Marketing Is Not As Spectator Sport

Marketing Is Not As Spectator Sport - Derek Mair

Too many SME business owners’ concept of marketing is like smiling at someone in a pitch-black room… You know you are doing it, the problem is no one else does.

Too many SME business owners complain about cashflow, without realising predictable cashflow comes from consistent marketing… A machine at the heart of your business.

Too many SME business owners think that marketing is an action you take… Marketing is absolutely every bit of contact anyone or any part of your business has with the public.

That it is something beyond normal business functions… In fact, the two most fundamental functions in your business, that you must normailse, is continual marketing and innovation.

Through marketing you create the opportunity to educate your target market on how to succeed at their goals using your solutions. It is a process that turns into a sale and never ends because customer service is simply marketing… Where your goal is to turn your best customers into your best marketers.

Here are 10 tips to modern marketing:

1. If you go on a date and only talk about yourself, chances are there won’t be a second date… So stop talking about yourself (Product and Service) in your marketing and start talking about what’s in it for your customers.

2. What is the most important story?
   1. The story you tell yourself
   2. The story you tell others
   3. The story others tell others about you

Yes, they are all important, however the first two are based on what ‘you say’, whereas the third is based on what ‘you do’. Get real clarity about what you want others to tell others about you and then live it.

3. Ordinary marketing should make your company look good; Extraordinary marketing should make your prospect feel good. Your prospects do not buy products and services, they buy emotional connections, (relationships) emotional empathy, (stories) and emotional experiences, (wow)… They will not remember what you did for them, only how you made them feel, and they certainly won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

4. Prospects and customers expect only one thing of you, as does everyone else you are in a relationship with, business or otherwise… That you do what you said you were going to do, when you said you were going to do it, in the way you said you were going to do it, period.

5. It’s not about selling your products of services, it’s about buying customers because marketing is simply math’s - if the math’s work it's good marketing if it doesn't its bad marketing. In other words, to turn your marketing cost into an investment you need to test and measure all campaigns. You need to know your ‘Customer Acquisition Cost’; how much it cost you to buy a customer… And as long as you are making more per customer than it cost to buy them, you're making profits... Give me a call and I'll show you how to measure it.

6. It is six times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sell more products and services or get referral from existing customers. To gain life time value from your expenditure of energy and money, you must keep in touch with existing customers. It's the follow up that makes all the difference... 68% of repeat business is lost due to perceived indifference; they don't think you care.

7. For the first time in history you have technology available to you that allows you to build and maintain valuable relationships… globally, called Digital Marketing:

1. Social Media Strategy. You can try to ignore it but it's not going away. More than 60% of businesses now use it. Think of it as your new interactive Customer Relationship Management, (CRM) System allowing you to connect and build brand recognition.
2. Website Strategy. When it comes to your website people are not interested in you or how long you have been in business or how big you are - they are interested in themselves - so your website must be oriented to your visitors and capture their contact information. Is your current website strategy for credibility purposes or prospect information capture so that you follow up?
3. Digital Integration Startegy. You need one

8. There is great value in being told ‘no’ because at least you will have learned from the experience; what value is there in never asking at all? …If this is you, the marketing procrastinator…

“Procrastination is simply a label you are giving to your fear of failure; ‘You must to learn to disassociate failure, from you being a failure’… The only true failure is the failure to participate in your own development, or to implement knowledge you have gained so that you may learn.”

Derek Mair

9. For the ‘I don’t have the time market’ procrastinators, this is simply an excuse to keep you feeling safe… Read again no x above and understand the outcome you must expect from marketing to always have more people to see than you have the time to see them.

10. Do you have a marketing budget as a percentage of your projected gross sales? To succeed you must put equal effort, time and resource into marketing as you do operations and financial control.

11. Under promise and over deliver.

Marketing is not as spectator sport... so stop doing stuff; and start doing stuff that really matters… Your marketing, think about it, plan for it, and commit to it. I use a very simple, proven and effective 7 stage marketing plan... give me a call and I will help you implement it