Tag Archives: Marketing

JOINT VENTURE MARKETING

Posted on January 19, 2012 | 2 Comments

One of the most effective marketing techniques is Joint Venture marketing, whereby you find a non-competing business whose customers are the same type of people as your customers. You get this business to promote you or mail their customers promoting your product or service and then split the profits with the host business. It takes many years and many thousands of $ to build a customer base so why not take advantage of someone else’s hard work?

And the beauty of it is that it’s a win-win for both of you! Jay Abraham, the famous and successful US marketer, has a sound piece of advice when it comes to setting up “host” relationships: “Be generous with the host company when setting up the deal. If you can’t get the host company to pay for the mailing, offer to pay for it yourself. Or offer them 60% instead of 50%. Or offer them 100% until they double their money, and a lower percentage thereafter. Offer them whatever it takes to get them to do the joint venture with you. What do you care how much they make, since you’re investing so little up front and have so much to gain yourself”?

Over the years when I’ve explained this truly effective technique to clients I get many blank looks as they think it’s all too hard, despite the examples I produce from real businesses showing that in fact it’s like everything in life, it just takes a little effort and imagination. Now imagine how thrilled I was to see this pavement sign outside a local shop which I immediately captured with my mobile ‘phone:
Joint Venture MarketingIsn’t that fabulous? So simple, so low-cost and so straightforward and yet so effective! It costs the shoe shop nothing, not one cent, so they’re happy little bunnies. And neither, of course, does it really cost the pedicurist anything either, just their time. But the return for the pedicurist, if she does a good job, is huge taking into account the lifetime value of a typical customer – even at $50 per visit, monthly for even three years is $1,800! What a local and very simple example to explain joint-venture marketing to clients.

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EFFECTIVE BLOGGING

Posted on January 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Blogging is one of the most effective yet free – yes FREE – ways of marketing yet few venture into this area. It can position you an expert in your field, build your profile and brand, and draw prospects to your website. Here are a few tips to get started:

  • If you don’t know what to write, don’t worry unduly, just pick on an area you know well, the sort of thing you’re probably discussing regularly with customers or staff. This could be the key frustrations customers suffer when dealing with suppliers in your industry, tips on how to get the best out of your product or service or how the customers can reduce costs or save time etc. Google is a great source of ideas and inspiration.

  • Blog regularly by getting into the habit. I’ve conditioned myself to blog in the same as I’ve conditioned myself to keep fit – if I don’t do it I start to worry and actually feel guilty! The more you do, the easier it becomes.

  • Keep them as short as possible. This isn’t easy and takes practice, but the less you write the easier it will be to read and keeping them short doesn’t mean you are short-changing your readers as writing concisely and to the point will be far more effective and informative.

  • Make your blogs as easy to read as possible without excessive technicalities or jargon as these will just confuse your readers. Youngsters are useful here as they will be able to pick out words they don’t understand. No children or nieces or nephews of 10 -14? Email them to me, I’ll get my younger two to read them through.

  • Write your blog as though you were speaking to a down-to-earth client or customer, not as you would have done whilst you were at school trying to please your English teacher. Not as far as text language maybe, but short easy-to-read sentences, bullets and “chunking”, breaking it down into small easily digestible parts.

  • Try and focus on areas of interest to your readers which may not be the same as yours. Initially, you may have to suck it and see, or look at other blog sites but when you’ve done a few blogs you’ll find that some topics or areas are much more popular than others, so write more on these.

Starting to blog is like going to the gym or for a run on a winter’s night – it’s a scary thought but once you get out there you enjoy it, so don’t delay or prevaricate, just do it! If you need help with your blogging contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz.

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BECAUSE OF THE CUSTOMER

Posted on December 8, 2011 | 2 Comments

I was searching through my extensive collection of business and marketing material the other day when I rediscovered this useful ditty about the importance of the customer:

Because of the Customer

Because the customer has a need we have a job to do
Because the customer has a choice we must be the better choice
Because the customer has sensibilities we must be considerate
Because the customer is unique we must be flexible
Because the customer has an urgency we must be quick
Because the customer has high expectations we must excel
Because the customer has influence we have the hope of more customers
Because of the customer we exist!

No idea who came up with this, and Google was no help, but isn’t it true?

Nowadays of course, great customer service is no longer enough, and we must look to add value in as many ways as possible, and work out ways to help our customers help their customers, but given the poor service that’s still so common in so many businesses (despite the recession) perhaps many more business owners & their teams should learn this off by heart!

If you need help with your customer care strategy contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz. The first thing we’ll get you to complete is our 30 question Customer Care questionnaire and then work with you to discover your customer’s key frustrations. We then design a fully customised customer care strategy for your business, typically incorporating key aspects such as performance standards, focused staff training and customer advisory boards to ensure your business begins to display the characteristics observed in the most successful customer driven companies.

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RISK REVERSAL

Posted on December 1, 2011 | 1 Comment

When you’re asking a new customer or client to do business with you for the first time they are taking a big risk by placing their trust in you. Now of course, from your perspective they are not, but it’s necessary to put yourself in their shoes and see things from their point of view. Yes, they may be unhappy with their current supplier but often it’s a case of better the devil they know!

Now to increase the chances of getting that new customer or client on board you need to help them by reducing the risk as far as you are able to or by eliminating the risk by you taking it on the chin, by “reversing” the risk onto yourself. After all, you want the business, so why should the customer or client go out on a limb?

One risk-free way for you to achieve this is by third party endorsement as it always helps if someone else can reassure the prospective customer or client that you are reliable and can be trusted. The easiest way here is testimonials from named individuals, as anonymous testimonials can be fabricated. Another good way is some case studies that talk about specific results and clearly demonstrate how you’ve gone beyond the norm to help your customers and clients.

Now since it can also be difficult to prove the bona fides of case studies an even better (but riskier for you) way is to tee up some referees who are prepared to speak to the prospective customer or client and answer their questions about you, your reliability and how you’ve performed in practice. If you’re new in business this could be difficult but otherwise, there’s normally a customer or client or two that you’ve done that special favour for who’ll be prepared to help.

A potentially even riskier but very effective technique is to offer an unconditional money-back guarantee if the customer or client is unhappy with your product or service. This will only work if you’re good at what you do so take care or you could be in difficulty very soon! Yes, you may get the odd time waster with nothing better to do but on the whole I find this works well, both for me and for clients.

Feeling very brave? Some take this a step further, by offering an even larger cash refund if they get it wrong. That may be over the top for you, but if you need help coming up with your risk reversal strategy contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz.

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ADDING VALUE MADE EASY

Posted on November 24, 2011 | 1 Comment

Before you get out there and start doing business you need to decide where your products or services sit in terms of your value proposition. Simply put, your have four main choices, low price low value, low price high value, high price low value or high price high value, as can be seen on the graph below:

Adding Value graph

Some examples will help. Low price low value – $2 Dollar Shop? High price low value – some firms of accountants who survive on their brand name alone! High price high value – luxury cars? Low price high value – those trying to buy market share as you wouldn’t normally survive very long!

Now often value is not actual value, it’s just a matter of creating a perception of value, which is often achieved by high fashion, being trendy, being in the right place at the right time or clever branding e.g. iPads (which is why Apple has $76 billion in cash!). Often, that’s tricky for smaller businesses with limited resources so what we need to do is to find a way to boost value without cutting our prices.

Value is defined as customer benefits less costs to the customer, and importantly costs are not just monetary, they also include effort, time, anxiety & emotional costs. Try hanging on the ‘phone to a call centre, or standing in a long queue, or having to return something that’s faulty or that you didn’t order, or receiving a huge bill you weren’t expecting. Aren’t all these costs? These days, we are time poor, increasingly stressed and less inclined to put up with poor service and we want things to be easy, so what we’re looking for are solution providers – we want someone who’s going to solve all our problems and to whom we can just delegate everything to.

So to increase value to your customers without cutting your prices you must reduce or eliminate all the other costs of doing business with you. This means seeing your business through the eyes of your customers and reviewing all your business processes to make these as efficient and as smooth as possible for your customers. Take for example the stationery supplier who comes to your premises to see what you need and then takes care of their own order, or the furniture supplier who not only delivers but assembles everything as well, or the domestic appliance supplier who takes your old appliance away AND all that annoying packaging. Providing superior value like that is now becoming the norm so just providing good customer service like in the old days is no longer enough!

If you need help to set your value proposition and/or increase customer value without cutting your prices contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz.

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FREE YET EFFECTIVE MARKETING

Posted on August 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

As those who read my blog posts will know by now, effective marketing can be carried out totally for free and keeping in touch regularly with prospects, customers, clients or patients is essential to growing your business. One effective way to keep in touch is to send out newsletters and few businesses are so downright boring that even an occasional newsletter can’t be made interesting and give out tips and useful information. Providing you avoid adverts and talking too much about you or your staff – no one really cares about Deidre’s OE or your new reception desk – they really will keep your customers coming back more often.
Leaving aside the debate about whether physical or electronic is best, sometimes it takes a little trial and error to discover the best way to deliver the newsletters electronically in the most eye-catching or interesting looking format.
You could try Business Contact Manager on Outlook. Available as part of the package so effectively free, a friend of mine finds this works well. I didn’t have much luck with it, as for no apparent reason about half the newsletters just disappeared into the ether! In addition, it is limited on formatting and you get no dashboard reports on just how many have opened your newsletter or what sections they have read.
Much more useful is an on-line marketing tool called Mailchimp. Mailchimp is totally free to use (up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month which should do for most of us!) and has a number of really useful features:

  • It stores your contact list safely and securely. They categorically guarantee not to share or use your contacts.
  • You can categorise your contacts e.g. between customers or prospects or between different types of customers.
  • You can clearly see who has subscribed or unsubscribed.
  • It shows you, for each newsletter or mailing, just how many recipients have opened the newsletter and in addition, the “click rate” or ‘click through rate” which measures the number of times recipients click on a link to access an article or your website.
  • You’ll get a very good idea of how you’re doing as your results are presented side by side with your industry average. For example, a 40% open rate may not look good to you, but when compared to the 15% average achieved by people in your industry, it’s actually awesome.

So what are you waiting for? It’s free, easy to use even for novices and a really effective way of marketing.

If you need help with your newsletters, Mailchimp or your marketing contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz. If you’ve gone to all the trouble and expense of being in business you may as well maximise your returns!

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MARKETING, MARKETING, MARKETING

Posted on July 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

If location, location, location is key to real estate then marketing, marketing, marketing is key to business. It matters not how good or skilled you are at your chosen trade or profession, if you can’t market yourself or your business you just aren’t going to make it.

Now don’t, as many business owners do, confuse marketing with advertising. Wikipedia says “advertising is is a form of communication used to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to take some action with respect to products or services”. Marketing has been usefully defined as gaining, delighting and keeping customers, whilst making a profit and building the value of your business. In other words, marketing is virtually everything you do in your business which works and is effective.

Many business owners put marketing in the too hard basket, saying there’s too much to learn, it’s too expensive, it’s just not their thing or they can’t afford it. But you don’t need to spend loads of money on marketing, as many of the most effective marketing techniques are free, see here for some free marketing tips ad ideas.

Nor do you need an expensive marketing consultant who, mostly being ex-journalists will most likely focus on PR (public relations) activities which can cost a lot. Read some marketing books – the best marketing book is written by Dan Kennedy “The Ultimate Marketing Plan”. Don’t be put off by the title, it’s not a dry, dusty book about planning, it’s a very practical book with loads of practical examples – furthermore, you can get this for free  (click here). Have a go at the worksheets in the back of the book (ask me for a better copy of the worksheets) which will guide you to come up with loads of low-cost, practical and effective marketing strategies.

Further help with your marketing here or contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz. If you’ve gone to all the trouble and expense of being in business you may as well maximise your returns!

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THE MOST EFFECTIVE REFERRAL STRATEGY EVER

Posted on July 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

Using effective referral strategies is absolutely key to business success yet the great majority of business owners don’t use any.

The most effective referral strategy ever is very simple yet costs very little. This is how it works:

  1. Get out there and meet people
  2. Find out what they do and then what problems they have and what challenges they face
  3. Work out how you can help them and what you can do for them, NOT focus on what they can do for you. DON’T charge them for your help.
  4. Prove your credibility by putting into practice what you said you were going to do and showing them how good you are at what you do
  5. Introduce them to others that can help them too but only those who share the same values as you and are really good at what they do.

What you’re doing in a nutshell is creating your reputation as someone who cares and who wants to help people, not someone who wants to take it all and give nothing in return. We all know people like this who are always looking for work – I can think of a few right now! Ever wondered why they’re in this position?

When you’ve done all that, sit back and wait for the referrals to roll in. Now remember, it work won’t work for everyone, it never does, but that doesn’t matter as that’s just life. What are you waiting for, get started?

If you need more business and help with your referral strategies contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz

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GROWING YOUR BUSINESS – MARKETING

Posted on May 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

To get your business from where it is now to where you want it, you need to bridge the gap by planning in four key areas – marketing, operations (or your day-to-day business activities), human resources, and management control.
Your marketing plan should cover five key areas:

  1. Your marketing objectives. It’s necessary to set very clear and measurable goals when drafting your marketing plan which dovetail into your overall business plan and ensure you get to where you want to be. For example, your marketing goals might be to double your turnover, increase the number of customers by 25% or to increase your average $ sale by 50% to maximise the spend by each of your customers.
  2. Your background marketing material. It’s a good idea to write down exactly what background marketing material you’re going to maintain so you can build this into your plan. By background, I mean things like your web-site, your brochure, your testimonials, case studies and success stories, your presentation folder, your presentation script, handouts and FAQ’s about your business.
  3. Your marketing strategies. These arethe actual marketing campaigns you undertake to reach your marketing objectives. They may include things like networking, your newsletter, direct mail, piggy-backing on other businesses in related fields with the similar customer bases to tap into their customer base, and referral strategies (a must). Each strategy should be “costed” and planned to a strict timetable so that it fits into your overall marketing budget and you know exactly what you’re doing and when, leaving nothing to chance. After you’ve tested each strategy (and tweaked these a bit if required) you’ll know the level of activity required e.g. if you find your prospect conversion rate is 33% you’ll need to get in front of three times as many customers.
  4. The way you will monitor your marketing performance. How will you know whether your marketing is working? You need to build-in some simple reporting systems to ensure your marketing is on track and you’re not falling behind in meeting your objectives.
  5. Who will co-ordinate the plan. One person should take overall responsibility for the marketing plan. Given the importance of marketing, you as business owner should fulfill this role.

If you need help to draft an effective marketing plan contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz

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WHERE IS YOUR BUSINESS NOW?

Posted on May 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

In order to get your business to where you want it to be you must first determine where it is now, as otherwise, you won’t know how much work you have to do to improve and nor can you set goals or action strategies, because firstly, the goals have to be realistically  achievable, (in other words, there is no point in setting a goal that is a bridge too far), and secondly the action strategies you adopt should address the specific problems in your business that need resolving.

There is a huge range of techniques available, ranging from very simple, yet vitally important, things like break-even analysis to much more complex techniques. Here are 12 of my favourite useful, low-cost and practical analysis tools:

  1. Benchmarking. Comparing your performance with your peers is simple, cheap and very effective. Any good accountant or business mentor should have access to benchmarking data but if they don’t, I can help you, so just ask.

  2. Break-Even Analysis. Again, quick and simple but I’m always surprised by how few businesses know their break-even point taking into account drawings, tax & loan repayments etc. You can extend this, once calculated, to work out what turnover you need to reach to achieve your desired level of profitability.

  3. Monthly or bi-monthly interim financials. If you invest a measly $500 in accounting software and some time and effort, you can produce the information any good bookkeeper or accountant needs to report on your ongoing profitability. OK, the figures will not be to the standard of the your annual financials but it’s quick and easy to journal in depreciation and adjust for loan or HP repayments and if you get your bank, AR and AP right you’re just about there!

  4. Gross Profit Margin Analysis. Before you put any strategies in place to improve your business it is essential to be aware of individual gross margins or margins across different product or service groupings, customer types or suppliers, as otherwise how will you will know whether any changes you intend to make will be effective? In addition, just by completing this exercise you will be far ahead of the competition as very few businesses know how they are performing in this area. Even if you made no dramatic changes, you would probably find that your business would improve just by you being aware of this information.

  5. SWOT Analysis. An oldie but goodie, looking at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats gets you thinking about a whole range of issues so you can plan accordingly.

  6. Key Performance Indicators. Here you can drill down into your business to see how you’re performing in those areas of the business which are critical to your success. For example, if you’re a retailer you should be looking at the number of active customers, transaction frequency i.e. how often a customer buys from you, sales per selling hour, store conversion ratio i.e. the percentage of customers who visit who buy, or profit per customer visit. What I do for my clients who use me as a mentor is to design a simple one-page monthly report showing the performance for the month and year to date compared to the previous year and target figures.

  1. Competitor Analysis. Why re-invent the wheel, make the same mistakes others have made before or not take advantage of the ideas and strategies successful entrepreneurs have used to get ahead? There is a huge amount of information available these days plus its reasonably easy to find out what your competitors are doing well and where you can do better. Contact me for my useful Competitor Analysis worksheet.

  2. Marketing Analysis. How effective is your marketing? Do you do any marketing or just splash out on the Yellow Pages once a year? I have a 50 question marketing effectiveness analysis I‘d love to help you complete to see where you stand and if you’re under-performing your capability to deliver more income, certainty and profits?

  3. Customer Care Analysis. How happy are your customers? How many of your customers are you losing? Ask me for my 30-point customer care commitment test – you might be surprised by the answers!

  4. Prospect Conversion Rate. You’ve invested all that money and effort to get your business to where it is today and get the customer in the door so why not do the best you can to convert them to a customer? Just measure the percentage of prospects that become customers across the different sources of leads and overall. For example, for referrals your conversion rate should be 90% or more!

  5. Leads Analysis. Work out where your new prospect leads come from e.g. how many come from your website, walk-ins, advertising or referrals? Having done that, then work out the average cost of a lead from each source category. This enables you to concentrate on the most fertile leads sources as well work out the best use of your marketing $ in comparison to the lifetime value of a typical customer.

  6. Customer Profitability Analysis. The 80/20 principle holds true every time. If you find which customers are making you the most profit you can focus on the them plus encourage them to refer their friends – guess what type of businesses their friends will have? The other 80% can, on the whole, be left to themselves.

If you need help to plan for your business to succeed contact Nick on 0800 ASK NICK or email nick@abac.co.nz.

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