The Marketing Viking

Over the last few years, I’ve talked to over 200 business owners and, although their problems have differed greatly there’s an underlying theme that needs to be addressed.

And that theme is, to put it bluntly … Most of You Guys Are Making Things A Lot Harder Than They Need To Be!

Let me explain …

One of my “rules” of business is that: “if you can’t get repeat business and/or referrals, you’re in trouble.”

Why? … because you’ll have to make every sale cold to a stranger that doesn’t know you.

And, anyone who’s ever been in sales will tell you that’s “HARD WORK“!

… But I see a lot of you doing this - you go after strangers instead of spending more time on your existing clients and warm prospects.

So, I’m going to give you a basic rule of thumb: if your time is limited (and whose isn’t?), here’s the sales hierarchy:

1. Enquiries
2. Existing customers
3. Solicited referrals
4. People who enquired, but didn’t buy
5. Brand new cold prospects

Rather than giving you the “how to” myself, I’m going to let you learn from the very best.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, car salesman Joe Girard was the “World’s Greatest Salesman”. But it wasn’t selling that made his the best, it was his marketing.

He was a master at getting huge volumes of people through the door with the minimum effort, and he did it by targeting his existing customers, referrals and people who had enquired, but didn’t buy.

(do these three categories sound familiar?)

If you read his book “How To Sell Anything To Anybody”, he talks in detail about the systems he developed to constantly pick this “low hanging fruit”.

And, that’s my advice for this month: get Joe’s book.

You can buy it from Amazon.co.uk here:  How To Sell Anything To Anybody and it’ll cost you about £6. Or, you can find it second hand for even less.

(Chapter 11, where he gives away the details of a referral system that sold 550 cars in a single year, is just gold … if you apply it)

So, please, get the book. And, once you’ve read it and applied some of Joe’s techniques, drop me an email to let me know how you got on.

Best wishes

Steve Gibson

PS This post is based on a newsletter I sent to my subscribers. If you’d like to receive my newsletter for free, you can sign up here. 

(1)Why Adwords Is So Special

Let’s compare Adwords to direct mail:

A customer acquisition mailing costs around £700 per 1,000 letters.

On average of 22% your letters will get binned without being opened and, if you’re writing to businesses, many letters will never be seen by the key decision maker.

But the biggest problem is that, even with a good mailing list, most of the recipients just aren’t interested in what you’re selling

Now, compare that with Google Adwords:

With Adwords, clicks can be as low as 2p (my Adwords clients, who are in a wide variety of industries, average around 75p a click) and you can target your ads so they’re only seen by hungry prospects at the very moment they’re actively seeking what you’re selling.

(more…)

In the summer of 2006, many people who were using Google Adwords found their ads had been disabled and Google was telling them they needed to bid more to re-instate their ads.

This was christened the “Googleslap” and, since then, there have been a number of additional “slaps” where Google have targetted another group of advertisers.

So, what’s going on?

Google, as usual, haven’t been too explicit about their intentions but, reading between the lines, here’s what I think is going on:

(more…)

People often ask “does pay per click work”? Or “will it work in my industry?”.

I want to talk about these questions because they don’t really make sense.

PPC is just a form of multi-step direct marketing.

Step 1, someone sees your ad. Step 2, they arrive at your landing page. And so on … and the final step is when they agree to buy.

The simple rule is: if someone doesn’t complete the final step, no sale is made.

(more…)

Effective copy - whether it’s an advert or a web page - tends to have certain elements and each of these elements serves a purpose and should appear in a logical order.

And one of the key copywriting mistakes I see from non-marketers is that they cripple their response rates by leaving out essential parts of the sales message.    

Different marketers have different formulae, but here’s the basic 5-step approach I tend to take: 

• This is what I’ve got
• This is what it can do for you
• This is why you should get it from me
• This is why you should believe me
• This is how you can get it

It’s not cast in stone - as I said other copywriters have different steps - but it’s a great place to start. 

If you look at your own ads or your website homepage, does it have those elements? And does it have them in this order?

- Can the reader quickly see what the offer is? 

- Does it explain why he or she should buy from you instead of your competitors?

- Is there evidence that backs up the claims you make about your product or service?

- Is it obvious to the reader what he or she should do next?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, you’re probably letting a lot of money spill through your hands.  

Steve Gibson

Start-ups businesses often come to me with the question “how do I market for free?”

My typical response is my “marketing resources” speech:

Marketing a new business usually requires the investment of marketing resources.These resources can be:

* money - money to run ads, money to hire professional marketing skills

* marketing skills - the ability to do your own marketing skillfully

* connections - if you know the right people, you can not only bring in money and skills, you can also get access to other people’s customer bases

* time - and a hell of a lot of it if you’ve not got the money, skills or connections to do the high impact marketing that will really get you off the ground

If you don’t have these, there’s no getting away from it, you’re playing with the odds against you.

And I still think that this is true.

But I’ve now found a better answer:

The best ”free” marketing is paid marketing that works.

If you can turn a profit with paid marketing, it costs you nothing: you get your money back with interest.

And that means it’s free.

And anyone starting a business, without the connections to help them on their way and who can’t afford to wait months until they’re making a livable income, should realise that the fastest route to success is biting the bullet and paying to make your offer to your target market.

Steve

PS The above advice is aimed at new or struggling businesses. If a business is established and has happy clients, it’s usually easy to market for free.