The Marketing Viking

With the evenings getting colder and darker, I’ve been spending more time in front of the TV and I’ve discovered something: TV advertisers think we’re stupid.

What do I mean?

Here are 3 things I’ve seen in TV ads in the last few days: 

(1) Alan Hansen pushing a shopping trolley around Morrisons because it saves him money.

(2) The queen of detox diets, Carol Vorderman, marvelling at saving a few pence on some crappy pizzas at Iceland.

(3) Joan Collins queuing to get served at a post office.

(the only true-to-life thing about the Post Office ad was the staff chatting among each other while a customer was waiting)

None of these things has credibility. So, why are they being used to sell? And, do they work?

My answers to these questions:

(a) I don’t know.

(b) I don’t know.  

There are three reasons why the ads might work:

Firstly, each of the 3 ads contains a sales message (two of them are price and the Post Office ad lists services available from the P.O.) and getting your sales message from the mouth of a celeb - even when that celeb is incongruous with the product/message - is usually better than not getting it out at all.

Secondly, all three sales messages are fairly “factual”. They don’t really need you to take a leap of faith and trust them.

Thirdly, the “what the f*** is Alan Hansen doing in a supermarket” effect draws people’s attention to the ads.

Those are the reasons why they might work, but on the flipside, the endorsements are so phoney they’re robbed of any power.

My guess is that all three ads could have been improved by showing an “ordinary looking person” talking about their experience.    

Steve

65.6% Increase In Sales So Far …

 If you’ve visited the split testing section of this blog, you’ll know that I’m a great believer in split testing web pages and that I believe it’s the easiest, cheapest and safest way to increase sales from an online shop.

I’m currently running a split-test on the FAQ page of a client’s site.

I’d long believed that it was putting of prospects by focusing on questions along the lines of ”if the product doesn’t work, what should I do?”   

So, I knocked up 3 “positive” questions and put them ahead of the existing questions.

Here’s a screenshot of the results so far:

(more…)

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. 

Just an update:

If you’ve been following my posts on my SEO coaching, you might be wondering why everything has gone so quiet.

 The reason is simple, I’ve been taking the keyword analysis techniques and coming up with words for my pages.

The guidelines I’ve been given is that I should have at least 400 words per page and each page should have roughly 5% keywords i.e. 20+ words per page.

With 14 pages required for my site, that’s 5,600+ words and 280+ keywords.

So, it’s taking time!   

So far, I have 4 complete pages online, with another 10 to go.

However, my homepage was indexed last night (without any links going to it as far as I know), so I thought I’d check some rankings this morning.

I’m nowhere for my primary phrase, but I’m #8 out of 2,090,000 for one of my other keywords.

That’s one page, no inbound links and a domain that’s only 15 days old: #8 out of 2,090,000.

I’m pretty happy with this and finally seeing some results has pushed up my enthusiasm.

Although I understand the approach Rob is teaching me and it makes sense to me and it’s clear why it should work … SEO still seems like voodoo to me.     

As strange as it seems, I’m hoping that this SEO project is going to run into problems and that I’ll have to refine my site over and over.

This is because it just feels too easy right now and, if it ends up taking more skill than I’ve used so far, it’ll “make more sense”. 

Steve