The first question people normally ask me is what can I do next to market my business?

Before we start with something new, you need to unearth the goldmine’s that are in your business right now that will generate you money and build loyalty with your customer base.

The last 18 months have been hard on the economy and businesses.  Companies are holding on to their purse strings tightly.  I have seen a lot of businesses who have reduced their prices in order to stay in business.  But this is a very dangerous strategy, which will ultimately harm the business and is often unnecessary.

FACT: Very few people actually buy on price, even in a Recession.  If you have sold something on price that customer didn’t fully understand the benefit or value of what they have bought.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a few products and services which are very much price led.  But for the majority of businesses, right now there is a goldmine of opportunity by offering the customer real value.  Convince them of the value and they will paradoxically be prepared to pay you MORE in the Recession than before.

RULE:  Don’t cut your prices look first at how you can increase value.

TIP: One of the quickest and easiest ways to increase value is to offer a Guarantee that is really powerful.

Simply really, when you stop and think.  Guarantees reduce risk and fear.

When a customer makes a purchase, they are initially taking all the risk. By eliminating the risk you remove the barriers that stop them from making a decision to buy from you.

The truth is the customer can’t lose. 

When I tell my clients that I offer “Money Back” Guarantee, the first thing that they say to me is that they couldn’t afford to do that.  They would be out of business within a week.  Their customers would take advantage.   Really!

Over the last couple of years I have worked with a number of companies.  I offer a 100% Money Back Guarantee – No Questions.  When I tell clients this, they think I am mad.  But the truth is, this simply guarantee has brought me more word of mouth work then I could actually do.  Yes, on a number of occasions I have given the money back.  On reflection, at the time, there were two problems at play:

i)             The client didn’t under the value of my work, no matter how hard I tried to communicate it to them.

ii)            Long term, these customers would have ended up costing me more money than I was invoicing them for.

Can you relate to this kind of business?

So what do I mean by “give a great Guarantee?”

Where possible, offer a full unconditional 100% money-back Guarantee. If a customer is anything but completely and utterly delighted with your products or service, you give them their money back.  No questions, no arguments, no delays!

And yes, I really do mean a 100% unconditional Guarantee.

It is a quirk of human nature that the longer you offer the Guarantee, the less you’ll have to honour it. i.e. if you offer a 30-day guarantee, by the time day 21 arrives, if they’re not sure… they’ll come back for their money.  If the same Guarantee is for 12 months, the customer relaxes and the risk to your business is reduced. .

I can still hear you staying I am mad and questioning why you should even consider giving a Guarantee like this?

When companies I work with really push on this point, I get them to look at their business and potential problems which could cause a client to ask for their money back.  But that is a totally different post to this, which I will follow up with shortly.

I won’t lie to you…. I know sound like Nessa from Gavin & Stacey…. Yes, you will have to honour your Guarantee.  At the end of the day, business is a numbers game.  You work out the maths – if someone asks for their money back on X sale, but you make an extra XYZ sales, who is the winner?

Goldmine No.1, Guarantees are one of the best ways to strengthen your business in the Recession and set you apart from your competition.

Please test a strong Guarantee and let us know how it goes.

Plus watch out for next week’s Goldmine.

Most businesses I talk to tell me that when it comes to marketing, they feel overwhelmed.    So many decisions, options and tools to use.  Which one will work, which one will not cost much, which one will take up the least of my time??

With so many options and decisions to make, fear creeps in and this then stops a business in its tracks when it comes to their marketing.

To be truthfully, working on your marketing is one of the most important tasks you need to do in order to be successful. I want to share with you 10 tips that have been tried and test over the years with my clients that you can use today, to build your marketing plan and reach more potential clients.

1. Give them what they want. Most businesses market what they deliver. The key point is to find out what your clients really need. Understanding people will unlock potential profit doors for you. What you do is the solution, find the problem.
2. Emotionally engage your audience. You need to keep them interested and coming back for more. Story telling is an age old success story, look at the success of Hollywood and TV. Find out what their questions are and answer them, provide them with tips, advice and back up with case studies and testimonials.
3. Competition. Look at the marketing methods used by the companies in your field that you look up to. What are they doing? What can you copy. Analyze their techniques and apply them to your own business?
4. Action.  Simply knowing the right business model or the right techniques will not give you the edge. It takes more than just knowing what to do in your business to achieve extraordinary results. You have to take Action!
5. Dig deeper. Find out what it really is that makes your business unique. I can assure you, you will be very surprised. Make this the focus for your marketing. Don’t get into the routine of just doing marketing for the sake of checking off boxes on your “to do” list.
6. Personal. Uncover your story, what’s your background and history. People buy from people.
7. Transparency. Tell the truth. Become the expert. Reveal things about your business and include the problems and weaknesses you have overcome. This really adds to your marketing.
8. Keep it simple. I client I started working with late last year, started calling his clients and picked up additional work. Simple!
9. Don’t be afraid. As you engage people, there will be some who are going to like you and some who don’t. This is just a fact in business. The truth is that if you engage people you can sell more. It is easier to sell to someone who likes you then someone who does!
10. Change.  Remember that things change.  Find what works for your business, implemented and keep going back to your customers to find out what they want.  As their needs change, look to see if you can adapt to their needs.  Great if you can, if not, you need to find new clients.

You don’t have to do all the steps above. Start off with one and take it from there. The key is to focus on the steps. They will help you develop a winning marketing plan.

If you have any questions, drop me a comment and I will get back to you

The number one reason that I receive from a potential new clients is because they have spent a lot of money on marketing and received absolutely nothing in return.

When I first start with a business, the first thing we look at is what they actually sell.  Nearly 99% of the time, business owners (or the people doing the marketing) are marketing what you deliver, not what your product or service can actually do for a potential client. These two things aren’t the same.

The second thing I hear from a business owner is that it is obvious what I need to market. 

Or is it?  For example

If you’re a financial advisor, you probably think you’re marketing financial advice. If you’re a HR advisor, you may think you are marketing HR advice. If you own a clothes shop, you may assume you market clothes. If you market a restaurant you may think you are selling a meal.

In each case, you’d be right in terms of your deliverables, but you are wrong about what they are buying.

What you’re marketing and what you actually deliver are two different things.  The key to increasing your sales is to realise that what you are really marketing is hope – your clients’ hope of achieving their goals.

I have worked with a variety of business owners from design agencies to bridal shops.  They have all faced the same problems when increasing sales.  They have confused their marketing with what they deliver.

For example, if you are financial advisor, yes you deliver financial advice, but what the client really wants is hope.  Hope that you can help them with their money and deal with things that they don’t really understand.  Ultimately, they want to make money, which you can’t promise, but you can offer hope.  If you sell carpets, you deliver the carpets and lay them in the house, but what you are selling is hope.  Hope that at the end, the room/house is going to look better then the owner has visualised it in their heads and also practical for their needs – you are helping to create a home.  If you own a restaurant, you are not selling a meal, you are selling hope.  Hope that the evening will be something to remember, that the meal will be better then what they can do at home.  That for once, they don’t have to do the dishes! The meal may be for a special occasion i.e. birthday, reward, celebration.

You’re marketing to your prospects’ hopes that they’ll be happier, more successful, more attractive, smarter, richer, more comfortable, and more secure, etc. Target you’re marketing to the real reasons people buy and you’ll be much more successful in motivating them to make a purchase from you.

Do you see the difference?  Let me know your thoughts.

The six large film studios, including Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox, have supplied film clips to Movieclips.com, a new online service that allows users to watch 12,000 clips free of charge and to place them in blogs and social networking sites.

The site also allows people to buy or rent the full film.

This is believed to fill a gap in the market, particularly at a time when DVD sales are in decline.

For the full article – see P27 – The Financial Times, 3 Dec 2009.

Viral marketing means to spread out information. Traditionally this was and is, still done via   word of mouth.  Online it can be achieved with emails, newsletters, promotions and your website (to name a but a few).

For example, I received an email the other day from a friend who had forwarded it to me.  The message was about the Take That Circus Tour DVD being launched on 24th November.  There was the option to opt in in the email to receive information.   My friend forwarded it to me, because we went to the concert together and she knew I would be very interested in the email.

My friend was obviously on a companies email list to have received the message. By offering the facility to forward the message to friends and share, the company are building their list.  Because there is a very strong chance that I will sign up to receive more information.  Hence the viral nature.

Viral marketing is free and takes less then 5 mins to set up.  What are you waiting for, add a forwarding facility onto your online marketing and grow your list.

One of the cheapest forms of marketing is to build a list of potential contacts and clients and marketing to them.  Using email, newsletters, flyers or what ever you care to create.

One of first tasks I always do with a client is to get the to build their list.  So, I thought I would share with you my top secrets on how to do it.

Secret No. 1 Landing Page or Squeeze Page. 

A squeeze page/landing page is a shameless and blatant tool to get visitors to your website or blog to leave their names and email address in exchange for a valuable piece of information.

It can be your home page on your website/blog or it can be one page website that is created just to capture their details.

This information can be in the form of a down-loadable report, a video, piece of audio or an invitation to a special event.

It is a “teaser of information” about what products you sell or services you provide.

99% of people (or traffic) to your website/blog will leave without taking any action.  Think about the money you are leaving on the table.  If you have a system that you can capture their names and email in exchange for information, you can start to build a relationship with them.

Let me know how you get on

We all know that one-sided relationships don’t work.  So why do we set up our websites to talk  at our customers? 

Does your website focus entirely upon your business and talk just about you and how wonderful you are? 

Have you ever wondered why some websites bring in leads on others don’t?  This is because those websites are focused on the customer/visitor and they are developing a two relationship.

When designing your website, think about these four things:

1. People like to be entertained – your content has be interesting and of value to hook them.
2. People want their opinions valved - blogs and forums can be added to your site to give customers the option to add comments and start to engage in the conversation.
3. People are egocentric - the first question in their head will be “What are you going to do for me?”
4. People want to do something – they want to take part, i.e. leave a comment, download a document or watch a video.

Give them something to do.  Offer a free report or whitepaper or the option to download some audio or video.  Ask them for comments and get them to leave their opinion on a topic.

Guess what you have when they leave their email, phone number or address?  A qualified lead.  Qualified because they stayed on yoru site long enough to take action.

Go and look at your website and let me know if your business has been losing out on leads.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the Apprentice.  But last nights epsiode was a train crash and I for one will not be watching anymore epsiodes.  

When is  marketing going to get the same respect as the sales function in Sir Alan’s organisation.

The Apprentice makes good TV, but in the really business world a business built on sales alone will not survive, especially in this climate.  What most people would have picked up from last nights programme is get the sales right and nothing else matter!

So what about the customer and their experience of the product.  I am sure that anyone who bought the honey product, wouldn’t be running back to buy again!

The losing team, had a better product and ticked more marketing boxes i.e. promotion, packaging, place, people  and physical evidence, but the project manager was let down by the price.   They even got their sales strategy right.  

Ben was given the task of helping with costs and did absolutely nothing, but complain.  Which is what he normally does. He was clearly given a task and did absolutely nothing to contribute on the cost front.  Plus he is rude and doesn’t even shut up when told to by Sir Alan!  For this reason alone, he should have been fired.

The winning team’s project maanger, had no idea what he was doing.  I would be embrassed to be associated with such an awful product.  

But in the boardrooom that didn’t matter.  The winning team made the most money! The product was awful, they had no pricing structure, no plan for distribution and only won at the last minute because they were giving the product away.  If this was a really company, it would have been interesting to see how many complaints they would have received the following day/week about their product!

If I had bought their product in Camden I would have complained.

Yes the team that lost did really messy up on the costings and price. Costs are important, but they were working as a team and the Project Manager made it very clear that she need help… where was that help?  If it wasn’t for Nick no one would have known about the huge mistake they made with the oils.

There were other people in that Boardroom who should have been fired! 

What a twist it would have been if the winning team where called back in and asked to explain they mistakes and one of them was fired!

Business is about sales, but if you don’t get the marketing right where are the customers going to come from.  It isnt’ just about Sales.

Last nights episode was a train crash.  I can’t believe that some of the people who messed up on last nights task are still in with a chance to work for Sir Alan on a six figure salary.

This isn’t what being in business is about.

I was shocked today to read that the UK Government has become the biggest spender on advertising in Britian.  Every day we are bombarded with over 10,000 state-sponsored messages via, TV, Billboards, Magazines, Newspapers, Radio and the Internet at a cost of… Wait for it… You won’t believe it…. £400m a year!

This got me thinking about how I interact with government advertising. 

I don’t actually take any notice of it.  This is because I work in marketing and I understand the psychology of how businesses use advertising to engage us.   Do you actually take any notice of any government advertising you have seen recently?  If so, what was it?

Spending £400m on advertising when we are in a recession is madness.  I would rather the money be spent on something that needs it and for me to see the results. 

There are cheaper, better and more credible ways of interacting with your people – the government just need to learn how to do it.

What do you think?