When it's Time to Realign Your Marketing

People have no money. They’re feeling the pinch. No-one’s doing any business at the moment. No-one’s making purchasing decisions right now.

Is that so? Here are a few facts for you:

• Michael Jackson announces 10 concerts. They sell out instantly. He announces 10 more…and 10 more. They all sell out. Top ticket prices £1,000+


• Aston Martin launch and start to successfully sell bespoke £1.2m car


• Whitbread can’t physically can’t find enough land and build Premier Inn hotels fast enough to keep up with demand


• Domino’s Pizza & Mc Donald’s report large increases in profits
  Aldi, Morrison’s & Sainsbury’s profits up


• Sales of the Nintendo wii top 50m worldwide


• Gaming sector up


• Adult clothing and toys, erm, up


• Cinema advertising up


• British tourism up
• Business networking group 4Networking recording record membership levels

There are hundreds and thousands of other examples too.

Money is still around and growth is being achieved – you may just need to realign your business to succeed. You can realign by changing your market focus to the sectors that are enjoying growth. Realign by changing the message about your product. Realign by selling something new to your existing customers. Realign by taking your resources and employing them differently to solve a different problem. Realign by changing your position in the market.

Your realignment might at first look crazy – £1.2m car in a recession anybody? But the craziest thing you could do is to fail to realign with where the money’s being spent.

Zero to Hero – It’s All in the Headline

Celebrated by journalists, advertisers, marketers and astute business people for hundreds of years, great headlines are zero-or-hero, loved-or-lonely, make-it-or-break-it important. And it becomes more so every day. We live in a world where the headline is everything – whether we take notice, what we’re going to think about what comes next, how much time and credibility we’re going to allow something. It’s like this because we no longer always have time to try to work out whether stuff is relevant or interesting to us or not. There’s too much choice, too much information, too much to take our attention.

Give me the headline! I can then work out:

• Do I read this email?
• What’s this document trying to tell me?
• Is this magazine worth buying this week?
• Is this brochure worth picking up?
• Does this website help me?
  

It’s the difference between engaging people or being ignored. No one gets to the opening paragraph or looks for the subheadings if the headline hasn’t interested them first.

And headlines don’t just come in text.

• What’s the headline that your suit shouts in a first meeting with a client?
• How do I trust you’re going to solve my problems? Easily? Courteously?
• When you answer the phone like you don’t care what have you told me in BIG CAPS up front

Everything we do communicates something. And people will understand you more easily when you communicate – with everything you do – like a classic newspaper article; winning headline first, then bold opening paragraph giving an overview, followed by paragraphs broken up with subheadings.


How would your communication look in print? What (and where) are your winning headlines?

Owning Your Business' Space

Which space does your business (or product) own? This is a fundamentally important question for all businesses for four reasons:


1, It encourages you to think about your prospects geographically

2, It forces you to define your prospects by type and/or sector

3, It makes you develop your unique propositions

4, Because to ‘own’ that space you have to continually be in people’s hearts and minds


If you can’t define your space, you can’t ever own it and you’ll struggle. Or fail. However, if you can define it (from 1&2) and you can clearly communicate your benefits over and over again (3&4), then you’ll become the choice of the people that you’re aiming at and you’ll stake out your territory.

Overly simplistic?

Why? Show me an easier way than doing this? Sure, it won’t negate competition or suddenly cure all the world’s problems, but it’s a lot, lot easier than wasting time, money and opportunity on soul-destroying hit ‘n’ hope marketing campaigns.

A Different Perspective on Your Clients' Attention

Imagine that the people you wanted to present to; the buyers, decision makers or budget holders that you want to be in front of to make sales, sold you their time. So rather than making appointments in the ways that you currently do – through whichever sales & marketing approaches you’re currently using – you just had to book and pay for their undivided attention whenever you wanted it. Kind of like an ‘Attention Credit’.

You’d have to think about whose time you wanted to buy the most and at which price points, so you’d pick your target audience very accurately to suit your proposition and your likely lifetime profitability. You certainly wouldn’t go and make dozens of poorly researched appointments or pay over the top to sit in front of people who wouldn’t be interested in what you do.

These Attention Credits would not be cheap to buy either, so you’d be forced to think about how well you’re going to communicate when you get there. Why would you pay for an hour and a half’s worth of blabber when you could communicate everything so much better in 45 minutes?

If buyers sold you Attention Credits it would pay you to properly target your marketing, to research your clients properly before you met them, to communicate in the most effective manner possible, and to continually test and measure what you’re doing. You’d create an outstanding process to ensure you were getting the very best return on your investment.

Not so different to what’s happening in the real world then. Shame that we just don’t feel the pain of the marketing cost & the poor communication in the same immediate way that we do the pain of a ticking meter.

It's Snow Excuse Not to be Selling

Is it deep and crisp and even where you are?

Snow has covered much of the UK overnight and more is forecast. Of course this causes major disruption to all our normal activities but it does provide big sales and marketing opportunities (not least, of course, if you’re stocking shovels). If it hasn’t affected you where you are it may well be that it’s affected some of your customers.

Many people who are usually in a busy office may be at home today and will have only their inbox and their mobile to keep them company (apart from perhaps overly-excitable, off-school children). No colleagues by the water machine or office politics issues to take their attention. Even in full offices today, normal business won’t happen in quite the same way. Customers will be away, deliveries and meetings won’t take place, and there will be a very different atmosphere.

So take advantage. What can you do to keep in touch with your customers today? What can you do to help them? Could today be the day when you just call the people you need to keep in touch with but never seem to get round to doing? Could you review your marketing plan or your sales pipeline? Could you send a relevant, personal email to people? Could you write that direct mail letter you’ve not got round to? Could you do a sales plan that helps you with your major objections? These are the days when you can gain a real advantage over lazier competitors.

The other big advantage you have is that people remember the conversations they had and the things they did on days like this. So if your customers have snow – even if you don’t – they are far more likely to remember whatever you do today.

Take advantage.

Then go tobogganing in your lunch hour.

Sometimes You Get More than You Bargained For

I recently worked with a plumbing company – a very straight forward husband & wife team. (Marketing to many plumbers is an ad in the Yellow Pages and a name on the side of their van, so they had approached me with some trepidation). We worked on a localised mail campaign which addressed the real concerns of people looking for plumbers and I advised them to spend a little time and boot leather delivering the letters around their local area.

Yesterday was wet. Very wet. Yet undeterred, and armed with a couple of hundred envelopes, Mrs Smith (not a changed name, she really is Mrs Smith!) posted letters on four roads in the pouring rain before deciding that enough was enough and going home. When she got back she was astonished. She had four calls from customers waiting for her and through her letterbox she found a handwritten note which read:


'Many thanks for your circular. As a retired commercial director I must congratulate you on your efficient presentation of this excellent letter. I have put your sticker on the inside of my kitchen units and will most definitely be using you when the need arises.'


What do we learn here? That;

1, Getting marketing done professionally pays
2, The fundamental principles of profitable marketing are universal and recognisable
3, Adding something that engages the ‘might use you in the future’ group is a sure-fire winner
4, Don’t put things off because it’s raining (use that as a metaphor for recession if you will too)
5, Hand written notes have the power to touch people even more than four new customers

They Don't Believe You

When people don’t believe they don’t act. You don’t get many Sikhs going to church on a Sunday morning, and you won’t find many environmentalists queuing up to buy a 4x4. Strangely though a Sikh may be welcomed into a church very warmly and many 4x4s are actually quite green with good mpg/CO2 figures, clean engines, and long life cycles. But it won’t happen if people don’t believe.

When people do believe they’ll act in utterly incredible and even unjustifiable ways. They’ll camp outside your shop of a cold night waiting for it to open, they’ll fly to the States to buy the latest Apple i-whatever so they can have it three months early, they’ll rave about you. In extreme they’ll do frightening things that are totally justifiable only in their own minds – like deliberately blowing themselves up and killing innocent women and children in the process. Belief is sometimes frighteningly powerful.

People make their decisions around what they believe and what they don’t. What they believe about you, your claims and your industry. The time share business suffers here. Time share holiday homes – what a great idea – but we all believe we’re going to get ripped off so we avoid them. If their claims get bolder – however true they might actually be – we only believe them less.

If people aren’t buying from you in the numbers you’d like it’s probably because at some level they don’t believe you. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s just you haven’t convinced them otherwise yet. It’s (probably) not that they think you’re lying either. You just haven’t got them to really ‘get it’ yet.

When they do believe, they’ll buy. And they’ll rave about you. That’s what people do.

So if your product really is that good, it really is twice as powerful as your competitors’, how are you going to communicate that credibly? Because unless they’re believing it, you’re wasting your time and probably your marketing spend with it. It’s more than likely something really simple that’s blocking your path. Be honest with yourself and identify it.


Happy selling.

The Big Marketing Budget Mistake

Imagine your bank did this deal for you. For every £1 you give them, they give you £1.10. They then give you thirty days to pay your bit, too.

Now here’s the question. How much are you going to budget to spend with them?

Of course you’d be mad not to spend as much as you possibly could with them and to continually reinvest what you take out. Why would you put a budget on it?!

This is the madness of marketing budgets. If your marketing works – ie: it’s giving you a measured positive result – why would you do anything other than spend as much as possible on it? High growth companies of all sizes tend to get this and they become obsessed with working out customer lifetime values, how much they are happy to spend to acquire each new customer and then continually spending in the areas where they can be sure to get a positive return that they can measure.

Much of my work centres on getting business owners and directors to stop dreaming up and wasting budgets, and to start learning to find and actively maximise these calculated money makers. (When you consider I guarantee my fee for this work you realise how sure I am of the difference there is for you here). Good marketing is like your bank giving you £1.10 for every £1, not about sticking to budgets.

How to Increase Retail Sales in 2009

The widely predicted January retail bloodbath has begun as early and viciously as the sales did a few weeks before Christmas. The outcome of this will change not only the business landscape but also the landscapes of many towns. Yet retailers have let it happen to themselves in so many cases by sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring simple sales and marketing practices.

Retailers are blaming the economic situation. Mmm. And they’re blaming online e-tailers. What?!

The facts are that ‘physical’ retailers have seen the internet & economic trends coming and done either little or nothing about them in most cases. They have failed to understand why people visit shops and why people buy online, and what the relative advantages of both are. The simple fact that many online retailers have seen themselves as fighting the internet for the last decade rather than embracing it is just beyond belief.

Most retailers believe that the online e-tailers have them beaten because of price. Wrong. Or convenience. Wrong again. The main reason that e-tailers are forging ahead is because of information. It’s the way that e-tailers are able to get the details of prospects and customers and use that information intelligently that is key. An online e-tailer can continually remind its customers and prospects exactly why they should do business with them; whether that’s because of price (or the perception of better pricing), convenience or any other USP.

The sad thing is, physical retailers could have been doing this for years but it never occurred to them. It never occurred to them to get their customers’ details let alone to continually keep in touch with them or offer them relevant new products. It never crossed their minds to continually tell them about a home delivery service because they never bothered to dream one up. They never thought about telling everybody who bought Widget LX that Widget GLX had just been launched, or about the wonderful in-shop service, the advantages of professional fitting, or of their…. you get the point.

If you’re in retail and have no system of gathering and effectively using customer details – however manually – then get very excited. Implementing some basic practices here could have an utterly amazing effect on your business at a time when many in the sector don’t know what to do apart from slash prices still further.

Beating the Paradox Conundrum

There are so many confusing paradoxes in the world of business.


Woolworths’ problems stemmed from the fact that it didn’t have any particular focus, yet there are many companies that are failing because they didn’t diversify enough.

Many businesses enjoy success because they take risks – Porsche’s Cayenne off-roader for example. Many cause themselves problems because they do – take Toshiba’s now-defunct HD DVD format. Or who could forget the calamitous Sinclair C5?

Some ventures fail because the board or the owners give up too early. Others because they didn’t give up on something early enough.

Some will say your primary focus should be to maximise the value of each client above all else. Some say you should have as many clients as possible to spread risk.

If you do lots of marketing people will think you’re desperate. If you don’t do lots of marketing you’ll fail.


Whether you succeed because you do one thing or succeed because you do another is down to the perceptiveness of the people in charge to consider a situation – maybe a situation that hasn’t even presented itself yet – make a decision on it and then take conclusive action. Even if that decision is then to do nothing about a particular situation. The problem is that if you do nothing because you’ve considered nothing then you’ll be a very mediocre business, and one thing that’s absolutely black and white in business is that mediocrity always fails in the end.

It’s simple to explain how to make decisions that will more often than not bring you out on the right side of the paradox: you drop all your own pre-conceived notions about how right you are about something, learn to always be researching and taking calculated risks, map out your end game with every venture, continually communicate your core values, and ensure you can deliver.

Easy to explain, not always so easy to do. Which is why perceptive decision makers are a rare and often very wealthy breed. Why not decide to be one?

When Should Becomes Must

It’s that time of year again when people are asking what the coming year has in store.

For many businesses next year will be a year when ‘should’ becomes ‘must’. All the things you know you should have done this year but haven’t got round to, your business must embrace next year. Because 2009 won’t be very forgiving for those who don’t. We simply have to maximise the manifold opportunities that are out there.


I’m sure you already know that….


* You should learn about the importance of building and keeping good customer relationships

* You should get good at relationship-based email marketing

* You should become good at demonstrating your expertise

* You should properly embrace the power of the internet / blogging / social media

* Big companies should learn to react like smaller companies can

* You should check your overheads on a regular basis

* You should find the time to congratulate your top people

* You should get rid of deadwood

* You should get really good at managing your staff’s time

* You should make internal & external communications as clear as possible

* Sales teams should become better at using their time

* Sales people should be either sharpened up or shipped out

* You should add new marketing strategies

* You should continually be improving your sales processes

* You should have a proper system for lead management

* Marketing strategies should be continually tested and measured

* You should realise it will never quite be the same as it was before

* You should ensure that everything you do or invest in is adding value

* You should always value your loyal customers more than anything else


…..but next year a big gap will open up between those who take action and those who don’t. Big companies must stop deliberating around the board table and be decisive. Small companies must leverage their power to make quick decisions. All must realise that the new territory is going to feel very strange at first.

Oh, and by the way, you really should put all of this into a plan.

How to Make Business Networking a Part of Your Marketing Mix

Business networking, as I’ve reported here before, has exploded in recent years and the trend is continuing. It’s no longer the preserve of the smaller business either, with more and more SMEs and even large corporate businesses now foraying onto the networking scene.

Yet more and more people are saying it doesn’t work. So what’s going on?


Last week I spent some time at Andy Lopata’s workshop on business networking strategy. Andy is without doubt the expert on business networking – he works with many large companies and trains their staff on getting the most from networking. He says the problem lies in that many people ‘play’ at networking. They give it a go with no real expectation as to what they’re going to get out of it or, just as detrimentally, what they’re going to put into it.

The fact is that networking is now very sophisticated in the UK, so rather than just turning up somewhere for breakfast, you should look to build a proper networking strategy as part of your marketing mix. Of course many people aren’t doing this so with record numbers of people heading into networking without a strategy, it’s no wonder many are falling out of it.

So if you’re going networking and want to make it a success, here are the key points you should know:


1. Understand why you’re doing it. Consider the mix of profile building and personal development as much as the referral generation.

2. Write down a plan with your goals on it. Writing down your goals influences your behaviour which of course influences your results. Your networking plan should link in to your overall business plan.

3. Based on the above, choose the right group or groups. Consider both on and off line networking. Many people erroneously choose their networks based on what times they meet or where they meet. Are these the groups that will help you to reach the goals you have set yourself?

4. Measure your return. Your financial return can be measured not just by your sales performance, but also in terms of savings generated on supplies or time taken to achieve other projects. Your return in terms of personal development or profile might be more difficult to measure but you should certainly look to put some value on your personal development.

5. Consider the message that you want to get over to people. Make it succinct, precise and jargon-free, and be consistent in delivering it. Tell people exactly what makes good business for you and also the kind of people that it’s useful for you to meet.

6. Help others as much as possible. You’ll find people are more willing to help you either because you’ve helped them or the fact that you become valuable to the group.


When you look at it this is just a list of common sense marketing principles; just don’t forget them if you’re going networking. If you don’t apply them you risk becoming one of the people wondering why networking doesn’t work when perhaps you really didn’t know what you were there for in the first place.

And the opportunities are passing you by.

Beating Recession

Do you know what I dislike most about recession?

It’s nothing to do with economics, it’s those people who knock confidence in others.

It’s people who would otherwise deem themselves to be intelligent business people (or journalists) suddenly deciding that their opinion about recession is right and spouting it out here, there and everywhere. I’m not talking about those with some opinion, I’m talking about those that jabber on and on incessantly about how we should mark their words about the impending end of world economics as we know them.

The economic tide is one thing, but mate-down-the-pub economists really wind me up. I studied economics at A-level, I’ve studied accounting and business finance, I’ve run a business in finance that put packages together for listed companies, I’ve worked with investors, I’ve worked with businesses going through IPOs, I’ve talked to halls full of business people about financing on behalf of Business Link, and I get email updates on policy from the Treasury. But can I tell you what’s going to happen next year? Of course not. Is my macro economic judgement worth anything to your business? Probably not.

I heard an ‘expert’ business advisor at a conference on Tuesday night who in the same breath told everyone how well his own business was doing right now, but that he wasn’t going to grow his business because he was fearful about recession. My only advice would be not to use that advisor.


Do you get the facts?

As is recently well documented, recession is defined by having two successive quarters of negative growth. One quarter (which we have now ‘officially’ had) could be a blip. But this is the economic definition, what we should be concerned about is what it really means.

All that’s happening is that a pie (the economy) that’s been growing nicely for many years is now going to shrink a tiny bit. Last quarter our economy shrunk by 0.1%. Yesterday’s predictions by Mervyn King were that next year the economy could shrink by as much as 2%.

Now get real. If your business’ sales dipped by 2% could you survive? Most would. And that’s an average. Some sectors will be hit worse – estate agents, mortgage brokers, motor manufacturers, furniture companies – which means, by the law of averages that other sectors will do better. And even that’s not the whole picture. The biggest influence on your business is not the wider economy – it never has been. It’s YOU and your ability to make decisions. If you can make a decision to go and get a bit more of the pie, or even a bit of a different part of the pie, then your figures can look very different.


Do you know what I love about recession?

That’s precisely what I love about recession – the huge opportunity for those that realise that they alone are the key. For those that stop frightening themselves with all this macro economic stuff and deal with what’s actually happening right in front of them, there is actually more opportunity than ever before. My sales training programmes are going through the roof at the moment. Why? Because there are plenty of business owners out there that understand that whilst their competitors act like that daft business advisor, they can thrive – by maximising their share of the market.

It’s that kind of Darwinian aspect that I love. Those that go prowling NOW, those that are the fittest of their species will prosper. And note – it’s not the biggest, the flashest, or the proudest. It’s the fittest; the most alert, agile and ravenous that survive. And prosper.

For those that really want it, NOW is your time. Your weapons are outstanding marketing and clinical sales skills. Go for it!

What's Really Stopping Your Customers?

Have you ever stopped to wonder why more people don’t buy from you?

Your company does a great job, you’re passionate about what you do and you know that the people who do buy from you love you. So why is it sometimes such a battle to get more people to do the same?

There could of course be many reasons. You might still be reliant on too few sources of lead generation; your sales skills could be letting you down; or you could just simply be getting the wrong message across. The great news for you here is that tweaking any of these could open the door to an increase in profits for you. But there’s often one thing that’s totally overlooked by business owners and entrepreneurs, and it will completely stop customers buying from you at any price.
It’s risk.

The simple fact is, that to many of your potential customers, buying from you for the first time could well be a considerable risk. You might know that you’re, perhaps, a good florist, but to somebody else you’re the success or failure of a wedding day or a funeral. You might be quite happy in the knowledge that you’re a great courier, but you’re the potential breaking of an important business deal to somebody else.

Taking that first step to buy from you is a huge leap of faith. And it’s never going to be easy for your potential customers to make a huge leap – especially if it’s away from the comfort of another supplier. So we need to break that leap down into far smaller steps. Steps that allow them to walk towards the point of buying from you in a far easier way, until the very last step before they become a full paying customer is just a totally natural progression for them. This is called risk reduction strategy and it’s used all around us by large and highly successful companies. It also often provides us with a far more enjoyable and more profitable way of doing business.

There are many ways you can reduce risk for your customers and all will have a significant effect on your ability to get new customers into your business. Here are a few of my favourites:


• Guarantees or warranties

• Money back offers

• Try before you buy

• Full demonstrations

• Customer testimonials

• Payment terms that show confidence in your quality

• Payment terms that spread the cost of an investment

• Free samples / advice

• Relationship building (people trust those they know better)

• Reduced price (or loss leading) introductory offers


That’s a list that could provide a huge boost to your sales or profits although right now I understand if it looks a bit frightening. Some of that stuff might look expensive or risky for you to do. If you give free samples, won’t that be expensive? If you spread your payment terms out, won’t you have a problem getting paid?

You naturally need to take the options that work best for you, but don’t not take them through your own fear. Once risk is removed for your customers you will find that people will generally be happier to pay more for your goods or services and they will come to you in far greater numbers – you’re now a low risk option for them after all. If you’re still worrying that people will take advantage of you then let me tell you that you’re worrying unnecessarily. Yes, you might just get the odd person who wants their money back, or who has a bit too much of the free sample, but most people just don’t behave like that.

Most people who start taking these steps towards you are doing so with a genuine amount of interest. And if you do get the odd one who takes the Mickey? So what? Don’t get annoyed – put it down to human nature and concentrate on the additional sales and profits that you’re generating.
Risk reduction strategy is one of the most psychologically powerful tools in your marketing armoury and it will give you some very cool results. Don’t be afraid to use it wisely.

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.

Email Marketing

I did a talk on email marketing the other day to a group of people running expanding companies and it amazes me that after a decade or more of having everything that you need to be good at email marketing, it is so ignored or mis-understood by so many.

Email marketing isn't about spam or sending out a perpetual stream of untargeted offers. Email marketing is about keeping relationships and offering value.

Here are the key questions and objections that tend to come up.


How do I get email addresses?
From the business cards of everyone you meet; from your website – offer something to visitors in exchange for their email address, from your customers, from referrals. There are loads of places. Just make sure they are people who have an interest in what you do and are happy to receive your emails. You can buy lists, but these can present problems and are far less likely to give you the results you want.

What should I write about?
Anything that you do – whether generically, or that you specialise in – that they might be interested in. Comment on articles in the press or recent events that link in with what you do. Be yourself too. Don’t write your emails in difficult ‘business speak’ but convey a bit of your business’ personality.
You can also tell people stories about what’s happening in your business, what they should look out for this season, events, thank them, warn them, send them reports or links to other sites, or even just remind them about something. I’ve heard stories of an investment banker who used to send all her clients an email a couple of days before Valentine’s Day to remind them!

Subdivide the people to whom you want to write. You might want to send an email out to everyone, or just to existing customers.

How often should I send out emails?
As often as you like. Keep them bright and interesting and they will be well received. Daily works well for some people. I have worked with people who send out daily emails and have a very good read rate. For the large majority weekly works. There are no rules, go with what you feel is right and can fill with interesting and really useful material. I send them as-and-when with no fixed rule.

People in my line of business don’t do this
Excellent news! A vet once emailed me to tell me that this wasn’t possible for her and that it wouldn’t be the thing for them to do. I nearly fell off my chair, and then thought about opening up a veterinary practice. What an opportunity! People love their pets and would love to get really good advice from their vet by email. Getting their addresses would be really easy – these people regularly walk through your door – and the fact that no-one else is doing it is just superb news. In fact, unless you’re running a funeral parlour I can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t be doing this.

Isn’t this just spam?
No. We need to be absolutely clear about this. Spam emails are unwanted, unsolicited, and irrelevant emails – think about your own experiences. We’re sending emails to people with whom we either have, or are beginning to have, some kind of relationship, about something we know they are interested in. You should clearly still give people the option of opting out on all emails too.

I have never worked with a company who has done this correctly and had problems with it. In fact on the contrary I’ve heard of clients whose customers have complained when their regular email has dried up when, perhaps, the author has been away for a week or two!

Should I send this out from me or the company?
From you personally, keep it as personal as possible. Relevant, useful and personal are the keys.

I did this once and it didn’t work
Probably because you hadn’t got this kind of leading edge information at the time you might have sent out one ‘10% off’ offer like everybody else. What I’m encouraging you to do here is different. Use email over time to develop relationships and you’ll be surprised at what happens. It won’t change your business overnight, but worked correctly it will provide you with all kinds of opportunities that you are simply walking past today.


And of course, it’s going to cost you somewhere between very little and nothing to do it! Please don’t fall in to the ‘too good to be true trap’. Get emailing today!

A Word About Your Words

The greatest single thing that stands between you and your potential customers is words. You might need other influencers along the way, but the single biggest influence will always be words. You can't get people to see, experience, or imagine your product or service without them.

The power of words is often unrecognised by small and medium sized businesses. Their adverts, brochures, websites, conversation, even their business cards are full of poorly written words that are literally costing them hundreds or thousands of pounds or dollars in lost profits.

This of course is good news for you!

Choosing your words well - in all situations - can have an unbelievable effect on your revenues - often boosting a small or medium-sized business' profits by as much as 50-100%. And it costs no more than choosing bad words, which is likely what your competitors are doing.

Writing copy that works is a skill. But it is a skill that can be very easily learnt - even if you've found it difficult in the past. These are the golden rules with words:

Purpose - What is the point of the words you are about to write or say? For example, if you are writing a small web advert, the job of the advert is simply to get a click. Not to sell the product. Don't feel you have to cram everything you do into everything you say or write.

Perspective - Always write from the customer's perspective. Don't talk about what your product is, as much as what it will do for the customer. If you're selling something technical, put the spec at the back, or as an appendix. Get the customer message across first. Theodore Levitt, the American economist and Harvard professor (who chose these words brilliantly) said: 'People don't buy quarter-inch drills, they buy quarter-inch holes'.

The Magic Word - You. Use it and reap the rewards. As a customer 'you' want to hear what is important to 'you' and what 'you' will get if we work together. By using 'you' in copy, you will also find that it is easier to write the rest of the copy - it will feel more natural, as if you're speaking to a customer or having a conversation with them.

Simplicity - Keep it easy to read. Some people will skim detail, others want more. Try and make it easy for both kinds but avoid waffle at all times - you'll put your readers off. Only address one issue at a time in each paragraph.

Adjectives - Adjectives (describing words) will bring your copy or conversation to life. Describing your product as fast, beautiful, or neat helps to get your message across. However there is a big rule to this: use powerful adjectives, but use them sparingly. Copy or speech that is littered with adjectives becomes hard to follow. It becomes waffly and will force your reader or listener away.

Assumptive Words - Obviously you need to make sure your customers are on side straight away. Naturally they will agree with what you say if you start your sentence assumptively. Words that end '-ly' are good here (these words are your adverbs). How many successful campaigns for big companies start with 'worryingly, obviously, happily...'?

Choosing your words carefully can massively boost your business. Here's something that happened to me recently. I changed one word - one word! - in an advert with only ten words in it, and improved the response rate by over 45%!

Don't just use words, choose them. It can make a big difference.

Your Customers are Here

You have hundreds, possibly even thousands of customers out there who want to do business with you. They want what you’ve got to sell. They actively want to spend their money with you. Many of them might even love to be your customer for life. They have the potential to be a continual stream of income and profits for you.

But they don’t know about you yet. They are your missing customers.

There’s only one thing that’s going to link you up to your hundreds or even thousands of missing customers – and that’s great marketing. You probably have a very good product or service. Quite possibly, you have an outstanding product or service. Unfortunately though, that’s just not enough. You have to find a way to both find these missing customers and then make sure they truly, truly understand how they are going to benefit from doing business with you.

The good news is there are hundreds of ways for you to do this. They include dozens of forms of advertising, direct marketing, internet marketing, search engine advertising, email marketing, direct mail, telephone marketing, direct sales, public relations etc etc...

That’s why marketing should always be the most important thing in your business; it’s the engine that drives everything and will make you grow and prosper. It’s also why becoming good at marketing is the single most important step you can take to growing your business. Most often when a business fails it is because the people in it are poor at marketing. They might blame cash flow, recession, politics, war or anything else they can think of, but a fundamental lack marketing skills is often at the core. The ones that really understand this go on to become the success stories.

How many ways do you continually market your customers? What are the lifetime returns on this?

This blog aims to help you, challenge you and allow you to have a bit of fun along the way too.