For many small business owners and marketing professionals, the results from their marketing efforts can be sporadic and unpredictable. Often times your marketing efforts seem to work, but other times they are miserable money sucking failures.
If you are sending out “ad-hoc” marketing messages that may create demand one day and none the next, then you do not have a system. All you have is a random marking tactic that happened to work one day.
To avoid this you must have a reliable, predictable, nearly automatic program that will deliver quality leads and
customers with the least amount of money possible. Your marketing must become systematic at targeting your
ideal customer for a particular product or service and then move them along the sales funnel until they either say “no” or they become a customer.
Without this steady stream of leads and customers coming in, you will never have the security of knowing what is
coming around the corner.
“But Marketing Is Expensive….” You say. It’s not expensive unless it doesn’t work. You should be prepared for some level of failure when developing a system. But once you have a system built that returns a profitable amount of customers in relation to the dollars spent on marketing, you can repeat your efforts as often as you like.
Predictably “turning on or off the faucet” as your business needs dictate. This scalability factor is very important to being able to grow your business or keep it at a level that you feel comfortable with. Either way, having a system is the only way to get reliability of sales and profits.
“So How Much Should I Spend?” There is no free lunch when it comes to acquiring customers. If you have a customer that is worth $2000.00 and you are willing to spend $50 to get that customer, then you might as well give up now. But if you have been spending $1500 to get that customer in the past, then developing a system can end this waste.
“I Don’t Have Time for All of this Marketing” You have to make the time or hire the right people to get this in place. There is no more important activity in your small business then generating the activity that will drive future sales.
“So What Makes Up My Marketing System?” This is where testing, testing and more testing will come in to place. A hypothesis must be developed as to what will attract your ideal client to respond. Then, you test your idea. Once your results are in, you see if you can beat those results by making ONE small change. Do this over and over, always trying to improve.
Here are some basics that need to be included:
Identify your list of prospects: Nothing is more important than the list. If you’re trying to sell ice to Eskimos instead of hot desert dwellers, it won’t matter how good your offer is.
Identify where your prospects are at and how they can be reached. It may be in a magazine, direct mail to their home or office in a variety of formats, TV, newspaper or whatever. All of these work for certain groups, you need to find out what kind of prospects you’re trying to reach.
Grab Their Attention: This is one of the biggest mistakes I see marketers make: THEY ARE BORING! People love fun, they love a story, and they need to be shaken out of their general state of a comma to notice your message. Think powerful headline and unique packaging.
WIIFM Radio: What’s In It For Me? That’s all your prospects care about. They do not care about your company, your logo or anything except themselves. It’s just the way it is. So don’t talk about yourself as much as you talk about how your product or service solves your prospects problems. Confront their fears, hopes, dreams and frustrations.
The Powerful Offer: If your offer isn’t irresistible then stop marketing now. Don’t think you always need a discount either. You can make information offers like “The top 10 things X needs to know about Y before purchasing A”. If you can get a prospect to raise their hand instead of trying to sell them on something on the spot, you have a better chance of converting that prospect through thoughtful follow up steps.
The Call to Action: Your prospects should have a deadline and an easy way to respond that they feel comfortable with. Calling in a talking to a sales person may not be where a prospect is in their buying cycle, so you need to have ways for them to “raise their hand” so you can follow up.
Follow Up And Repeat: You need to have some semi-automatic way to keep in touch, deliver value and process your leads through the sales funnel. This can be done with auto responders for email, list generating for your mail house and telemarketers and reports that help identify where prospects are at in the process.
If you can develop this “Marketing System”, you will change your marketing fortunes forever. If you have wanted to eliminate “Cold Calling” or sleepless nights due to an ineffective marketing system, then now is the time to invest in your future!
Call or email Lynndell to find out how you might be able develop a predictable and profitable marketing system.
