Will Pull Marketing Generate Leads?

If you know your prospects and have their contact details in your CRM system or database, well… pull marketing may not be the most effective method to use for increasing sales leads this month. That said, it could be a viable way for converting prospects into Customers using our Triangle of Trust process if you have some very compelling content to give away to your prospects as teasers.

Folks, if you need new business from potential Customers that are currently unknown to you… pull marketing can be a highly effective weapon in your arsenal. Many people have asked us to present a list of best practices when they need more leads for their business so we collected a few of the best tips and posted them here for your review – hope it helps to answer some of your questions. If you’d like more concrete information or a customized process map, just get in touch with our sales team by filling out this form. Just to be sure that we are on the same page, please understand that it is essential to integrate push marketing techniques to support your pull marketing efforts. This helps to ensure that your brand’s buzz generates leads that you can convert into sales.  A good pull campaign will:

• engage your audience in a dialogue
• compile consumer data
• build and maintain trust
• provide value to the Customer
• compile leads
• empower your Prospect and Customer
• provide an authoritative knowledge base about your brand or niche
• increase your search engine visibility
• give your Customer the tools they need to inform others about your product or brand

Here are a few action steps to get you started.

Establish your marketing objectives:

What exactly is your goal? What will you use to measure your success? Once you have established your optimal end result you can begins to lay out a road map of specific milestones which will help you to achieve your goal in a timely fashion.

Master your keywords:

Which search terms do you want maximum visibility for? B6 Group has developed a set of processes to create first page search results in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other engines for virtually any long tail keyword. Always consider optimizing the ‘buying terms’ (those keywords that carry the highest potential for commercial intent). Positioning articles, pages and lenses for a wide variety of buying terms is an effective step in each campaign. For example; instead of focusing on “widget”, strive to target phrases such as “widget price”, “cheapest widget” or “buy widget”. Microsoft has an effective tool for measuring terms with commercial intent here.

Know your PPC

Get very familiar with driving traffic for low cost using PPC. In order to achieve this objective, you will need to achieve a high quality score on your landing page which means that the page your PPC ad points to must be highly relevant to the keywords in your Ad and it helps if the keyword is also included in your URL, your title tag and even your domain name.

Empower your Customers:

A well run campaign will give consumers the tools that they need to send your brand “viral”. If you gain your Customer’s trust and provided them with value, they will not hesitate to spread the word. Integrate your brand with social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg or Squidoo.  The key value to your brand in this category is that you are giving the Customer an opportunity to do your marketing for you, as well as providing valuable feedback and metrics.

Video:

Videos are useful in two primary ways. First, a video allows you to provide value to your Customer. Information always has value and a video is the most effective way to transmit your message. Secondly, a video that is hosted on Youtube, Google Video or metacafe is an excellent vehicle for traffic generation. Next time you check out a YouTube video, click the link under the user avatar and chances are you will wind up on a sales page.

Social Bookmarking:

Always distribute links to your blog posts, web pages, press releases and videos to social bookmarking services such as StumbleUpon, del.ic.us, reddit to name a few.

Interaction:

Get out there an begin a dialog, learn how to tweet, set up accounts on facebook, twitter and other social networking sites in the name of your business or your product and then personally develop the dialog with your target market. You can search for prospects, interact with them directly and even pitch them in real time but be careful… social media is extremely powerful and can have lasting results on your brand image so be prepared before you cross the line. If you always act with your Customer’s best interests in mind, you should do just fine. An examples of how to do it right can be found here.

Link Building:

Link building will increase your search engine rank and increase your online visibility. We can organize a unique linking system that is proven to place your website among the first page results for all major search engines. One easy method of gaining search visibility is to swap links with the owners of other websites, or include a url with comments wherever possible. Remember that on-site linking with good quality, long tail anchor text is equally important to off-site linking from other sites and article directories. Try to focus on optimizing each page for one single keyword and you can expect to experience a real boost in SERP rankings.

If you have specific questions or wish us to prepare a quote to help you with one of your projects, you can always reach us with questions.  Remember that an effective pull marketing campaign is only effective if it is thoroughly planned and executed in a professional manner.  A really effective pull marketing campaign requires months of planning and years of daily maintenance and execution.

Push and Pull?

One significant marketing trend in recent years has been the growing use of pull marketing techniques and channels.  Outsell, Inc., a media research firm, recently estimated that U.S. marketers will spend $65 billion in 2009 on their websites, which are constructed for the purpose of pulling Customers.  MediaPost recently reported that U.S. spending on search engine marketing (another pull marketing technique) will grow from $12.2 billion in 2008 to $22.4 billion in 2013.

Strictly speaking, pull marketing refers to marketing communications that are initiated by the prospective Customer.  In a general sense pull marketing is a distinct approach to marketing that relies heavily on engaging or informational communications to engage with potential Customers.  The single most important characteristic of good pull marketing communications is that the content is not overtly promotional.  The primary focus of most pull marketing efforts is on providing information that prospective Customers will consider to be valuable.  So for example, you might create a series of white papers, recorded webinars, articles or even micro-sites that address a concern your Customers have raised. We can show you how to efficiently discover your Customer’s concerns online and then deliver an ongoing stream of information to help both your Customers and Prospects get back in sync with your brand values and core messages.

The basic objective of pull marketing is to demonstrate your expertise and thereby establish your company as a credible and trusted source of information about a particular subject matter area. By doing this, you have provided the consumer with value even before they consider buying your product. When potential Customers go looking for solutions that fall within your area of expertise your company is more likely to receive favorable consideration because you have already established a bond of trust with the consumer.  Better yet, consumers who trust and value your content and products are more likely to use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to help build your buzz.

The effectiveness of traditional push marketing techniques is clearly declining. The fact is that people like you and me are bombarded with up to 3,000 advertisements each and every day! It’s a wonder that we are able to remember any of these ads. Sure, chances are still good that the ones that appeal to our sense of humor have at least a shot at our daily top 10 list but we have our own agenda today and we have access to the internet which means that we can PULL information that we need toward us when we need it.

The Internet has also contributed to the diminished effectiveness of traditional push marketing.  We have become confident that we can use the Web to find information about almost any product or service.  More importantly, we are confident that we can obtain that information whenever we want or need it. We rarely pay attention to marketing messages that aren’t relevant to our immediate interests or priorities.

Pull marketing is growing because marketers have recognized that their prospects are determined to control when and how they access marketing information.  Rather than fighting this mindset, savvy marketers are using pull marketing techniques to build credibility and trust enabling potential Customers to obtain the information that they want exactly when they want it.  We don’t believe that pull marketing will ever replace push, but it has become an essential strategy for many companies to reach out to those prospects that live by today’s social networking norms. 

Today’s most effective marketing programs are often a combination of push and pull.  For example, I frequently receive e-mails (push) that invite me to attend a Webinar (pull), watch a video (pull) or download a white paper (pull).

Are you ready to integrate pull marketing? Click here and let us know if we can help you set up a successful strategy.

What Does Your Business Need Today?

Every business needs to succeed in at least 4 out of 6 core areas in order to survive
and all 6 areas if they want to prosper. These areas are:

• 1) Create products that Customers want to buy
• 2) Generate sustainable and healthy profit margins
• 3) Sell products / services profitably
• 4) Generate new sales leads
• 5) Convert prospects into Customers efficiently
• 6) Run a productive organization

We frequently coach our Clients to achieve success in each of these 6 main areas. If we could help you to improve any one of these categories – where would you want us to start?

Give us a call, let us know your thoughts.

How Fast Can You Achieve Results?

Success is about planning and process. Sure, there is more to it but it really boils down to knowing your goals and then planning the steps needed to achieve those goals

Did you know that 50% of a manager’s job is trying to figure out where the company is going in the next five years while the other 50% is supposed to be focused on execution. The latter seems to present a formidable challenge for most execs but the interesting thing is that know-how and technical proficiencies are not the major obstacles here.

Most managers today are burdened with issues such as a lack of time, insufficient planning, unclear communication, lack of accountability, no mentor or senior leadership to guide them, low commitment to getting a job done well, lack of determination, lack of passion for what they do, lack of focus and discipline etc. There you have it – the no holds barred – anything is possible – year 2000ish – next generation manager’s issues in one simple paragraph.

What to do… alas, what to do…

Here’s some food for thought:
1) Get organized and set some clearly defined goals for both yourself and your company.

2) Break those goals down into smaller and easier to achieve stages.

3) Create a vision of your best outcome scenario.

4) Be able to clearly communicate your outcome to others.

5) Write down a plan to accomplish the tasks involved with achieving success in each stage. Be sure to include milestones and metrics.

6) Be determined to focus the majority of your time and efforts on your goals.

7)  Remember to take a few days off each week to do other things and recharge your batteries.

8) Celebrate your success each time you achieve a milestone.

Want to take a shortcut to success?  Just drop us a line and let us know why we should help you. Five lucky winners will be chosen next month.

Push or Pull?

With SEO initiatives trying to wrestle with the ubiquity of search engine dominance in our daily quest for information… it turns out that if you really want to succeed in promoting and selling products online, you need both push and pull strategies in place before you launch.

OK, sure, social networking technologies have raised the bar even further so that pull strategies are no longer an option… they are a must have for online marketing success. So, let’s start with some brief definitions and then move into a few suggestions.

Marketing theory distinguishes between two main kinds of promotional strategy – “push” and “pull”.

Push marketing is where you develop advertising and promotional strategies geared toward your marketing and distribution channels to entice them into promoting your product. As consumers, we rarely see this type of marketing because it is directed to the importers and distributors. It might include wholesale discounts, kickbacks, bonuses, and other types of support. It’s all designed to have the retailer promote your product to the end users instead of promoting a different or competing product.

Pull marketing on the other hand is when you develop advertising and promotional strategies that are meant to entice the prospect to buy your product or service. Some classic examples are Sales Events such as “bring in this coupon to save 25%” or “buy two get one free” etc. With pull marketing, you are trying to create a sense of increased, time limited value so that the Customer will come into your store to buy something today. When companies encourage happy Customers to spread the word to their friends and families – that’s a type of pull marketing also known as referrals or word of mouth (WOM) marketing. When companies produce ads that are controversial, edgy or downright shocking, they create a ‘buzz’ – and that’s another type of pull marketing. The ad pulls prospects into the distribution channel and if done well – right into the retailer’s arms.

It can be inferred from the above descriptions that Push is generally used by larger organizations with minimal if any direct contact with consumers (thus B2B) and Pull is preferred by the retailer (B2C) who deals directly with consumers and needs more sales this week. As technology provides increased and direct access to the consumer – larger organizations are starting to see the light – they too want to own a piece of the consumer’s attention.

Until recently, TV was the medium of choice for launching pull campaigns but the costs are high and the metrics are delayed so success can only be measured months later – much too late to change tack. Most large firms lack experience in communicating with consumers online and given their sloth like execution speed, achieving success with cost effective pull strategies can quite a challenge.

Online, this is a different story as long as the pull strategy is process based, systematized and supported by a team of experienced online marketers. Yes… online, large firms can help foster communities, create buzz, influence the winds of change and even view the success metrics of a pull campaign in close to real time.

The questions are:
Are large firms ready for real-time interaction?
Are they able to read the metrics, see the wind changing and then tack in time to catch the next breeze?
or do they still wish to act like supertankers heading toward the same destination with no regard for wind and weather?

Let’s dig a bit deeper… before responding.

Push

A “push” promotional strategy makes use of a company’s sales force and trade promotion activities to create consumer demand for a product. Typically this involves a reasonable investment in materials to get things rolling and placed in the right hands for maximum effect along the chain of distribution. The producer’s cost for push campaigns is often complemented by wholesaler’s and retailer’s advertising campaigns that are used regularly to drive traffic and leads into their shops.

Following the distribution chain, the producer promotes the product to wholesalers, the wholesalers promote it to retailers, and the retailers promote it to consumers.

A good example of “push” selling is mobile phones, where the major handset manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson and Nokia promote their products via retailers such as Carphone Warehouse. Personal selling and trade promotions are often the most effective promotional tools for companies like these – for example offering subsidies on the handsets to encourage retailers to sell higher volumes.

A “push” strategy tries to sell directly to the consumer, bypassing other distribution channels. With this type of strategy, consumer promotions and advertising are the most likely promotional tools.

Pull

A “pull” selling strategy is one that requires high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up demand for a product.

If the strategy is successful, consumers will ask their retailers for the product, the retailers will ask the wholesalers, and the wholesalers will ask the producers.

A good example of an effective (but expensive) pull strategy is the intense advertising and promotion of fast food restaurants and also kiddie toys – mostly on TV. Fast food restaurants often use children’s toys as a hook in order to target the primary influencer (the child) and insert desire into this very vocal and assertive segment of the population. Parents find it very challenging to resist visiting the restaurant that their child talks (and often sings) about day after day and hour after hour.

Thus, in this example, the producer creates demand using a loss leader to lure their target into the retail shops. Ten years of research has revealed that the more memorable and emotional the promotion is – the better the ROI.

In the online world, there are many different ways to create demand including leveraging social networks, viral tactics, videos, mobile phones, software applications and utilities like Twitter and community forums. The online difference is that the internet is quite transparent to feedback (both positive and negative). Marketers need to be aware of and plan for damage control to minimize the impact that potentially disruptive individuals can have on their pull campaigns.

Sure, you can filter out negative comments and such but, with social networking… the consumer really has a voice in this medium and the marketer’s task is often to convert the negative input into something more neutral should it occur while driving more and more traffic toward the core promotional message and thus the distribution channel.

Over-delivering on promises and flooding the media with video testimonials has helped many of our Clients overcome undesirable input by drowning out the noise of negative feedback or converting it into something more positive and constructive.

The focus of an effective online pull promotion is to create consumer demand for a reasonable cost and have consumers pull the product into a given online or OFFLINE distribution channel.

With careful planning and best practices pull campaign success is easier to achieve today than ever before. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in creating, launching or maintaining pull campaigns online. We have an entire library of process maps dedicated to serving our Clients with proven methods to achieve pull strategy success.

Did you know this about SEO?

Here are a few facts that most people don’t know about Ranking their sites in the Search Engines:

1 – Any Page that you make and publish creates Google Page Rank that is greater than ZERO.

This violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics
“Matter (Page Rank) is neither created nor destroyed”.

Google doesn’t care. Every time you publish a web page and it gets crawled, it gets assigned Page Rank just for existing.

That means that the more legitimate, non-duplicate pages you have on your site, the more you can affect your OWN rankings with internal links!

2 – Duplicate Content “OFF-SITE” is practically irrelevant.

“ON-SITE” Duplicate Content will kill your rankings.

3 – Your Web Page Template (Navigation Links, Footer Content, Side Bar Content) counts in the Duplicate Content calculation.

That means if your Web Page Template’s content has 200 words, and the rest of the content on your page is 50 words, you probably have Duplicate content issues.

4 – The Google Cache Date of any web page can indicate the relative power of the links on that page.

The more CURRENT (Fresher) Google’s Cache date of a web page is, the more likely that the links on that page are getting counted. If the page cache is CONSTANTLY getting updated, that’s a pretty strong sign that the links are getting counted MORE than a page where the cache date is OLD.

Want to optimize your site for the search engines so that you improve your position and ranking?
Then let us know about your needs by clicking here

Features, Advantages and Benefits

Hey there,

Why is it that most people in business think that they are going to sell what they have by delivering a list of features along with a few reasons why someone should buy their product?

The truth is that there is a much deeper psychological process behind making a decision to buy something than most business people realize.

When selling to Consumers, the pitch must appeal to a buyer’s emotions or the sale is simply not going to take place. When selling B2B, keep in mind that the buyer is still a human being with needs and a strong desire to succeed – a benefits oriented approach has been proven to be more successful than any other technique we tested during the past 20 years.

If you’re ready to sell something, we are ready to help you create a winning pitch.

The first step is a bit of homework so grab a pencil and some paper and get ready to answer a few questions:

• Write down a list of your competitors and their websites
• Write down what they’re doing, what they’re offering etc.
• List their product’s benefits

Ahh, now we come to the core purpose of this article…

Do you know the difference between features, advantages and benefits?

A feature is what a product has. In essence, the core components of your product or service; sometimes referred to as the bells and whistles or buttons, knobs, levers, switches, format, platform etc.

An advantage is what the product does or how it performs against a competitive product. A vacuum for example, is a product that might have the advantage that it doesn’t need bags. Another advantage would be that it can clean the floor in a room without you being present. In a services business one advantage would be the number of years of experience you bring to the table or your level of certification. Some common advantages include words like fast, easy, simple, cheap and good.

A benefit is what a given feature means to your prospect in terms of emotions and passion. A true benefit goes really deep and says something about how it makes you feel – a really great benefit gets a consumer excited because it means something special to the buyer.

Here’s a good example. One of my Clients sells a facial cream online and she called it something like, microderm abrasion emulsion – essentially it is a cream that helps reduce wrinkles.

On her website she listed several features such as ‘it reduces wrinkles’, ‘it comes in an easy to use home care kit’, ‘it is pH balanced’ etc etc etc.

When she came to me to help increase sales, conversions and traffic… I asked her to:
Take a piece of paper and create three columns.
List as many features as you can in the first column.
In the second column, list what you believe are the top benefits.
She wrote down ‘because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger’ and ‘because it comes in a home care kit, it is easy to use at home’ and the third one was ‘because it is pH balanced, it’s gentle on your skin’.

As politely as possible I let her know that those are really advantages not benefits so we continued the exercise and I asked her to list in the third column what she felt the ultimate end result for her Customer was going to be – in other words, ‘the ultimate benefit’.

Here is what she wrote:
‘If it makes you look younger: then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will know your true age, you’ll fall in love all over again and you’ll be able to attract that person you’ve had your eye on.’

‘Since it’s easy to use at home: you won’t suffer embarrassment by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home.’

‘Since it’s gentle on your skin: there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like surgery or those harsh chemical peels people usually buy.’

We had arrived…
These were descriptions of how Customers would feel before, during and after they used the product.

In a very short time she was able to list several of the true benefits her product offers to her Customers. She took this piece of paper and changed her website to reflect the benefits. She also adapted every piece of marketing material including all advertising (online and offline), all landing pages, sales letters and Customer communications and within 2 months her sales doubled. One month later sales doubled again. Then she adapted the packaging to reflect the new text and sales doubled again. Sure we did some work on conversions and 6 months later, she was not able to buy as much traffic as she wanted – not even from Google ,Yahoo and MSN combined… Folks, this stuff really works! I’ll let you guess if I am referring to the creme or the marketing process here.

Remember, real benefits go deep. They live within the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person wanting or using your product. In order to increase your sales you will need to tap into that sweet spot and then use the real benefits in everything you produce to help sell the product.

What is Lateral Thinking and Do I Need It?

Two of the services we frequently use with our Clients are Idea Generation and Problem Solving. We approach both challenges with very different, process oriented methods but there is one thing that remains constant – Our ability to think laterally and come up with novel concepts by looking at situations in new and different ways. Many of our Clients are so deeply involved in an issue such as their daily business that they find it hard to change perspective and see things from an alternative angle. This is where we come in… we tend to see things that are ‘outside the box’.

Vertical thinking, also known as logical thinking, takes an idea and carries it forward. Lateral thinking, on the other hand, provokes fresh ideas and essentially changes the frame of reference in almost any situation. Vertical thinking tries to overcome problems by dealing with them head-on, lateral thinking attempts to bypass obstacles using a variety of different approaches.

In essence, Lateral thinking is a tool that helps us change our way of thinking about something often by modifying our perceptions.

With logical thinking you start out with certain given components and boundaries wrapped in a process. This is similar to the situation in chesswhere you start out with specific pieces and are expected to play by the rules. The issue is that in most real life situations, we can not use the chess model or logical thinking to solve problems because you don’t know what the pieces are, what they represent or how many pieces actually exist… knowing the rules is almost irrelevant to solving a problem or generating new ideas.

Throughout our lives we are handed several different rulebooks (cultural, social, business oriented etc). When we get these rulebooks we just assume that the components that the rulebooks refer to, simply exist and we tend to accept that certain boundaries and limitations are present because they were mentioned in the rulebook. Lateral thinking throws out the rules and assumptions as well as the boundaries and limitations so that we are free of our social, cultural, geographic and demographic bonds.

Lateral thinking focuses on changing some element to enable a new and fresh perspective of a given situation. Lateral thinking deals primarily with perception. By using lateral thinking techniques we can organize the external world into the pieces that we can then process. Perhaps more importantly, by observing lateral thinking in others we can generate new ideas and better understand how they perceive the world around them.

The brain is a self-organizing information system that forms asymmetric patterns. In such systems there is a mathematical need for moving across patterns. The tools and processes of lateral thinking are designed to achieve such lateral movement to accomplish a given result.

A famous person once said that you can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper. Think about that for a moment… If you were driving in a car on the highway but your intended destination is behind you, driving faster while keeping the car on the same heading will not get you to your intended destination.

If you were to continue thinking about a problem or a solution in a given way, this may not be as useful as changing tact and trying something completely different. Additional effort in the same direction will not necessarily help you get the results you were after but applying some proven tools designed to turn the car around, may offer you options that you never knew existed. It’s a format of thinking ‘out of the box’ and our Clients believe that we are very good at it. It may be because we do it frequently.

If you have a challenging problem or need some new ideas, please, fill out our form and allow us to get in touch with you today.

What Exactly is Marketing?

Marketing is: The science of finding prospects and turning them into profitable Customers for your business. Let’s have a look at the 3 core elements in this statement:
– Science:
When I use the word ‘science’ here, I am referring to the methods and approaches that have been carefully tested and refined over time that deliver successful results. In marketing, doing things right incorporates metrics to measure results, testing to understand what works best and ROI accountability to know what elements and methods deliver a better return over time.

Here at BoxOnline we have been testing and retesting hundreds of approaches since our launch in 1999. We have followed the scientific method to eliminate all sorts of approaches that do not work well. We have also identified a few amazingly good approaches that seem to deliver exactly what our Client’s want time and time again. These sort of methods are what we refer to as proven methods. Today, we only offer proven methods to our Clients.

– Finding Prospects:
We often start by building a profile of your prospect(s) so that when your sales message reaches one, it connects with them and they find your offer irresistible. If we did not do this, the sales message would likely fall on deaf ears.

– Turning them into profitable Customers:
Our objective is to persuade prospects to act in a measurable way. We want to be able to measure our performance and know how well a given approach is working and what the difference is after a change has been made to a campaign.

Our marketing formula is based on something that has been dubbed the Business Friendship Model.

Consider how people make friends. The actual process is:
1) Get someone’s attention
2) Connect with them based on a common theme
3) Emotionally commit to do something with each other in the future
4) Act on the commitment by getting together again or doing something thoughtful for them such as buying a gift.

Often a business owner wants his business to appear larger and mightier than it actually is and thus they try to create an image of being a large corporate firm. We rarely support this sort of thinking because our experience has shown that when you try to behave like a big company, you de-personalize your relationship with prospects. In our research, small businesses grew faster when they were fueled by relationships rather than by expensive image campaigns.

So, what does a business typically do when they want to build a relationship with a new prospect?
1) Run Ads to get their attention
2) Relate to the prospect in the Ad
3) Get prospect to respond and commit emotionally
4) Get prospects to act

Well, Consumers don’t necessarily want to follow this process because they have needs of their own and based on our experience here is what prospects actually want:
1) that you, (the business) pay attention to them
2) that you, want to connect with them
3) that you, want to make a commitment to help them
4) that you, want to act on that commitment and are ready to deliver a desirable result to them

Does this make sense to you? If you are able to think like a prospect, it should. If it doesn’t, let us know… We’d love to hear your opinion – especially if you have a product to sell.

The Psychology of Sales

Sure, there are boatloads of books on this topic so I’ll do my best to keep this article brief, helpful and to the point. First, this page is dedicated to the many kind folks I meet each day who really need help selling their products and services.

Products and services are wonderful things from both the perspective of the consumer or Customer and the person or company that is offering or selling the products and services. For starters, the consumer gets some form of benefit from the products or services otherwise there would be little reason to purchase them. The seller, likewise receives a benefit in the form of compensation, usually monetary. The difference is that the consumer gets value whether perceived or real from the transaction or the receipt of the product / service.

How the consumer perceives this value is the topic of this article today.

From here on out when I mention the word ‘products’, please understand that I mean both products and services.

Here are my suggestions when you want to sell a product to a given target market.

1) Know your target market well.

That means that you need to understand who they are, how they tick, what they like and dislike etc. If you have hundreds or thousands of Customers this goes for you too – that is what databases are for!

Let’s start with something basic like Motivation Strategies.
Are your Customers motivated TOWARD something or Motivated AWAY FROM something?
If you were to ask them why they purchased your product, what would they say?
More importantly, what would you learn from their response?

If you were to ask your Customers something neutral such as “What did they do this past weekend?” and then follow up the question with “Why did you do X this past weekend?” Chances are good that you will learn something about their motivation strategy.

If they were to answer that they “went to the mountains to ski” this would indicate that the person is likely to be motivated TOWARD something and thus, they tend to know what they want and they will move toward their goal of getting what they want.

If the response to question 2 were “to get out of the city” then you might guess that this person is motivated AWAY FROM something and this sort of individual knows exactly what they don’t want.

In order to sell to these two very different types of people, you need to be able to identify their motivation strategy quickly and then apply a marketing tactic even quicker. Your first step is to create two sets of marketing tools from business cards and form letters to signs, messages and selling phrases that you will learn by heart. Your purpose is to communicate with your prospect effectively using their choice of motivation strategy so that your message is accepted with gratitude and your offer is given priority consideration.

If you wanted to sell a massage to a person that is motivated AWAY FROM something, your marketing message may be something like:

– Want to relieve stress?
Come visit our Spa on the 3rd floor right now.
(special offer limited to the first 5 people, today only)

– Need to get away from it all?
Experience our 100 minute vacation
(Hurry, we only have 4 slots left)

If you wanted to sell the very same massage to a person that is motivated TOWARD something, your marketing message may be something like:

– Are you ready to relax?
Our experienced massage therapists are waiting for you on the 3rd floor.
(special offer for first time Clients – today only)

– Would you like a treatment that is usually only offered to top athletes?
Sign up for a medical massage on the 3rd floor today – there are only a few slots left.

In addition to knowing your Client’s motivation strategy, learn all you can about them and take notes so that you can communicate in a very personal and meaningful way in the future. For example, if you do not see a Client after several weeks, why not send them a thank you note for their last visit and mention a few personal things in the note that would perhaps encourage them to get back in touch with you. When they contact you, present them an offer that they would find hard to resist.

2) Always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS include a benefit in your marketing message. Just to be clear, I am referring to a benefit that your Customer experiences when they do business with you.

3) Incorporate some form of scarcity in your offer – there may be thousands of X available but to many people, the perception of scarcity is a very powerful magnet.

4) Upsell and Cross Sell at the appropriate moment but do it as often as possible. This is a lesson learned from McDonalds and it pays off royally. Have you ever been to a restaurant where they asked you if you wanted fries with your order? That would be an example of a cross sell. If you heard someone ask a Customer if they wanted a large order of fries for only 20 cents more, that would be an example of an upsell. Do not miss out on this essential element of profit building unless you really want to leave money on the table.

5) Practice each of the above suggestions with Clients, Customers, Prospects, Friends – you have nothing to lose

6) Test variations of the above to improve your results and keep track of what works and what does not work.

7) Reserve time in your schedule for building relationships. Many of our Clients are so busy delivering products that they forget to keep relationships warm. The result is that they have to work extra hard to acquire more new business. It is much easier to keep a Client than it is to find a new one so, spend a few hours each week, keeping tabs on your Customers and going out of your way for the ones you really want to keep. The idea is to grow the business you do with your best Customers in such a way that you build a lifetime of value into the relationship. Build those relationships and they will pay off big time.

Naturally, we offer our Clients courses in the above areas with the implied benefit that knowledge will increase their sales but we do things a bit differently over here. We select our Clients very carefully, only a few applicants are accepted each time we open the doors but those that make it through have a compelling business case and a determined desire to succeed. These are the kind of folks we enjoy helping. We could guarantee that our methods will double your sales or you get your money back but instead, we often opt for a success based fee thus, we only get paid if our efforts deliver results. Have you ever worked with a company like that before? Come on, give it a try and apply for a chance to be one of our top performing, revenue generating Clients today.