be a lot easier to come up with powerful marketing messages.This is challenging because it takes time and deep thinking. But if you realize its importance, you’ll invest your energies to come up with a powerful message that makes your service attractive, interesting, and compelling to your ideal clients.Challenge # 2. Making your business visible with repeated impressions of your message over time. It can take several impressions before someone responds to your marketing message.Just today, I noticed a message that one of my first level connections had sent to me on LinkedIn. When I checked the message, I noticed that he had sent me a total of 13 messages over a one-year period.The messages were actually very good. They had the right tone and great calls-to-action. It’s just that I don’t pay a lot of attention to my LinkedIn messages and had completely missed the first 12!He understood the value of repeat impressions over time and had developed a system within LinkedIn that had enabled him to send a unique, personalized message every month for a year. Pretty impressive.If he had only sent one or two messages, the chances are good that I wouldn’t have seen them.Again, my experience with the majority of self-employed professionals is that their marketing visibility is, at best, random and inconsistent, and at worst, non-existent.As you may know, I’ve sent out an email newsletter to my list pretty much every week for 21 years. That’s visibility. It’s really quite simple, but not so easy.If you want to be effective at your marketing, you must identify marketing strategies that enable you to get your message in front of your prospective clients consistently.And again, this is challenging. What is the best marketing activity for you, your personality and talents? How can you fit something into your schedule and do it consistently, not for a few weeks but for years?The question is not just what marketing strategies to use. Networking, speaking, blogging, email newsletters, webinars, social media, and direct outreach can all work.The more important question is what strategies will work the best for you and how exactly you can implement those strategies without spinning your wheels.You’re looking for proven, step-by-step instructions so you can evaluate if a strategy is right for you and something you can fit into your schedule on a regular basis. Remember, sporadic implementation is a waste of time.Implementing visibility strategies takes commitment and persistence. Is growing and succeeding in your business important enough for you to make that kind of effort? If it is, you’ll succeed at finding the best strategy for you.The final challenge may be the most important of all to overcome.Challenge #3. Maintaining the right marketing attitude and mindset over time, despite setbacks. If you can’t maintain The 3 R’s of success – responsibility, resourcefulness, and resilience, your marketing will never achieve the results you want.These 3Rs are absolutely essential. Responsibility is the stance that the buck stops with you. You are the only one who will find a way to attract clients and you won’t give up until you find that way. You won’t make excuses or blame circumstances, but instead will be accountable for making results happen.Resourcefulness is the skill to utilize your talents, and abilities to quickly find smart ways to overcome difficulties and find solutions. And to be resourceful, you can’t be full of doubts and fears of failure or rejection. A responsible person commits to finding a way; a resourceful person tries every way possible until they discover the best way.Resilience may be the most powerful trait of all. It’s what enables you to bounce back from adversity, setbacks, and even failures. And if you’re working to attract great clients, you’ll inevitably experience all of those many times. People who are not resilient don’t even try, let alone succeed.All of these essential qualities are in short supply. But if you work to grow those qualities persistently, over time, they will help you succeed with the first two challenging things in marketing – messaging and visibility.Despite these three marketing challenges – messaging, visibility, and mindset – there is good news.Improving your skills or abilities – even a little – in any of these three challenge areas will increase your marketing effectiveness.There is no perfect way of tackling all three challenges and you can’t do it in big leaps that get you there overnight. But you can work on all three slowly, with persistence, making small gains every week.When you improve your messages, you’ll start to see a better response in communicating to your prospects. Marketing then becomes like a game that starts with the question, “How can I communicate my value more clearly and powerfully?”When you increase your visibility, you’ll also notice a better response because to some degree, marketing is a numbers game. Your question might be, “How can I get my message in front of more of the right people this month?”And when you enhance your responsibility, resourcefulness, and resilience, you’ll find that playing the game becomes easier and more fun. The 3Rs are the fuel that enables you to persist with the first two challenges.Where do you start?You start by admitting where you are now and then committing to a purpose (your WHY for being in business in the first place), a goal (a specific thing you want to achieve), and to taking action (the actual steps you’ll implement to get there).Yes, marketing is challenging. But meeting those challenges is absolutely worth it.Cheers, Robert

Compulsory centralized marketing programs are probably one of the supreme strengths of franchising. Pooling funds from all of the franchisees in a system gives them communally much greater marketing power. This fundamental fund can be used to do things that no individual franchisee could afford. The fund can also be used to hire professionals to produce advertising materials of far better superiority than what an individual owner could create. It is essential for anyone considering a franchise investment to know prior to becoming a Franchisee that the Franchisor’s marketing system is a good one. The essential qualities of a good franchise marketing program include these actions.The first priority in any marketing system is knowing that the results will be more people using the products or services of the Franchise.
Second, allow franchisees to offer their opinions. They work in the market in which they operate and know what works and what does not. The final decision can be made by the franchisor, but franchisees will appreciate your allowing them to become involved. Create a franchise advisory group consisting of representatives of all of your franchisees. They should meet with the franchisor’s marketing group and provide input into future projects and campaigns.Marketing funds should be directed primarily toward covering the costs of controlling the marketing effort (internal expenses, agency fees, etc.). Next they cover the expense of producing advertising resources (print, direct mail, radio and television ads, etc.). Finally, they pay for media purchases to place these advertisements for the advantage of the contributing franchisees. A frequent franchisee criticism is that too much is being spent in one of these area and not enough in another. Clearly there must be a practical balance between these needs.Don’t spend more on brand advertising than on efforts to bring in more customers. Building the brand is very important but so is bringing in customers. A powerful brand is only as good as the customers in brings in. The marketing system should be carefully documented. A franchisor most likely won’t provide all of their proprietary internal marketing documentation, but you can ask for at least the table of contents of the marketing support manuals they provide to franchisees. This will give you a good idea of the extent of the strategies they provide in training franchisees to market successfully. It will also validate that they have improved their systems to the point where they have record them in manuals and other support and training tools.
The undisputable way to determine how the marketing program is working is to start asking the existing franchisees. You’ll find that they will be very accommodating on this topic since few things are closer to their hearts than marketing. Be precise and ask them how well the marketing works in terms of bringing customers to their business. Also ask if they think they’re steadily getting good value from their contributions to any required marketing fund. If you find a franchise system where the greater parts of the existing franchisees are unhappy about the way their marketing dollars are being administered, you can presume that others will be unhappy as well. If most of the franchisees are satisfied with the way the marketing fund is handled then you will often find that franchisees are happy about most other factors in their business as well.
Franchise Marketing Ideas for Explosive Growth
To expand your franchise you must use marketing techniques which will help to reach your target audience. Franchise marketing involves two areas. Customers are first and of course Franchisees. Both can benefit from the same marketing ideas and techniques, but the results differ significantly. Unfortunately, many franchise companies miss this little fact and focus their marketing methods too heavily on one cause over the other.Search Engine Marketing (PPC & SEO)
Search engine marketing means bringing increased traffic to your company on search engines through paid search billboards or other ads as well as natural search earned through SEO practices. Distinguishing between how this helps your franchise grow and how consumers will react is an important difference:Consumer: PPC and SEO techniques will help drive eligible traffic to your franchisee’s local page. This eventually helps you generate more leads or sales because your franchisee location or information pages will hopefully be shown to a direct and relevant audience that is most likely to become a long-term client or customer. It saves consumers time because they are instantly taken to the page that means the most to them because of your ads and to SEO efforts.Franchise Development: Each type of marketing will help drive traffic to your website which in turn will help create more leads. This essentially benefits franchise development the same way as with consumers. Your ads and organic search submissions are optimized for this audience and deliver prospects attracted to starting a franchise.Encourage Online Testimonials.
Testimonials are a strong method for showing your success and satisfaction amongst franchisees and customers. Because you manage the reviews you display on your site nevertheless they can make a big difference:
• Consumer: Testimonials provide opinions submitted by satisfied customers and it is important to include them on your site.
• Franchise Development: Testimonials are important to franchise development because they permit prospective franchisees to see how current franchisees’ businesses are functioning as well as their experiences with the corporate office.Franchise Development
The objective is to invite franchises in the locations where you don’t already have a franchise. Social media can help make this a likelihood by showing the opportunities your business offers next to your target market. Those who are seeing your social media crusade are your target market; consequently your products and services as well as those who relate are all in one place. Once you see who is the most active on social media, you can start generating more personalized content and emails to ultimately start up a conversation.Build familiarity in the media.
This is one facet of franchise marketing that has become more imperative in recent years. Building familiarity of your brand in the media is a great way to find that stability for your two goals:
• Consumer: Local newspapers and TV stations want to know what’s happening in the neighborhoods they cover. Connecting with publishers, editors and producers with press releases of anything newsworthy at your business will always be of interest to media professionals. Offer to write a free column that benefits a news outlet’s viewers. Many local media sources will show interest in your business. Always make sure you’re offering pertinent information and have something you can offer back to these media outlets.
• Franchise Development: Build relationships with media outlets and provide them with in-house research performed about the industry you operate in and how the franchise system operates in general. The information you provide should be valuable and interesting that the general public.Infographics
An infographic is an eye-pleasing portrayal of intricate data. Gather your data, and statistics, and create an infographic to transmit your company messages. They can be used in print, on blogs or on social media platforms.Preparing Your Message
Create a budget to make your infographic. When creating an infographic, using various free programs and templates is not a bad idea. The collecting of data and creating charts and graphs can be time consuming. However, the payout could be substantial.Choose your message.
The infographic should provide details about your business while not being overly complicated. Keep away from messages that are sales-focused. Buy our product is not a good communication to present. Stating how a product expands quality of life or helps to improve business is a better choice. Non-profits, universities and individuals can profit from infographics, in addition to companies. Infographics can present a story to potential customers more easily than you can by speaking.Assemble data that sustains your message.
Choose between assembling your own data or finding reliable data from other sources. The following are good places to find statistics if you can’t collect them yourself:• StatPlanet provides worldwide statistics.
• Search government websites such as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics or the EPA to get dependable statistics.
• Trade journals and scientific studies provide study-based data.
• Make sure to list your source(s) for your statistics at the bottom of each graphic section. Use the most trustworthy sources that you can find.
• Use industry reports from Ibisworld.com.Input your data into an Excel spreadsheet. The data that you gather can be entered into an Excel spreadsheet where you can create charts of varying types to use in your infographic.Choosing Infographic Tools
A graphic designer. If you want a fully personalized infographic, you should consider hiring someone who can produce it. Rates vary by designer so make sure your budget is adjusted accordingly. If you want to use your final infographic to improve web traffic or social media content, then you should hire a graphic designer. A graphic designer with experience will be extremely beneficial. Use a large headline. Don’t try to save space by making the font smaller. Use a big font that is easy to read, so that it catches the reader’s eye.Use your logo.
If you want your website found, make sure your logo, website and social media URLs are prominent in your infographic. If you have a general message that you want to go viral, you can skip this step.Use photographs.
If you prefer you can use photos over illustrations. Use between one and six photographs. Make sure to leave plenty of room to separate the images and add text.