Small Business Marketing tips to Profit in a Recession – Advice from a Friend at the Small Business Development Center

I’m going a bit off topic with this post. My past few were about the importance of leverage and systems. I’ll be going back to the topic but I had a conversation with a Joint Venture partner today that I wanted to pass along.

He and I are both small business marketing and growth experts and are giving a Growth Strategy Seminar for our local Small Business Development Center (SBDC) clients. The SBDC is an organization funded by the Small Business Administration (SBA) that has a mission to help Americans start, build and grow businesses.

The Director of the local SBDC is a friend of mine who used to be president of a fairly large, worldwide insurance company. He’s working with the SBDC now because of his passion to help the small business owner succeed and prosper. In preparation for the seminar, we asked him what are the most important messages we need to communicate to seminar attendees (particularly in light of the tough economy).

Here is what he said is the most important marketing messages that business owners need to know:

1. Keep on marketing. This is no time to cut back on the life-blood of attracting and keeping clients.
2. Know your customers, their needs and why they are buying your product or service.
3. Have all clients and prospects in a database so you can regularly communicate with them and give them reasons to purchase from you. Use your database to build demographic and psychographic profiles of your target market.
4. Market to your target market. It is a huge waste of resources to be marketing to people who are not prospects. Unfortunately, most businesses spend the majority of marketing resources on people who will never buy from them.
5. Give clients a consistent experience. Remember that your product and service are elements of your marketing mix. For years, the buzz word has been “exceed expectations,” which is great but the first part is to provide a consistent client experience. Most people expect, and are satisfied if you do this.
6. Track and measure what marketing is working. If you don’t track, you don’t know if it is working. If it isn’t working, you are wasting resources. If it is working, you want to build on and improve it to maximize results.
7. Don’t try to find the magic bullet. Small improvements in different areas can yield exponential increases in sales.

There you have it. If you find yourself swimming against the tide or so overwhelmed with what you should be doing next, you want to give me a call. If you want to see how you can achieve dramatic increases in sales (or to just stop the bleeding!), you want to give me a call. I look forward to hearing from you.

Small Business Marketing to Up Your Profits in a Down Economy with Marketing Systems

One of the single biggest marketing problems I see with small businesses is the lack of a marketing system. Every thing they do is tactical and is rarely planned, budgeted, tracked or measured.

A media rep comes into the business and says, “You need my product to get clients.” TV, radio, newspaper, Yellow Pages or an agency. The thing is that they all have compelling stories and loads of statistics on impressions, market awareness, branding and loads of other marketing terms. Which do you choose?

Most businesses are in a “trial” mode and will keep trying whatever is sold to them, hoping that one of them will be the magis bullet. Worse yet, they continue running an ad without knowing if it is generating the results they need. They think, “Hey, I’m getting my name out there.” When somebody needs me, they’ll give me a ring.

As the spider webs gather on the phone, the owner gets frustrated, the ad rep tells them they need to run a larger ad or run it longer. That’s a bunch of garbage. If you had an investment that was tanking and your broker told you to wait or invest more, you’d find a new broker.

Before you advertise, you need to think of how you are going to systematize your marketing. The advantage of the marketing system is that you can actually plan on results. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if you implement a certain element of your marketing system, you will most likely make a fairly predictable amount of profit?

Companies all over the world are doing it everyday. The owner knows what business is coming in and where it is coming from. Once I set up a system in a business and test my materials, the owner knows that if they send out a certain mailing to their clients, they will make a predictable return. If they run a particular ad with a particular offer, they know it will make them a predictable amount of money.

You can do the same in your business. In my previous posts, I talked about leverage. Now we are into the systems and the types of systems that you can build in your business. I make money and get referrals through the success of my clients, not due to the size or frequency of their media buys. Stick with me and I you will learn the basic elements of implementing my powerful and guaranteed Hidden Asset Marketing System in your business.

Small Business Marketing to Up Your Profits in a Down Economy

In my last post, I introduced the concept of LEVERAGE and the impact it will have on your business when you understand and integrate the concept into EVERYTHING you do. I wrote about leveraging every contact and individual in your business and network for to maximize the benefit to them and the profits to you.

This post is about leveraging and systematizing communications. When you prepare any client or prospect communication, think beyond using it for that individual and instead create it as a template for a communication you will be using repeatedly. Whether it is a thank you note, collection letter, sales letter or proposal letter, you can use it again. Create it as a mail merge document so you can maximize efficiency.

Does your staff send out personal communications? They should be sending out the same materials so you have control of the message and content as well as to improve their efficiency. Think of it like this: Do you want an employee who is having a bad day or is planning on leaving you to be writing to your clients and prospects without your oversight?

Do you want a sales rep who should be in front of clients and prospects to be spending hours or days preparing communications and proposals? Remember that it is human nature to find activities to fill the time available and many feel as long as they are doing something, anything, they are working, irregardless if it is actually productive.

Do you have an online or offline newsletter, autoresponder, ezine, blog, Web site or participate in social marketing sites like facebook? If so, you have massive opportunities to leverage and create a system in which one communication can be used for each of the marketing tactics.

If you properly structure all of these communications, you will have the materials required to prepare special reports to use as an incentive to get clients to sign up for your newsletter. If you combine the special reports, you have the material for a book or information product!

The majority of the materials and posts you read that I write are either from a special report that I’ve already written or are being compiled for a future report and book.

Leveraging and systematizing your marketing and business are so important that I will devote a lot of posts and notes to them. After all, I need materials for my book, don’t I?

Small Business Marketing Guide to Up Your Profits in a Down Economy

Let’s continue with profit-boosting ideas that will increase your profits without exhausting your marketing budget (I’m assuming that you are budgeting for marketing and not just hoping dollars will become available). I’m going to focus on two keywords and they are two words that can dramatically change the way you look at your business – Leverage and Systematize.

Think leverage – If there is a client in your business and they are buying from you, what can you do to leverage this contact? Here are some ideas:

• Cross-sell or up-sell to increase the value of the transaction
• Get their name, address, email address and record their buying preferences so you can continue marketing to them with coupons, newsletters and other tactics that encourage additional purchases.
• Ask them for referrals (learn how to ask for referrals!)

Give them coded coupons to hand out to their friends. When they are redeemed, send the client a thank you gift.

• Ask what business they are in and see if there are products or services you offer that the business could use.
• Start a platinum membership club for your key clients. Sell memberships that entitle them to special offers and privileges.
• Find out what other businesses they frequent and ask for an introduction to the business owner to explore joint ventures and strategic alliances with them.
• Send them a thank you note for their purchase and include a coupon for a discount on their next purchase if they return within the next month.

Pretty much every item listed is leveraging a relationship with a client. Do the same with your prospects and suppliers. You want to leverage every contact to see not only what additional profit you can gain but what additional service or benefit you can bring to your clients.

Small Business Marketing to Up Your Profits in a Down Economy

The most powerful, simplest and inexpensive marketing strategies to bring your business a flood of sales and waves of profits is the joint venture (JV) or strategic alliance. Essentially, you are leveraging the relationships another business has with their customers to build your own business. They work as well in both online and off line and can be very simple or very complex, multi-million dollar deals.

Your starting point is to identify non-competing businesses that have a client profile similar to yours. Approach the owner with a letter or phone call and let them you have a unique idea that can generate a lot of new clients. There are a couple of things you can try.

One is to offer to pay for a mailing to their clients recommending your service or product. Include a special offer, with a deadline for redeeming, that is unique to their clients. I’ve found that creating a coupon on which the offer is printed improves response.

Some businesses you approach will express concern about the confidentiality of their list. If so, offer to have them send it directly to their list themselves. You will want to write the sales letter or coupon yourself but allow them final approval on the copy.

Another tactic is to create a mailer on which you both print an offer and mail it to your combined client lists and share all expenses equally.

I believe it is very important to conduct due diligence and to take the time to get to know your potential business partner as well as the quality of their products and services. If you plan on recommending somebody to your valued clients, be sure they will meet your standards and expectations.

Typically, only about three of ten business owners will wish to pursue a joint venture so you’ll need to make several calls but it will be well worth the effort. In my opinion, the JV is about the most powerful marketing strategy any business, large or or small can implement.

Up your profits in a down economy – How to open a cash windfall

Have you ever “mined” your client list? If you have a list of satisfied clients, an email list, a list of vendors and a personal network, you are probably sitting on a gold mine from which you can “extract” a cash windfall.

In my previous couple of posts, I referenced the importance of regularly “touching” your clients. If you’ve been doing that (or even if you haven’t done so regularly), you’ve been building and cultivating a relationship with them since they have been buying from you. You can leverage this relationship for immediate cash.

How do you go about doing this? Sit down in front of your computer and write a letter to your best clients and tell them about your situation, that you need to raise cash to help build and improve your company. In return for their support, you will give them special treatment, special discounts and bonuses just for them.

This is a very powerful technique that leverages one of your most important Hidden Marketing Assets, the relationships you have cultivated over the years. Will it work for you? Only testing will tell but the odds are in your favor because your clients trust you and people enjoy helping people they trust and have given them good service

Now, if you really want to leverage this concept, start thinking about whom you can create a joint venture with and make a special offer to their client and prospect list. I’m not talking about the BS internet joint ventures where a guru gets other gurus to promote their latest and greatest products, without seeing it or having any idea of what it does. You know what I mean. You get the same email from twenty people saying their “good friend” has the most amazing money making system in the world

I’m talking about a genuine relationship with a business owner you know and trust. Somebody who has the same beliefs about quality and service that you do. I’ll go more into structuring joint ventures in another post but start thinking of how you can approach clients and prospects with a very special offer.

Up your profits in a down economy – Increase client value

In this order, these are the easiest people to sell to:

1. An existing client
2. A past client
3. A referred or endorsed client
4. A cold prospect

This list is an established fact. Even knowing this, where do the vast majority of companies spend the majority of their marketing dollars and effort? On number 4, the cold prospect. Nearly every client or prospect I speak with spends little, if any of their marketing dollars strengthening their relationship with their existing clients.

The thing is, most of them realize they should be keeping in touch with customers but still do nothing about it. Very few companies even have any process or method of getting basic contact information like name, address, phone number, email address or a list of the products purchased by their clients. According to a study conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, for every month that passes without your contacting your clients, there’s a 10% reduction in loyalty to your business.

For about $10 to $15 per client per year, nearly any business can build a customer contact program that will dramatically increase their sales and profits at a fraction of cost of obtaining a new client. Ideally, you will have 12 to 14 contacts per year. Rather than looking at this as an expense, look upon it as an investment in the lifetime value of your clients.

The key to success in your client contact strategy is to include an offer, a coupon, a discount or other reason for your clients to contact you and purchase additional products or services from you.

In my next post, I’ll list some of my favorite client contact strategies and tactics you can use to increase your profits.

Till then…
Dedicated to multiplying your sales!

Up your profits in a down economy – Post 3

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of improving your selling skills. Without a doubt, it is the simplest way to dramatically increase the value of each sale.

Even if you don’t take the time to go through a professional selling course or book, there are some things you can do to increase the average transaction value.

• Start by identifying your most popular selling products or those that are easiest to sell.
• Select one or more products or services that compliment these products.
• Create “bundles” with special package pricing that applies if the client buys the extra product at the same time as the initial purchase.
• Create a sales script and rehearse the words that you will use to up-sell to a client. Say you own a pet store and a client just bought a training leash for their new dog. You say, “If you are using this for training, I recommend you also get the bookGood Owners, Great Dogs. I think it’s one of the best training books ever written. If you get the book today with the training leash, I can discount the book 10%.”
• It’s that easy. The key is to know what extra value you can bring to your client, believe in the value of what you are offering and ask the client to buy it.

The key is to get used to asking. Will it work every time? No, but it will only work if you ask! Whatever you sell, it is very likely you can add value with additional products. Since you’ve already spent the money to get the client in front of you, you owe it to yourself and the client to insure they have everything they need!

Up your profits in a down economy – Increase profit per transaction

One of the simplest tactics for increasing your profits is to pay attention to the client who is directly in front of you. It doesn’t matter if you have the person on the phone, in your store, in your restaurant or on your web page, it is fairly simple to get the client to buy more.

Most businesses leave an absolute fortune on the table because they simply ring up the sale that is in front of them and make absolutely no effort to add to the transaction. To put things in perspective, think of the additional profits McDonald’s makes every year because they ask the question, “Would you like fries and a Coke with your meal?” Most of us could easily retire if we had that money!

The easiest person to sell to is an existing client. What you need to do is to train yourself and your staff to ask/recommend to the client to buy more. Too many people feel they are being pushy but that’s not the case. Imagine yourself in a clothing store. If a salesperson suggests a nice shirt to go along with the slacks you just bought, do you feel they are being pushy? What about the waitress who encourages you to get dessert? Do you think she is being pushy? I doubt it!

The bottom line is that it comes down to selling skills and having an attitude of serving your customer. If you have a good product or service, offering it to your client is a way to serve them.

Have you ever read any sales books or bought any sales programs? It is one of the strongest recommendations I have for you. It’s made a major difference in my income over the years and can do the same for you. Spend some time in the bookstore, online or in the library. Buy several programs and develop your own style around the proven strategies and tactics of the sales masters.

Click on the resources tab at the top of the blog and see who I recommend. Become a student of sales and apply what you learn.

Unique Selling Proposition Part 3

In this video, I continue to discuss the Unique Selling Proposition and get into the details of how to use the information you’ve gathered in the previous steps and begin writing and refining your million dollar USP!

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