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Archive for the ‘Small Business Marketing’ Category

When a potential buyer makes an inquiry, have you found yourself responding with an answer similar to this:

“Well, our process is that first, we find out about your needs. Next, we’ll put together a proposal and then we’ll let you know how much it costs. And then, you can take it from there.”

Why is this a mistake? The problem here is that you’re doing an alot of work – work that you’re not getting paid for – without even ensuring a sale. In addition to not closing the deal, this type of business practice also makes the sales process very labor-intensive for you. You have to take the time to find out the client’s specific needs. You have to write a proposal and you have to work up a cost for them. Then, they’ll decide if they want your product or services.

By customizing your approach for that client’s individual needs, you could conceivably put in a day’s work or more, and have nothing to show for it in the end.

So, the first thing you need to do is stop customizing. Instead, start creating packages of your services and/or products – packages that people can see and buy, right off the shelf.

This is a practice that can work really well for you. By creating a package, you are specifying what your product or service is, setting specific prices, and actually quantifying the benefits of your offer. It forces you to make your intangibles tangible. Customers are more apt to purchase when they can see, touch, taste and smell what they’re getting.

You can also create a variety of packages at a range of levels. Begin with a starter package. You might even consider creating a budget package, to make your services even more accessible.  In addition to your base packages, I encourage you to develop a first class program or product – call it The Rolls Royce program – for those people that want the absolute best.

You don’t have to develop hundreds of packages. Two or three range levels are enough to begin with. By offering a range, you’re creating the illusion of customizing. People can basically ascertain their needs, look at your different packages and say, “Yes, that’s the one that’s right for me.”

When you develop your packages, design them so that your solutions match the client’s ideal end results. You want to highlight the benefits, not the features. Your clients don’t care so much about your process as they do about achieving their desired solution. If you’re a coach, for example, you probably focus on the coaching process, but your clients are interested in what that process will do for them.

Maybe they want to simplify their life. Maybe they want to find the confidence to apply for a promotion or find the support to start a new business. Or, maybe they want to find a new relationship or get through a difficult divorce.

There are many different things and many different end results. The important thing is to keep your client’s desired end result in clear focus when you create and describe your packages. Your packages need to clearly show clients how what you’re offering is so closely aimed at that desired end result.

You can still deliver the same quality results you would by customizing, but by turning your expertise into packaged information, you can spend a lot less time, get a lot more clients, and help a lot more people at the same time.

You know the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure?” You see this philosophy proven time and again, especially at flea markets, garage sales or “scratch and dent” sales.

The items are hardly “trash;” they are just no longer esteemed by the seller.
They are, however, of great value to the buyer.

In unloading unwanted, outdated or overstocked items, the seller creates space and generates some extra income. In finding something that fits their needs and their budget, the buyer feels like he got a great deal. Everybody wins.

Whether you are in a product-oriented or service-oriented business, you can create this same winning combination.

If, for example, your business is introducing a new product, your existing inventory may end up including too many choices. When there are too many products to choose from, customers can become confused and overwhelmed by the number of options. There’s a saying in marketing: “A confused mind never buys.”

You simply don’t want to confuse people when it comes to them purchasing a product from you. To avoid that happening, streamline the products you offer.

Here’s something I did that you can easily emulate. A couple of years ago, while I was restructuring my web site, there were products I no longer wanted to sell. They weren’t actually inventory because they were digital products. But I didn’t want them cluttering my website anymore. I implemented a “last chance” sale and offered the products at a 50% discount for one week only.

Amazingly, over the course of seven days, that sale generated £11,000 worth of business. Can you imagine discovering £11,000 worth of hidden money in your business? That money was there all along but I didn’t tap into it until I got creative and put it together as an offer. I gave people a reason to buy.

You can do this. You see it done all the time with clearance sales. If your business ends up with a whole lot of excess stock – stock that has been returned or stock that you’ve taken to events and didn’t sell out of – your inventory just builds up. Instead of storing it indefinitely, where it just costs you and doesn’t benefit you at all, offer it at a special discount. Chances are you’ll make some extra money and create some space in the office.

If you’re in a service-oriented business, your “stock” can be your time or your expertise. You don’t really have it laying around, taking up excess space. It’s difficult to have a clearance sale on your time. The variation is to offer a pre-sell of a program.

Though you’re not selling an actual product, you can pre-sell a program. Put together a coaching program or a teleseminar series where clients pay up front for the program you’re offering. It might be a six-week series, but you’re getting the cash flow up front.

Obviously, then, the onus is on you to deliver. But you don’t have to actually have that program created before you sell it.  Offering the program as a pre-sell will force you to stay on track while simultaneously putting money in your pocket.

So, take a look at your inventory. Out with the old, in with the new, as they say. Do some spring cleaning or fall clearance of your old products.  Have a pre-sale of your newest program or offering.  Your clients will appreciate the value of the savings and your business will benefit from the value of the earnings. Everybody wins.

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Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. She publishes a free, weekly newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Have you heard the joke about the tourist who is driving around Ireland and stops to ask a farmer for directions? The farmer leans into the car and says, “Well, you know sir, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Like all good jokes, there’s an element of truth about human psychology in his answer. Most of us wish that we were starting from somewhere other than the place that we’re actually starting from.

When you think about starting your business, have you said any of these things?

If only I had more experience.
If only I was younger.
If only I got started earlier.
If only I had more money.
If only I was self-employed.
If only I had more time.
If only I wasn’t committed to this other project.

Always remember that where you’re starting from is a lot less important than the direction you’re heading.

Everyone who is running their own business had to start somewhere. And a lot of them started in much more challenging situations than yours. Whether you have situations, reasons or excuses, they all boil down to the same thing. They are stopping you from moving forward.

So, if you’re in a successful business, but tired of trading your time for money; if you’re pressed for time and want to break free of your existing revenue model; if you want to learn to earn revenue through products and passive streams – you’ve got to begin somewhere.

Stop finding reasons why right now is not a good time for you to start. Stop using your current circumstances as reasons to justify staying where you are. Right now is the perfect time to start to improve, grow and expand your business. Right now is the time to stop procrastinating and stop making excuses.

You can start your information empire from any point. Yes, where you start will influence the steps you take and the order in which you take them. But, the point is that you can start right now, from right where you are.

You may be familiar with Jim Edwards, an online information marketer. He sells e-books, among many additional things, in his information product funnel.

Jim started his information empire from probably the most challenging situation a person can be in. He was bankrupt, worked full-time, lived in a trailer, and had precious little free time to build his own business. But, he carved out time every day to come up with marketing ideas, write sales copy and work on the mechanical nuts and bolts of his business.

Because he couldn’t afford resources, he worked a lot of long hours by himself – 16-hour days or even longer.

You probably aren’t starting from a situation as dire as Jim’s. His is an extreme example that even when the situation is really tough and challenging, you can still take the steps and get started.

The only difference between you and someone who is running a successful information empire is that they decided to start, no matter what their circumstances were. You can learn from their examples.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Going through the work of identifying your target audience, really getting to know them and developing products to meet their needs can be very rewarding. If you want it to be financially rewarding, you’ll also need to learn the art of making repeat sales. Repeat sales generate eighty percent of the profits for a successful business. When you’re ready to move beyond the one-time transaction, here are some ideas for mining the gold of repeat business.

Breaking the “Find New Customers” Cycle
It’s difficult to watch someone work very hard to build a business, only to leave the additional income from repeat business on the table. That’s what happens when you’re constantly chasing new customers and making one-time sales to them, rather than offering new products and services to existing clients.

If you think about it, it’s actually easier to sell a product to a satisfied client, isn’t it? So it doesn’t make sense to get caught in the cycle of “go out and find more clients and sell them the same old product.” In order to boost your income considerably, you must, instead, begin creating new products that meet the needs of your existing clients.

Once you make up your mind to pursue additional business with existing clients, you can step off the never-ending cycle of chasing new clients and watch your income move up at the same time.

Learning What Your Clients Need
You may be asking yourself, “But how do I know what my existing clients need?” You can actually use the same process that you used to create your original products. Here are some helpful steps:

• Look at your client base as a target market.
• What questions are those existing clients asking?
• What additional needs continue to be unmet after they buy your product?
• What add-on products complement your original offerings?
• How could your product line be expanded naturally to meet more needs?

Here’s an example that illustrates how a one-product company can create add-on sales to its existing customers. A hypnotherapist specializes in smoking cessation hypnosis. She has lots of clients who come to her for that service, but once they stop smoking, she doesn’t ever see them again. She’s spending a lot of time and money in marketing to attract new clients.

Because her existing clients know her smoking cessation sessions work, they’re the perfect prospects for additional services. By listening to her current clients’ concerns, she learns many of them are ready to take on new challenges in life, now that they’ve quit smoking. She offers to help with visualization sessions so they can focus on their new goals.

By expanding how she sees her existing client base, and focuses on their needs, she has opened the door to a whole new level of income. You can do the same thing. If necessary, take some time off from marketing to new target audiences and turn your complete focus on your existing customer base.

Develop the habit of listening to your clients’ questions and determining what needs still exist. Turn those needs into products that fill them. Not only will your clients be grateful, you’ll also see your income multiply substantially.

You will always have to do some marketing to bring in new clients, but there’s far less pressure when you’re making repeat sales of new products to existing clients. Once you stop chasing new clients and focus on building more products to help your customer base, your whole business will turn around. Learn how to mine the gold of repeat sales to build a strong, sustainable business and a solid base of satisfied customers.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Your webpage is like a salesperson in print.

When visitors go to your website, it should provide them with all the information they need to know, and leave them with no doubts about ordering products or services from you.

Does your webpage do that? If it doesn’t, you’re missing one of the best conversion opportunities there is. One-to-many selling. Your strategy should be to get people to visit your site, and let the site make the sales for you. Use your webpages as sales pages.

This has been my own strategy and specialty, because sadly, I don’t have time to speak to every single person who expresses interest in what I am offering.

And frankly, not everybody needs to speak with me. Some people wouldn’t even want to speak to me; they just want the information they need in order to be able to make up their own mind.

So if you’ve made the decision to drive traffic to your website because you don’t have the time for conversations with too many people, focus on the quality of your webpage. Make sure that page is in the absolute, best possible shape to close the deal for you.

Think of it this way. If you were to expend time and energy recruiting and training a salesperson, you would make absolutely sure they were fully informed.

They would know all of the information about your business to give to prospective clients. They would be able to give all of the reasons why the prospect should buy this particular offer at this particular time. They would be able to overcome every objection.

That is what your webpage should do.

It should answer every possible question. It should inform visitors of the value of your service and convince them to make the purchase. And that may take a lot of information, a lot of words and facts and details. Don’t worry if it seems like a lot of copy. Since you aren’t having a back and forth exchange with the potential client, you have to anticipate any questions they might have, and address them all. Your webpage should be as long as it needs to be to get the job done.

You don’t want them leaving your webpage without making the purchase because they didn’t have some piece of information that they wanted. If a piece is missing or incomplete, you risk the chance that some people simply won’t buy.

So are you cutting corners in your sales process? Do you just seem to always run out of time or are you too lazy to get your webpage sorted out? Have you put proper emphasis on effective copywriting or considered hiring a copywriter to do it for you? If not, you are shortchanging yourself and your prospective clients.

And that will be so wrong. If you’re selling something that can make a difference to people, it’s your duty to make sure that as many people as possible benefit from it.

Their lives are going to be enhanced by what you’re offering. It’s going to move them forward, in their business and in their life. You need to make sure you’re doing a complete and thorough sales job on your webpage to help make that happen for people.

That page should function as your own personal salesman or woman, working for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

There’s a saying that you have to spend money to make money. I have to say I couldn’t agree more with this. I know many trainers are hesitant to spend money when their cash flow may be low, but spending money to market your services is just one more step to attracting clients. But there is certainly a right answer and wrong answer to the marketing equation.

When you get to the point where you have clients calling you asking for your services, you’ve taken a step in the right direction. I’m certainly not saying to go out and spend money on advertising just for the sake of marketing because it’s necessary. Your goal is to find those marketing techniques that give you the best return on your marketing investment. It’s basic math and it’s as simple as 1+1=2!

For example, say you place an advertisement offering a free report for callers. It’s a worthwhile technique to use. It gives the caller something tangible to ask for and it produces more results than just offering a phone number to call for enquiries. Let’s say you spend £250 for this advertisement in a trade publication. That can be a fairly significant cash outlay if you’re just starting out.

But, if that £250 investment results in picking up £10,000 of business, you’ve created a 40 to 1 return on your investment. You should be asking yourself “where can I spend another pound?”!

Now, how about the investment of your time? That’s also a simple math calculation. If you’re making cold calls how many prospects are you going to get within one hour’s time? One or two perhaps, if you’re able to make it past the gatekeeper. What if you could take that one hour and multiply those results infinitely?

It seems an easy to decision to make, reaching more people in the same amount of time. But it’s a concept that many have yet to grasp. It’s a matter of taking your one-to-one marketing techniques and changing them to one-to-many techniques.

I can’t stress this enough – the one-to-one selling techniques that are used in the larger companies don’t work for those of us flying solo!

The quickest change you can make to take your marketing techniques to the next level is to engage either in direct mailing or advertising. Once you’ve fine tuned your message, this limited investment of your time has the ability to produce infinite results.
So, now that you have some ideas on how your money and time are going to produce the best benefit to your business, you can roll this together to take another step towards becoming a Client Magnet.

Attracting clients, having them call you is at the heart of this simple equation. Using these advertising methods, along with other steps outlined and detailed in my Attracting Clients system is going to put you in the position of having clients contact you to meet their specific needs and the return on your investment will transform your business.

I regularly get email questions from people saying, “I’ve got this new XYZ service. How can I find the people who need it? How can I let as many people know about it as possible?”

The problem with this question is the idea of  promoting your new product and service, without really thinking through what your audience wants.

To sell your new product or service you need more than visibility in the market.  You need to give your market what THEY REALLY WANT

Let me give you an example. There was a dog food company and they had been very successful in their market category, but they were losing market share. The new chairman was determined to turn things around. He called a board meeting with his top sales people, marketing people, his top researchers, and all the division heads.

He began to get heated, ranting and raving. “Why are we losing our share? What are we going to do about this?” As he intimidated the room with his behavior, a young intern raised his hand and said, “Sir, the trouble is the dogs don’t like the food.”

See the problem here?
The company had been trying to fix a fundamental problem without identifying the true source of their problem.    They thought that spending more on advertising, or spending more on marketing, or promoting more, or doing PR, or all of these activities would increase their business.

And it’s true. All these things will increase your business IF you’re offering something that people really want. But if you offering something that people don’t want to buy, then no amount of promotion is going to compensate for that. All it’s going to do is make you tired and broke.

It would be the same as trying to convince a market that black and white televisions are a better buy in a market where the consumer doesn’t want black and white anymore, they want color. You can’t jump in to promotion before really making sure that what you’re offering is something the market is really hungry for.

Promoting a new product or service takes consistent effort, it uses resources, and it requires constant energy. And so, it’s very easy for someone who has jumped in naively to get disillusioned very quickly. The lesson:  You should never begin promoting without making sure that the market really has a need for what you’re offering.

The sad thing is many businesses don’t learn this one lesson until it’s too late. Many go out of business at that point. I don’t want that for you. I believe that you’re in business because at some level it’s a calling for you.

You know deep down that you’ve got something valuable to offer. You know that there are people in the world that you can truly help. And I know how frustrating it is if you have been trying to help those people, but you feel that you can’t connect with them.

I’m not saying that you should get out of the market. Rather, you should find out how to corner the market you’re in. Granted, if you’re selling an inferior product that people don’t want, you can’t do a lot to fix that. Otherwise, the answer lies in making sure your business offers match the demands of the market.

The solution is aligning what you’re offering with what people really want.

Everyone loves a happy ending. Think of Cinderella and Pretty Woman. Basically they’re the same story – the story of someone who started out in rags and was transformed to riches.

And if you think about marketing campaigns, you’ll realize that this type of story is frequently used to emotionally engage customers. People love hearing about how someone rose from having nothing to having it all – or at least to being well on their way to the top.

Is the story of your business a “rags to riches” tale?

A “rags to riches” story describes a transformation. It could be about your own experience, or it could be about experiences that you’ve helped others to create. It may be a story of financial transformation. Or it may be more about a personal transformation that someone has gone through.

Whichever is the case, it just might be the story that will help you to emotionally connect with your audience and attract new customers.

Perhaps you’ve come up from having very little to now running a successful business. Or perhaps you are in the business of working with clients on their images, helping them to rise to riches. Either way, there’s a transformation, a before and after story, that you can tell.

A good example is this headline from Rich Schefren’s “Internet Manifesto:” “Learn how young broke cocktail waitress went from living out of her car with two dollars and three cents to her name (there’s the specificity there) to earning her first million in two short years.”

That’s classic “rags to riches”.

So if yours is a Cinderella story, make it the theme of your marketing. Consistently tell stories about the transformation that you have achieved or have helped other people achieve.

Share with your audience how you went from sweeping ashes to wearing the glass slipper. Engage people with your story, take them along on your climb, and they’ll want you to help them make the same transformation.

So much to do, so little time – and not enough to show for all your hard work. If that’s become your mantra, if you just don’t know where to start, let me give you a checklist of things to focus on that will save you time and grow your business.

Basically, there are three things, and only three things, that will allow you to double, triple, even quadruple your income – more leads, more clients, and more sales. Follow these tips for ways to achieve them, and watch your business grow.

1. Analyze your business. Determine what it will take to bring in more revenue, whether it’s getting more clients, or getting your existing clients to spend more money.
2. Develop a SYSTEM (Save Your Self Time, Energy and Money). If generating leads only happens when you attend a networking event or place an ad – if it’s something you have to think about or make time to do – it’s not a system. A good system will make lead generation automatic, will let you go on holiday and come back to find more leads than before you left. Examine each aspect of your business to see what is working for you and what isn’t. And if something isn’t, then drop it and focus on something else.
3. Take yourself out of the equation. Are sales totally dependent on your involvement in generating them? If you must constantly promote your business in order to attract clients, you need to find a way to make sales that isn’t dependent on you alone.
4. Expand your lead sources by increasing your visibility in the marketplace. Explore social media, like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Consider a new magazine or publication for advertising. Think about doing something more with articles, or starting a blog.
5. Develop a strong conversion process. All the leads in the world won’t increase your income if you can’t convert them into paying customers.
6. Don’t restrict how much a customer can spend. The amount of business that customers can do with you is limited by your highest priced product, service or program. You need to raise the amount that people can spend with you, giving them more opportunities to give you money. Look at your highest priced product or service and see how you can take it to a new level. Create a new high-end product that your existing customers will pay for, and that will attract more new leads to your business.
7. Encourage customers to increase their spending by creating an up-sell. Find connections between your products or services or programs, and when a customer wants to buy item A, automatically suggest supplementing the order with item B. Typically 35% of customers are more than willing to take your suggestion to spend more money.
8. Make customers feel special. Develop continuity streams of income by creating membership programs and continuity programs, where people pay a monthly fee for your service or your product. Offer ongoing support by way of refreshers and top-ups for a regular fee.
9. Track and test. Analyzing and evaluating where you focus your time, energy and money is a sure way of knowing whether your methods are productive. Track and measure the value of your lead sources and the effectiveness of your conversion process in generating revenue. Assess your website for qualified traffic, readily accessible information, and sale completion. These statistics will prove how well your site is working for you.

Applying these steps to your business will help you to focus on attracting more leads, converting them into paying customers, and generating more sales. This is the surest way to increase your bottom line and watch your income grow.

In an ideal marketing campaign, everything you do brings your prospects one step closer to buying. This can include using a free report to pre-sell your prospect. Here are a few suggestions on how to craft your report in a way that will pre-sell your prospects so that, by the time they reach the sales letter, they are already sold.

1. Use a nice, juicy title. People are attracted to titles; so try to come up with something different and interesting—something that doesn’t scream “free report.” Make it compelling; you want people to give you their contact details in exchange for this report, so give a title that compels them to do so.
2. Make sure it’s fit-for-purpose. Every single contact you have with a prospect—be it through your website, by telephone, in person, by email or letter—must have a definite purpose regarding progressing your sale. And so should your free report. So think about it in that context; how does it progress your sale?
3. It needs to have an objective. A free report is not a bunch of tips and tricks thrown into a document; it is a marketing piece that should create a state of receptivity in your prospect by helping them along in the sales process. At the end, your prospect should be more ready to buy than they were before.
4. Focus on marketing, not sales. Peter Drucker told us that the purpose for marketing is to make sales obsolete. So, our mindset should be towards building a strong marketing campaign, not creating another sales pitch. Your free report should reflect that.
5. Pay attention to positioning. How and where does your free report fit into your marketing campaign? At what point should it be offered? The positioning of your report is imperative to overall success. Placed correctly, it serves as a perfectly-timed prelude to your product or service.
6. Give it value. A free report should have value beyond selling. So, include information worth reading. Make it relevant to your prospects; give them something valuable they can take away from the report itself.
7. Keep it balanced. A well-crafted free report finds the balance between providing useful stand-alone content and the right amount of enticement to make your readers want to know more. It speaks directly and indirectly about past results, without sounding too obvious. It hints at the “more to come” without becoming an overly-aggressive sales pitch.
8. Provide answers. Every reader will ask two things; “Who are you and why should I listen to you?” and “Why are you offering this and what will I get from it?” So make sure you answer those questions up front.

The free report can be an essential part of a strong marketing campaign; taking your prospects one step further in the progression to sales. By crafting your free report with a mind to marketing, rather than sales, by the time you’re readers are finished, the selling has already been done.