How Businesses Can Make Marketing Work
Take your marketing to new heights. Today, we’re going to go through practical and proven ways to take your marketing to new heights using techniques and strategies that are up to date. Sometimes, you have a customer that’s a bit skeptical, and the way that we like to overcome this is to make sure you have the answer to the question that they might have.
If they’re skeptical on the price of the product or the service that you’re going to be providing, give them reasons to not be. This could be something as simple as customer reviews and feedback from people that have already done this that gives you an elevation and prestige, and that might wipe away those negative thoughts and feelings.
Offer a Free Trial
One of the other things that you can do is offer a free trial or a lower priced trial of whatever it is that you’re doing. If you’re a pie shop, giving away a sample might remove the skepticism. If you’re a technology provider, dropping the price of one of your services so that they can get an idea and a taste and a feeling for how you work can be a great choice. This is known as a tripwire. It’s something that they trip over and go, “Oh, okay. This is good,” and then they get excited. It gives you a warmer way to start the relationship off as opposed to being cold and skeptical.
Make Sure Your Online Presence is Suitable
An easy way to give this away is online, so that means you need to make sure that your business is online and you have a good, active presence. That means that have a website that is updated regularly and have great content on there that could remove their skepticism. Twenty four hours a day, people can be looking up reviews about you and working out why they want to work with you. Have a Facebook page with lots of posts on it. If you don’t post regularly, get rid of your Facebook page. There’s no point having it. Don’t have social media channels for your business if you do not have yourself actively updating those channels. That’s at least once a month for a business that is offering high-value products, or a couple times a week if you’re selling to a business to consumer business that is selling pies, for instance.
Social Media Marketing
Social media. There are lots of different outlets. If you’ve moved online or you’re looking to move online, there’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, all these different things, and many more. You should think about how you use each of these different outlets. Twitter is great for small comments that people might go, “Oh, yeah. That’s good.” Just like a little SMS type of amount of comments.
Then, you have Facebook, which is what is called the casual social setting, which is where you have things where customers are commenting, and you’re putting up posts about why this is great and making people laugh at a funny photo or two. Then, you have LinkedIn. LinkedIn is your professional network where you’ll be putting things such as new advancements in pie recipes or other such things such as moving location or look at this happy prized pack that someone won, or whatever it is. LinkedIn is definitely more about the business, not about the community. Snapchat, for most businesses, is going to be required.
Snapchat will be exactly like Facebook but shorter. It’s just a small video service where you could share stuff like happy customer videos.
Pricing
Pricing is a big one that we should be discussing as well. People seem to hold themselves in a certain position that pricing is the number one thing that clients are looking for. I completely disagree with this. You go to any funky bar with the hipsters in their beards in Brisbane, and it is full of people paying for overpriced coffee. Why is that? The coffee doesn’t cost that much more to make. It hasn’t been digested by monkeys, and even if it had, why are we paying so much more for it there?
The reason is that everyone else is, and you want to fit in like everyone else. If you are hell bent on price personally, you have to think about the type of customer that you’re getting and if they’re the same as you and the same mindset as you. If they don’t have the same mindset as you, then you shouldn’t be looking at the price. If price is very important for your industry and there are no other identifiers and you’re running very, very lean, then you’ve got to have some seriously wicked awesome integrations with automation to make sure that if you’re making 5% or 2% on anything that you’re doing, that you’re able to deal with tens of thousands of customers as opposed to hundreds. In short, sell on the fantastic service, the fantastic product, the experience that they get. You want them to have a wonderful experience.
You Pay for the Experience
When you go to a hipster bar you’re paying for the experience. “Oh, this is kind of funky.” Same as going to the movies. You can watch the movie at home, but you’re paying to be the person that watched it first or one of the first people with the experience. The actual movie did not cost any different to be made. It’s just the way that it’s being shown, so change around the way that your business shows its products and services, and you better change around your pricing, and make sure that’s nor your identifier.
Do You Have a Recurring Income Stream?
Most businesses are moving to a model where there’s a recurring income stream for them, and there’s a little to no capital investment for their consumer. The reason for this is over time, it works out better for the business, and it means that the entry point for their customers is much lower. It also means that when planning for your exit strategy, your business is valued significantly higher than what it would have been if you didn’t have a recurring income stream. When you go to the bank and they say, “How much do you earn?” you can say, “Reliably, this is how much I earn.” Now, it doesn’t work for every business yet, but if you can think of a way that your product or offering can be delivered in a re-occurring way, you got to be on the road to victory.
I’ve said many times that I don’t pay a set price for a doctor to keep me healthy. They do this in third world countries, but they don’t do it in Australia. In third world countries, you pay the doctor only while you’re well. They want to make sure everyone is well because anyone that’s unhealthy and unwell, they don’t get money from, so it’s in their best interest to keep everyone well. If a whole community is paying a doctor only a few dollars a month to stay well, the moment that doctor finds anything that can make the patients better, it’s going to be in their interest to continue to make the patients better, and he gets a lot more money from everyone. Everyone is a lot more efficient. Do that with your business. That can apply to anything where you’re fixing anything. You could be a mechanic, replacing surfboard fins or whatever it is. Anything would work if you look at it like that.
Find out the Difference Between You and Your Competitors
You need to work out what the difference is between you and your competitors. You need to work out why you are the person they want to do business with, and then you need to market that strength and market the hell out of it. Jump on Facebook. Jump on all these different social media platforms. Start a YouTube channel. Write a book. Do all these things, which set you apart from your competitor. Have it so that they are no longer your competitor, and then you don’t have anyone to compete with. If you separate yourself and you become an industry leader by writing a book, by holding community sessions, by teaching people whatever it is that you do, the reaction will be “Wow, this guy really knows what they’re doing. They really know what they’re on about.” That in itself speaks strongly enough, and they’ll start working with you.
What I’ve Done
I’m doing all these podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels, all the things, and giving away lots and lots of knowledge and advice technically in business, in marketing, in life, in everything, and that doesn’t mean that I’m watering down my products. It’s showing people how things can be done, how things are meant to be done, and it’s showing them how much is out there. If you’re creating content that is engaging and helping your customers, it’s going to give you a platform to pivot off and maybe in the future, if you did want to make a book, a book is what I would call a business card on steroids. A book is going to absolutely throw you into the future. If you come to a client meeting and you have a book, they’re going to go, “Oh, this guy is good.”
If you’re selling pies, just a little e-book that’s only a few thousand words long that you can offer to clients will be better than nothing. Creating all this content sets you apart from your competitors because you’ve had a different walk of life than them and you have different goals in life than them. This screams throughout the content in whatever you’re creating. It elevates your prestige, and that in itself is great for credibility.
You Will Start to See the Results
Once you have credibility and you have content out there and you’ve got your website and you’re updating everything regularly, the next wonderful thing comes. Your conversions increase. I’m talking an average website gets between .5 to 2%. Someone that has great engaging content is 20 to 25%. Convert them from someone who’s just searching online to someone who’s actually jumping in and making actionable steps towards using you and your product. Create a following and a community around you and your product. Doing this will mean they are your spokesmen. They are your marketers, and they will believe in it.
I’ve got a fantastic company that we work with called Energy Boost Fitness, and he’s created a following, a cult following of 700 to 800 people, possibly more now. All these people, he’ll put up a post about an event, and 60 to 70 people, he’ll have from putting the post up to attending the event and paying to attend it at $70 to $80 ahead. They have faith in his decisions, and they have faith in the direction that he is pushing them and what they’re going to be achieving out of his recommendations.
Now, he might put this post up a couple times a year, but with a following like that and a conversion of nearly 10%, at those sort of numbers, he’s making $11,000 or he’s having $11,000 be spent from just that post. That’s pretty good. When you have a community around like that, it’s the best marketing you can ever do. These events that he organises have people rock up and they’ve all got power finale. They’ve either made that matched his branding or they’ve bought branded items from him in way of shirts and so on, to make sure they’re looking like a community and all working together. It’s crazy, and that’s what you need to do. Make a cult following around your business.
Talk to Your Customers Individually
When you’re focusing on your marketing online, make sure that you’re talking to your customer. Don’t talk to the group of customers. If you have five or 10 different types of customers that you work with regularly, write up and create a different name and personality for each of those 10 customers, and then write up and create a different branding profile for each of those 10 customers. Think about what would their favourite colour be. Would they rather go on a yacht or would they rather go on a ship, or would they rather just spend the weekend golfing? What would their interests be? Do they have kids? Do they have a wife? Do they have a husband? What are they? Who are they? How are you going to market to them? A great example would be, if you have a celebrant who is selling her services, wedding packages, if she is to say that she marries everyone, that’s not speaking to anyone, but if she specifically states in one of her marketing campaigns that she marries LGBT members and that is her specialty and she has photos up there with rainbows and lovely same-sex couples and so on, when her community members see that, they will then go, “Wow, that’s amazing. Oh, that’s really great. She is the one that we want to go with,” because you’re going to speak more strongly than anyone else.
This can work for any business. If you’re a plumber, you can just as easily install a hot water system as you can replace a tap within reason. If you advertise yourself as a hot water specialist, that will mean that anyone that has a hot water problem is going to come to you because they see that that’s what you’re doing above and beyond anything else. When you start talking to them and start having a discussion with them and you’ve already got them through the gate and they’re no longer a lead, they’ve been qualified, and they’re now a client, and they’ve dropped some coin on you, you can then start talking about other services that you do. They’re going to be, “Oh, you can replace taps as well? Well, that’s great. That’s awesome. We’ll keep this guy on our record.”
The Final Word
In closing, make sure that overall, your business is online. You’ve removed skepticism. You’ve made a pricing strategy that works long term for your business and works for your clients for you to stay profitable. Make sure that you’ve got great credibility, and establish yourself as an industry leader to increase your conversions. Focus on your marketing, and make sure that you’re using a sniper marketing approach where you’re talking directly to your customers so that your customers are listening directly to you. I hope this has been helpful, have a nice day, and stay good!
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