Tag: Local Marketing

Jay Abraham said there are three ways to increase your business.

1. Increase the Number of Customers coming to your business. There are four ways to increase the number of customers.
• Create new customers
• Retain current customers
• Win back lost customers
• Get referrals from your current clients (the best of these come from your best clients).   See my blog on this subject titled: The 80/20 Principle

2. Increase the Average Dollars per Sale

3. Increase Repurchase Frequency

Before moving forward you must know what it costs you to acquire a new customer.

Here is the information you need:

Cost of all Advertising, Promotions, Promotional discounts on 1st transactions plus some Allocated fixed overhead expenses – the same percentage as new customers contribute to overall revenue.

Add these all together, divide by the number of new customers you acquire by month and/or by year.

• Let’s look at a hypothetical business as an example:
  • Let’s say you spend $15,000/mth spent on advertising (print, tv, radio, billboards, etc)
  • You have one of your employees manage your social media (like Facebook) and manage your website and it takes her 40 hrs/mth = 40 hrs x $25/hr = $1000
  • Fixed overhead is $30,000/mth and you calculate that 30% of your mthly revenue comes from new customers who never return = $30,000 x 30% = $9,000

• You acquire 100 new customers/mth

In this example, your cost to acquire a new customer is $25,000/100 or $250.00.

Here’s the Rest of the Story that no one considers:
A lost customer costs you the $250 you invested to acquire him PLUS another $250 to replace him = $500.

How many business owners think like this? In my experience, very few.

So, hypothetically, this business should be spending $300 to acquire each new customer.

BUT it gets worse:
A lost customer can’t refer someone. With Principle Centered Marketing, Selling & Business Practices we think a desired end result should be that every customer refer at least one other customer to your business.

In fact, the easiest way to double your business is to have every client refer one person.

So, in that first year you lose the new customer that cost you $250 to acquire plus it cost you an additional $250 to replace him.
BUT you also lost the referral he would have sent you and in my blog
What Are Your Clients Really Worth?  we showed you how to calculate the real lifetime value of every customer or client.

Every business I’ve ever spoken to is vastly under-investing in marketing because of the way they think…or don’t think.

Tom Peters in his landmark book “In Search of Excellence” opined that it costs 10 times more to acquire as it does to retain (a customer).

Keeping customers = Success

Losing customers = Failure

What would happen if instead of spending $250 or $300 or even $450 to acquire a new client, you spent $50 rewarding your best customers, making them feel like a V.I.P. and providing so much value that they become your outside sales force?

Principle Centered Marketing, Selling & Business Practices focuses primarily on creating trusting relationships at every level so that not only does your business grow with less time, effort and money invested than your competition, but your personal income grows, becomes more predictable and your personal time with family increases.

Here is an important point: People don’t want to be customers of a business, they want to be in a relationship. They want to be educated, remembered, entertained, made to feel important.

Your clients want to feel personally and emotionally connected to you and your business.

Decide now which way makes more sense to increase your business and then…Take the appropriate action!

We help small business owners:
1. Leverage their time
2. Increase their cash flow
3. Attract and keep the Right clients and employees

How:
1. Essential Elements Discovery Process
2. Automated Email marketing
3. FB marketing
4. Video marketing
5. 1-on-1 “Do It For Me”   coaching, consulting, mentoring

In order to have the best customers, educate them through your marketing.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Consistently tell the world what you offer, why you offer it and how it will benefit them.

In the early 1920’s, there were about ten different brewing companies aggressively competing for the same market. Schlitz wasn’t doing very well and was number eight in the marketplace.

All the breweries advertised the same basic message: “Our Beer is Pure.” They didn’t explain to the beer drinkers what pure really meant. They just kept saying, “pure, pure, pure.”

Schlitz hired a marketing consultant in hopes of improving sales. The marketing consultant was taken on a tour of the brewery and was told how Schlitz brewed their beer. He was very impressed with what he learned.

The Schlitz facilities were right on Lake Michigan and the lake water back in the twenties was very clean.

However, even though they were right on the lake, they drilled two five-thousand-foot artesian wells because they had to go deep enough to find the right combination of water and mineral content to make the best beer possible.

They explained how they labored thru 1,623 separate experiments over five years to identify and develop the finest mother yeast cell that could produce the richest taste and flavor.

They showed the consultant how they went through a process of distillation of the water before they used it to brew the beer. It was heated to five thousand degrees Fahrenheit and then cooled down and condensed – and they did that not once but three times to make sure it was absolutely purified.

They described the bottling process where they steamed each bottle at temperatures of sixteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit to kill all bacteria and germs so they would not possibly contaminate the taste of their beer.

Then they explained that they had every batch tasted to make certain it was pure and rich before they would ever bottle it and send it out the door.

The consultant was overwhelmed by this brewing process. He told Schlitz management that they should tell consumers about the extraordinary measures they took to brew their beer. Schlitz management said, “Why would we do that? All breweries do the same thing we do.”

But the marketing consultant understood the concept of preemptive marketing. “But no one in your industry explains it,” he answered. “The first person who tells the story and explains how, and the reasons why, you do something, will gain distinction and preeminence in the marketplace from then on.”

Schlitz was the first and only company that ever told the story about how their beer was made. That became their unique selling proposition (USP).

The word they used was Krausening…all the breweries did it, but only Schlitz told the public.

Within six months Schlitz moved from number eight in the market to number one.

This story was shared by one of my marketing mentors, Jay Abraham

Getting an MBA will open a lot of doors but here are 6 things you DON’T learn from an MBA.

1. People want to be led.
   But they want to be led by someone they trust.
   Trust = Competence plus Character.
   In everything you do and say, show that you know what you are doing and talking about and that you place Integrity and your reputation above money. They want someone to educate them on the features of what you are offering but more importantly, how it will benefit them. Always remember WIIFM – Every time you make a presentation, the client is silently asking…What’s In It For Me?

2. Tell people what action to take.
Every selling transaction, whether it’s a direct personal contact, a sales call, letter, email, text, video/vlog, commercial, or print ad, you need to lead them into taking an action.
It might be simply leading them to take the next step – “Pick Up The Phone and Call me Now at ……..”
Marketing is nothing more than selling and selling is all about persuading someone to take an action that will benefit them.

3. Test Everything and Test Small.
A Little Bit At A Time All The Time Has The Greatest Chance of Success.
It’s the Principle of the Tortoise and the Hare.
Test different headlines, body copy, offers, etc.
Then track results. Very quickly you’ll find out what offers produce more sales, profits or customers.

4. Advertising/marketing is nothing more than Salesmanship.
EVERY marketing/selling communication should make a compelling case for the product or service you are selling.
I constantly fought the thinking of most marketers who are traditionally “creative-minded” and get caught up in “cutsey”.
I want and teach “where the rubber-meets-the-road” marketing.
Function over form.
Every business owner has a story to tell. Something that makes you and/or your product UNIQUE. Tell the world. Tell it often.
Would you train your sales people to stop their sales presentation in mid stride or tell them NOT to ask for the sale or to take an action?
Would you tell your sales force to be flippant or “cute” in their sales presentation?
Would you tell them to only give a partial presentation?
Of course you wouldn’t!
Once you understand the Principle difference between “cutsey” advertising and rubber-meets-the-road selling and Principle Centered Marketing, you will have an immediate advantage over your marketplace and competitors.

5. An Educated Customer is the Best Customer.
If you haven’t by now understood the message, it is the more your prospects and clients know about you and your product, the more comfortable and trusting they become.
An Educated Customer Is The Best Customer.
Every business owner has a story to tell.
Something that makes you and/or your product UNIQUE.
Tell the world. Tell it often.
The research you went thru before even representing this product.
Present facts, proof, give a frame of Reference. Tell the good as well as some of the detriments.
I would much rather lose the sale during the presentation and gain a reputation of Integrity, than lose it after the sale because the client received disappointing results.
Under Promise and Over Deliver is the best Rule to follow.
In a follow-up message, I’ll tell the story about Schlitz Brewing company from back in the 1920’s that clearly demonstrates this Principle.

6. Always Make It easy for Your Customers to Say YES.
Every time you make a selling statement on a feature, give the client a frame of reference they can wrap their minds around.
Like this: “Have you ever searched for something on Amazon and the next time you went to your Facebook page, you saw an ad for that very same product? That’s Retargeting.”

Human nature is to say NO when we don’t completely understand something or we don’t have a complete Frame of Reference as to how it works, how it will benefit us.
Make it easy for the client to understand.
A very powerful way of doing this as well is to ALWAYS offer a Risk Free Guarantee.