I’m a fan of hazelnut chocolate spreads on my bread. Not a big fan, but I love the creamy chocolate taste.

Nutella has been my choice for a long time.

The supermarket in my neighborhood sells Nutella at $4.30 for the medium sized bottle – 375 grams.

Two weeks ago, dad came home with a different brand. It was bigger, and it was cheaper. I was 400 grams, and it was just $3.00.

Wow. Sounds like a good buy.

But after tasting it on my bread, I could immediately taste the difference. It was a hazelnut chocolate spread that didn’t even taste like hazelnut or chocolate. If you want my frank opinions, it tasted more like a can of creamed sugar. Very ugly.

That unfinished bottle is now sitting on my kitchen table, and I’ve bought my new Nutella… and I know I’ll NEVER ever try out that “Brand X” creamed sugar hazelnut chocolate spread again, no matter what will say about changed formulas or even if they are selling 3 kilograms at $3.00.

The point?

If you are going to market yourself as a bigger and cheaper alternative. At least, be sure that it is an ALTERNATIVE.

Most of the time, if you are going against a big brand with a huge fans, you don’t even stand a chance. Your chances come from people who are not exactly huge fans. Like me. And you have ONE chance. Just ONE chance. Cherish it. It will save your business.

I was reading Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big, and this sentence struck me.

“Be different… or cheaper. You will fail if you try to do both… or neither.”

Is very true. Many businesses, big and small, struggle because of a price war. Competition. I know a friend who owns a computer hardware retail shop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He tells me that the markup for computer hardware retail is less than 5%!

That is tough business, I must say.

Note, also that there will be only ONE medal for “cheapest”, but there can be an infinite number “DIFFERENT” products/services. In reality, the “cheapest” usually goes to the big guys – the one who can afford to be “cheapest”, the ones who own large manufacturing plants and can product volumes a thousand times yours.

So strive to be different. That is your only guarantee of survival.

How are your products and services different from others?

When you hire a Search Marketing Services company to work on your web marketing, understand that search marketers are not professors.

They don’t know the market at their fingertips.

But what they do is TEST. The good thing about web marketing is that it is relatively less costly. You can access the demand for a small set of keywords for less than a hundred bucks using a pay per click campaign.

Spend that advertising dollar on the local newspapers, and you probably get two lines of text in the classifieds, clumped together with 348 other advertisers… and you wonder why people don’t call up to buy your products.

And keyword research tools can only bring us that far. These tools are… well… tools. Keyword research tools are not crystal balls.

A proper web marketing campaign does not involve just the setting up of the campaign, building content and links, but also continual testing and learning from experiments.

That’s the value these companies provide.

Does the picture say enough?

Many people I know are reluctant to hire professional services for email marketing. They opt to blast out to their mailing list of 3782 people all through an email client, instead of using a credible third party autoresponder / email marketing services company like AWeber

Is it worth it? When you send out emails like this, how much sales are you losing?

Proper email marketing management is not just about spam laws compliance and blasting out emails. It is about:

1. Personalising your email for effectiveness
2. Making sure the emails look the same, or at least, similar across browsers and clients
3. Making sure your emails get read (see picture above for one that doesn’t)
4. Testing different email copies to see which ones hit your list’s hot buttons
5. Sequencing emails so your prospects are eagerly waiting for your offer
6. Tracking the click throughs for each link
7. Segmenting your list to make sure the right offer goes to the right segment
8. Building a relationship with the people in your list
9. and so much SO MUCH more…

So the question is… Guess, which one I clicked?

Answer: Nah, I haven’t clicked any yet. I clicked on my windows start button to fire up my screenshot capture software! Fooled ya!

In fact, they always say the length of a blog post is like a woman’s skirt.

Long enough to cover what is necessary, short enough to be interesting.

Blog posts do not have to take a long time to write. Get your point across, and then stop.