System Of Success

The Success Formula

An Introduction

to a Successful

Marketing System for

Small/Micro Businesses

Even though there is an awful lot of really useful and in-depth information within these few pages, we are no-where near able to dig too deep and wider on this subject, or this book would be an A3 size with thousands, if not tens of thousands of pages, as there is so much information that we could discuss and talk about in this subject of business, in particularly, small/micro business marketing.

Many aspects of marketing are all to do with knowing your market and more specific to your customers and understanding the psychology of how and why they buy.

That’s why after many years of personally researching, studying and learning psychology and the behavior patterns of people’s buying habits and their conscious and subconscious mindset. I like to use a mixture of old-fashioned trusted technics and the latest science, i.e.; NLP, Hypnotherapy, and others technics, to learn and understand individuals and their way of thinking, to utilise in business, more specifically in sales, advertising, and marketing. I would love the opportunity to share all of this with you to help you and your business succeed.

Here within these pages, I have highlighted many strategies and tactics and how it should all work together seamlessly, effortlessly and ultimately with huge results.

A Personal Thank You

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for taking some of your valuable time to have a look and read this book, and I honestly hope from the bottom of my heart that you learn something of value to use in your business.

If you have an open mind and ready to apply just a few of these ideas to your business, I promise that you will start to see some rewards, if not please contact me via my email at info@marketingmadness.net and I would be glad to offer any assistance to aid you in crafting some of these successful strategies into your business.

MJ

© Copyright 2016

Are you exhausted and fed up with
marketing campaigns that just don’t work?

 
Are you sick to the teeth with the gimmick
strategies that just keep flopping?

 
Are you feed up spending so much time
and money with nothing to show for it?

Did you know that over 95% of your prospects miss-read or misunderstand your marketing messages?

They don’t really know or understand who you are, what you do, or even that you are there in the first place!

Welcome to the Success System where you will discover a wealth of valuable information introducing to you the concept of successful marketing to small and micro-businesses. Within these pages, you will find many successful strategies and techniques that actually work for the small micro-businesses of today.

The problem with most marketing books nowadays is that they are mostly written by academics behind a collage desk, large corporations or marketing consultants working or have been within large conglomerates, after doing their degrees in college. Never having any real experience with micro and small businesses. Never had to work in the trenches building from scratch with nothing.

They are called the ‘mediocre marketing experts’ or ‘large corporation marketers’ and there’s a lot of them. They don’t always understand the concept of how a one-man-band or a small family run business with very little spare money, run their business or how they do business in the micro-business world.

They talk about ‘company departments’ and ‘teams’, with turnovers of millions, just to try to impress you, showing that they are a successful marketing consultant.

Large corporation marketing is so different from micro/small business marketing, their agendas are so different too. With most business or marketing books, the average micro-business owner can’t always relate, or just unable to do many of the things that the book recommends due to their market, budget or size of their business.

Many micro/small business owners are the advertising, marketing, designing and sales team all in one, and maybe with just a few hundred or thousand pounds to play with each year towards their marketing and advertising budget.

There has never been a more important time to learn to become the master of your own marketing, but only if you want your business to grow and succeed.

Within these pages, I want to share with you a few ideas on how you too can increase your customer base, reduce your lost and fallen customers rate, increase the life-span of your customers and most importantly increase your own income.

Too many small business owners wonder why their marketing and advertising isn’t working, they think of marketing of just having a business card, brochures, maybe some PR or even a website, etc, but these are all just small components of your marketing.

Most businesses are copying each other like the blind leading the blind, not really knowing what they are doing when it comes to marketing their business.

The proof is in the UK’s financial tables within every category of every business, with a ratio of 90% of UK businesses underachieving, 60% of them are struggling endlessly and the other 30% are either broke or have gone bust! With just 10% of UK businesses classed as successful. But why?

The overwhelming majority of businesses are engaged in marketing that is failing them. Most businesses think in terms of individual campaigns and strategies to bring in a few customers at a time and not worried about looking after them for the long haul.

But successful businesses think in terms of Systems, foundational infrastructures, which includes long term customer relationships and referrals and following up.

For a successful system, we need to have in place the Planning, Image, and Branding well before we can even consider implementing any marketing strategies and applications.

The System (the Who and What) is the understanding of who you are, what you do, who your customers are and how you do it.

Planning (the how and when) is the implementation of the system by identifying the goals you want to achieve and by when in your overall business

- The understanding of how to nurture your prospects into ambassadors of your company

- Learning who your ideal customers are

- Having all your strategies, applications and goals all mapped out.

• You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint.
• You wouldn’t bake a cake without the recipe
• You wouldn’t be able to assemble a thing without the instructions

Every business needs a carefully planned marketing system in place before any business can operate successfully.

Image and Branding (the why) is who you are, what you stand for, who your customers are, and how you do it better than everyone else and why they should buy from you, expressed in a visual manner through your website, brochures, PR, etc.

The true concept of marketing is to find selective people to get to know you and to like you, then to trust you and buy from you, and then to love you by developing them into becoming an ambassador of your company. (Find, Like, Trust, Buy, Love, Repeat and Refer). The implementation stages are where we make the marketing system become a habit rather than just individual ad-hoc strategies.

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. You must build your marketing system around them. Learn how to put a successful marketing system in place to gently move your prospects to trust you, and become a loyal customer and a referral source so you can produce a sustainable, solid, positive revenue stream.

Many businesses are deeply rooted in their old fashion ways of doing things the way they have always done, mainstream, brand and name visibility driven, largely unaccountable advertising and marketing.

With the introduction and new developments of the internet, many people think that by using this new media they are doing a new kind of marketing. In truth, they are merely moving the same bad advertising and flawed marketing practices from one media to another. Most of their money is invested based on ‘faith and hope’.

Many other business owners find it difficult to change how they look at their relationships with their customers. Many are stubborn, ignorance and naive, refusing to learn from experience leaders that could help and support them in may ways, thinking it’s all just a waste of money. All resulting in their down fall leaving them in the 90% category.

One of the biggest barriers and challenges amongst small/micro business is the lack of support and ‘GOOD’ advice - But not any more!

IF DONE RIGHT, YOUR BUSINESS COULD BE

Are You Ready And Open-Minded To Take The Next Step And Take Your Business To The

Next Level?

A.P.R.I.L.

Five Key Points To A Successful Marketing System.

Accountability

Every aspect of your business should be accountable for all of its actions. Business owners expect measurable results and get a return on their investment, ie: If they invest in inventory, they expect to sell it, if they employ a worker on an hourly basis, they expect them to work for a full hour, if they employ a sales rep, they expect them to make sales, but for some mysterious unknown reason, business owners are willing to let their advertising and marketing off the hook? Demand real performance.

Profit-driven

It’s not an expense, it’s an investment. When executed correctly, it works and works well. Marketing should command the same amount of attention and respect as any high-value business function. You just need to structure your programs around your goals.

Marketing must be Profit-driven, it is about sales and generating new business that resulted from your marketing spend. That’s it. It’s not about how much web traffic you’re driving or how many likes or friends.

Results

Marketing should be about results, plain and simple. Friends and likes don’t put meals on tables or money in your pocket, so just forget about all that. It’s an excuse for marketing companies to charge you for not needing to be responsible for the lack of results they produce. Any type of marketing should be completely responsible for its end results, as marketing has a direct influence on your bottom line, more directly your income!

Investigate

Before you can set out you must first do your do-diligences, research and investigate your market and customers, to get to know what they want and how they want it. Without doing your research, you are putting yourself in the high-risk failure bracket.

You will not know the answers to your five questions; what, when, where, who or how, so when things go wrong or don’t turn out the way you hoped for, you will not know what to do, when to do it, where to go, who to see or how to get there. Only your investigation will reveal all this.

Learning

Take the time and make the effort to learn about your business, your market, your customers and how to connect the dots. By learning who your customers are and how and where to approach them will make the whole concept of marketing so much easier, cheaper and much more productive. Taking the time to learn is great but be sure to learn the correct way, copying and listening to others that get it wrong also, will only amplify your disappointment with marketing and become afraid to do it as it seems a waste of time and money. Learning to do it correctly will not only improve your business and income but will save you a lot of time and money.

With all this in mind, you can now start to learn about the true concept and meaning of, and how you can apply it to your business.

The Success System

There Are Only 4 Main Components Of Any Business

Your Four Wheels

Business Fundamentals and Activities.

Customer Service / Experience Attitude, (Being and Behaviour) (Before, during and after purchase).

Your Profession / What You Offer (Your Label) (Providing a Skill, your Knowledge, Service or Product).

Marketing (Image, Communication & Sales).

Each of the four components is as important as each other to successfully succeed in business. Your wheels need an equal amount of air to make the cart move smoothly and easily.

The air represents your Time, Efforts, Energy and investment.

Business Fundamentals and Activities are the activities that you have to actively engage with, throughout your working day. This could involve activities such as; Accounts and Tax - Pricing - Recruitment and Training - Own Training - Dealing with Red tape and Politics - Stocktaking and Shelf filling - Production - Administration - Wages - Employment Laws, Dealing with Premises, inc Rent and Rates, etc, etc.

Customer Service / Experience is your attitude & behavior towards prosecutors and customers before, during and after any purchase. It is the experience your customer gets when dealing with you. It is also your image of who we are trying to be ie; Honest - Trustworthy - Respectful - Believable - Friendly - Helpful.

Your Profession / What You Offer is the label you use, the sign you put above the door to describe the profession you are in, it is providing: your Skill - your Knowledge - your Time - your Service or your Product, to your customers that you exchange for money. This is what you do on a day-to-day basis, this is just one part of running your business.

Marketing is the Image that you portray, the communication you have between you and your prosecutors/customers to gain their trust and to like you, and the all-important selling of what you offer. Without this, you do not have a business and without business, you will not have an income.

The purpose of any business is to sell a product or service to make money, and your ability to sale anything is fundamentally the key existence of your financial lifeblood.

So it is paramount that Sales and Marketing are equally supported by your time, energy and efforts within your four business components. Many small businesses fail to realise this and pay a big price, they either struggle to make a living or they end up going under.

Your Business Plan vs Your Marketing Plan

Where the purpose of a business plan is to encompass the entire structure of your business involving all four components, Business Activities, Customer Service, What You Offer and your Marketing. Your Marketing plan only focuses on your Marketing System.

Your Marketing Wheel

Think of the wheel of your cart as bicycle wheels. It has a hub in the centre part of the wheel, this is the Marketing System where it all comes together and makes it all work.

It is connected to the spokes which are the individual components and of the same size which makes up your marketing Wheel and holds it all together with the rim where the tire is held in place. The tire is where you pump the air in (your Time, Efforts and Energy) to make your cart move smoothly and easily.

There are five main categories and approximately sixteen individual marketing components which makes up your marketing Wheel.

By merging all 5 categories (the 16 individual marketing components) together, will make a complete system, where each component works in unison with each other. Some of the individual components could work solo but have a much higher success rate and efficiency when working within the system. Your marketing system will be 100% more productive and successful for your business, producing far better results.

As a wheel it is vital that all five categories are roughly equal size otherwise it would not be completely round and unable to turn effectively. Likewise as with your marketing, to make a very successful business your marketing needs to be round with each marketing category is in its place.

As a business owner, you will need to keep in check that all the components are working well and none are missing or bent out of place. For any business to be successful in today environment, marketing must consist of a mix of activities which together blends in seamlessly as one. Gone are the days when a business had a website, some brochures and did a few email’s or letters, but all running separately from each other.

Today we must look at the marketing system as one system with many smaller components all working in unison together. It is not necessary that each component must be of the same size, ie; the amount of time and effort spent on each component must be equal.

As you may find that one aspect of your marketing may work much better than another, and it would make sense to focus your attention on what works. But all the other components must still be in place working together, you cannot make a sponge without flour, so the right ingredients must be in place.

You may use more of one ingredient than the other ie; you will use more flour than flavouring, but you still need to add the flavouring otherwise it just wont taste the same.

The Secrets of a Successful Marketing Strategy

The truth is that marketing is not a secret but a system, a system of strategy, and if done correctly will result in total success for any business large or small.

Nowadays instead of hunting for customers you must nurture them using your prospecting and buying cycle system. Once you have a happy customer they can now be nurtured and trained to be your best marketing tool. If we spend as much or more of our Attention, Time, Energy and Resources to our customer experience when dealing with us we would not need to spend as much to get new customers in the first place.

Neutering your prospects to become your powerful marketing tools is essential.

You need to take them all the way through your prospecting and Buying Cycles.

Each of your marketing spokes of your wheel (your 16 marketing components) all play a vitally important role in your prospecting and buying cycle. (a chain that all links and works together)

The truth is that marketing is not a secret but a system, a system of strategy, and if done correctly will result in total success for any business large or small.

Nowadays instead of hunting for customers you must nurture them using your prospecting and buying cycle system. Once you have a happy customer they can now be nurtured and trained to be your best marketing tool. If we spend as much or more of our Attention, Time, Energy and Resources to our customer experience when dealing with us we would not need to spend as much to get new customers in the first place.

Neutering your prospects to become your powerful marketing tools is essential.

You need to take them all the way through your prospecting and Buying Cycles.

Each of your marketing spokes of your wheel (your 16 marketing components) all play a vitally important role in your prospecting and buying cycle. (a chain that all links and works together)

The Cycle of Prospecting

You must first get someone to know, like & trust you.

AWARENESS - They must get to KNOW YOU through Your: Branding, Ads, Networking, Web Presence, Printed Literature, Email and Online Marketing, etc.

If a prospect is looking for you or your kind of business and unable to find you then what’s the point, You need to be VISIBLE and easy to be found. If they are unable to find you when they need you, you will lose their trust and their business.

You must give them a reason to LIKE YOU - Through Blog & Pod Contents, Social Media & Profiles, and Communities. Video and Audio Content, Events, PR.

This is where you build a deeper connection with your prospect. Without a defined process for getting to know more about you and your product and service, prospects will hold back from becoming your customer. You must give them a reason to like and trust you.

You must first give them a reason to BELIEVE YOU and have TRUST AND CONFIDENCE in you through: Educational Content, Referrals, Reviews and Testimonials, Conferences and Shows.

You must build trust, all your marketing and sales materials must communicate your core message with complete clarity. During the trust-building phase, your prospect may need to be nurtured for a time to get them to know like & trust you.

ENGAGEMENT - They must get to TRY OR SAMPLE you through Workshops, Evaluations, Demos, Free Trial Offers. Free Testers and Samples.

One of the best and fastest ways to ensure that your prospects become a happy customer and a referral agent is for them to sample your product or service and in turn give your business the opportunity to sample your customer. Do you have a product or a service that you can let them try for free for a short period or at a very low cost with a 100% money-back guarantee, so there is no risk to them?

The Key to a Successful Business

is in your Buying Cycle

Do you have your customer service and after-sales systems in place to fulfill your customers' expectations and to give them an unforgettable buying experience?

Your main aim is to nurture and transform all your customers into happy customers by offering outstanding customer service and after-sale service and then educate them to complete the buying cycle, by so they become your most powerful marketing tool.

Train, nurture and transform all your customers through the cycle to = Buy > Love > Repeat and Retention > Recommend and Refer.

Your first and only goal with every customer is not just to make a sale, but to complete the buying cycle and to train them to become apart of your marketing system by Neutering them through your prospecting and buying cycle. Awareness and Know > Like > Believe, Trust and Confidant > Try = Buy > Love > Repeat and Retention > Recommend and Refer.

Buy - By providing an incredible offer supported with a strong guarantee to try your products and services is a great way to reach people who simply don’t have enough experience with your company to determine if they should go with you.

This is often a significant problem when you compete with better-known organizations. By offering the low-risk trial or incredible offer supported with a strong guarantee you can gain the upper hand.

Love - Do you offer a follow-up service to find out if your new customer is happy? And if there is anything else you can do to make their buying process experience with you even better? I am not talking about up-selling them any more products. Just find out how they can feel better and be reassured that they can trust you to deliver your promises.

Do you have an after-sales service team/department or pack? A set of instructions or an information pack which sets out and explains everything the customer needs to know, identifies your company procedures and everyone within your business your new customer needs to know in case of problems or in order to move forward?

If the project or service needs to be past over to another department or person, is there in-place a smooth process by which it can be handed from the sales team to the after sells or customer service or even the production team if your company is bigger.

Repeat and Retention - Once you have done a good job and the customer is happy, you are halfway in creating repeat sales, and long-term loyalty and referrals from them.

Far too often we assume our customers are happy and getting the results they desired. You need to make certain that your customers are getting the best value possible from your products and services. Commit to teaching them over time the proper way to get the most from it.

By creating a systematic set of “how-to” materials or tutorials, you can teach them how to use more of the features and help them be more successful in using your products or service.

Do you produce regular education on your products and services to point out special or advanced features, tips, tricks, and secret, or cross-sell other products and services, or up-sell and upgrades?  They will ultimately experience greater value and that’s what generates referrals.

Recommend and Refer - Now your customers need to become a total advocate for your business. There are many ways to stimulate and facilitate even greater amounts of referrals.

You can offer incentives or upgrades if they refer more customers to you.

As an example: Dropbox, the web-based file sharing program, implemented a successful referral program, users were given more Dropbox space when they shared a referral link with new customers. This program was so successful that it increased sign-ups by over 60%. Many Dopbox’s customers become a powerful tool and was reward for it.

You can also do educational seminars and introduce your strategic partner to network to your customers and vis versa. Hold events and offer VIP tickets. Produce a referral board and regularly publicly publicise your best referral’s.

If you have a weak link in your chain, your chain will break and your system will not work, so it is paramount that you regular maintenances your marketing system and keep a close eye on it at all times, updating, tweaking and perfecting your system regularly.

Plan Before Play

We must first lay a solid foundation for our marketing strategy before we go out and find customers, a clear focus of what we want to achieve. Just as a successful sports team planing their game plan, (who will be playing and in what positions, what tactics and strategies) before match day.

The first part of your marketing strategy is to have a;

A good solid foundation of trust, honesty, and respect,

With Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms, good, bad and ugly news about your business travels much faster than ever before, so always be honest, truthful and respectful to all your customers and prospects to get them to; know like & trust you.

Secondly, you must listen to your customers

Before doing anything, you might find that your customers want something different to what you think they want, find out what they want and how they want it, then give it to them. By listening and offing them what they want and how they want it will only improve your chances of success.

If they complain about a part of your service, just do something about it, don’t dismiss them - they are your customer, your income and lifeblood.

You will also need to;

Identify your ideal customer/client profile

Be specific and detailed. Focus you,r attention and efforts on appealing to the people who are most likely to buy from you. It makes sense to work with only the people you want to work with and that includes your customers.

You don’t need to serve everyone.

Be really picky and narrow down your targets so you only have people that you want to be your customers. You want customers that are happy to pay your prices, enjoy your service and don’t complain about everything.

Get rid of all your complainers, moaners and time wasters, they don’t do you or your business any good. Your ideal customer is someone who not only buys your product or service but really wants what you have to offer, because...

They love it.

They tell all their friends about it. They come back time and time again. And what’s more, you love doing business with them. Of course, the only way you will attract your ideal customer is if you have a crystal-clear picture of who they are.

Customers are more inclined to buy from a company who focus on their specific needs. They feel that you are more specialist in your field and that they will get more of personal service. By narrowing your focus and defining your targets, you target specific types of customers and have matched your offer to your customer.

Many business owners may think that by limiting their target audience they limit their opportunity and income.

In fact, it’s just the opposite, by narrowing your focus and defining your target, you will attract the attention of your most relevant customers that want to buy from you. What you are doing is opening the doors of your prospects that want to buy from you right now!

Also don’t let yourself be diverted off course to do jobs that you don’t really want or know how to do, just stick to what you are good at and love doing.

Your Unique Core Difference (or your USP)

It doesn’t include things such as excellent service or offer a high standard of service, as you need to do that anyway, your customers will already be expecting that as part of your day-to-day service.

You need to be different, really different and stand out to the rest in a distinctive way, this is especially important when your product or service is similar to your competitors.

Heres just a few examples;

Domino’s Pizza: “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less—or it’s free.”

FedEx: “When your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight.”

M&M’s: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”

Unless you can pinpoint what makes your business so unique, you cannot target your customers successfully.

Many transport companies just use ‘friendly service’, while others use ‘on-time service’ or ‘travel in luxury’. Which ones would you travel with? Even if they were more expensive, you know you would get there on time and refresh.

Wal-Mart sells bargains while Rolls Royce only sold luxury, they are both distinctive in their own way but stands out from its competitors.

If you can’t come up with anything special you can always ask your customers - In fact, you should always ask every customer of yours these all-important questions:

• What made (or will make) them come to you and not your competitors?
• What’s the one thing you do better than all the others?
• What could you do better?
• Would they refer you to someone else?
• Who else do they refer to others?
• How would/do they go about searching Google and other search engines for you or your type of business?
• What would they type?

Establish Your Core Marketing Goals  

Every marketing strategy needs to work around specifically defined set of goals. Otherwise, you’re basically throwing arrows in the dark.

Without clear goals, marketing campaigns have the potential to be dangerous for your business.

You risk wasting lots of time and money if you do not have set goals to achieve within your marketing system. Your goals should be custom-tailored to your business objectives.

Not sure what your company’s marketing goals should be?

Start by asking questions and listening as actively as you can.

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit every time.

But if you aim at SOMETHING,

there’s a good chance of hitting it”.

Know Your Customers - Customers are the lifeblood of your marketing efforts. To be effective in reaching them, you need to truly understand their needs, values, personalities, and interests.

That’s why one of the most important rules in marketing is ‘Knowing your customers’. Who are they? What do they value most? What inspires them? What brought them to your brand?

But you can’t ignore your business either. To select the right goals, you need to take the following three steps:

• Identify your customer's needs.
• Identify your business needs.
• Connect-the-dots so that your company and customers are seamlessly aligned.

Measurable and Accountable Results. A system is a structure and EVERY part of that structure plays a vital role in strengthening and holding each other together. EVERY part of that structure is accountable. Like a chain, if one part gives out, the whole structure becomes weak and unsafe then collapse.

Your marketing system is not a complete system if all the parts are not working in unity with each other, and you won't really be sure if your marketing system is working properly if you have no idea what is happening with your results.

You need to keep track and measure your results regularly with your goals to see if they match and the only way it to that is by keeping records.

An effective system will show you what and when you go wrong, or if you are doing it correctly. So it makes seance to have a good record-keeping system in place to monitor and hold all your marketing and advertising activities accountable, as your income is a direct result of your marketing.

You should never leave it to chance

Always use a tracking system when using any form of advertising, use promotional codes when offering offers and change the codes with each and every types of medium and campaign you do and always, always, always ASK your customers where they saw you or how they found you.

Add a unique promotional code to every item and media of marketing used, advertising, letters, website, all with a different promotional code so it makes it so easy and quick to track every little thing you do. You won't know if your marketing system is working effectively if you don’t.

Follow Up System 

Following up leads creates a connection and starts a relationship with prospects. One of the best ways to do this is to continue to provide value.

Having a good follow up system helps to prevent you losing £1000’s from lost customers, it also allows you to have a structure in place to reach out within the correct time limits, as waiting too long before following up will also lose your customers.

Having a system makes it much more measurable and accountable so you don’t lose track of where or when you need to follow up. Having a good follow up system is also timely, waiting too long to send an email will likely be received as spam, If subscribers have forgotten you and can not recall who you are, they might put it as spam themselves.

In your follow-ups, don’t just try selling in every email you send

out, but offer help and advice, give them valuable content-rich

information that will be helpful and they will come back and even look forward to your emails. 

Following up could be the difference between 12% to as

much as 87% response from any of your marketing campaigns. That’s a large portion of your customers base.

Joint Venturers

JV’s are a strategical alliance with other businesses to achieve a common goal by leveraging and duplicating each other existing resources with no risk to either side of the partnership. It is an agreement between two or more companies to share and work together with one common goal, to trade customers.

This is where you could leverage your time and efforts by working together with another business within your area to bring about better service to your customers. By offering more than what you can do alone, will dramatically increase profits and enabling you to focus on more important things, like, running your business.

Creating a strategical alliance with other business will not only increase business but without any cost to you, but would bring in a steady stream of income from many avenues.

This is a must-have marketing strategy within every business marketing system.

Educational Content

You need to do more than just selling. If you are totally focused only on selling your product or service to everyone who you meet or visit your website, by publishing only promotional content, you are probably going to be stuck going around and around before completely going under.

Just pushing your products and services or displaying too much promotional material will quickly turn potential customers away.

Instead, focus on helping people to get to know you and to start trusting what you have to say. Prove that you know what

you’re talking about by giving them valuable information

about your area of expertise and give them a taste of what you offer through free content.

Educational content should be informative, interesting and relevant. This gives you a more

authoritative voice and gives you the edge over your competitors who are not willing to offer any extra value through educational content.

Your customers are looking for ‘What’s In It For Them’, (WIIFM) through your product or service, so focus on providing them with educational content that demonstrates your expertise in a “non-sales” way.

Trust is something that needs building, want your prospects to trust you? It helps to build trust if you show people the face behind the business. In order to build that trust, you want to show that you are human and the human side of your business.

By offering free educational content to your prospects and customers you are providing insight on topics you feel are important to them, they will feel valued and start to trust you.

Become An Authority.

It’s just not enough to try to stand out anymore, we need to stand away from the crown so we are seen completely different from

the rest.

The best way is to become a type of celebrity authority within your field, a go-to-expert, that everyone looks to for advice and knowledge.

This can be done via a number of marketing avenues very effectively with very little cost but does require some commitment and consistency, and a little confidence will help.

Business owners know more about their own business than most so it stands to reason that they are already an expert in their field, so why not show it publicly, you are already doing it by running your own business, so why not do it with bells on.

This is another aspect of branding, but this is personal branding. Where you brand yourself as the expert and authority within your filed and community.

Just like your business, you must first let people know that you are trading and open for business and looking for customers. Likewise, as an authority, you must first tell them that you are an expert within your trade, so when they need help, advice, and someone they can trust within that field, you are the go-to-expert they can trust.

Publicise Yourself. Many people would have never known who Alan Sugar was if it wasn’t for his popular TV show, ‘The Apprentice’, even those he was a very successful entrepreneur for many years within the computer industry with Amstrad and other companies.

But now it seems everyone knows him and classes him as one of the UK’s biggest business experts.

The reason was not that he is an expert but he promotes himself as an expert via his TV show.

Not everyone has their own TV show but can still get the same results from using the right tools.

Online Presence.  It is completely astonishing that a large portion of small businesses with today technology still don’t believe they need a website!

But they are most likely on Facebook and Twitter so why don’t they have a website???

Many other businesses owners make the fatal mistake of viewing their website and even a mobile app as sperate tools from their marketing, an extra optional add-on, and not as part of an important seamless marketing package. This kind of thinking could cost them dearly, if not with disastrous consequences.

With the majority of your potential customers online according to Google around 97% of consumers are using the internet to search for local businesses like yours. An astounding 60+% of them use their mobile.

For a very small investment of time and money, a website or an App is PARAMOUNT for every and any small, medium or large business regardless of business type.

It's like an online business card, EVERY BUSINESS SHOULD HAVE ONE!

Surveys show that you could be handing over more than 90% of your potential customers to your competitors for not having a website and an app.

One of the main reasons for your regular customers leaving you is because you do not communicate with them, and a website and now the mobile app are two of the best ways to regularly communicate with your customers.

You must interact with your customers to get them to trust you, having a web and mobile presence shows that you are professional and you mean business.

The subconscious psychological message it gives out tells the customer that a business that does not at least have a website, may not be trusted or they are not legitimate or that they don’t really care enough for their customer to have one. So not having a website could display a lack of care for your own business and is not very professional.

What’s worse is that many businesses are promoting other businesses with their email address. Why not promote your own business? Why use Yahoo or BT-Internet or other email providers email accounts for your business when for a couple of pounds you could have your very own web and email address with your own companies name.

It is also not very professional to use email providers email accounts for business use.

The fastest-growing marketing trend ever is the mobile app, normally it takes years for momentum to grow before we see any big changes in peoples habits, but the mobile app as rapidly changed the way people see and do things within every age, gender, race and class groups.

It is rapidly becoming apart of our everyday life, over 65% of phone users now use a smartphone or tablet and this figure is growing month by month. If you use a smartphone how often do you use an app? or get push notifications, messages and reminders via your phone?

We all use an app or two every day, whether it is to connect to the web, or a company directly using their own app, Amazon, eBay, Tesco or Asad our bank, or PayPal, checking stats on our favorite sports team, watching video on YouTube or listening to music on iTunes or similar. We use apps to make our lives that little bit easier, like using the dictionary, checking our currency exchange rate or using a measuring conversion app.

Most of the time we don’t even realise that we are so dependent on our phones, most people never leave it more than a few feet away, some even sleep with it.

The smartphone is rapidly being a central part of our world, we use it for almost everything now, so if you want to be apart of your customer's world you need to adapt quickly and provide them with your own app before your competitors do. Your customers will rapidly move to your competitors if they provide them with conviction and easy access to them.

A mobile app can provide your clients with a whole range of services; News, Exclusive Offers, VIP Memberships, Discount Coupons, Food Ordering, Push Notification Messages, Appointments & Reservations Loyalty Programs, Shopping Cart, and so much more.

Over 85% of local businesses see a dramatic increase in business after investing in mobile marketing in their first year. So, it is vitally important that every business needs to think about having an app for their own business. If you are serious about your business, you will be already looking or at the least, thinking about using an app in your business.

A Complete and All-round Online Presence But it’s not enough to just have a website anymore. A static website just doesn’t work. You must keep up with the times, and have a more interactive and visual approach where internet users are now concerned.

Whether you have a website or a web page, set up landing pages, use social media, do video, have an app and do lots of online marketing. Creating a blog, a podcast or a Vlog and having an active and powerful online presence is a crucial component of your marketing system no matter what size your business is or what industry you are in.

The 8 Second Rule

Having an interactive and visual web presence gives people a better reason to visit and stay on your site. But the secret is in how to create an effective website as you only get 8 seconds to make the right impression and keep people from moving on to your competitors.

Using multiple strategies will certainly widen your net for a larger catch. But it’s not just the quantity, the real money for any business is in the quality of the catch.

So be very picky and specific as to who you want as your customer, focus your attention and efforts on appealing to only those who are most likely to buy your product or service.

Be careful as there are so many online strategies now that one can apply to their marketing system. But, be sure not to go overboard. Using too many online strategies will dilute the quality of your marketing.

Use just a few strategies but using them consistently and often will result in a far better catch. Like fishing, a fisherman fishing for type of specific fish, rather than a using a troller hoping to catch a larger quantity of them, but in doing so, catching many other things in the process which will only consume time, energy and quite often a lot of money sifting through rubbish for the right specific type of fish.

Google

Google is currently the undisputed giant of the internet, the master of all searches, so it makes good sense to learn and understand how to use google to our advantage.

The problem however with Google and many other social media platforms are that they continually change and update their direction and algorithms.

Each year, Google apparently changes its search algorithm around 500 to 600 times. While most of these changes are very minor, they occasionally roll out some “major” algorithmic update that affects search results in significant ways.

Alongside that Google rolls out products and services every month, so it is vital that we try to keep up-to-date with most of the changes, updates, and new releases so we don’t get left to far behind.

Google can play a very powerful part of your marketing BUT BE WARNED! Don’t risk your entire business and in particular your income on just relying on Google and other social media platforms alone, as they change, you could lose out big time. Just remember that their loyalty is with themselves and their shareholders, not you!

Google AdWords is an advertising service for businesses wanting to display ads on Google, enabling businesses to set a budget and pay only when someone clicks on their ads.

Googles PPC is their Pay-Per-Click service, were advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked on to. This can work very effectively and fast when implementing the correct type and purpose of your ads.

Today, we live in a different world than just a few years ago.

We now use and promote via many other great online social platforms, such as; Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest, etc.

Just remember the internet is just another form of marketing, another tool to use and the rules and principles still apply to the internet as it does offline.

So many people don’t grasp this and they just think the internet will make all the marketing problems go away, but all they are doing is moving the same mistakes they make from their existing marketing over to the internet with the same results.

Just having an online presence or website isn’t the solution. It must be done in the right way to create a successful website/ presence.

Social Media (SM) Marketing

This is where you promote and market your business via the many different social media platforms.

The big problem with SM’s is the time you can spend on them, like all other marketing strategies. It can take hours of work to build out your profiles, and several hours a week to even maintain the most basically active presence. Add up those hours, you could spend half a week wasting time and money and not see any results from it.

So you need to have a clear plan and objective of what and how you want to use your SM Platforms for. It’s not only time consuming but it is a long-term strategy, don’t think you will make a million overnight. You are going to need a lot of followers before social media marketing pays off, and that means there’s a lot of work involved.

Like any marketing strategy, you must test your ROI, (Return On Investment) to make sure it is worth doing, if not drop it.

Here are a couple of tips on social media marketing:

Keep Your Social Media…

• Up-To-Date and Looking Fresh

A fresh up-to-date look and content will keep your followers coming back, they won’t get bored with the same old boring look and content.

• Listen to More And Less Talk

Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them.

• Specialize

Highly-Focused marketing strategies build a stronger fan base. So, keep your SM platforms focused and don’t be all things to all people. It is much better to have 100 raving fans that love reading, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 who has no interest in what you do.

• Quality Trumps Quantity

Too much can be too boring, but if it is high-quality valuable information then people will love and share it with everyone else.

• Have A Little Patience

Content and Social media marketing take a little time to grow and mature, but when done correctly can pay dividends.

• Compounding Results

Once you have created and published amazing, quality content and work too hard to build and nurture your online audience, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and much more.

Sharing and discussing your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

• Influence

Find online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and work to build relationships with them.

• Give Value

Focus less on selling your product or service directly to your audience. But Focus more on adding value and creating amazing content and developing relationships.

• Be Consistent

When it comes to Blogging whether on SM or a website, a very large number of Blogs start but don’t continue. You need to consistently publish content. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

• Reciprocity

You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them.

• Video Marketing

One of the greatest and most powerful new marketing tools around. Video is now taking content marketing to another level.

In many cases, it is what we call a ‘game-changer’.

Studies have shown that by incorporating video into your marketing campaigns you will not only increase a higher rate of traffic and convert more users but you will dramatically increase your Google ranking, conversions, open rates, click-through rates and much more.

Studies have also shown that by adding a video to your web or landing page you could convert up to 80% better than ones without.

Some Very Useful Stats:

Recent studies show that there’s a much better chance that your marketing message will now be seen, with well over a Billion Internet users watch online video every day. 90% of online shoppers said they find video helpful in making shopping and buying decisions.

If you’re not using video marketing, you’re missing out on a huge market opportunity. It’s not just the number of people who are watching videos that’s important – it’s the reasons why they watch it.

But there are some tricks to make it really successful.

Successful Selling System

Every successful marketing system needs to run a successful selling system. The way consumers make purchasing decisions is constantly changing, so it’s important to continually revaluate your sales strategy.

We all know how hard and difficult it can be in the dog eat dog world of business, but the question you should be asking yourself is;

‘How can I achieve

outstanding results?’

‘What will make me or what

I am selling irresistible?’

Selling.

This is what business is all about, without it you have no business.

Sales is 80% mind-set, 20% tactics, technique, and strategies.

Nowadays we need to give people more credit, as they are much smarter today.

They know what they want. People want to buy, they are looking for something and it’s our job to help them understand what it is they are looking for. With all the confusion of everything else around them trying to get them to buy, you need to help clear solid and easy path for them to buy from you.

Selling isn’t hard if you know how! If you guess at it, guess what? You will be guessing at it for a long time, and even if you do sell something you won’t really know why or how you sold it because you were only guessing at selling.

So How Do We Become Good At Selling?

First, we must understand our product, then we must know our target audience, who we are selling to? And only then, we can sell.

We must follow a process or sequence to achieve our ultimate goal. This takes careful planning, but fortunately, with a solid strategy in place, you can make sure you stay consistent and closing more deals.

Most people who try to sell are repeaters or showers of information, they are not really selling. To be good at selling you need to educate your customers. You need to provide insight to our customers, the ability to provided information beyond the obvious.

You have to find that perfect balance between being persuasive but not arrogant or annoying. Selling is not to pressure someone into buying from you, you are just sharing information, news, and details about your product. If your product is good and is of good quality and value, then you don’t ever need to pressure them into a sale.

The best sales technique is the ability to share. You have to also remember that when trying to make a sale, the customer needs to come first.

Become a friend to your prospects, help them to get to know you and trust you, by building a strong customer relationship from the outset will build strong long-term loyal customers.

When preparing a sales presentation in any form, here’s 20 vitally important key things that will make a profound difference in successfully selling anything:

• Prepare and Plan
• Know Your Customer
• Identify the Decision Maker
• Be Genuine and Honest
• Build Trust
• Begin with the End in Mind
• Communicate Clearly
• Stay Confident and Positive
• Give to Receive
• Overcome All Objections
• Know Your Competitors Well
• Say Nice Things About Your Competition
• Sell and Give Value
• Under Promise and Over Deliver
• Keep Your Mouth Closed
• Listen to Your Customer
• Watch What You Say
• Ask for The Sale
• Create A Sense of Urgency
• Ask for A Referral

However, the most important part of a sale is the closing of the sale.

So, How Do We Close A Sale? 

Our job is to reduce the resistance to buy, there are usually 5 reasons why people don’t buy.

• No Money
• No Time
• No Need
• No Urgency
• No Trust!

(1) No Money

If you can show them the VALUE of what you are selling (ROI-Return on Investment) then people most often will buy.

(2) No Time

If you can show them that they can SAVE or MAKE MORE MONEY or it will IMPROVE THEIR LIFE somehow with what you are selling, then they will make the time.

(3) No Need

It's our job to make them AWARE that they need it, want it, desire it, and can’t live without it. But just because they need it doesn’t mean they will buy it! So now we need to make them understand the URGENCY of buying it.

(4) No Urgency

We need to make a SEANCE OF URGENCY, why they should do it NOW!  Sell them the gain and the pain, they need to feel that senses of urgency, by selling them the gain, (the benefits) of buying but also the pain of missing out. Once you have them knowing they Need It, then they need to feel the Urgency and to know that they need to take action now!

(5) No Trust

You need to win their TRUST! Do they believe you and/or believe in you? You need to build a report with them, you need them to trust you to buy from you.

You must ask yourself

“How do I build and develop more credibility?” 

“How do I gain their trust?” 

“What do I need to do to be trusted?”

If all else fails, always ask why they didn’t or don’t want to buy, always take notes so you can improve and can make changes to your presentation next time.

The word ‘No’ is often missed used, it can often mean yes but they need more time or information.

What most prospects are saying when they use the word ‘NO’, is:

•         Not yet
•         I need more time
•         I don’t understand
•         I need more information
•         I need help
•         Later, come back some other time when I’m ready
•         Who? I don’t know you
•         I would like to but, I need to know you first
•         I’m worried, can I trust you?
•         Why you?

Remember the word ‘No’ doesn’t mean ‘Never’, it just means ‘Not Yet’, that’s all.

It’s your job to find out what is missing and what they need to make that all-important sale.

Your Offer

To get that sale, it is paramount that you have a really good offer to entice your prospects to buy from you rather than your competitors. It is very similar to your USP but it is the sale itself this time that needs to be different, unique, special and of high value for people to choose to buy from you.

If your product is the same as your competitors, ask your self:

“Why will people buy from me rather than somewhere else?”

“What makes the buying experiences from me so different and better than all the rest?

Your offers are the glue that glues your product to the sale, it bridges the gap between a sale and a no sale. You need to make your offer so irresistible that they are begging YOU for the sell and throwing their money at you, rather than the usual way around, you begging them.

Think about what your ‘USP’ of your offer is and how it can make a big impact on your sales.

Ask yourself:

- What is your starter offering?

- What is your free or trial offer?

- What is your core offer?

- What is your members-only offer?

- What are your add-ons to increase value?

- What is your “make it easy to switch” offers

- What are your strategic partner pairings?

If you are not sure ASK people what would make them buy from you, what will make your sale more enticing for them to part with their money with you.

WIIFM  (‘What’s In It For Me’)

This Is Most Important, you need to understand the psychology of what people are thinking to succeed. For every business owner, the most important thing is to tune in to is what people are thinking.

As humans, we are always thinking about one person, ourselves! Next time you are around someone listen and hear what their conversation is about, it most likely will be about them. This is just human nature and to be successful in business we need to know how we can use this to our advantage.

Your customers are looking for ‘What’s In It for Them’, (WIIFM)

This is the first thing you should always ask yourself when preparing any type of marketing, what-so-ever, whether it be a letter, a website, a brochure or just a business card.

Think for a moment that you are the customer, or even better, ask someone else, ask what BENEFITS your product will appeal to them, ‘your customers’.

Remember benefits not features, as features will help sell a product but won’t sell it on its own, but a good strong benefit will sell it time and time again.

You need to show them what’s in it for them.

VIP Memberships

What makes people feel special? Being apart of something unique and exclusive. People love belonging to something exclusive and unique, it makes them feel very special and wanted.

Having an exclusive membership to an elite group or the limited number of people gives a very special and unique feel to it, only they and a few other especially selective people are allowed in or take part. To be part of something exclusive makes you feel powerful and special.

It gives you the opportunity to have control over your customers easier, you choose who becomes a member or not, as they would need to meet certain conditions.

You can offer better deals and offers, unique and limited products and services to members only for joining your exclusive club to make them feel even more special and exclusive.

It can allow you to charge more than normal due to its exclusivity. It also offers a seance of loss and urgency.

It helps you with your research. It offers you the chance to see what people are papered to pay for things by asking your members lots of questions, as your members love being part of something and love it when you ask for their opinion and ideas.

It also helps with your feedback and testimonials.

Discounting

There is a good way and a bad way to discount. Unfortunately, most businesses use it the wrong way which in the long term can damage their name and reputation. People don’t like or want cheap, as cheap is just crap! Not worth anything, cheap means it will fall apart as soon as you use it, or fads after the first wash, or taste like cardboard. Cheap is Crap and no one wants crap.

What they really want is good value and good quality, but at a fair price. Getting a good deal on something that is usually worth more is a great feeling, a seance of achievement.

People love to feel that they are getting a good deal it makes them feel a kind of spacial.

Discounting can help improve business when needed, like a specific product that needs pushing out the door, when you have a quite period or just to bump up your sales. It is a great way to offer specific offers and discounts with short deadlines. When done correctly it can drive new, regular and repeating customers to you! But don’t just discount or lower your prices because all your competitors are doing it, people never just buy on price alone.

Attract New Customers

It can be hard to attract new customers especially if those customers are happy with the service they receive elsewhere or do not know you exist. A special discount could give them an incentive to try your services and possibly change their buying habits. Discount cards and voucher have been shown to work nationally, by allowing the public to try out services that they might not have come across before

Measurable Results

Advertisers could benefit from a smart cost-effective and quantifiable means of attracting new customers, it will enable the advertisers to know how well the campaign is working by the amount of business being redeemed in a certain period and generating future revenue for their business. You will be able to track your response and account for every penny spent unlike other forms of advertising, saving your company time and money.

Boost Sales in Those Quieter Periods

Your offers could include exceptional discounts out of season or for quiet days of the week! Such as seasonal establishments, midweek or mornings incentives, you could offer a 15% discount or “buy one get one free” at certain times of the day or week.

This not only gains the public interest and lets people know you are there it also increases sales in those off-peak periods.

But don’t over do it, you don’t want customers getting used to buying only when you have discounts on.

Retention Value

Discount club card and vouchers could be kept by customers until you stop the promotion.

Highly Effective Ways Of How Discount Promotions Can Work For You: Highly Emotional Sell - Consumers love a discount. So presenting your offers as a discount.

Proven To Work

With lots of case studies in various business categories, discounting can really work if done properly. That means you can run your discount campaign safe in the knowledge that, as long as your offers are right, you’ll get a great return.

Focused, Flexible Offers

Using new products, aged stock, quiet days, manufacturer supported products, unique products, or just presenting a package deal, you can be very focused on your advertising message. Who, What, and Where advertising takes a back-seat.

“COME AND GET THIS PRODUCT NOW” takes the lead and the results can be outstanding.

“Hello, We Are Here!”

Surprisingly a lot of small businesses are not known by its local population, this may be because they are not in the high street location, lack of effective signage, and marketing or that consumers pass them by for the larger supermarkets or shopping centres, new people move in and out of an area constantly, so even if you thought local people knew where you are, there will be a lot that doesn’t.

Copywriting

Probably the Most Important Aspect Of Your Business.

Most business owners think copywriting is to do with writing sales letters, but they would be wrong, BIG TIME - and that’s the problem right there!

Copywriting is to do with EVERYTHING concerning your business when it comes to communicating your message to your prospectors and customers from letters, emails, blog posts, video scripts all the way down to your business cards, the wording on your uniforms, even your within your logo.

Copywriting is the communication between you and your prospectors and customers in print. Every business must use it, not a single business can shy away from it, it is a part of the business just as much as money is. We all need to learn how to use it effectively and to the best of our ability as it is crucial to get it right for the success of our business and income.

The very concept of any type of sales, marketing, advertising, sales letter or brochures, etc, is that it all must sell a product or service. All your marketing and adverts are all about creating attention and desire for your product, it must tell people what to do to get your product or service and show them how to buy. It must ask for the order and close the sale, it must be credible, believable and you must deliver and you must do it all in print.

You need to make sure that EVERYTHING is in uniform with each other, it must seem like it is all part of each other, like your branding, it must work as one seamlessly. Your copywriting should hold the same message across all your marketing media working off the same page.

Your messages need to be hard-hitting and compelling to constantly attracting their attention and to get them interested in you and your message. Be personal, show your human side and use emotion to create desire, as personal builds trust and emotion sells.

All of your messages to your prospectors and customers must be direct, honest and with impact. Whether it is a letter, an ad, your website or even your sign writing and letterheads, they must all GRAB your prospects attention, get them interested in what you are saying and stimulate a strong desire and yearning for what you offer. But you only get about 8 seconds to grab their attention before they move on to someone or somewhere else.

All Marketing Should Be Result Based - Accountability.

It’s all about the sales and generating business that resulted directly from your marketing spend and that’s it! 

Your marketing should be about results, plain and simple.

Every aspect of your business should be accountable for all of its actions. Including your marketing. It should be accountable for every penny it spends, resulting in producing tangible results for your business each and every time.

All marketing should be a kind of direct response marketing, that is where you try to provoke a result (a response) directly from a single marketing item/action (ie: flyer, PR, Ad, Web presence etc.) Whether it is to attract a lead or a customer.

Lead Generation

It is not realistic for anyone to think they can just set up in business and then sit back, and start working the phones expecting people to flood into your shop or office with overwhelming business.

It just doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to work hard building your marketing machine to generate leads and then nurture them into customers.

Start taking advantage of any referrals you get, and leads from your advertising and PR all can easily fuel up your marketing machine, if you use them consistently and conscientiously.

Effective lead generation is about getting your potential customers to ‘know, like and trust’ you and to get them to take action on your offer and to ‘try or buy’ what you’re selling.

Lead generation describes the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing your sales pipeline.

So don’t just try selling to everyone as soon as you meet them. Its might not be the right time for them to buy from you right now.

So rather than just moving on to the next customer, forgetting about them, take their details, give them something of interest and of value so they see that you do care, then follow up some other time when they are ready to buy.

Always collect everyone’s contact details who you meet or visit you or online. Try to get as much useful information from them as possible, so it makes it easier to follow up and contact them in the future. Collecting leads are as important as collecting customers.

Always give them something of interest and of value in return for their contact details and useful information. This will start to build a strong trusting relationship that could develop into a long-term loyal business relationship. You can not put a price on that, it would cost you a huge amount of your advertising budget to replace just one of your long-term loyal customers.

Customer Retention

Keeping your customers happy and regularly informed is crucial and extremely important to the existence of the success of your business. Regular communication is key between you and your customers and prospects. They won't easily forget you and go somewhere else which happens far too often with most businesses.

According to the Harvard Business School,

increasing customer retention rates by just 5% could increase profits as high as 95%

It is very naïve of many business owners to believe that a customer will come back, in fact in many cases they expect them never to go elsewhere. This is insane, if you do not look after your customers and keep them extremely happy and remind them of you then they will go elsewhere. It is your job to remind them about you not the other way around.

96 percent of dissatisfied customers don’t complain, they just walk away, and you’ll never know why. That’s because they often don’t know how to complain, or can’t be bothered, or don’t believe it’ll make any difference.

Successful customer retention starts with the first contact an organization has with a customer and continues throughout the entire lifetime of a relationship. By keeping in contact with your prospects and customers you are keeping your business in the forefront of their minds, so as and when they need your product or service, they remember you and not your competitors.

One of the best ways to keep in touch is via a printed newsletter (no not an email one).

There are several reasons why; First, it is a physical thing that they can pick up and read, it has far greater retention value and it can be passed around. With today's virtual internet, people are starting to love holding more physical thing again.

Secondly; A physical thing is worth more in the minds of your prospect, it shows that you care and happy to invest not only time but money in them.

They appreciate that a lot more. It gives them a reason to like and trust you. 

Thirdly; An informative, helpful but also an emotional and honest newsletter will build much more than a strong relationship with you and your customers.

It will even build bridges between you and any unhappy customers that you might have, as it will show the real you, your human side of your business.

Fourth; Emails have a very high non-open rate, an approximately up to 96% of all emails now are unopened, trashed or spammed. People get way too many emails, so they are left unopened. But a printed newsletter is much more likely to be opened, read, kept and passed around.

By keeping it friendly, personal, fun, informative, regular and honest it will let them know you are also a human, trustable, reliable and knowledgeable. Let them know that you are approachable too and are willing to make changes and amendments when necessary.

Another great tool to keep happy sustainable customers are simple but effective is ‘Birthday Cards’. A great cost-effective way to keep in touch and show that you really care for your customers. Collect all your customers birthday dates and send them all a birthday card. You can also include an inclusive birthday offer or something that they will appreciate.

How nice would it is to receive a card and we will always remember them for it.

But don’t use this as an excuse just to try to sell them something. If you are a restaurant you could send them a voucher for a free meal with your complements if they bring a few friend with them. It’s also is a great tool to remind them of their up and coming MOT or your yearly maintenance call from your local plumber, electrician, gardener or even a health check up from your nutritionist etc.

Referrals

Studies have shown that referral marketing is the best forms of marketing when it comes to sales and conversions. Referral marketing is also called word-of-mouth marketing,

It’s a powerful marketing channel because people trust the opinions of their family and friends and other people they respect,

Here’s a couple of reasons why referral marketing is one of the most powerful forms of marketing:

Precision Targeting

Referral and word-of-mouth marketing tend to be much more targeted because people tend to know their friends and social audiences pretty well. This allows your brand message to spread more effectively than with most other marketing channels.

Trust Factor

Trust goes a very long way when it comes to buying something if they have been recommended by someone they trust. If we don’t trust someone, we aren’t going to listen to them.

You are unlikely to trust someone straight away if you don’t know them. With referral marketing though, the sales pitch is usually coming from someone that they either know well, like friends or family member, or it’s coming from someone they have trust in.

People always trust other people’s opinions and thoughts, even if they have no experience what so ever on the matter then a salesperson or generic advertisements.

Using the Power of the 80/20 Rule

Who would you rather have...

A lead you got from a cold call who may or may not want what you sell? 

Or, a highly qualified lead referred to you by one of your happy customers?

Most people would probably choose the second kind, the warm lead. Now, how to get those business referrals on a regular basis to grow your business successfully.

It makes seance to utilise your best assets to bring in more referrals. Most of the UK’s top successful companies use 20% of your best customers to bring in 80% of their customers by using inbound marketing efforts.

Do you currently have a referral marketing program in place? No?

Then the first thing to do is to find out the main reason why your customers are referring you in the first place, then try to duplicate it over and over.

When it comes to developing a referral marketing strategy for your company, the most difficult aspect is that you’re not in total control of the conversation that your client or customer has with their referral – and they may or may not do a good job.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t help your clients guide them in that process: The best referral marketing strategies tap into the power of human-to-human relationships, and your strategy should empower their word-of-mouth discussions, making it simpler and easier to share your message and business.

Asking for a referral – It may seem easy and obvious, but many businesses don’t know how to ask!

 Be outstanding – The more unique and impressive your business is the more likely your clients are to share and talk about your business.

Use tools and incentives – Using tools and incentives can work well, but you need to use them wisely. The incentive is just that an incentive, not a bribe. Don’t try to bride people, let it feel natural and organic.

An incentive is there to help to remind your customers and referrals to act quickly and rewarding them for supporting you. It could be a free gift that is of interest to them or something that will help them.

Use tools like a referral card with all the information and message on that you wish to share with leads, maybe asking them to visit a landing page with a video describing your story, testimonials and any offers you offer.

Another type of incentive is to publicly recognize your best referrals on a regular basis, you can have a page on your website or a board on your wall above the counter, displaying their name and a photo, you could make it into a competition with other referrals with a prize for the most referrals.

Helping by giving – A great way to encourage people to refer others is to support a charity of some kind and letting everyone know that each time one of your customers refer another you will give a portion of that sale to your chosen charity.

Share your story – Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to spread the news about your business, and when sharing your simple stories to your customers, they’re more likely to remember and give you more referrals.

Harness the power of nurturing – Just because you were given a referral from a client doesn’t mean they’re ready to do business with you right away. You may need to nurture them with pain-relief content specific to their needs.

Reach beyond the referral – Once you have a new business referral, the next step is to treat them with respect and love, so after they have become a customer it will make it easier to convert a referral into a referrer, as they came to you that way and they are half-trained.

In order to convert your new referral leads into customers, you need an inbound marketing strategy tailored to your audience. Building your referral marketing program requires no more work than your any other promotion efforts – but the payoff is far greater for your bottom line.

Effective Time Keeping

It’s important that you develop effective strategies for managing your time. Sometimes it may seem that there isn’t enough time to do everything that you need to. This can lead to a build-up of stress. Once we have identified ways in which we can improve the management of our time, we can begin to adjust our routines and patterns of behavior to reduce any time-related stress in our lives.

Some strategies include setting clear goals, then breaking your goals down into small simple steps, and reviewing your progress on the way.

Other strategies include prioritising and focusing on urgent and important tasks rather than those that are not important or don’t move you towards your goals; organising your work schedule; list making to remind you of what you need to do and when; persevering when things are not working out and avoiding procrastination.

Use a day-to-day to-do list, a daily list of tasks that need to be done that day. If you don’t have a smartphone, then carry a pen and paper or an organiser or diary wherever you go.

The Advantages of Using a To-Do List:

• Focuses your mind on the most important objectives
• You are less likely to forget to do your important tasks
• Writing a list helps order your thoughts for the day, week and month
• It helps show the bigger picture and where you are aiming at
• Don’t hold everything in your head
• It saves time and even money, as you can predict the unforeseen things
• It helps you decide on priorities: the most important and the most urgent
• You are less likely to become sidetracked
• You get the reward of ticking off your achievements
• You feel more in control, even when things don’t always go the way you want it to
• You have a record of what you’ve done and needs doing
• You always have something to work on and aim for

Keep Asking Questions?

It’s important that you develop an effective strategy to use your customers for research prepossess - they are your best critics and supporters.

They are your customers, they are the ones who spend their money with you, so it makes seance to ask them if what you are doing is correct, and/or what they would like to see different to improve their customer experience with you.

You should always be willing to learn and to adapt. The key to survival is to adapt to change and the only way to know how what and when to change is to ask!

You must always keep asking yourself questions about your business and marketing,

questions such as:

• ‘How can I keep my customers even happier’
• ‘How can I get them to spend more money with me’
• ‘How can I increase my response’
• ‘How can I increase my profits’

These are all vitally important question that you should always be looking for answers to and always have an open mind. Seek advice and learn to earn, as it has a direct impact on your income.

In any purchase, both the buyer and the seller are at risk, but the buyer has more choice of sellers to choose from, plus the seller is the one asking for the buyers money. So, for this reason, you need to reverse all the risk of the sales to the seller, giving the buyer more confidence when buying from you.

You may have to repay a couple of unsatisfied customers who are just generally not happy, but you will always get them. But the increased business will heavily out weight any amount you may need to repay back, about 100/1.

Human psychology predicts that the longer the guarantee lasts the fewer people use them, so let's say you got 5 returns on a one or two-month guarantee, you’ll only get 1 or 2 if that, on a longer guarantee.

That’s sometimes because people forget but usually after several months if they have not already returned they probably won't as they are very happy, the good news is that we are not really a nation of complainers. The risk to you is minimal compared to the amount of business you will generate due to your generous guarantee.

Why do you think eBay or Amazon is so successful? it's not because they are the cheapest, in fact, they not. It's because of their GUARANTEES and services that they both offer, whether or not they use 1000’s of companies, eBay and Amazon Guarantee every penny so you feel much safer shopping with them.

MJ - © Copyright 2016 Marketing Madness.