Radical Approach – Know thy Customer

One of my mentors told a Client (a manufacturer of drills) that

“People don‘t want your product.”

The president of this large manufacturing firm looked shocked but my mentor continued,

“Your Customers are not interested in drills with more bells and whistles.
They are in the business of making holes – and they want help with 2 things:

1) Making more holes in less time and
2) Making good quality holes

end of story.”

With these words of advice the manufacturer changed his entire marketing approach and for the following 5 years achieved sales records never seen in that industry before.

Think about it for a moment…
What do your Customers really want?
What specific benefit can you provide them with both today and in the future?
What are you waiting for?

How About Some Fishing?

We offer our Clients both the opportunity to learn/implement new strategies and the ‘pair of hands’ type consulting services where we roll up our sleeves to get the job done. What we’ve learned during the past 20+ years can be summarized as follows:

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. (Approximate cost: $25.00)

Teach a man to fish and he will go out and buy expensive fishing equipment, stupid looking clothes, a sports utility vehicle, travel 1,000 or more miles to the “hottest” fishing spot, and stand waist deep in cold water for hours covered with mosquitoes and flies just so he can outsmart a fish. (Average cost per fish: $1,495.68 mileage may vary – depending upon time available, quantity of fish biting, ability to maintain a calm and quiet demeanor and the level of patience on tap)

Summary: We’re always glad to help you to reel in a big fish – even if it means getting wet.

Contact us today.

Are You Running a RevGen Machine?

Here are 10 things I think about when a Client comes to us for help with their website.

1) Is there actually a market for your product?
By that I mean, are you absolutely positive that you’re selling a product or solution that people are actively looking for online – and not finding? That, by the way, is the formula for a successful business. The best way to answer this question is to do keyword research and confirm whether people are using search engines to look for a solution to the problem your product addresses — but not having any luck finding one. Our two favorite keyword research tools are Wordtracker and those available to Google Adwords users.

2) Are you getting enough traffic?
Before you can really judge your website’s effectiveness, you need at least 1,000 unique visitors (not pageviews). If you’ve only had 100 visitors and haven’t made a sale, be patient! You just need more traffic. Once you’ve reached 1000 visitors, then you can begin to assess how effective your site really is.

3) Are you getting targeted traffic?
If you’ve had 1,000+ visitors to your website and you still haven’t made a sale, find out where your visitor traffic is coming from. That’ll help you know if it’s targeted or not. The best way to get top-quality traffic to your site is by bidding on extremely targeted keywords in the pay-per-click search engines. By “targeted,” I mean, keywords that speak directly to the people who are most likely to buy your product. If you drive 1,000 visitors to your site using targeted keywords in your PPC ads and you still don’t make a sale, then we know the problem isn’t the quality of traffic you’re getting. It’s your website.

4) Is your headline effective?
If your site doesn’t have a compelling headline that clearly communicates a powerful benefit, your potential Customers aren’t going to stick around to read your offer. Writing a better headline is usually the easiest way to fix a floundering website. If you get more people to stay on your site and read your offer, more people will buy your product.

5) Are you distracting your visitors from your main sales message?
You need to get rid of everything that distracts your visitors. This includes: links to other websites, Google Adsense ads, banner ads for other products, free articles that don’t support the sale…
Keep your visitors focused only on buying your product and your sales will go up.

6) Are you using testimonials effectively?
Like I said in last month’s editorial, testimonials are one of your most powerful selling tools. Nothing says, “Buy it now!” like an unbiased third-party recommendation. If your site is brand new and you don’t have any testimonials yet, give your product to a few friends or better still – industry colleagues and ask them to provide you with testimonials and photos / videos on how well it worked for them.

7) Does your guarantee take away the risk of buying?
A good guarantee is an essential selling tool – especially on the Internet. Unless you’re a major brand (like Sony, Apple, Nintendo) that your Customers inherently trust, you need to let them know you’ll stand behind your product. Reassure them that if they’re not 100% satisfied they can send it right back for a full refund. And remember, a longer guarantee usually results in more sales – and fewer refunds!

8) Is your price too high? or too low?
Most people know that if you price your product too high, you’ll hurt your sales. But this can also be true if your price is too low. People get suspicious when the price is far below their expectations. They think it’s probably “too good to be true” – and as a result, they don’t feel confident making a purchase. Use some common sense when it comes to setting your price and do your market research to know where you fit into the market – consider your objectives… How do you want to be perceived – as a high end provider or a low price outlet etc.

9) Is your ordering system easy to use?
Just because you can figure out how to navigate through your ordering process, it doesn’t mean your average Customer can. If you want to make sure your ordering system is “user-friendly,” find a few friends who aren’t very Internet savvy and get them to order your product. Watch over their shoulders and take notes. Where did they get stuck? Make sure you fix whatever problems they encountered – because your potential Customers are encountering them, too!

10) Do you have good salescopy?
If you aren’t using well-written salescopy to sell your product, then you’ll never achieve online success. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter whether your particular site needs short copy or long copy, the fact will always remain: Your product isn’t going to sell itself! You need to find the right words to do the job. If you are not confident with your sales message, your text or your pitch, let us know, this is something we do for our Clients all the time… in fact, all of the above 10 items help to give you an idea of some of the services BoxOnline offers Clients to move their business forward so that they too can succeed with their online ambitions.

Marketing vs Sales

Ok, I admit it. I’ve wanted to tackle this one for years and now I’m going to do it. Ready?
Most entrepreneurs and many business people confuse and combine marketing and selling and this has got to stop because they are two very different types of activities. Please allow me to explain.

What exactly is Marketing? (most entrepreneurs get it wrong)
Marketing is bringing the market to desire your product or service. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The biggest obstacle to marketing effectiveness is attention span. Human attention has become the scarce resource of the information age. When you add it all up, more information is being generated in the next 24hrs than you could absorb in the rest of your lifetime. Paying attention is rare because time is scarce. Your marketing needs to break through the ever present information smog so that it gets the attention you want from your target audience. In an attention deficit society, consumers are forced to look for shortcuts. One of the most popular shortcuts today is to find an expert or a specialist that can do the thinking for you and then, even make decisions for you. Dan Kennedy said “Most people are simply wandering around with their umbilical cord in hand looking for a place to plug it in” Give them something to plug into with your marketing message.

What is Sales?
Sales activities get people to take action. Selling is about converting a prospect into a paying Customer. You may achieve this verbally in person, over the phone or in a recording or you may get results by using a well written and compelling sales letter. Your focus with sales is to get the order. Your focus with marketing is to create desire. It is usually that simple.

A bit of comparision: Sales effectiveness can be easily measured. Marketing effectiveness is a bit softer and thus, I would suggest to use marketing systems, strategies and tactics whose performance can be measured with metrics relevant to your business. Spend money on a good sales person and measure his/her performance but never throw money at marketing campaigns that don’t allow you to track conversion rates easily.