Tag: small business marketing strategy

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Business Ideas

3 Keys To Attracting Leads, Clients and Sales to You Effortlessly

It sounds magical, doesn’t it? Attracting leads, clients and sales to you effortlessly. In fact, it almost doesn’t sound possible.

But the truth is, it IS possible, even if it isn’t magic. It’s all about good, solid marketing principles. And if you follow the below 3 keys, you’ll be well on your way to experiencing that for yourself in your business.

1. Create a powerful message that appeals to your ideal clients. This could also be thought of as your Unique Selling Proposition (or USP).

So what exactly is that? Basically it’s the solution you provide presented from your ideal client’s viewpoint. So, for example, let’s say you’re a business coach. Well, those are a dime a dozen. Instead, what if you specialize in helping women entrepreneurs get over their blocks to making more money in their business. See how more powerful that is? And how it can magnetically attract your ideal clients to you?

Or let’s say you’re a fitness and nutrition expert. Yawn. But what if you specialize in helping women with hormonal issues lose weight. Ah, much more powerful.

In addition to attracting your ideal clients to you, you’ll also notice these also position yourself as an expert. After all, if you have such a specialty, then you must be an expert. And of course, people would much rather do business with experts.

2. Be consistent with your message. Once you know what your message is (and you’ve tested it so you know it attracts your ideal clients) now you need to get it out into the world. Resist the urge to be creative about it.

I know, I know. You get tired of saying it. You’re sure other people must be tired of hearing it. But if you’re not consistent, if you tweak a little here, a little there, maybe edit it here, you’re not getting the full power of it out there.

Look, even you’re most loyal clients aren’t going to get sick of hearing your message. Why? Because they really don’t “hear” it as much as you think they do. People are busy with their own lives and they really aren’t paying as much attention to you as you think they are. So if you don’t repeat it and repeat it consistently, then you run the risk of people not remembering what you stand for, or maybe being confused about it, and if they don’t remember or are confused, they’re not going to invest with you or recommend you or anything else.

3. Be frequent with your message. You’re going to feel like a broken record, but the best marketers are the ones who have a simple, powerful message, are consistent with that message and repeat it over and over again.

And don’t just repeat it in the same places, find different ones. Get your message out there in as many ways as you possibly can. (Just as long as those places are where your ideal clients hang out.) Online. Offline. Networking events. Speeches. Podcasts. Etc.

In fact, here’s the place where you can be creative. Find new and different ways of getting your message out there, and do it as frequently as possible. Because the more often your ideal clients stumble across your message, the more likely it is when they’re ready to make a change, they’ll reach out to see how you can help them.

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Business Ideas

3 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make While Building Their Businesses

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working with both very successful entrepreneurs and ones who aren’t so successful. What makes one entrepreneur successful while the other one not-so-much? Chances are they’re making one (or all three) of these mistakes. Read on to learn more.

1. Marketing their business is not a priority. This is probably the biggest reason why I see businesses fail or either get sucked into a stressful feast-or-famine model (either too many or too few clients). They don’t make marketing their business a priority.

If you want to have a full pipeline of clients at all times then it’s crucial you make marketing a priority.

So what do I mean exactly by marketing your business? Basically two things — you have one or more ways to bring new leads in the door and you have one or more ways to turn those leads into clients. One of the easiest ways to do this is to set up an opt-in box on your website so you can collect the names and email addresses of the people who visit your site, then have a follow up system in place once they give you their email address to start warming them up so they become clients. Ezines and teleclasses are two great tactics to use as follow up.

2. They don’t take action (or they don’t take action fast enough). Successful businesses are built on momentum. Momentum is built on taking action. Whether it’s creating information products, launching new programs or even getting your new website up (or your ezine out), it’s all about taking action.

Now there is a caveat here. It’s not enough just to take action. You need to take the RIGHT action at the RIGHT time in the RIGHT order. So how do you know if you’re doing that or not?

Well, one way to do that is to educate yourself about marketing and business-building. Or an easier (and faster) way is to find yourself a business/marketing coach or mentor who can quickly assess your situation and give you a plan of action. (Of course, once you have that, then you need to make sure you actually implement that plan.)

3. They give up too soon. Look, every successful business person and entrepreneur I know has had a few stinkers. The difference is they’ve been in a business long enough to know a failure or two every now and then is normal and they move on. Entrepreneurs who are new or a little unsure of themselves tend to create a story around their failures that are simply not true. They’ll instead think there’s a problem with the product or the industry or themselves or something else — you get the picture. When the reality could be they didn’t market enough or they didn’t take enough action or they skipped a couple of steps when they were marketing their product or a myriad other easily preventable mistakes.

Before you throw in the towel on something — whether it’s a product you just created or your entire business, stop and ask for some help. Find out if success is just a few tweaks away or you really do need to do something more drastic.

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Business Ideas

5 Things I Did Right to Start Seeing Consistent Business Growth, Income and Success!

I was very excited about how I ended 2010. I finally hit a financial milestone.

However, I wasn’t an overnight success. I started this process in 2005 to transform my business from a one-woman freelance copywriter to president of a copywriting and marketing company.

I’m going through all the things I did so you can duplicate my success. Below are 5 things that worked for me:

1. Started attending events. Now, I’m not talking about becoming an event junkie. But I do believe going to events is key to taking your business to the next level.

There are so many benefits from attending events beyond what you’re going to learn from the speakers — networking, connecting with your “tribe,” getting out of your own little world so you can get some fresh ideas for your business, meeting the “movers and shakers” in your industry and more.

In addition to all of that, you also may discover your business starts to take off because you’re finally taking yourself and your business seriously.

2. Started regularly marketing. This one is tough if you don’t have a support system, but it’s crucial if you want to break the feast-famine cycle (either too much or too little business — when there’s too much you stop marketing because you’re crazy busy and when there’s too little you’re in “desperation marketing mode.”)

If you want to have a steady stream of clients and customers and a full pipeline of leads, the way to do that is by regularly marketing. It’s that simple…and that difficult.

But there are 2 things you can do to make this MUCH easier — change your mindset so you put as much emphasis on marketing as you do everything else in your business and implement a system to make it easier for you to follow through and your team to support you.

3. Got in alignment with what I teach. In my case, it meant making marketing my own business as important as marketing my clients’ businesses. In your case it may look different. But the reality is, you personally need to be in alignment with what you teach or how can you possibly stand tall and value your gifts and your brilliance?

Now, I have an important note about this — do NOT use this as an excuse to not move forward in your business. If you feel like you’re not in alignment, then get yourself in alignment. The only way you’re going to transform your business is if you do what you need to do to be an alignment and practice what you preach. (And if you can’t get yourself in alignment, maybe you need to take a hard look at what you’re providing. You might need to tweak your offering — this could be a message from the universe you’re not doing what you’re truly meant to do.)

4. Surrounded myself with the right people. You can’t do it all yourself. If you want to grow your business, you need to get a team in place to support you. Now this is something else that can feel scary — after all, hiring people is a big commitment. So what I would suggest is start small. Hire a VA (virtual assistant) for a few hours a month or a bookkeeper. Then make sure you use that time for revenue-producing activities.

Eventually, you’re going to reach a point where you have a big team working for you. The only problem with that is then you suddenly find yourself spending a bunch of time managing them. That’s when you want to look into getting a COO or a business manager for your business. I was lucky. My husband has joined the business as the COO and that has made a HUGE difference in being able to grow the business.

5. Did what I needed to do to work through my blocks. You may have heard the quote (and I’m paraphrasing) that the best self-development tool is having a business. ALL your obstacles and blocks will show up as you start and grow a business. And don’t be surprised if some of the biggest blocks show up when everything looks good on the surface.

I have 2 suggestions: First, know this is normal and be prepared for it. Second, don’t stop investing in yourself. Whatever you need to do to keep moving forward and busting through those blocks. Maybe you need a coach, a product, or something else. Or maybe you need to finally outsource something you’ve been reluctant to let go of (your copywriting for instance?)

Chances are you know what you need to do to keep moving forward, so what I want to encourage you to do is honor that feeling start taking action.

Which leads me to the last (bonus) tip:

6. Take action. Nothing happens if you don’t take action. The best advice I can give you (other than marketing yourself regularly) is take action. Get those to-do’s crossed off your to-do list and watch your business grow!

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Branding

How Branding Can Lead to a Business’s Success…or Failure

For better or worse, every business out there has a brand.

I say for better or worse because you may not like what your brand is. Your brand could be confused. It could be nonexistent. It could be conflicting.

Brands are more than a logo. Your brand is the core identity of your business.

And if you don’t know what your core identity is, or you never took the time to map it out, then you more likely than not have a confused, conflicting or nonexistent brand.

So why is this a problem? Well, because without a strong brand, you’re going to struggle needlessly trying to grow your business.

You see, you may be getting clients and business, but I can guarantee you’re working a lot harder then you would be if you had a strong brand. A strong brand attracts your ideal clients to you and repels not-so-ideal ones. This is one of the ways you become a client magnet — having a strong brand then promoting that brand through a marketing system. Without this, you’re out searching for clients, rather than simply responding to clients coming to you. It’s a lot more work and a lot more stressful because you’re never sure where your next client is coming from.

If you have a strong brand, that means you have a strong reputation in the marketplace. So people already know who are you and what you do. They know what problems you solve. So if they have that problem, they come to you. If one of their friends has that problem, they refer their friend to you. See how that works?

Now let’s look at the flip side. You have a weak, confused, conflicting or nonexistent brand. People may have heard of you but they aren’t what it is you do. They have no idea what problem you solve, so they don’t know if they need what you sell or not. They don’t know how to refer you. And worst of all, they quickly forget your name or your business name because it has no meaning or value for them.

And if you don’t figure out what your brand is and then do everything you can to continually emphasize and remind your ideal clients about it, then the marketplace is going to decide what your brand is. And you’re probably not going to like what the marketplace decides. (And yes, you need to do both — figure out what your brand is and then consistently market it. If you only do one and not the other, you’re back to the marketplace deciding what your brand is.)

So how do you know what’s going on with your brand? Ask yourself these questions —

1. Do YOU know what your brand is? If you don’t, then you most definitely have a branding problem.

2. Do you know what your brand is but you don’t have a full pipeline of ideal clients?  Then you either have not communicated your brand to your ideal clients or you’re missing the marketing piece. (Or your branding is all wrong for who you want to attract so you may need to go back to the branding drawing board.)

3. Do you have a brand but you keep hearing things like: “Wow, I didn’t realize you did THIS.” Or “I thought you only did that, not this.” Then you have a brand communication and/or marketing problem OR you’ve gotten away from your brand (more on that next week).

4. And of course if you hear things like” “I’m not sure what it is you do.” Or “You’re the best-kept secret” you clearly have a brand problem.

Remember, it’s up to YOU to communicate and market your brand to your ideal clients, it’s not their job to remember you.

Categories
Branding

The Secret Behind Successful Branding (and No, It’s Not About a Logo)

Of all the different marketing tools out there, the most nebulous, and also the most misunderstood, are these two — branding and positioning.

And since they’re misunderstood, they aren’t used correctly, leading to all sorts of problems.

Branding and positioning are extremely powerful. Used correctly, you will magically attract your ideal clients to you. Used incorrectly, and that same power can destroy your business.

So, let’s talk definitions. First, branding. No I’m not talking about logos, colors or slogans. Yes that’s a part of branding. But branding is a lot more then that.

Branding is really about your business’s core identity. (Not your personal core identity, your business’s core identity). That’s probably the easiest way to explain it. And yes I’m simplifying it some — but hang with me.

Branding is what your business represents. What your business is all about. Once you know this, and you have a strong core identity, the logos and colors and slogans all fall into place. But you need to have that core identity first.

Your positioning is how you stack up in the marketplace. How your ideal clients describe you and how you compare against your competition.

Your branding comes first. So the first thing you need to do is figure out your business’s core identity.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Okay let’s start with a quiz. Have you ever found yourself thinking —

* I don’t know what makes me different

* I can’t describe what I do for my clients

* I’m not sure why my clients hire me instead of my competition, but I know they love me — I get great testimonials from them

* I’m not sure and/or I can’t describe what my strengths are

* I’m not sure what I should be offering

* I don’t do anything different than what my competition does

* I can’t compete — I don’t know why anyone would hire me over my competition

* I never know what to say at networking events

If the answer is yes, you have a core identity problem.

So, how do you fix this? Well, I’m going to give you a few tips to get you started.

First off, write down everything your business represents to you. What you do, why this is important to your clients, what your vision is, what you feel your gifts/brilliance is, etc.

Next, write down what you want your clients to think of when they think of you. Write down everything, not just “good service and high quality.” I want you to write down things like “trustworthy, high sense of integrity and honor, expert in the field.” Things like that.

Now, I want you to go talk to your clients. Ask them why they hired you. Ask them how they would describe you to someone else. Ask them what they would say if they were recommending you to someone else. Ask them how they differentiate you from your competition.

Now compare the lists. What do you like? What don’t you like? What “feels” right? What doesn’t “feel” like you or where you want to go with your business?

Once you get a handle on this, you can take that and start building your business around it.