Accelerated Income from Marketing

What exactly does marketing give us?

The answer comes from the correlation between time and money. We can’t do anything about time of course; that moves at its own speed. But we can do something about the speed at which we can earn money. For example, think of an amount of money you would really like to earn this year. It would be obvious to say that earning the same amount of money but stretched out over the rest of your career is not going to be quite so appealing. But if we were to accelerate the processes needed to earn that amount so that we could do it in 10 months, or 6 months, or even less, then it suddenly all gets very interesting.

And that is what marketing is all about, achieving that acceleration, getting the results we want more and more quickly. Acceleration is a multiplication effect. In terms of physics it is the speed at which speed increases. In business it is a very simple formula:


(No of customers x No of transactions x Price) / Time = Income Acceleration


The sad thing is that without this information many businesses have no idea how to achieve better results. They become trapped in a consistent mentality of ‘having to advertise’ because it’s what they think they should do, or hoping that they get a referral somewhere but have no clear referral strategy. They compete predominantly on price because, well, isn’t that what all businesses do? And they will then tell you that that is what running a business is like.

Put that kind of thinking into the model above and you can clearly see why so many businesses struggle. I don’t want that for you, and I know without doubt that you’re aiming for more than that – you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise. Marketing is not something to be thought of in isolation. It’s not an academic subject to be dealt with on occasion by the management. It needs to be in the very heart and soul of your business, your people and the way you work.

Let’s just deal with advertising first of all. Advertising can be a way of bringing people into your business and as such it can be a part of your marketing mix. However it very often doesn’t work or it is relied upon on far too heavily by businesses. It certainly does nothing about the number of transactions you can do with each customer or price. Marketing encapsulates the whole acceleration formula.

Here’s a very simple strategy for accelerating your business success. It starts with your existing customers. Those people who, if you’re like 95% of other businesses out there, you ignore or don't treat as well as you should. They dealt with you once but now you’ve forgotten them. Even if your business revolves around repeat supplies you’re certain to have these poor ignored people who once were happy to do business with you. You need to get in the habit of speaking to them. Regularly. Write to them, email them, call them, send them a gift, make them a special offer, tell them about new products, invite them to events, ask them for a meeting, let them have a trial of something new, send them a hello, a thank you or some interesting information. Do whatever you need to do but do it and do it regularly. Every business can do this – I've known take away restaurants do it successfully!

In fact I have never known any business not to win additional sales from this technique and have seen some great relationships rekindle. Every business has an untapped source of wealth and profits in their customer base that they are just ignoring. Instead they are wasting money advertising for more people to deal with once and then ignore! It’s just madness but they can’t see it because that’s exactly what the next business is doing!

So that’s the ‘number of transactions’ part, but what else do we need to create some acceleration?
Here’s the killer punch that gives this strategy the accelerator. Ask for referrals while you do it. How easy is that?! When you are talking to customers always ensure that they are aware that referrals are important to you. If they have bought from you once and liked what you do, isn’t there a great chance that they will know somebody else who would benefit from what you do? Send out ‘family and friends’ vouchers or referral slips. This kind of thing works equally well in business to business circles and I have had some great results for clients in businesses such as IT and finance.

If your business is new or only has a small base you can still use this strategy. The size of your base doesn’t matter and even if it is absolutely zero, start by using the same principles with your old contacts – people who you have dealt with before in some capacity or other. Using this strategy you can achieve more sales from each customer and get them to introduce more customers who in turn can feed back into the same process. If you can also use some advanced strategies for increasing your prices you are well on your way to real accelerated growth. We’ll cover price strategies another time.

Of course this is the tip of the iceberg. There are many ways to pack all sorts of great marketing strategies into the acceleration formula. Remarketing your existing customers well is just one, but it is one of the quickest and most effective. And that, of course, is what acceleration in your business is all about.