The Marketing Viking

I was recently interviewed by a client of mine.

In this interview, he asked me about my marketing approach and how I use my marketing model to massively reduce risk and create substantial growth for my clients.

As the interview is quite long, it will be posted in sections. Here is the first part. I hope you enjoy it. 

Steve Gibson

……………..  

Q: Most business owners are desperate to increase sales, but they struggle to get more clients. Why is that?

Steve: Usually, it’s because they approach from the wrong direction.

For a start, they narrow down the question from “how do I increase sales?” to “how do I get more clients?” … and that immediately cuts down your options.

Q: What do you mean?

Steve: I have a model which says there are areas of marketing - what I call the five steps of the sales/marketing process - these are:

External lead/sales generation
Lead conversion
Up-selling
Re-selling
Referrals

To give a quick overview: (more…)

 Most business people seem to think that all they have to do is an excellent job and the referrals will come flooding in.

What they don’t realise is that:

(1) clients are often unable to recognise when you’ve done an outstanding job for them.

and

(2) clients often don’t know who your ideal prospects are.

So, most business are saying:

“Why don’t you, the client, who has no experience in this field, go and do a market analysis to see how the job I’ve done for you compares to the work my competitors do.

“And then, if you are able to conclude I’ve done a good job, work out what my target market is and find people who match that and send them to me….”

Which makes no sense.

If you take the time to educate the client - to show him how you’ve served him well and then tell him the sort of people he should be sending to you - you make it easy for him to send you referrals and you will almost always dramatically increase the number of referrals you get compared to the traditional “Mr Client, please go and knock your head in to find me some business” method.

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.

A badge of honour … or a waste of time? 

Google Adwords qualifications are frequently used as a “badge of honour” or, alternatively, a “scare tactic” by a number of PPC consultants. 

So, I was interested to her Perry Marshall, the world’s #1 (and, at $726 an hour, probably the most expensive) Adwords consultant, speak out on the Google Adwords Professional qualification. 

In a recent tele-seminar with marketing expert Dan Kennedy, Perry said: 

“I didn’t bother getting their [Google’s] silly little certification.  Google sets up campaigns for people and they do a terrible job at it … I should be certifying them“  

And hit the heart of the matter by saying: 

“[my customers] know that Google can set it up for them and it’ll suck money out of their wallet. If I coach them how to do it, it gets set up right.”

And summed up Google’s Adwords expertise with: 

“just because they built the piano doesn’t mean they know how to play it”. 

I’m glad to hear that Perry is saying things that I’ve been saying for a while i.e. that Google Adwords Professionals may know all about how to “press the buttons” on the Adwords Software, but that’s not what counts. 

Adwords success is all about marketing.

So it’s no surprise that the most sought after Adwords consultant in the world is an experienced direct marketer, rather than someone who’s learned their trade from a course devised by some Google techno-geek.

Steve Gibson  

PS If you’ve got a few hours and you’d like to take the Google Adwords Professional training, you can do it free at the Google Adwords Learning Centre.

Split testing is one of the most powerful tools available to marketers - but one that’s overlooked by most businesses.

With the release of Google’s Website Optimizer, website split-testing is now free for anyone.

And, one of the benefits that Website Optimizer offers is that it allows you to test more than one element at a time.

For example, I have a client who has a lead generation website.  We recently tested two variables on his sign-up page: headline and deck copy.

We had two different headlines and two versions of the deck copy, giving us four combinations.

Website Optimizer then rotated these four combinations until we had enough visitors (and sign-ups) to produce meaningful results.

Once the testing was over, Google gave us estimates of the difference between the headlines and copy.

Because our goal was to find the winner, rather than to know the exact difference in performance, we stopped the tests once there was more than 95% confidence in the results.

So, Google’s estimates have a certain degree of uncertainty.

Here are the results:

Headlines: headline 1 (the original headline) was 21.7% better (with +/- 11% uncertainty) than headline 2 (the test headline).

Deck Copy: copy 2 (the new version of the copy) was 37.5% better (+/- 16%) than the original.

(more…)

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future of internet marketing. And everything points to one conclusion:

“Amateur Hour is Almost Over”

What do I mean by this?

Up until now, it’s been relatively easy to establish an internet presence, but this is getting harder every day.

For example:

- The search engines used to be easy to manipulate but every year they become more sophisticated and it takes far more skill (and merit) to get to page 1.

- Click costs are increasing in pay per click advertising, which means more skill and diligence is required to use PPC profitably

- It’s been free to send email to customers and prospects, but increasingly unforgiving spam filters are blocking emails (even emails that are 100% legal and legit!) and costing us money. Plus, there’s talk of charging for commercial email in the near future.

- More and more businesses are waking up to the value of online promotion and this is causing markets to become more and more crowded. Every week millions of pages are added to the Google index. And some of these are competing for our market.

So, what’s this going to mean?

In a word: “carnage.”

It’s going to be the survival of the fittest. And those businesses that are only making money because it’s cheap and easy are going to go to the wall.

However, there’s good news … this is going to help people like you and me.

Anyone who’s got a product/service that adds real value to peoples’ lives and knows how to market it will be safe.

The businesses that will die are those that:

- Offer nothing special or unique to the marketplace

- Don’t market or market poorly

- Have sites with low “earnings per visitor” or poor conversion rates

- Rely on paid or “unnatural” links to exploit loopholes in Google and generate free search engine traffic

- Depend on free spammy emails that yield a tiny return

…And good riddance to them.

Your action plan right now should be to get to the higher ground.

Assume that your cost per visitor is going to increase and make sure that, when that happens, you’re bulletproof.

This means you need to work on the conversion rate of your website - your copy, your offer, your sales process, your usability - so your visitor value is increased.

Maximise your back-end - your repeat and additional sales to your existing and past customers - to increase your profit per customer.

Where appropriate, use up-selling to increase your average profit per sale.

Implement active referral systems so you can get “free customers” from your existing client relationships. There are dozens of different types of referral system and they almost always outperform the passive “sit and hope they’ll recommend me” approach most businesses use.

If you do these things, your marketing will be light years ahead of most of your competitors and you’ll be in a far better place to handle - and profit from - the times ahead.

And remember (to borrow inspiration from Nietzsche) “what kills my competitor only makes me stronger”.;

Best wishes,

Steve Gibson