Category: Sales & Marketing

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Sales & Marketing

What Ducks Can Teach You About Branding and Business Success

Of all the mascots I would expect a high-end luxury hotel to have, the lowly mallard duck is certainly not one of them. And yet, that was what greeted me when I stepped into the Peabody Orlando Hotel.

There is an actual story behind the ducks (which is printed on the napkins) but the reality is the story is less interesting than how the hotel has built a brand around ducks.

First, you have the “March of the Ducks” — at 11 am the ducks “march” (or more accurately waddle) on a red carpet to spend the day in a luxurious fountain. This fountain is located in the middle of the hotel and is actually quite a nice place to get a little work done or enjoy a coffee and cupcake (while watching the ducks splash around).  At 5 pm they then “march” (waddle) back to their Duck Palace to enjoy a duck dinner and a “quiet evening” together.

Now the fact they make this an event — with marching music, a red carpet and an actual Duck Master (which is trademarked — yes if you were thinking about hiring a Duck Master for your own Duck March you would be out of luck) is one thing. But the ducks are also front and center to their branding.

There are ducks on the carpet, duck soaps in the rooms, drinks named after ducks, ducks embroidered on the staff’s clothes — the list goes on and on. It’s all quite tastefully done and the ducks are elegantly and subtly woven throughout the hotel’s brand and image.

Now the real question is, of course, is it worth it? Only the Peabody knows for sure but from the outside it certainly appears like it is.

First off, remember where the Peabody Orlando is — it’s in Orlando competing against Disney World (who knows a thing or 2 about branding themselves) Universal Studios and other theme-oriented attractions. Without the ducks, the Peabody would be a very nice, high-end hotel that would be like every other very nice, high-end hotel. With the ducks, now you have your own attraction. Now you have something to talk about.  Now you have something your kids might want to see almost as much as Mickey Mouse.

 

(Now there is another Peabody, complete with ducks, in Atlanta as well. The Atlanta Peabody certainly wouldn’t be in competition with Mickey and company, but I suspect there’s enough other competition with high-end hotels and history that the ducks earn their keep there as well.)

One of the main ways you can successfully market yourself to an affluent clientele is to provide an experience. People like experiences. It gives them something to talk about (or write ezine articles about). And if you wrap an experience inside your brand, you just transformed yourself from a “good” business to something extraordinary. And extraordinary is what gets people to notice, to “take a chance on” if nothing else to witness that experience for themselves.

So, for you, what can you do to create an experience for your clients? And is this something that can be woven into your branding strategy? (And if you can make it unexpected or off-the-wall even better.) Or maybe it was an accident you overlooked at the time — with the ducks Mr. Peabody came back from hunting and was enjoying some Jack Daniels with a friend, when they decided it would be a nifty idea to put the duck decoys in the fountain. Well everyone loved the decoys floating around so now we have actual ducks in the fountain. (See what I mean about how lame that story is? But no matter, the point is they saw an opportunity and seized it — do you have any of those “happy accidents” in your own business you can capitalize on?)

Remember the point of a good brand is to make yourself memorable to your ideal clients. And a great way to make yourself very memorable is to wrap your brand around an experience.

 

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Sales & Marketing

The Fuel that Drives the Engine of Your Sales Success

fuel

It is important to identify the prospects that will have the highest need for your product or service.  These are your best prospects—the ones who are most likely to buy, use, and recommend you and your services.

When you have identified your best prospects and know where to find them, you can use your marketing skills to generate leads that will most likely result in profitable sales. Qualified lead generation is the fuel that drives the engine of your sales success.  The techniques discussed here can keep you supplied with highly qualified leads.

How can you identify those prospects that are most likely to want to hear your message? And, once you’ve identified the profile of those most likely to buy—your TOP 20%—where can you find prospects in large numbers who fit that profile?

Begin with an analysis of your sales over the last year or two.

In your analysis, you look at three things:

1.            Who bought what?

2.            How did you find and sell those customers?

3.            Why did they buy what they bought?

Possessing the right marketing skills is crucial in properly identifying the right kinds of prospects for a company. Smart companies accomplish this responsibility by profiling the top twenty percent of their current customers who typically provide eighty percent of their profits.

Looking for new business is very expensive. Therefore, companies need to avoid the wrong kinds of prospects for them.  Just as it is critical in distinguishing the attributes of the right prospects, a company needs to outline the characteristics that make-up the bottom twenty percent of their customer base. Anybody in business can easily recognize who the complainers, price-grinders, and transaction-oriented clients are. By clearly understanding the bad traits of those bottom twenty-percent, companies can much easier avoid the wrong prospects.

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Sales & Marketing

Which Event is Right For You? 3 Questions to Help You Choose the Perfect Event

If it hasn’t hit you yet, it will soon — there are an awful lot of live events happening in the online world.

 

Now there’s an excellent reason for this — hosting your own event can be a huge business booster, so many entrepreneurs find themselves giving the whole event-hosting a whirl. However, for the attendee, it can be downright overwhelming to decide which events are worth the time/money/aggravation to attend.

 

If that’s you then never fear, help is here. As someone who has attended probably a gazillion events (the good, the bad and the ugly) I have a few thoughts on this whole event-attending business. Below are 3 questions to ask yourself when an event invitation crosses your path:

 

1. Is the event promise something you feel like you need to learn? First and foremost events are about training, so taking a look at what you’re going to walk away with is an excellent place to start. In addition to reviewing the event promise (or transformation you’ll receive by attending) also check out the event host. Is this someone you want to learn from? Not only from a credibility standpoint but are you going to enjoy watching them on a stage for big chunks of time?

 

If the answer is “yes” then it probably would be worth your while to carve out the time in your schedule to attend (especially if there’s not another way to get your hands on the information). If the answer is “no,” that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t attend, but you should definitely keep reading.

 

2. Will the networking be worth it? Will your ideal clients be in attendance and/or possible joint venture partners? Events are also about meeting people live and in person. If your peeps will be at the event then you also probably want to be there. If they aren’t going to be there, well, then you may want to think twice about attending, unless…

 

3. Is it time to infuse your business with new ideas? Are you feeling old and stale sitting by yourself in your home or office? Events are fabulous at helping you shake the cobwebs out of your current thoughts and behaviors and have you see things in a new light. If you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed in your business, attending an event can be just the ticket to helping you get a fresh new perspective (which ultimately can lead to you getting unstuck and un-overwhelmed).

 

And I know I promised 3 questions but here’s one more bonus question:

 

4. Has it been awhile since you attended an event? I do think there are a ton of benefits to getting yourself away from your daily to-do list and into the energy of possibilities that events hold, and if it’s been awhile since you attended an event, then it’s probably time.

 

Now for scoring — unless you had all yeses or all no’s, there’s no real right or wrong answer. If there was only one yes but it was a really strong and important yes, that may be enough for you. But on the flip side, you still might decline to attend an event even with all but one yes (if the one no was strong enough you just felt like you couldn’t stomach going).

 

Mostly what I wanted to do is to help you think about all the reasons why it’s important to attend events, and then to decide if this particular event is the right one for you.

 

 

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Sales & Marketing

The Anatomy of the Perfect Subject Line

Article Contributed by Kay Ackerman

Your carefully crafted marketing email won’t even have a chance to impact your mailing list unless it includes a well-crafted subject line. People are inundated with emails, and, even if they subscribed to your mailing list, they may not be interested in hearing much of what you have to say. The subject line is your one chance to convince people that it’s worth their time to open your email. Consider the following guidelines for the perfect subject line as you craft yours.

1) Make it clear and relevant: Generic and confusing subject lines don’t attract readers. Take a hard look at your email and craft a subject that clearly encompasses what’s in the email. Don’t leave your readers guessing what the email is about, because they’ll see it as junk. Don’t make readers guess who it’s from, either. The from portion of the subject line should contain a consistent brand identifier. Develop a consistent set of tags and choose one to enclose in brackets at the beginning of the subject line to indicate what type of email it is.

2) Include a call to action: People are responsive when you give them something to do. Come up with an actionable step and frame it in the subject line. This gives the person something tangible to respond to, in addition to a better awareness of what content they’ll find inside. Include a relevant deadline to put some urgency behind the action and increase the chance of having your email opened now rather than a week later.

3) Make it local: If location matters to your business, use relevant information about the user’s location in the subject line. For example, you may be opening a new store in Chicago, so send an email marketing campaign to subscribers, noting that it pertains specifically to the Windy City. This helps people see at a glance that the email is relevant to them.

4) Keep it short and sweet: Your subject line should never contain more than 50 characters. If it does, the last portion will be cut off, both on computers and mobile devices. In fact, data compiled by MailChimp suggests that the most successful subject lines contain between 28 and 39 characters. Make every word count, and cut anything that’s not adding to the message.

5) Be descriptive, not sales-focused: Although it sounds counterintuitive, you don’t want a sales-oriented subject, even when people know you’re trying to sell something. Rather than selling what’s in the email, just tell what’s in the email and leave it up to the reader to make the decision to buy what you’re offering. This makes your subject line clear without being pushy.

Within these general principles, keep in mind that every audience is different. People on your mailing list may respond better to some subject lines than others, so manage your email marketing campaigns to identify the most successful subject lines in terms of open rates and click-through rates. As you gather data about your mailing list, you’ll be able to fine-tune your approach to reach your audience with relevant, interesting subject lines.

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Sales & Marketing

The Mistakes I Made Creating My First Info-Product

My first information product was an ebook called “Got Ideas? Unleash Your Creativity and Make More Money.”

Bet you didn’t know that, did you? That’s because it was a complete flop.

Yes, my first foray into the wonderful world of info-marketing was pretty much a train wreck.

So why I am talking about it now? Because I realized the other day the lessons I learned were invaluable and my failures could help you become a success.

So sit back, grab a cup of coffee and let me share the story of my first info-product. It was in 2004 — which was the beginning of my 2-year “transition” period where I transformed my business from freelance copywriter with 80% of my business coming from local businesses to entrepreneur/business owner with a national and international client base and having the resources and team to help my clients on a much bigger scale.

Needless to say this was a nerve-wracking time, filled with ups and downs and LOTS of “learning opportunities.” One of those “learning opportunities” came in the form of my first ebook.

When I first decided to make this transition from freelance copywriter to entrepreneur/biz owner, I did what many of you either are doing or have done — invest A LOT of time, money and energy learning stuff. And one of the things I learned was I should be selling an info-product. 

Well, I’m a writer, right? I could write an ebook.

At the same time, I was also in the middle of a rebranding (remember, I was making a transition so everything was changing). Since creativity is one of my passions, I had decided to combine creativity and marketing/copywriting and have that become the foundation of my business. This would be perfect I thought. No one else is doing it, I could be the only one, and I’ll kick this whole thing off by writing a book about it.

So I spent MONTHS writing this book. I put aside HOURS of my time every day writing it. It ended up being 144 pages of solid content. I finally finished it that summer, put up a (pretty bad) sales letter and waited for all the money to come rolling in.

Needless to say, that never happened.

I did sell a handful of them. Maybe a dozen or two. Not nearly the amount I had assumed I’d sell.

Now, I wasn’t exactly discouraged after this but it was a shock. Like being dunked in the ice cold water of reality. It caused me to do a heck of lot more research into how to successfully sell online. I didn’t take my failure personally — rather I instead decided to use my failures as a jumping off point that would help me turn my next product into a success.

However, I know a lot of you DO venture into these murky waters, end up with a failure on your hands and become so discouraged you never sell anything online again. I don’t want that for you. You see, EVERYONE who is ever sold anything online has had a lemon or two (or ten or a hundred). It doesn’t mean the process doesn’t work (it does) it just means you need to know the pitfalls to avoid so you end up with a success and not a failure. 

So what mistakes did I make? Well, let me tell you, I made a bunch and I’m going to share those with you over the next couple of weeks. But one mistake I did NOT make was having a bad product. Like many of you who are struggling selling a product, your product is fabulous. The flaws are in the other parts of the process and that’s why you’re not seeing the success you deserve.

So stay tuned for next week and part 2!