Too much “Hard Sell” can mean “No Sale”.  With the proliferation of advertising both online and off-line, customers have grown wary of products or services marketed through traditional sales methods. 

Entrepreneurs of today must therefore learn how to invest more time and money in soft-sell methods.  Here are some real secrets to making your customers want to give you their money.

Share Information
Take a look at the web, and you will notice that most corporate sites invest considerable resources on disseminating information to their target market.  The information that these companies provide is geared not only to give customers a better idea about the products and services offered; they also help these companies build their brand as well as their credibility in their particular industry.

Notice, too, that one of the growing trends in television commercials is the use of controversial, funny or shocking information to grab viewers’ attention.  Statements like “9 out of 10 women suffer from…” or “the most common defect of…” give information about a topic of interest to the market being targeted.  Use this strategy to educate consumers and position yourself as a credible (and thus quality) supplier of relevant products or services.

The Human Touch
You must also improve your relationship with your customers.  Most businesses –especially those which are hard to differentiate from their competitors – lose a lot of customers because they lack the will or the means to maintain contact with their customers.  Invest some of your time and money to set up a system which will let you readily and regularly communicate with prospective and past customers.  This will help you capture a larger share of your market, and this will motivate your customers to spend more money on your business.

Lower Perceived Risks
For the regular customer, every purchase decision involves a delicate balance between risks and benefits.  What happens if the product doesn’t work?  Will they replace the defective product with a new one?  Will the product work as advertised?  These are just some of the questions that are usually raised whenever a customer contemplates making a purchase (especially a big one).

You should strive to lower your customers’ perceived risks.  Offer money-back guarantees or product warranties; showcase testimonials from satisfied customers or industry awards for product quality.  These and other similar methods will assure your customers that you will always stand by your promise or your unique selling point.  When customers are less wary, there’ll be less resistance to your products and services.

These are just some of the things that you can do to become irresistible to your customers.  Learn more by subscribing to our marketing newsletter.

Writing is one of the most important skills that a business owner can possess. Whether you are looking to write business letters, emails, blog postings, forum posts, articles, newsletters, eBooks, eZine, autoresponders or sales copy; your ability to be both clear and effective will determine your levels of impact on you readers.

Here are 5 tips for clear and effective writing:

Catch the Reader’s Attention

When you are writing you should start with a short sentence that is designed to captivate your reader’s attention. The goal of the introduction is to make your reader interested in what you have to say.

You will want to identify the bigger picture of your writing by explaining why your topic is important and how it applies to your reader’s personal or business life.

You will also be able to catch your reader’s attention by knowing the audience; who they are, what their needs are and what would they be hoping to learn or gain by reading your text.

Use Strong Verbs

Verbs describe action and readers pay attention to action. Use active verbs instead of static verbs, avoid turning verbs into nouns and beware of using technical terms that you reader may not understand.

Clear descriptions are powerful when communicating a message in a way that is interesting and easy to follow for your reader.

Keep Your Writing Simple

If your writing is not simple, you may lose your reader’s attention. Be sure to construct simple messages, avoid parentheses, strive for simple paragraphs and have a clear and organised path for your reader to follow.

An organised writing structure with well organised thoughts is crucial to use when planning your business writing.

Keep Your Readers Involved

There are several ways to keep your readers involved while they are reading your writing such as providing specific examples, using stories to paint pictures in the minds of the reader and using effective quotations when appropriate.

Use an Effective Closing

When you are concluding your written content, it is important to summarise your thoughts and to include a clear call to action for the reader to follow.

Be brief in your conclusion and be sure to end by emphasising your thoughts and what the reader’s learnings or calls to action should be.

You will need to learn how to be effective in all forms of written communication in business.

To learn about how to use clear and effective writing when drafting an email, read my article called “3 Incredibly Simple But Outrageously Powerful Keys to Guaranteeing your Email Messages are read”.

Emails can be used for business communication, general communication and sales messages as an autoresponder.
 

Discounting is a short term fix with long term consequences! While there is some disparity among experts, most say that even in the current marketplace, discounting can cause long term damage to your overall business success. According to www.sm.com.au, discounting is a costly strategy for retailers. While the book called, You Can Compete, suggests that discounting will double retail sales, most data points towards a business disaster. There are several successful alternatives to discounting that are available for your business.

Retailers who have been indulging in discounting by dropping prices and holding pre-sales before major holidays risk losing customers over the long term. Discounting can cause a business’ customers to become conditioned to sales or discounts. If a change in the economy of your infrastructure were to require a price increase, you will likely lose a large portion of the client base that you worked so diligently to build.

There are several reasons why a business should avoid using discounting as a technique to increase sales, including:

Volume
Too many companies fail to account for the effects of price on sales volume. While reducing prices could yield additional customer purchases; can the purchases match and exceed the necessary volume levels for profitability when taking into consideration the deep discount?

Impact on Customer Relationships
Dropping and then raising a price back up can create ill will within your customer base. Some companies use this pricing strategy to engage a customer or to make a sale, hoping that this sale will result in a residual long term customer. Once the loyalty has been established, some companies then participate in price gauging, losing those initial customers to their competition who has a more consistent pricing model. Deep discounting can also tarnish your brand, unless you are looking to be considered over the long term as a deep discount retailer.

Impact on the Industry
Price cuts that are not backed up by the manufacturing company’s production cost reductions can lead to competitive counter attacks, potentially eroding your company’s profits. Competition can also be created among similar retailers unexpectedly, forcing you to take a lower than expected profit per item sold.

Margins are an essential component for a business’ bottom line. To read more about the importance of business margins, click here to read another one of my articles. There are several available strategies to avoid discounting your products for sale. Your business can give away gifts with purchases that have a high perceived value to its customers.

Businesses with outstanding client service are not concerned with discounting. Evaluate your current customer satisfaction levels and your current business practices to determine how you and your business can provide outstanding customer service. In addition to great customer service, a company with outstanding products & services does not have to concern itself with discounting. Ensure that your business is offering the best products available in its field or industry so that you can demand the appropriate pricing for the product’s value.

While discounting may be implemented and appropriate for some retailers and businesses, the concept should be carefully considered for its effects on your business. The use of alternatives to discounting will be more beneficial for your business growth over the long term. Consider which strategies will be the most effective for your business and business niche.

Creating a great Unique Selling Point or USP is much like making a love letter.  You must, through words, create an image of yourself that the object of your affection will love in return.  Unlike love letters though, you’ll have fewer words with which to accomplish your goal.

Daunting as it may seem, making a USP for your business is actually quite easy if you follow the steps outlined below.  By breaking the task down into manageable items, you will be able to trim down your message to include only the most pertinent, compelling and effective words in your USP.

1.  List down the Unmet Wants or Needs. 

To make an effective USP, know what your customers want and need.  Next, determine which among them are not being met by your competitors’ USPs.  For instance, due to the rising popularity of health products and healthy lifestyle, a restaurant that has a USP of “all ingredients are 100% organic, guaranteed!” can effectively compel a significant portion of the market to dine in the said restaurant.  Gift shops can also take advantage of the market’s growing need for more personalised gifts; they can offer a range of customised or made-to-order products as well as free hand courier service.  To gain some insight on your customers’ unmet needs, talk to your customers; conduct a baseline market study.

2.  Determine Which among Possible USPs You Can Deliver. 

A powerful USP is only half of the equation.  For your USP to be really effective, you should actually be able to deliver its promise.  Offering a 30-minute delivery guarantee to customers, for example, entails that you make a study of the routes, traffic flow, production process, and the many factors involved in making and delivering your product to your customers.  This can cost money.  You may have to invest in new equipment (e.g. automatic ovens, GPS-capable gadgets), a traffic update service subscription, personnel training, etc.  Choose from among your possible USPs one that not only packs a powerful message but is also affordable, manageable and deliverable.

3.  Keep it Short, Effective and Unique: 

Now, trim down your USP to its most effective length.  Keep it below 10 words.  Include powerful ad words such as YOU (to directly communicate with the customer) and highly visual adjectives.  Furthermore, the benefit must be couched in tangible and measurable terms (delivery within 30 minutes, $xx dollars less, uses 300 Watts less power, etc) so that the readers will immediately realise its value to them.  Naturally, your final USP must be unique.
 

Having a business without a Unique Selling Point (USP) is like running for office without a defining slogan.  The result can be similarly devastating:  you’ll lose.

Your business needs a USP.  It’s your business’ unique promise to customers.  It cuts through miles of marketing red tape and categorically tells your customers that “this is who we are and this is what we can do for you that any other company cannot”.

Not having a USP will hurt your business in more ways than one:

1.  Lower Conversion Rate: 

Having no USP almost certainly means a lower conversion rate for your ads.  Your Unique Selling Point is the central marketing message upon which the customers you are targeting will focus; it will be the pivotal factor in converting potential customers into buying customers.  To illustrate, imagine that you are a typical customer who has become tired of pizza delivery delays.  Wouldn’t an ad for a pizza place that says “delivered within 30 minutes or your money back” compel you to try out the company that made this claim?

2.  Less Memorable: 

People tend to think of businesses and brands the way they think of other people.  Some are hard to remember and yet others (the noisiest, the most trustworthy, the most artistic, etc) are very easy to remember because of their defining characteristic.  In the same way, businesses that are able to invoke emotional responses from customers through a defining characteristic are usually remembered and get referred to others.  Loreal’s “because you are worth it” manages to cut through the price issue by addressing its customers’ need for quality and their desire to pamper themselves and to feel good.

3.  Less Focused: 

Not having a USP also decreases the focus for your business and leads you to try covering all the bases – to try satisfying all of the implicit and explicit promises you make to your customers.  This stretches out your resources for less the market share.  Consider Head & Shoulders’ USP “you get rid of dandruff”.  By focusing on the dandruff issue, Head & Shoulders is able to concentrate all of its resources in delivering this single promise.  It is also able to corner a specific niche or portion of the shampoo-buying market.

Indeed, being generic hurts your business.  Stand out from the crowd through your unique selling point.  Start by reading about how you can formulate a USP for your business.  Resources abound online; marketing newsletters are especially helpful in this regard.  If you are finding it exceedingly hard to create your own USP, seek professional marketing help.

An important aspect in any strategic marketing plan is solid market research or analysis.  Others may call it competitive research/analysis/intelligence, but they all boil down to one thing:  knowing what goes on in your industry from trending to movement in your competitors’ businesses and such before laying down your marketing campaign.

The data you have gathered will help you analyse each critical part of your business and, accordingly, conceptualise your next steps taking into consideration the information you’ve learned about the activities of your competitors, including their physical presence in strategic locations, their advertising campaigns, newest launches or re-launches and even their soon-to-be releases.

Hence, your market analyses (and who does them) are very important in the creation of your counter-attack plan, so to speak, which will be instrumental to capturing your share (and a larger share at that) of the market that you have in common with your competitors.

Down on All Fours
When doing your research, it is important to remember that your job is not only to find out EVERYTHING there is to know about what your competitors are doing but also to protect your company or brand in the process. 

The last thing you need is to be accused of spying, although in the competitive business industry, market analysis is an accepted part of any company’s research and development sector; it is acceptable as long as it is accomplished without doing anything illegal. Nevertheless, your research should be as thorough as possible. 

You may be required to go down “on all fours”, figuratively speaking, just to get relevant information on your competitors’ movements and activities.  Not to make it sound like a dirty business, the point here is that your chosen researcher/analyst should be able to gather relevant information by exhausting every legal means possible. 

Otherwise, your efforts will be in vain.

What They’re Doing
Based on what you’ve learned, you can make a few sound assumptions on what works and what needs improvements.  From here, you can conceptualise strategies that will have better results than your competitors’ and you can learn from their mistakes.

Be careful not to copy whatever successful formula they have already concocted, though, since you could also be sued for infringement.  You may however, base your campaign on what they’ve done.  Repetition and copying is not only devious but also pointless.  What would be the point of offering exactly the same services that your competitors are already providing the market? 

Your services should be distinct enough to make a difference and to generate interest. Instead of copying your competitors systems, products or services, what you should do is veer away from strategies that have failed; you’ll learn what these strategies are through a thorough competitive research. 

You can also find a way to improve your services, products or systems so that they exceed that of your competitors. In any business, knowing what your competition is doing is an integral part of success.  This will help you avoid any accusations of being a mere copycat, help you develop your products or services in a way that your niche market will be happier about and basically become the natural choice among everyone in the same field.

Do you set your prices according to what you believe your market can afford? If you’re a professional, do you offer a sliding scale for payment? When anyone requests a price break, do you automatically agree? All of the above practices carry a danger that can needlessly keep your revenues down.
 
When you’re tempted to set low prices, remember these points:
 
1. What someone can afford and what they will pay aren’t necessarily related in any logical or predictable way. I’ve had clients hire me who had next to no income or savings, while someone earning a six figure turnover or salary decides the same offering costs too much.
 
2. Someone may ask for or expect a bargain, but end up paying the original fee.
 
3. What you say about your products and services, and how you present your company and conduct yourself, influence what folks will pay.
 
4. Those willing to pay more may be the most loyal, trouble-free clients to work with.
 
Test your prices, instead of making assumptions about what your customers can afford!  You may be pleasantly surprised!
 

Every customer is different, so why treat them all the same?

To start treating customers as individuals, look at how and when they buy. This will help to start putting them into groups and understanding the needs of each group. For example:

1.  High volume / high value buyers…who place frequent large orders
2.  High volume / low value buyers…who place frequent small orders
3.  Low volume / high value buyers…who place occasional large orders
4.  Low volume / low value buyers…who place occasional small orders

Groups of customers who have similar needs or who behave in a similar way are known in marketing as ’segments’. You will probably need to use different marketing techniques and approaches to reach different types of customer. 
 
Now you can identify why each customer segment buys your products and services and what ‘benefits’ they are seeking.  This in turn will help you to target existing and new customers more effectively with specific products and services. As a result you can make better profits. For example, low volume/high value buyers may be more profitable for you than high volume/high value buyers who may continually squeeze you on price. 
 
You deliver benefits through what marketing people call the ‘”marketing mix”. These are essentially the tools of the marketing trade. Your goal here is to define your “unique selling proposition” (USP) – something that truly sets you apart from your competitors.

The basic marketing mix consists of:

1.  Product – the goods and services you are offering, including packaging and service content, such as warranty, after sales.
2.  Price – what the customer pays. Remember that there are different types of prices, such as list prices, discounted prices, and many different ways to arrive at prices. Price may be used to communicate the position and values of the product/service.
3.  Place – how and where the customer obtains the product/service. For example, a catalogue company may allow customers to buy through the catalogue itself, on the company’s web page or through off-the-page advertising.
4.  Promotion – the means and mix of activities used to promote the product or service, for example, advertising, direct marketing, PR, exhibitions and trade shows.

So, take some time to review your current marketing mix and identify if its giving you the best results.

How much do you know about marketing?

I come across so many business owners who simply confuse marketing with sales and focus solely on “selling”.  Yes, I know that the end result is to make a sale but there’s more to selling your product or service than making a sale.

Let’s start with a definition of marketing that I have used for more years than I can remember:

Marketing is “A management activity that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements, efficiently and profitably”. 

>>> Note the words:  “identifies” “anticipates”; “satisfies”; “efficiently”; and “profitably”. <<<

Customers’ needs are anticipated and identified by undertaking marketing research and segmentation and then a marketing mix is developed to satisfy customers – efficiently and profitably.

Businesses that adopt this marketing concept, centre its activities on the needs of its potential customers.  Its financial success will depend on satisfying those needs.

A marketing orientated business will develop a structure designed to identify and interpret customer needs; to create goods and services appropriate to those needs; and to persuade potential customers to purchase those goods and services.

This involves integrated marketing, i.e., using different marketing variables in a balanced and co-ordinated manner.

Additionally, all parts of the business will need to appreciate that they have an impact on the customer, and are therefore an essential part of a marketing process.

Are you ready to focus on your customers?  I hope so.