How do you know when your marketing is successful? When prospects come directly to you for solutions. So how do you get to that stage? By putting in a lot of effort. You need to consistently produce quality marketing over the long-term before you start attracting customers on a regular basis. Why? Because there are lots [...]
David Ogilvy, the man known as the Father of Advertising, has a timeless piece of wisdom. “You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.” Take a close look at your ads, blogs, videos and social media posts and ask yourself: are they interesting or boring? Sad to say, [...]
When you do marketing, your small business has to earn the right to ask for a sale. How? By providing your customer with helpful, relevant, interesting information. If you do that, customers will gladly accept a sales pitch at the end of your marketing message. But if you go straight into selling mode and provide no [...]
When businesses do marketing, they should act like they're having a one-on-one conversation with a friend, rather than delivering a formal speech to a roomful of strangers. When you do friendly, conversational marketing, you make the customer feel comfortable and understood. But when you do formal, speechlike marketing, you make the customer feel uncomfortable and even [...]
Think about all the interactions you’ve had with businesses over the years. If there’s one thing that turns you off more than anything else, it’s the feeling the business doesn’t care about you. So when you’re communicating with customers – before, during and after a sale – you need to make it clear you care about [...]
In your marketing, you have to be willing to give up something. If you want to attract older customers, you have to be willing to give up younger customers. If you want to attract female customers, you have to be willing to give up male customers. You can’t be all things to all people. If you [...]
When you do marketing, don’t focus on how you can get your business to sell. Instead, focus on how you can help your customer buy. When businesses put out marketing designed to get a sale, they tend to produce self-centred marketing that makes the customer feel cheap. But when businesses put out marketing designed to help [...]
Does your small business have values? If so, you should share these in your marketing. Why? So you attract like-minded customers. Just make sure that when you share your values in your marketing, you do so in a way that focuses on the customer rather than your business. For example, if one of your company’s values [...]
To succeed with marketing, you need to be consistent and persistent. Marketing works when you keep repeating the same core message – again and again and again. In the short-term, you won’t see results, because it takes time to build trust, credibility and brand recognition. But if you keep repeating the same message, eventually it will [...]
Have you ever spoken to a potential customer who keeps questioning your integrity and competence? It’s frustrating, because you know you’re honest and you know you’re good at what you do – but the customer won’t accept your assurances. Want to know why you’re not cutting through? The reason is because you’re starting your sales pitch [...]
