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| 3 Quick Referral Marketing Tips |
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What if you were to make a conscious effort to add a complete referral marketing system as a part of your overall marketing strategy. The key here is “system”… That means it is a reproducible process that you can use to over and over to get the desired results you want. More referrals! Here are a few tactics to add to your referral marketing system, and efforts: 1) Give more referrals – Pretty simple right? Sure is. Leveraging the laws of reciprocity will surprise you. Be on the look out for leads for other businesses, even if they aren’t currently a customer of yours. By giving first, you will be surprised at your results. 2) Give testimonials – If you work with local businesses, and you haven’t given them a testimonial by all means give them one. Proactively at that. By delivering your customer, partner, or prospect a testimonial for their business you create top of mind awareness of yourself and your company. 3) Send An “Ideal Client” letter to partners – Identify a group of 10-20 ideal referral partners for you. Then, create a letter that states you are interested in referring them business. In the letter, create a form that outlines what a perfect referral might be for them. Included in the letter, add your list with all the answers for your ideal client and referral as an example. This technique works! The key here is that you make this part of your system. Not a one time event, but something you do on a regular schedule. That could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Just do something! Best,
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| Twitter As A Lasso? |
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What’s a Lasso for anyways? You got it, rounding up your herd. Or in marketing terms, turning “suspects” into prospects that tune into your channel and start getting to know you as you gain their trust. Ok, so what’s the relationship with Twitter? Here you go… Twitter as a Social Media tool is an effective means to find “suspects” across the globe that are interested in what you have to say. You can go to search.twitter.com and in seconds find people that might have an interest or are currently looking for advice in your area of expertise. Or, you can find thought leaders in your market and start a conversation with their followers. Here’s where the Lasso comes in… It isn’t enough to just find them and start a communication on Twitter. Or add them to your list of followers for that matter… You need to bring them into your “herd”. Get them on your newsletter list and bring them into the private conversations you are having with your customers and prospects. Twitter is an excellent and efficient tool for list building. Start building the trust, then move them into your herd. Throw a free offer out there, listen to their needs, and respond with something valuable they can’t ignore. So next time you get on Twitter. Start thinking more strategically how you can move your followers from your followers list to your email list. Then from your email list to your customer list… Now Go Target, Attack, and Profit!
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| Marketing Is Hard Until It Is Easy |
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If you think about it, many business owners go into their marketing looking for the “quick fix” many times on the one hit campaign that is going to bring in a flood of leads. Reality check… It just doesn’t happen like that without some hard work, and elbow grease as my grandpa likes to call it. What does that mean from a marketing perspective? It means you need a marketing strategy and a system to execute it. If you don’t have that, marketing and lead generation will be hard, maybe forever. It gets easy when you know each day what you must do to execute your system. You will no longer be frustrated about what to do next. And, you will quit chasing the latest shiniest object out there that promises thousands of leads with one email blast, or page 1 Google rankings for $59… Here are two things you should do right now to get started: 1) Create a marketing strategy – Sit down, and spend the time to create a marketing plan. One of the best solutions I have found that we use in Duct Tape Marketing is Marketing Plan Pro by Palo Alto Software. It is based around the Duct Tape Marketing principles I use to coach small businesses like yours. 2) Just In Time vs. Just In Case Learning – Are you an info junkie? Do you spend time learning “just in case” you need it? Or, do you look at your strategy and focus on learning skills just in time to execute your strategy? Just remember, strategy before tactics is always a winner… Cheers,
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| If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It |
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From a marketing perspective, how do you know if it is broken or not without split testing, otherwise knows as A/B testing. As a small business owner you need every marketing dollar to pack the biggest punch possible. You don’t have the marketing muscle and budget of a Fortune 500 company. As such, your marketing system must have a split testing company to verify you are maximizing your results and ROI on every dollar spent. The obvious goal is you put $1 of marketing in and you get $2 out. Otherwise known as 100% ROI. Do you even know what the ROI is on your existing marketing? Do you track your performance? If not, you aren’t being a good steward of your marketing dollars. Worst yet, you may have a piece of marketing that is pulling and converting leads into paying customers but it hasn’t reached it’s full potential. Imagine if you increase the performance of each piece of marketing by 10-20%. Imagine what that would do for your revenues and profits. Bring in A/B split testing… Split testing has been used by sophisticated marketers for a long time. The thought is that you take your first piece of marketing and establish a “control”. The key part of establishing the control is gathering the data and the metrics in the first place. If you aren’t doing this right now, build that into your system now. If it is direct mail you are using, start using a unique 1-800 number, or on your marketing piece specify an extension. Make sure your office tracks these individually so you have a better understanding as to what ad, direct mail piece, or online advertisement created the lead in the first place. Now that we have our control, it’s time to tweak our original offer. If this is a display ad or direct mail piece, my advice is to start with the headline. If you aren’t grabbing their attention, they won’t read any further. The 2nd item I usually focus on is the offer itself, and the call to action. It is shocking how many marketing pieces I see from small business owners don’t even have an offer, let alone a strong call to action. The key here is to change one item at a time, and start comparing your results to the control. When you find a new winner, THAT is now your new control. Your marketing system should be a process of continuous improvement. If you are happy with the results in one marketing campaign, advertisement, or promotion move onto the next one and leverage A/B testing to maximize profits there as well. The key here is to integrate A/B testing as part of your marketing system, not a one time event that you do once a year. To Your Prosperity,
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| Before You SWOT… |
 SMOT Analysis Marketing If you aren’t familiar with a SWOT analysis, let me give you high level explanation. It it basically an exercise to identify your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. If you look at the image I have provided, you can see that they are built in quadrants to help you isolate areas that are internal assets or external assets and/or threats to your business. How the heck does this relate to your marketing strategy? In my opinion, there are few things you should consider before you dive deep into the SWOT analysis. If you have a better understanding of these things, you will be in a solid position to gather the data for the SWOT analysis and it will be more relevant. Let’s get started… 1) Who’s Your Target or Ideal Client? – Wouldn’t it make it alot easier to find your threats, strengths, and weaknesses if you knew your target or ideal client? I think so…I like to use an exercise to dive deep into who my target or ideal client is. Take 30 minutes and really get clear on who it is you are marketing to. How old are they? What are their pain points? What does their day look like? Give them a name if you can, and make them real. Now that we are clear on who we are targeting.. 2) Market Research – Sit down and identify all your potential competitors that are targeting your ideal client specifically. As you find competitors that are targeting your exact client identify them as threats. More specifically, how are they a threat. We are basically preparing our data for the SWOT to tie all this togther later. 3) Identify Your Assets – Now that we understand our competitors and our target market you need to take inventory. Take 15-30 minutes and write down all the assets that you have that you would consider strengths in targeting your ideal client. Consider all of those things that are shortfalls in your assets to target your ideal client. When I say assets, I am talking about things like credibility, testimonials, messaging, newsletter lists, partnershipts, etc..Basically anything that will help you reach your target market effectively. Now you are ready to SWOT… I find that doing just this small amount of pre-SWOT information gathering gets me clear on who I am trying to reach. Gaps in my message or approach. And a very clear picture as to who else is competing for the minds of my prospect. Now… Get to work
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| The Power Of One |
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Don’t underestimate the power of speaking to one person with your message. Speak to their deepest emotions, desires, pains, needs, and wants. Don’t underestimate the value of singling one single person out in your marketing as if you were sitting in front of them face to face. Create a fictitious “ideal customer”, and pretend you are speaking to that one person in all of your marketing. Reality check… Broad and general marketing statements are becoming less and less effective. Especially in Social Media…The ability to connect directly with ONE single person, and address their needs while providing THEM value has never been more effective. A connection on Facebook, an invite to LinkedIn, a Direct Tweet to a follower on your list. These small, personalized and laser targeted messages will build a raving fan base for your product and service with frightening speed. Connect with each single person and provide them real value. Address their comments in your blog. Survey them. Find out what makes them tick. Why do they use your product or service? Engage them… People are bored… Be interesting, stack the value, and communicate to their needs and I guarantee you more revenue, more leads, and more profits as a result. The Power of One! Go Target, Attack, and Profit!
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Are you using a laser or a shotgun in your marketing efforts?| Your Life, Your Way |
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Not a typical marketing or business blog post today. This video resonated so well with my own thoughts on work ethic, life, and success I HAD to share…
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| Stir Up Your Raving Fans With A Product Launch |
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Are 60%+ of your efforts focused on making offers to prospects and suspects, or are you “wishing” that people would buy your product, service, or idea? If you are a small business owner that has a crowd of raving fans, there is probably no better event internally to re-invigerate your fan base than an internal product launch. Not only is this is great way to increase your revenue, but is a great way to re-activtate customers that haven’t purchased from you in awhile. Are you saying to yourself, “I Don’t Have Anything To Launch”. Baloney…every small business can do several product launches in a year if they get creative and start making offers. Stop being boring. Spend some time getting creative and re-position your existing product or service so you can re-introduce this to your fans. Maybe you have a low performing product that needs attention. Or…perhaps you have a service that you could add a little more value to re-package it as a new offering. Here are 3 tips to get start gearing up for launching a product or service for you small business: 1) Survey, Survey, Survey – Get out there and talk to your clients. A sample 0f 5-10 is probably plenty. What products or services are they consuming now? What products or services do they wish you would offer? How much are they willing to spend on them? The bottom line here is do a little research. They will tell you what they need, but more importantly what they want. Compile all of your research and sit down and analyze what your clients are saying vs. what you are offering. Guaranteed you are going to find some opportunities… 2) Gap Analysis – Now that we have compiled data from real clients, it’s time to do some analysis. The easiest way I have found is to fire up a simple spreadsheet and compare your existing products to the features or wants discovered from your survey. 3) Re-Package or Create – Now that we have identified opportunities to enhance or create a new product or service, it’s time to get busy. Don’t lose steam yet, start small and build on what you have learned. Pull your team together and identify ways you can re-position and re-activate your fans. Drill into the benefits that the service or product will offer. Just make sure you are addressing the desires you uncovered in step 1. Many business owners fail to take this real feedback and integrate it. Your clients are telling you what you want, now give it to them and make them an offer they can’t refuse. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the product launch series as we get tactical about marketing a new product or service. Cheers,
Posted in Marketing Consultant Seattle, Product Launch | 
Tags: online product launch, Product Launch | No Comments »
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If you want to grow your business, you need to make more offers! Seems simple doesn’t it…| Analyze This (a.k.a who’s listening) |
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If you have a website, and aren’t looking at your analytics you are leaving money on the table. Period. If you don’t know what keywords your visitors are finding your website with, and what information they migrate to once on your site you are flying blind. If you have a blog, and you aren’t looking at the analytics you are flat out missing on juicy topics that your prospects want more of. So first off, go get yourself a free Google Analytics account. You can’t go wrong here and it takes about 5 minutes to get up and running. For those technically challenged, your web guy or gal can help you out. Here are few metrics you should be looking at: 1) Absolute Unique Visits – This is the most basic metric that will tell you the number of “unique visitors” visiting your website on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. This is important to understand when you start feeding these numbers in your online marketing strategy to determine how many leads you need to meet your goals. 2) Content | Top Content – The next metric I usually look at is content and the pages that my prospects are visiting most frequently. I find that many small business owners are surprised as to which pages actually get the most traffic. Use this as an indicator to get your most relevant content in front of your prospects directly from your main page. 3) Avg. Time On Page – It is always useful to know what pages your prospects are hanging out on the most. This metric will tell you those pages that prospects actually hang out and read. Typically a good gauge that you are hitting the mark with relevant content. If you mine the top 5 pages, this would be a good start for promoting in Social Media, Article Directories, and even your own blog posts. 4) Traffic Sources – My favorite is to look at where the traffic is coming from. From this screen you will be able to see what % of traffic comes from organic search vs. direct traffic. And you can also see traffic that is referred from partners, association websites etc. Before you allocate dollars to online advertising it is critical to understand the current state of where your traffic comes from. As you implement your marketing strategy, keep an eye on how the mix of your traffic sources change with each campaign. 5) Traffic Sources | Keywords – Without understanding the keywords prospects are using to actually find, you are not positioning your website tactically for lead conversion online. Many times you will find users searching for long tail keywords in combination that you may have never thought of. An example of this might be marketing consultant Seattle vs. marketing Seattle. Most times this occurs by accident. A great strategy is to use these keywords for further positioning. Write a blog post, article, or even a press release and integrate these keywords in the title and in the body and you will drive more traffic to relevant pages for your readers. Hopefully you found this useful. Stay tuned for a how to video on leveraging Google Analytics on your website. Now… Go Target, Attack, and Profit!
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Who gives a rip about what you are saying online?| My 9 Year Old Converts Better Than… |
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If you have kids, you know as well as I do that Kids are some of the best negotiators and sales folks around. Here’s why: 1) The word “No” is just an opening position not a finality. I wish more of us did this. I realized the other day that my son has an innate drive to start at no, find my objections and start building a case for the sale. Albeit it might be staying up later, you gotta give those kids credit. No means nothing to them, it is literally the point at which they start not end. If more small businesses owners realized that you are going to get a “No”. The question is why. Does your message not resonate with them? Have you handled their objections in your marketing and sales material in advance? Many times we don’t dive deeper into the why we aren’t converting and getting the No in the first place. You will be well served to follow the kids on this one and use “No” as a starting point in assessing your prospects objections and how your marketing is addressing them on the way to yes. 2) Kids form coalitions in their sales efforts. If you have ever had the kids around grandparents you know exactly what I am talking about. Or even siblings for that matter. This is a truly brilliant tactic that all business owners should use. By leveraging internal contacts at your prospects organization and building coalitions you are setting yourself up for the sale. This is often used against me when both of my boys work in unison to “close the deal”. It’s a powerful tactic those kids use, you may want to consider it. 3) Persistence. This one is often overlooked but extremely important. Kids use this as a default MO. How many times has your son or daughter asked the same question 5 different ways hoping there will be a different result? Yep, again they are sales masters. The point here is that if you are sending out one time marketing blasts and wondering why you aren’t getting results remember the kids here. You need a marketing and sales system that is persistence, educational, and somewhat automated. Learn a little from the little one’s here and let’s prosper this year. ~Matt |
…most of us really.|
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