Narrowly Define and Focus

All along your advertising, marketing, and sales should have been grouped together under the same direction of "getting new clients" focusing on a defined target market and pursuing prospective clients. This only works when all three avenues of creating clients lines up with how your business is defined. What is your core business and what is your strategy and goals to effectively target and reach prospects of your core business? First, what is your core business? Focus on the product or service that creates 70% of your business. Then, find the mediums of getting clients that create the most return. If you aren't getting any sort of true representation of what the medium is producing in regard to prospects or physical clients then you need to find out how you can know for sure. What is actually driving your business? You must know as much of a full answer to this question as possible in order to plan your resources (aka money) accordingly and get a great ROI.

Scenario: You advertise in radio, tv, and internet and decide that you need to cut back advertising because the budget isn't there and you determine to cut back everything the same amount. Then try and rationalize this decision. Is this because you don't know which medium is most effective in reaching your target market? Is this because you consider brand awareness in a healthy dose of all advertising methods a good method for brand awareness? But how much is converting to sales? Maybe you knew the rate of return your advertising and marketing had 10 years ago but do you know the response you are receiving from your advertising choices now? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking on a consistent basis and know the answer AUTOMATICALLY. If you do not, you may be throwing money out the door, infact, you probably are.

Narrow focus on a core strategy that gets 70% of your business. This is 2 fold: First, draw in customers for a specific product or service. Example: If you're a car dealer but 70% of your sales is trucs, you need to focus on advertising to truck buyers. Get specific with who a truck buyer typically is. Differentiate yourself in this way. Narrowly define yourself to the public, give them an opportunity to respond. Then when they do, you can provide the other products or services you sell once you already have gained their trust and credibility.

Second, focus on "getting new clients" in mediums that get more reach, more frequency, and cost less to market to your target demographic.

What is available is changing rapidly. Do your homework or hire someone with experience and whose job it is to keep up with trends and learn what gives your company the greatest benefits for its investment dollars. Ever heard of value investing? This is value marketing. Same concept, different application. The market buys when everythig is going well and gets bad results. The market sells when everything is going down, which is the worst time to sell. Don't be a product of your emotions or of what the market says. Determine value by a strict standard of measuring the company's results. If you can't measure the results effectively, then get out and find something that you know the direct result of your efforts.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:
Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

Customer Retention (Series Article 5)

As a small business, you have a real advantage in that most cases the owner of the business is directly communicating with the customers. If it’s not the owner, he is still close in a chain of command to the actual client contact. The more opportunity you have for personal touch with a client, face to face time or a thankful phone call, the better. In our society, we are working to cut out as much time as possible in order to be more productive. This is necessary in some areas but cutting off the appreciation to clients for their business is going to greatly inhibit your ability to retain customers.

You may ask, why should we be so concerned about retaining customers after completion of the business or transaction? Satisfied customers are your best resource in that they speak highly of the product. Some will be referrals to your product or service. Others will simply speak well of you and your company. In either case, any opportunity to have a contact that is appreciative of your product or service is a free sales representative. They are a face for your company and will speak above and beyond your own personal sales pitch.

If you are a service based company, there is nothing better than a written thank you card. Email responses are never going to be received in the same manner or appreciated in the same way. The time put into writing a short thank you card and mailing it speaks volumes over your verbal thank yous. Anyone that has given you valuable advice and you want to say thank you above just a verbal thank you shows them that you appreciate them. Most people aren’t necessarily looking for pay but everyone appreciates recognition. These people will be more likely to help you in the future if they realize that you do really appreciate their help.

Secondly, people tend to expect more in regard to technical support than they used to. Or, maybe it’s that they are getting tired of automated phone services. Either way, quickly taking care of their concerns in regard to technical support or customer service is important. Also, having a “live” person to communicate with is a major plus. One company that does this extremely well is Apple. I can call anytime and have a highly competent person not only assist me but give me great advice. This is invaluable. Try to offer this. The more automated steps you have for customers to go through, the more likely it is for them to get confused and frustrated. Make it as simple as possible.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:

Your confidentiality will not be compromised.

Online Inbound Marketing- (Series Article 1)

Inbound marketing is simply informing a company of the traffic coming to your product or service.

We will first start with online inbound marketing.

You may already have heard of Hubspot, one of the several companies focusing in inbound marketing. Hubspot is a great resource for companies that are looking to maximize their opportunity to contact prospects over cold calling. The only problem with Hubspot is the never ending resource of information. You may need two people to take advantage of all the resources and really maximize your investment and return for the price of the service. For a small business and specifically in an economy where time is money, this may not be the version for you. There is now a small business model that is more affordable than the service than I am familiar with. I would be hesitant to invest in the small business version unless it is substantially better than the google analytics version. Maybe I will post on my research on that in the future! There is a proven success record for inbound marketing in converting consumers into sales leads.

One thing that you do want to take advantage of with Hubspot is the inbound marketing training made available FOR FREE.

The small business version that I prefer is Google Analytics.
The most helpful information I find from these inbound marketing tools is the hits and the links. These analytics will tell you where your website hits are coming from and how many. This is a way you can track your websites success and prospect. And this version is absolutely free!

In this tight economy, monitoring and interpreting your traffic is vital for a website. A website in it’s nature is a source of information and not a marketing tool in and of itself. Getting the full advantage of having a website is the traffic that comes along to know your prospective customer. These people are already aware of your brand or product and have come to get more information. So, now that you have their attention, you can prospect those clients with more confidence. Forget the endless hours of searching randomly for work. Move over cold calling…prospecting is now the name of the game.

Know someone that needs to hear this information, please pass this along. If you need assistance getting leads, prospects, and clients cost effectively, please contact me:

Your confidentiality will not be compromised.