Most business owners don’t how to do effective marketing.

The purpose of this post is to outline this process in a simple way and show how we do this for our clients.  There are 5 steps.

1. Understand your Customer and their Needs

This means verifying your assumptions about your customer’s hot button needs by talking to actual customers.  You want to find out the most important things they want when buying what you sell.

For example, a home improvement contractor’s customers usually want these things: they want you to show up on time, they want you to charge what you promised, to do quality work, stand behind that work with a guarantee and keep their workplace clean and not leave trash all over.

What do your customers want?  Do you know?

2. Determine whether Innovation is necessary

How do you deliver on your customer’s needs?  Are you demonstrably better than your competitors or not? If you are just the same as everyone else you compete with, then you need to innovate the make yourself better.

This process of actually being better than your competitors is necessary so you will have something good to say in your marketing.  Marketing that just uses platitudes and says what everyone else says is a waste of money.

The key to effective marketing is to “Have something good to say”, “Say it well”, and “Say it often”.

Innovation can create that something good to say.

We have a systematic process that we use to help our clients do this so you do innovation on the issues that matter to your customers.

3.  Create your Strategic Marketing Plan

Strategy comes before tactics.  In marketing, this means developing what you say, how you say it and who you say it to.  You need to do this before creating any ads, web pages or marketing communications.

“What you say” means how you communicate your superior ability to deliver on your customers hot button needs (that you just developed by innovating as needed in the previous step).

“How you say it” is copywriting that needs to clearly and persuasively communicate why you are the best choice and . . .

“who you say it to” is your target market.

4.  Create your Tactical Marketing Plan

This has three sections – Lead Generators (include ads, landing pages, social media pages and ads, direct mail campaigns, lead magnets, referral programs, emails, etc) that bring prospects into your marketing funnel.

Marketing Tools (brochures, web sites, scripts, signage, audio content, video content, newsletters, white papers, reports, and more) further educate your prospects once they are in your funnel.  Then,

Follow-Up Systems (sequential follow up systems using email, direct mail, telemarketing, and any other multi-step follow up sequences).  Follow up sequences are intended to stay in touch with prospects by providing helpful and welcomed information over time so that when a prospect is ready to buy they will choose you.

All the components of your tactical plan educate the prospect as to how to buy what you sell and how to make the best decision for their needs whether it is you or not.

When you help people make the best decision for them, this builds goodwill and trust so that when the time comes to make a buying decision, you are the only logical choice.

5.  Create the Sales Plan

The goal here is to “franchise” your sales system by systemizing the process using marketing tools.

This will make sure you get the optimum results every time. We want to turn your company into a selling machine that doesn’t have to rely on superstar sales people but improves the performance of all.

This process does the sifting and sorting of prospects to deliver the best prospects to sales staff and also includes the creation of “knock-down” lists of key target accounts and the plans to get them closed.

Maximize & Optimize Strategies

Think of these as bonus strategies but also critically important.

– Perpetual Selling Strategies are designed to get customers to come back over and over again to provide a steady stream of sales and profits

– Joint Ventures leverage other companies customers and relationships for your mutual advantage.

– Upselling and Cross-Selling increase the profits of each sale.  You can consider including products and services that you do not provide yourself but that your JV partners offer.

– Referral Systems – we have over 30 different systems we can incorporate into your business.  Most businesses believe referrals are their absolute best prospects so don’t leave getting referrals up to chance, proactively install systems to create them!

Contact me at joemcvoy@gmail.com or by phone/text at 303-884-0859 for information on how we can help you to do all this for your business.

 

Most small business owners, and plenty of large business marketing employees, get marketing strategy confused with marketing tactics.

As a marketing strategy consultant, I often get clients who come to me and ask me to write an ad without understanding that developing the marketing strategy needs to come before the tactical implementation of an ad or campaign.

Here’s marketing strategy simplified

Strategy should always come before tactics.

Marketing Strategy is:

• “What To Say”
• “How To Say It”
• “Who To Say It To”

In other words, the “what to say” part is your message. The “how to say it” part is how and with what words will you say it (also called copywriting), and the “who to say it to” part is your target market.

If you don’t know who you are trying to reach and what message you want to communicate, your marketing will suck. This is why you see so many marketing messages with a headline of the company name, a photo of the owner or their product.

Marketing Tactics are:

• “When To Say It”
• “Where To Say It”
• “How Often To Say It”

This is where most business owners start. The “when” means the timing of your message, the “where” means through which media, and the “how often” part refers to the frequency of your marketing.

If you don’t take the time to define who you are trying to reach and then put together a message that will capture your prospect’s attention and get them to take some sort of action, you are wasting your money.

The Internet is not a strategy.

It’s just another media, or way to get your message out. There are plenty of different types of media both online and offline, and as Dan Kennedy teaches, you need a match between your message, your market and your media. Just as it makes no sense to use social media to target older people who never use it, it is appropriate to use mobile phone marketing, Facebook and text messaging to reach the younger generation.

In fact, my kids don’t respond to phone calls or voice mails, they text. I’ve even seen teenagers sitting across from each other sending texts instead of talking!

As marketers, our goal should be to reach the people we want to reach with a message that is relevant and interesting to them as inexpensively as possible. Spending some time to set up and define your marketing strategy before spending money is a great idea!

To get training on how to do this, go here to get access to the best and most comprehensive training available and here to see the details on the Internet marketing training available.