Archive for customized marketing solutions
Are you preventing sales?
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Have you done a ‘secret shopper’ experience with your business?
Checking on your employees phone skills, sending someone to your physical location to see how your sales people do or browsing through your website regularly can help identify places where you might be shutting out buyers. You spend loads of time and money getting prospects to your business – isn’t it worth instituting a regular ‘check-up’ process to make sure you aren’t automatically slamming the door in your hard-won prospects face?
You might even be blaming your marketing, thinking what you are doing is not working, when the real problem is not that people aren’t knocking on your door – heck they might even be pounding on it – but their experience in trying to buy from you makes them run off fuming.
Think about your own experiences with difficult purchasing processes. It’s worth the investment to take some time to make sure the experience you are offering your prospects and clients the best possible experience that you can. Script the people who answer your phones – coach them on using the script and make sure they understand why it’s there, what it’s for and why each point in the script is important. It takes time for people to get comfortable with scripts, but that’s ok. Top professionals, actors, athletes – everyone who succeeds at top levels use scripts. You don’t want your sales people to sound scripted, so they need to learn it and make sure that each point in the script is covered, even if they stray from it after learning it.
If you need help designing and defining the processes to stay on top of you sales people and prospect interactions, check out the Customized Marketing Solutions Session – it’s the perfect way to get help clarifying, testing and fixing where you could be stopping your prospect in their tracks.
Direct Mail Strategies – The Best Way to Market Your Business Offline
Posted by: | CommentsOne of single best methods ever for marketing your business in the ‘offline’ world, even to this day is Direct Response Mail Marketing. And, you can take well designed direct mail strategies and campaigns online as well, building them in email, with sales pages, and even on social media.
The first step with any direct mail strategy is getting really clear on your target market. I recently heard a story about a direct mail campaign for a hearing aid company. After some research they discovered that someone who was married, who had a living spouse was something like 30% more likely to buy a hearing aid (I can’t remember the exact numbers, but it was seriously impressive). Then, when they dug a bit further, they discovered that someone who is married, with a living spouse who also owns their own home is even 20% more likely, on top of the 30% to buy a hearing aid (again – I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was something like this). If you get that clear on who you want to target you can buy a list using that very specific criteria, which will make your campaign trounce average direct mail strategies.
The next step in developing your direct mail strategies, is to design your campaign with multiple steps. Multiple steps will outsell single step mailings every time. You also want to spend some time learning copywriting, or hire someone to write your sales letter to make it highly effective. You have about 3.5 seconds to grab someones attention when they receive your mail – you don’t want to screw that up.
Also, it is essential to make sure there is a very specific offer and a reason to respond NOW (you need to create sense of urgency). Be sure that the instructions on how to respond to the offer are very clear – what do you want them to do? Do you want them to call? Visit your website? Come into your office? (Also, you will generally get a better response with more options of response – so you don’t just want to include your website, give them a number to call (toll free or not – you should test that to see which brings a better quality lead).
You also want to make sure you track and measure the process – that is often why businesses use coupon codes – you know exactly how someone got to you if they are using a specific coupon code.
Be sure to be creative, outrageous even – reaching out and grabbing people by the collar makes them sit up and take notice.
A good direct response sales letter can turn a business around, and can often be used for many years. Learn to write a good sales letter, find out as much as you can about target market and buy a list of the people who fit in it, then test your letter, then use what you learn to make the campaign even more effective.
Remember, multiple mailings out-pull single mailings – a second mailing will often double the overall response.
If you aren’t sure how to get started and want some help, take a look here.
What’s In A Niche?
Posted by: | CommentsThe answer? EVERYTHING.
Your business is dependent – completely dependent – on your niche. If you don’t have one, you are effectively shooting yourself in the foot.
There’s a saying in marketing, “If you’re for everyone, you’re for NO ONE.” It’s time to pay attention to that…
Most entrepreneurs, particularly when they are starting out, think that their product or service is good for everyone… if you are one of them, go back and read that previous sentence again. Making a decision to be FOR someone is absolutely essential to the success of your business. You must learn niche marketing, targeting your product’s or service’s message to a specific niche.
Here’s an example of an excellent niche… Goddess Boudoir Photography. The very talented Jessica Morrisy – who is an outstanding photographer, put together a niche for her business doing boudoir photography for women. It is abundantly clear that not everyone will want to use this service, but for those who are interested, she stands out as a great option. No worries about asking some random photographer if s/he is willing to do it – here’s someone who’s standing up and saying, “Hey, over here – I do exactly that!” Very smart, Jessica took the time to learn niche marketing, she selected a niche that would work well for her, and went for it. From what I understand, it’s working VERY well for her.
For most entrepreneurs, choosing a niche is like pulling teeth – they just don’t want to do it. I suggest that you take some time, look around you at the success of the small businesses and entrepreneurs and see who’s growing fastest. I can almost guarantee they have a clearly defined niche – in fact, they may have multiple niches – which is a great option, but let’s just start with one. If you aren’t sure, take a look at where most of your clients and customers are coming from – see if something has already begun to stand out. If not, then go back and do some research on which niche is most likely to respond best to your product or service. It doesn’t mean you can never work with other people, it just means you are going to stand up and say, “I’m FOR dentists,” or, “I’m for dog owners,” or whatever your specific niche may be.
Take some time to learn niche marketing – it will make a huge difference in your bottom line.
Lifetime Value of Your Customer (LVC)
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Do you know the lifetime value of your customer?
Do you know what that means?
If you said, “No” to either of these questions, you definitely need this post…
The Lifetime Value of Your Customer, or LVC as I’ll call it from now on, is what your average customer is worth over the entire time that they are your active client. So, if your average customer buys 3 times a year for 5 years and each time they spend $100 (just to make it easy), then the lifetime value of your average customer is $1500. It takes a bit of digging to come up with this information, but from a marketing standpoint, it’s pure gold.
Why, you ask? Well, because if you know that your customer is worth $1500 to you over the next 5 years, do you think you would be more willing to ‘shell out’ $5 or $10, or maybe even $100 to get them and keep them? What if you find out that your average customer is worth $10,000 to you over 5 years? Now how much might you be willing to spend to get him or her? Quite a bit, I would imagine.
I was fortunate enough to participate in an event recently where the fabulous Jordan McAuley was invited to speak. He showed a very clear understanding of this principle when he provided EVERY person in the room with a copy of his book, as his gift for attending the event. I don’t know exactly how much each book cost Jordan to have on hand, I know he had to bring a big box with him, I know he hung around and signed them for everyone, chatting and really building rapport. Never mind the instant good will giving the book out created, making people want to sing his praises…
How many of the people in that room do you suppose have gone home and checked out his website at http://www.contactanycelebrity.com? (By the way, there’s a free 7 day trial there – have heard great things about the resource and will be playing with it myself soon… and you can get a 30 day free trial if you get the book, which gets incredible reviews. I look forward to spending some quality time with it this weekend.)
You can get the book here: http://www.CelebrityLeverage.com.
Jordan brilliantly showed his understanding of the LVC of his prospects – if just a fraction of the people that got his book join his website and stay on board, those ‘free’ books will have been well worth it.
(Note: I have no affiliation with Jordan, other than I think he is an amazing guy who has really figured something out that can help and support small business owners and entrepreneurs. None of these links are affiliate links and I don’t get anything for writing about him, his book or his site.)
How Important Is Twitter?
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I host a teleseminar every other week where I answer entrepreneur’s questions about marketing their businesses (if you are interested, you can sign up at http://AskPayson.com).
This week I got a question about Twitter that I think can benefit a lot of people, so I’ll share it here.
Basically, the question was, “How important is Twitter?”
As someone who was able to use Twitter to create more than a 1231% increase in sales during the holiday season, almost exclusively using Twitter, you might think that I would say it is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Well, if that’s what you thought, you’d be wrong…
At least in part…
I believe Twitter is a great media for building relationships with prospects, growing your business and ultimately, creating sales, BUT IT CERTAINLY IS NOT FOR EVERYONE.
As an example, we’ll take my business. I help entrepreneurs of many sizes learn basic 101 marketing strategies, build customized marketing solutions and develop a marketing plan that will allow their business to kick some serious butt. Twitter is a phenomenal place for me to share information, build relationships and reach prospects. I use very specific strategies that I designed allowing me to limit my time and still be extremely effective. Clearly, Twitter is a good place for me – and it’s important to my overall marketing strategy.
Now, If you had a business marketing, for example, a retirement community to people over the age of 65 Twitter might not be the best use of my time and energy. It may seem a bit obvious (perhaps even a touch ludicrous), but that average age demographic of Twitter users is no where NEAR 65. If you chose to spend time, energy and maybe even some money building a great “Twitter Strategy” it would be an absolute and utter waste. In this instance Twitter is DEFINITELY NOT IMPORTANT.
So, how do you know if Twitter is important for your business?
You have to know who your target market is – EXACTLY who your target market is. Then you need to find out if they are playing on Twitter – and if they are, then you can build a strategy that will let you play with them, and if they aren’t you can figure out how to better use your time, energy and money.
