Masterful Marketing » Marketing Strategy

Marketing is About Education, Not Sales

Debra — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:38:24 +0000

I started my career educating customers on technology products for a major computer manufacturer. My pathway into marketing - from educator to technical marketing to product manager to marketing director and now small business marketing coach and mentor – was a natural progression for someone with an educational background. I have always believed that marketing was a multi-faceted education for your prospects:

How do they go about finding the right solution to their particular need.
What do they need to know to get the best solution.
Who should they be working with to get to where they want to go.
Why there is value in doing business with you.

Whether I was marketing software products, business to business services or consumer services, marketing is more successful when you focus on educating your prospect rather than selling them your products or services.

SYMS – an educated consumer is our best customer™

SYMS – the Off-Price representative of over 200 authentic designer and brand names, is a company that was ahead of its time with its tag line – an educated consumer is our best customer™. Until recently, many companies didn’t want people knowing details about their products and services. But the folks at SYMS made sure the consumer was educated on their merchandise and understood the value and quality they were getting when they shopped there.

In my experience, business owners who try to push themselves on prospects rarely achieve the results they expected and therefore, are never as successful as they would like. Now in today’s Internet economy where people don’t need to identify themselves to find out who you are, what you do and how you can help them, you must become proficient in educating your audience so they come to you when they are ready to buy. But isn’t that a much more rewarding experience?

I’m thrilled when the phone rings and the person on the other end has found me on the Web and likes what I have to say. And I’m doubly excited when my clients get inbound leads that turn into sales making their jobs a little bit easier.

How do you educate rather than sell?

Educating your prospects is answering your audiences burning questions, through writing, presentations or conversations (both online and offline), and enabling them to visualize the solution to their problems. Once your prospect understands how to solve the problem and the associated benefits of getting an expert to help them, the more likely they will seek help with doing so. Knowledge is only power when it is shared. Your future clients will be attracted to you for your candor and expertise.

Does your business educate your audience so they can decide how they will solve their problem? If not, how can you start to change your marketing so that you attract your prospects and they want to work with you?

Passion Simplifies the Sales Process

Strengthen Your Marketing Messages

Debra — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:16:52 +0000

This is post five in the year end marketing review series to help you get ready for the new year.

If you have followed the previous posts in this series, you should know if and how your ideal client profiles have changed, what makes you different and why you delight that ideal client. Now we need to look at our core marketing message that should be woven throughout all of your marketing materials. Is your marketing message the right one for your market, aligning with your ideal client’s needs and telling them why they should do business with you loud and clear?

Your clients are being bombarded with constant noise from your competition about how they will help them eliminate a pain or solve a problem. You need to be heard through all this marketing noise with a captivating message that speaks directly to the needs of your ideal client, enabling you to connect with them.

Remember – It’s What You Do …

Your core message:

Is a short description of your business that catches your ideal client’s attention;
Tells them how you can help solve their problem;
Conveys what value you bring to the relationship, what makes you different and the benefit they will experience by working with you;
Explains why they should trust you and should do business with you rather than your competition.

… Not How Do You Do It!

Just remember that your ideal clients do not care what you do or how you do it. They only care about what you can do for them and the benefits they will get by investing their money with you. They are looking for solutions such as:

Solve a problem they are currently experiencing.
Improve a process that is not working for them.
Increase sales or cut costs, ultimately leading to a better bottom line.
Find new clients or open new markets, thereby increasing revenue.
Eliminate tasks they don’t want or don’t know how to do.

Note that all the solutions involve saving money, making more money, saving time, stop wasting time or helping them feel better about themselves. It’s not about the nifty new feature you offer or how you do something. It’s what can you do for me (or WII-FM – what’s in it for me?).

Focus your Message and Grow Your Business

Speak to your ideal client with a clear message that explains how you solve their problem. Focus on educating and informing them about the benefits of working with you rather than selling and create an image in their minds of life after they engage with you. Once you get their attention, they will listen to what you have to say. The more you understand the needs of your market, the better you can speak to them in a compelling and believable fashion.

Remember your message is the foundation of all of your marketing materials. Delivering a consistent message across all of your communication tools will help you capture the attention of those you want to do business with and help you grow your business.

How can you strengthen your message to attract your ideal client?

What Makes You Different?

Debra — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:00:07 +0000

This is post four in the year end marketing review series to help you get ready for the new year.

Whether you discovered that your ideal client has changed or not, reviewing what makes you different is something you should be doing on a regular basis because you need to be sure that what you think makes you different continues to be true as new competitors enter the market. With so many people offering the same products and services, you must create a long term competitive advantage that keeps you ahead of your competition. Being different gets you noticed, creates value and is easily remembered.

Determining what really sets you apart from others in your field and communicating it effectively is not an easy exercise. As business owners, we think we need to have something complex and difficult in order to be valued by our clients when in reality, it may be something we find easy to do but our clients find amazing. We are taught to believe that things of value have to be hard or complex. Just because these things we do are easy for us does not mean they are easy for others. You need to become consciously aware of this value you provide and use it to your benefit.

Do you:

Find simpler ways of doing things?
Serve a niche market better than anyone else?
Bring a new perspective to challenges that offer unique solutions?
Package your services in a way that appeals to your ideal client?
Create systems that help clients learn how to do things more effectively?

The secret to identifying your differentiation is to understand what your ideal client really wants and making sure you deliver it better than anyone else. You need to have a deep understanding of the market and competition and then determine where you can uniquely offer something that the competition does not, packaged in a way that others cannot easily copy.

Just a note: being the lowest price or offering the best service is not a unique differentiating aspect that will get the attention of your ideal client.

What do you do really well that makes you stand out?

Defining Your Products and Services

Debra — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:45:33 +0000

This is post three in a series that discusses your year end marketing review to help you get ready for the new year.

In part 1, we reviewed whether we were now focusing on a new and most likely, better ideal client. Next, we reviewed our goals to be sure they aligned with your business vision. Given this information, we will evaluate all of our marketing activities to make sure everything we do will help us reach this ideal client.

Do your products and services appeal to your ideal client?

Pricing and packaging your products and services correctly for your target market is one of the more powerful marketing activities that you can do. If your ideal client has changed, you need to review your business model to be sure your offerings are aligned with their needs.

Compare your ideal client’s challenges with your offerings.

Are you offering products and services that help your ideal client overcome some critical need?
Have you created packages that highlight your unique differentiator?
Do the packages (either products or services) have many benefits included to make the decision to work with you really easy?
Are they priced to fit within their budget while maximizing your revenue?

The key to pricing and packaging is to understand your client’s needs and then create solutions that are high value and low risk. Be creative with your offerings by putting together services and information products that are value-packed and are easy to buy.

Can you eliminate the risk of working with you?

The best example of matching products and services to your ideal client is what happened in my business. Originally I offered marketing consulting services primarily to high technology companies. Through my networking activities, though, I was meeting small business owners that needed marketing help. I realized that I truly wanted to work with the small business owner to mentor them in marketing, but I was having difficulty explaining what I offered and why it was beneficial to this new ideal client. To them, hiring a marketing consultant seemed high risk and not appropriate to their small business. I continually heard, “I’d love to work with you but I can’t afford your services”. They were assuming that my services were too expensive for their budgets primarily because of the way I had priced and packaged them.

But the reality was that my pricing and packaging were not clearly aligned with their needs. What they needed was advice, education and a mentor to help them with their marketing, packaged in a way that fit into their budgets. So I made a few changes to my business model and my brand:

Renamed by business from Vista Consulting to Masterful Marketing;
Changed my title from marketing consultant to marketing coach and mentor;
Created service packages (8 step program) and information products (teleclinics) with a package price, eliminating the fear that the offerings are too expensive for a small business’s budget.

These changes have resulted in a win-win for both my business and my clients. I get to help more small business owners and they get the marketing advice and services they need within their budget.

How will you adjust your offerings to appeal to your ideal client?

Small Business Marketing Review

Debra — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:29:05 +0000

This post is the first in a series that will discuss your year end marketing review to help you get ready for the new year. By the end of the series, you should have the information you need to create a basic marketing plan.

During the last month of the year, I always like to take some time to review my business results and my marketing efforts over the past year so that I can adjust where necessary and be ready to hit the ground running when the new year rolls around. The following are the areas that I look at to see what stays, what goes and what needs a bit of tweaking.

Current client profile – has it changed?
Goals – which ones did you accomplish?
Service or product offerings – do they need to be redefined?
Why people hire you or pay for your services – what makes you different?
Messages – do they still work?
Website content and other marketing materials – are they consistent?
Marketing activities for the past year – what worked and what didn’t?
Online reputation or presence – do you exist?
Action plan – what activities will you be using to market your business?

Let’s start at the beginning and work our way through the list.

Has your client profile changed?

As your business grows and matures, you start to notice changes happening that may not necessarily be planned. One of the areas that usually evolves is your client profile. Although we all do our homework about finding the right target market for our products and services, we become attracted to a particular type of client and naturally begin to focus. When this happens, everything you have read about why working with your ideal client is so very important becomes crystal clear.

This evolution shouldn’t be a surprise. Your business takes this turn when your passion for what you do and why you do it shines through everything else. You begin to truly understand what you offer, who benefits from working with you and most importantly who you like to work with. As you get a clearer perspective on your business, you begin to attract a more targeted audience, a niche so to speak, who value what you have to offer and the rest of them begin to fade. Not only do you thrive working with this client, these clients truly benefit from working with you.

What should you do?

If you find yourself working with a client that is different than those you started the year with, ask yourself:

Why are you naturally attracting this audience? (Passion? Personality? Skills?)
Have you focused on a particular industry within your target that just makes more sense for you?
Had you taken for granted something that makes you different that really is important to these clients?

By becoming aware of the changes and understanding why this has happened, you can now use this knowledge to evolve your messages, content and marketing activities to ensure you speak clearly to your ideal client. As I wrote in a previous post on Law of Attraction in Marketing, knowing your ideal client helps you focus and be explicit about what makes you attractive to that market. Don’t view this as a restriction but as a liberating exercise that will ensure you develop raving fans for your business.

This evolution has happened in my business where I now focus on providing products and services for independent professionals and small business owners in the construction and home services industry.

Have you found that you have focused your target market and evolved your business? Share your stories in the comments.

Small Business Marketing Plan

Debra — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:29:40 +0000

You search the web for “marketing plan small business” and you get terrifying results ranging from marketing plan templates that are too cumbersome for small business owners to articles such as the one from Microsoft called 5 easy steps to create a marketing plan where the 5 steps they list are 1) position your product; 2) tap your braintrust; 3) listen to your customers; 4) draft the plan and 5) track results.

Hm, thanks for the help.

Then you wonder why small business owners run for the hills when they hear the term “marketing plan” and never really grasp what they need to do to attract new customers and clients and grow their businesses. And although I’d love to give you a magic 5 steps to a winning marketing plan, it just doesn’t work that way.

So what is really important to know?

Your vision for the business
Who wants to buy your products or services
Your competition
Your differentiator (why should I buy from you?)
Products and/or services and how you will price and package them
Your message
Your brand identity and image

I call this the foundation information – you have to have a good grasp of this for your business. But, if you have this information, you are half way there.

Now you need your goals – specific, measureable, attainable, relevant and timely (S.M.A.R.T.) - to give you a path to success. For every goal, what strategy, tactics and supporting materials do I need to achieve that goal?

The following example shows the hierarchy of the thought process you can go through.

Marketing Plan Goal Strategy Hierarchy

Goal: Increase the number of qualified inbound opportunities per quarter to 50.
Strategy: Create an online presence that projects my expertise and helps those searching find my web site.
Tactics:
- Begin blogging;
- Write a monthly article for distribution via the blog, other sites, email newsletter;
- Build an opt-in email list;
Tools/activities needed:
- Develop a WordPress site and blog incorporating my brand identity;
- Develop a list of articles to be written and write one a month;
- Create a free tool that your target would appreciate and give it away to encourage people to sign up for your mailing list.

Remember, each goal may have multiple strategies with several tactics that require different materials and tools. Once you’ve laid out all of your goals, strategies, tactics and materials with their associated resources and budget, you can then decide what you can do accomplish each month based on your time and budget.

Want more help? Download my complimentary marketing plan and budget spreadsheet template by signing up for my email list. You can find the signup form in the sidebar of Masterful Marketing or on my Facebook Business Page.

Contractor Marketing Basics

Debra — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:25:53 +0000

Recently I have been working with a few contractors helping them market their businesses. Besides defining their brand and setting up their Internet presence, I work with them on how to decide what type of marketing will work for them. The following is a presentation that I gave to a group of contractors a few weeks ago and a brief transcript of the key points that I make when I give this presentation.

Contractor Marketing Basics

View more documents from Debra Murphy.

Slides 3 & 4:

Let’s discuss what marketing is all about. To me, marketing is educating your customer about why they should do business with you. Marketing is helping the customer realize the value you provide by eliminating a problem or satisfying a need.

Good marketing will attract your ideal client, retain existing clients, encourages referrals and helps you avoid price wars.

Marketing is not specifically advertising, sales or public relations. These are strategies that you could select as part of your overall marketing plan. Marketing is also not your Web site or blog, a brochure or a business card. These are tools of marketing to be used to effectively build awareness for your products and services.

Slides 5:

A marketing plan gives you direction and clarity on how you will market your business. By following a plan, you are also more likely to be able to measure your results. You won’t be reactive in your marketing, spending money and not following through. The plan will help you define what you do, why you are the best, who needs what you do and how to attract them. Another key point of the marketing plan is that it will help you determine the overall budget so you can allocate sufficient funds to successfully follow through.

Slides 6 through 15:

The key parts to the plan include:

Define your vision and goals - What do you want your business to look like in 5 years, 3 years and 1 year? Answering these questions helps you frame your marketing plan to ensure you are moving in the right direction. If you don’t want to build a large firm with multiple crews, your marketing needs to focus on things that drive enough business that you can handle yourself or with a subcontractor if need be. Once you have your vision, your goals are developed to help you reach your 1 year plan.
Identify your ideal client and how you are different from your competition - Who do you want to work with, who would benefit from working with you and how are you better than others that do what you do? Not all customers will be ideal and understanding why helps you avoid customers that drain you.
Develop your core message - What problems does your ideal client want fixed or what needs do they wish to fulfilled? Speaking to your customers on how you can help them enables you to develop a relationship that establishes trust. When a customer trusts you, they are more likely to do business with you.
Create your brand identity - What image do you want to project? Your image should align with your vision, values and goals so it does not send a conflicting message to your customers. Once you have established your brand image and identity, use it consistently throughout all of your marketing efforts.
Determine your marketing strategy, tactics and budget – What activities will you use to build awareness of your business? Understanding your customer and how they purchase your type of service will help you determine what will work and what won’t. Think about all the ways you can reach your customer, how much it will cost both in terms of money and resources and select those that you know you can implement. If you plan out for 6 months to a year, you can manage your budget more effectively and find the time to work a tactic completely.
Create sales tools to support the tactics and build your database of prospects and customers - What supporting materials do you need to help you sell your services? Web site, blog, brochures, business cards, signs, promotional items (pens and apparel) and other items can be designed to help you get your message to your customer. Wait until you’ve determined your strategy and tactics to avoid creating sales tools that are not needed, thereby wasting valuable budget.
Execute, track and measure results – Are the activities you are doing working? Take on only the activities that you can complete and measure. Working a strategy half way only sets you up for failure.

This is a really brief overview of how to develop a marketing plan for your business. I’d love to hear from home services professionals about whether you have a marketing plan and if so, how it works for you. What types of activities are the most successful and which did not work at all.

Develop a Social Media System

Debra — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:23:03 +0000

Some people just are organized. Others need a bit of help staying focused. When it comes to managing your time given all the social media activities, the small business owner can get more than overwhelmed. I often get asked how I keep up with all of my social media activities and still get client work done (which does pay the bills!).

Two of the experts have provided their social media “systems”, showing you how they approach these activities.

John Jantsch started this with his My Social Media System post and then asked others to share their systems as well.
Chris Brogan then responded to being tagged by John and shared his workflow system.

As you can see, these two systems are very different and work for them. The point of both of their posts is to create a system that works for you, refine it as needed and eventually your social media strategy will become a habit. So let’s thank the above two folks (and others who have responded to John’s initial request) for suggesting we write down and share our systems, as I’m sure doing so will help us stick with it and make it a habit.

What helps me is to use my laptop for social media tools. It sits next to me on my desk with TweetDeck, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendfeed and other applications open in their own window so they don’t interfere with my client work that is on my desktop. I monitor these tools using the following system.

Daily:

Morning:

Check LinkedIn each morning for updates and questions
Check Facebook each morning for updates
Check Friendfeed and update my status across the social networks

Continuous:

Check Twitter using TweetDeck every couple of hours (easy to organize groups and searches). Being open on the laptop, I can glance over to see who’s chatting and if interesting, join in.
Check email every couple of hours (clients send requests via email)
Monitor Friendfeed for updates and interesting conversations

Evening:

Scan Google Alerts blog feeds via Google Reader
Respond to Twitter followers – I check their profile to see if I want to follow back
Respond to LinkedIn connection requests
Respond to Facebook Friend requests
Subscribe to new friends on Friendfeed

Weekly (usually weekends):

Write blog posts for the week – schedule them to be published in the coming week
Tweak profiles across the many social media accounts
Check Webmaster tools for errors, issues needing fixing
Check Google analytics for information on traffic
Write a recommendation for a contact in LinkedIn, request one in return
Respond to other social media invitations

Being visible and participating in social media, like all marketing activities, takes time to reap the rewards. But if you come up with a system, and as John says, “work it day in and day out”, you will begin to understand what social media can and will do for your business as part of your marketing strategy.

Update: 2/14/09 – as I scanned my feed headlines in Google Reader I realized I didn’t incorporate reading and commenting on blogs into my personal social media system. That activity is normally part of my day and I will take a few minutes each morning and evening to scan, read those whose headline draws me in and comment when I have something to say. I also watch Twitter for notices of blog posts that seem interesting to me.

As with all plans, they are living and need to be modified. I will keep monitoring my use of social media and write an update to this as the system evolves.

Stay on Course for Marketing Success

Debra — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:48:42 +0000

I’m getting a lot of queries from my clients in the form of “What do you think of this?” where “this” is a proposal from a niche marketing company for them to buy a plethora of services from PPC Advertising to social media marketing services.

I appreciate that these companies need to sell their services to survive, but as marketing companies they should do a better job at targeting their offerings.

Recently I have taken on a client that was spending $2000 per month on Google Adwords with a company that I won’t name. As part of their service, they make a proxy of your Web site so they can track the results of the campaign. All this does is eliminate your site from the organic search engine results pages because the this company is drawing all traffic to their copy of your site. They also put their own phone number on the site so all calls to the company get routed through their service.
Another client sent me a proposal for SEO, PPC and a blog. The proposal nicely said that their current web site was not optimized for key search engine phrases. Upon evaluation, the site appeared on the first page (and in many cases in the first position) for each of their keyword phrases.
Finally another client sent me a 10 page proposal from a social media marketing firm that was proposing to create videos for viewing on YouTube. The proposal was totally untargeted at this small service business. In addition, it was poorly written with grammatical errors. For a marketing company to send such an unprofessional piece to a prospect leaves me concerned with the company’s credibility and what they will do with your precious marketing dollars.

Marketing Lesson

Evaluate all opportunities against your overall marketing plan.

Do these opportunities help you achieve the goals you have set?
Will they help you reach your target market?
Do they fit into your overall marketing budget?
What will you trade off to invest in this new activity?
Does it make sense for your business at all?

Stay on course with your marketing strategy to ensure consistent results. It’s ok to adjust the plan based on new information, opportunities that make sense for your business or an infusion of funds that you weren’t expecting. Otherwise resist the temptation to try something “new” just because you think you have to. You don’t.

Help Your Web Visitors Take Action

Debra — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:28:35 +0000

Many web sites I visit are great to look at and have a lot of interesting information. But what is it you really want your visitor to do when they are at your site? Do you want them to sign up for a webcast, download information or ask you to call them? Do you help your visitor make a decision or do you leave them with too much information?

Your web site needs to lead your visitors through the site with the purpose of helping them decide what action to take depending on where they are in the sales cycle. If you let the visitor wander aimlessly without a clear path, you run the risk of them getting confused, frustrated and leaving before they tell you who they are. Web site visitors are amazingly impatient. If they don’t see exactly what they are looking for in a few seconds, they will leave. However, once they find something that interests them (like your blog for example), they will stay for a while and come back for more.

When planning your web site, ask yourself the following questions:

Why do people visit your site? Can you provide them with what they need so that they are satisfied?
Are you holding their interest and making them want more?
Is everything they are looking for easy to find and presented in terms they understand?
Are you wasting their time with elements on the page that don’t add value?

Asking the Visitor to Take Action

A “call to action” in marketing refers to active copy that compels a user to take action. When developing your web site, think through how you want to weave effective calls to action into its structure. You want to do this because if you don’t, you are leaving it up to chance that they will figure out what they are suppose to do and actually do it. The obvious ones are “register for this seminar”, “subscribe to our newsletter”, “buy now”, or “add to shopping cart”.

Other more subtle or non-invasive calls to action are those used to move the visitor through the site on an information gathering process. Hyperlinks that help the visitor walk through a set of pages, next and back buttons, or hyperlinked phrases such as “read our success story” are all considered calls to action that get your visitor to stay at your site longer.

Use a clear call to action on every page of your web site and interspersed in the copy. Don’t leave the path to success up to the visitor – guide them through the process with a flow that takes them to a decision. Understand the process you use to get new clients and develop your site to mimic the process as best as you can. You still need the great design, clear content and a professional image for your web site, but don’t forget to tell your visitor exactly what you want them to do.

Search Engine Marketing is not a Commodity Product