As a small business owner or contractor, you know how important it is to stand out from the competition. 
But what are some specific ways you can do that? This article will teach you 10 ways to make sure your company can stand out in the market.
After reading this article, you’ll have a better understanding of how to make your company more visible and appealing to potential customers.
1. Make it Convenient
In today’s hectic world convenience is one thing most people highly value, even more than time or money. Most of us visited a convenience store and willingly paid extra for the items purchased because it saved us time.
How can you save your customers time by making it easier to order from you, being available to do business on THEIR schedule, adding delivery options, or offering payment terms?
2. Add Education and Training
Remember the last time you purchased an item that said: “some assembly required”? The instructions that generally accompany these items are terrible! They could be labeled as “Difficult to Assemble – Aspirin Needed”.
What if your product or service came with step-by-step instructional videos providing vivid easy-to-follow assistance? Customers love assistance. Not only do they remember the positive experience, but they also tell their friends about it.
3. Offer a new or unique product/service:
This is probably the most common way businesses distinguish themselves; however, it can be challenging to come up with an innovative idea that hasn’t been done before. When considering this option, remember that it does not have complicated or expensive. Whatever it is, make sure it’s something that your customers can’t find anywhere else.
4. Use Social Media
Social media is a great way to connect with potential customers and create a buzz about your company. Be sure to post interesting content that will engage your followers and make them want to learn more about your business.
If you’re not already active on social media, now is the time to start. Keep your content interesting, post often, respond to comments promptly, and run promotions or contests regularly to keep people coming back for more.
5. Create a Strong Brand
Your brand is what sets you apart from the competition. It’s important to create a strong brand that customers will recognize and trust. Be sure to choose a name, logo, and tagline that represent your company well.
6. Offer Incentives
Incentives are a great way to attract attention to your business. Offering incentives such as a free service that compliments the customer’s original purchase is a great way to get people interested in your products or services. Have you ever ordered apple pie with the burger and fries? I know I have.
7. Get involved in the Community
Getting involved in the community is a great way to show potential customers that you care about more than just making a sale. Try sponsoring a local event or volunteering for a charity.
8. Use Traditional Marketing Methods
Don’t forget about traditional marketing methods like print ads, flyers, and business cards. These techniques can be very effective in getting the word out about your business.
9. Have a Great Website
Make sure your website is professional and easy to navigate. Include plenty of information about your products or services and make it easy for potential customers to contact you.
10. Use Email Marketing
Email marketing can be a great way to reach out to potential customers and keep them updated on your latest products or services. Make sure you have a strong call to action in your emails and offer something of value. Encourage people to make a purchase but only after you have helped them in some way.
How will you make your business stand out?
Category: Promotion
Put Them in a Trance
We’re going to go through the 5 essential keys to a successful and reusable marketing campaign launch. Once you have these basics down, you can use them over and over again.
The 5 essential keys are:
• Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
• Put an effective sales offer to work
• Avoid the marketing pitfalls
• Use a world-class marketing perspective
• Get results!
We’ll go through each one of these, so you can see exactly how to use them and how they all affect the overall outcome of your marketing campaign.
Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Take the time to ask yourself some questions from the perspective of the customers/clients. What would it take to get your attention? What needs do you have that need to be met? What are the promises you want to be fulfilled?
Once you know the answers to these questions you can start putting together a plan to meet these needs. Then take a look at what USP your competitors are using to help you develop your own USP. Your USP is what you are “promising” your customers/clients. This is what’s going to set you apart from your competition.
Put an effective sales offer to work
To develop an effective sales plan, you need to:
1. Put together a headline that gets immediate attention.
2. Share the benefits of your products/services speaking from the customers’ perspective.
3. Identify the specific needs met by your products/services.
4. Make it easy to do business with you by offering guarantees.
5. Share your specific sales proposition.
6. Walk your customers/clients through how they should respond and act.
7. Motivate with a call to action.
What this all means is, that you need to put together what makes your products/services special and compel customers to buy. If they don’t feel like they NEED your product, they won’t buy it. You need to answer a question, solve a problem or feed an obsession.
You need to provide them with all the information they need to make an informed and confident decision. Buyer’s remorse is one of the worst things that can happen.
Avoid the marketing pitfalls
There are 5 major marketing pitfalls many businesses fall into and you should avoid:
• Ignore market testing and push on with an inaccurate plan.
• Offer an incomplete case, or reasons, throughout their marketing plan.
• Fail to notice the needs of their prospective customers/clients.
• Fail to diversify their marketing options.
• Fail to get market opinions on their offers.
These are all areas to avoid. If you’ve been working through these lessons, avoiding these pitfalls should be easy and natural.
Use a world-class marketing perspective
A world-Class marketing perspective is important, especially if you want to attract customers/clients from all over the world. You can do this with a number of different techniques and activities:
1. Keep a marketing journal and scribble down anything innovative you see.
2. Keep encouraging your marketing department, or yourself, to try new things and dump the ones that aren’t working.
3. Order from your own company under a different name and analyze the process of ordering, shipping, online store, customer service, and the product itself. This will show you where the areas for improvement in the customer experience.
4. Read every quality ad you can find and keep a file for future ideas to consider.
5. When out in public, watch how consumers behave in different situations and how they consider their purchases.
6. Step down a notch or two and work on the front lines with your sales and customer service staff.
7. Continuously acknowledge your staff, vendors, and customers. Everyone works and shops better when they feel appreciated.
8. Always listen to feedback from employees and customers.
9. Continuously test markets, ads, and marketing techniques. This is the only way to stay successful and know what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not.
10. Offer more information in your marketing than anyone else. The more information you offer, the more products/services you’ll sell.
11. A great marketing plan can only get better. Continue to fine-tune and refine your marketing plan based on testing results and feedback.
12. Be classy in your marketing. Make sure your marketing and advertising fit your company image, products/service, and quality.
13. Improve your best marketing areas and drop those that aren’t working.
14. Focus on what you say, not how you say it. The best marketing ideas turn into the best marketing naturally.
15. Develop all your ads, campaigns, and sales materials with attention to compelling and factual information.
By using these techniques you can put your name out there to the world and become one of the top brands in your industry.
Get results!
The last area we are going to talk about is the best-satisfied customers. If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted all your marketing resources and all chance of positive word-of-mouth advertising. You can satisfy your customers by:
• Providing quality products/services
• Providing high-quality customer service
• Providing a low-pressure, highly informative sales experience
• Taking all the risk away with a great guarantee
To generate more business there are a couple of simple techniques that work every time:
• Build your database with a contest.
• Do regular mailings with sales, discounts, or other incentives.
• Find other creative ways to keep your current customers coming back for more.
“As long as the reward is directly related to your product or service, you can’t lose. Why not get started today? It’s so simple, it’s so seldom done, and it’s so profitable. And that’s the bottom line.” ~Jay Abraham
It is so simple! So, why aren’t you starting today? We can help you put together a great marketing plan that will get you results.
Try our GUIDED TOUR and find the tools and resources you need to be built by some of the biggest names in the marketing world.
Linda Lewis
Do It Like the Big Dawgs!
Today we’ll take a look at how the kings of industry wine, dine, and otherwise cajole prospects
Most successful professionals use a series of information-based ads that build emotion and a call to action. These are much more effective than standard company branding advertisements. The same principles that go into putting together a high-impact (and, often, high priced) ad campaign can be adapted to fit your needs with similar results.
Here are some ways to put together and execute a professional, effective ad campaign:
- Put together a short report that’ll you’ll automatically send to prospects when they contact you. This should include a short description of your business and what you specialize in. Don’t forget to include case studies, samples, or other proof of your success.
- Consider newsletters as a way of educating and informing customers about your industry and the services offered.
- Offer a free seminar, webinar, or other lecture to build awareness of your business, but make sure you make the information pertinent to your target market and find speakers who are respected and known in the industry.
- Buy an existing business, introduce better marketing, and grow this new business faster than a “from scratch” business.
- Always test different versions of your ads to find the most effective ones.
- Use direct mail marketing to grow your business.
- Put together a database of previous customers and send them new information.
- Offer incentives such as frequent purchasing benefits, loyalty programs, referral programs, or others.
- Approach large firms who may need your services and negotiate a deal to be their exclusive expert in your field.
- Offer a 24-hour information line with a regularly updated recorded message. Make this available to all past and future customers/clients.
- Donate time or materials to local charities to show support in your area.
- Offer public clinics for the general public to come along and discuss what they need that’s free and approachable.
- Organize seminars your customers/clients can pay to attend by putting together a high-perception value package.
- Approach local newspapers by offering to write a weekly column about your area of expertise. Don’t ask for money, just a byline and bio.
- Develop a weekend or other destination seminar for customers/clients, not only does this give you an action-packed weekend with the most important people, it gives them a tax-deductible business adventure.
- Take a good seminar and turn it into written form as a home study, member site program, audio, or video program.
- Approach large companies and offer to give seminars to their employees, investors, or management.
- Be proactive with your marketing plan.
- Barter for your marketing. Offer products or services in lieu of payment.
- Be willing to bring in new clients, even if at an initial loss because it will likely pay off later.
- Regulate your marketing budget to maximize the potential income from them to hit the next year and try to push back advertising costs for the next year to offset your expenses.
- Make offers to target markets or target market businesses to pay them for referrals or shared databases.
- Offer loaner products to replace equipment that’s being repaired or refurbished.
- Give away something free to everyone who brings in a print version of your advertisement. This is a great way to see which ads are giving you the most bang for your buck.
- Continually consider what new products/services you can offer to current customers/clients.
- Develop a mail order division of your company.
- Offer a proposition to your competitors to trade customers/clients you were both unsuccessful in selling to.
- Use different marketing tactics as an excuse to attract new customers/clients with new offers and goodies.
- Offer a “you-choose-the-price” program. This is especially good for products you just can’t seem to sell.
So, there are 29 great ways to market to other professionals and businesses. Some other great ways to get your name out there for little or no cost are:
• Get involved in your community-volunteer, donate to local events, etc.
• Join your local Chamber of Commerce and attend the networking and other activities throughout the year.
• Join local, state, or regional professional associates for further networking opportunities.
• Become a board member of a local organization.
Advertising should never be your only method of marketing, there is a myriad of ways to get your name out there in a way that feels personal to potential customers/clients.
“Effective advertising…must be used to get your name out to the public. If your name is not familiar to people, they will not come to you.” Jay Abraham
If you’re not sure where you start with your marketing plan or how to reach out to your local community, competitors, customers/clients, and others who could influence your business in a highly positive way try our GUIDED TOUR to experience the tools and resources we have to boost your business to the next level and beyond.
Are you ready to ACCELERATE YOUR PROFIT? Book a 15-minute call to see if a PROFIT ACCELERATION CONSULTATION is right for you.
10x the Results of Paid Advertising
There are three key areas of public relations you can use to boost your advertising results ten-fold over your paid advertising.
The key to public relations lie in:
- Public relation or publicity
- Merchandising
- Promotions
With a solid plan in place that encompasses all these areas, you’ll have a great approach to use public relations in the best way possible.
Public relations include all that is the media. Don’t limit yourself. The attention of newspapers, television, radio, magazines, bloggers, ezines, and more are all equally powerful. Online marketing is just as, if not more, important as conventional media.
Here are the steps to get noticed by the media:
- Put together a press release for your company. The press release should be relevant to your target market and address consumer interest, not just announce your business.
- Compact your press release to include one hook and one angle. Choose the most attention-getting to make sure the media person you are sending it to is interested in reading it.
- Put your press release in professional formatting. With press releases, you need a dateline, the most important information at the top, facts, figures and wrap it up with contact details including who and how. Print the press release on your letterhead.
- Send your press release to all television and radio stations, local and metro newspapers, national newspapers, industry magazines, and any other form of media that reaches your target market. Don’t forget to include relevant blogs, ezines, press release submission sites, and industry professionals.
More importantly than a perfect press release is to make sure you have addressed the needs of your target market in the products/services you offer and made that clear in the press release. If you are providing people a solution to a problem, a way to avoid a problem, and an opportunity to enhance their life the media and public will be interested.
If you have a connection (or the ability to get a connection) with a celebrity, this can practically guarantee you’ll get attention. Make sure you have offered newsworthy information and then follow up with media outlets to make sure they are publicizing that information.
“One of the most powerful techniques every business should use is free publicity. As the name implies, there is no cost, just the time and effort required to attract attention to your business.” Jay Abraham
Our GUIDED TOUR can show you how to put together press releases that work! Check out how the pros do it and craft the perfect press releases for your business.
Telemarketing is NOT the Anti-Christ
Today you’ll learn how to use direct mail marketing and, yes, telemarketing to your full advantage. I know, the word “telemarketing” might as well be four letters, but there is a way to help customers feel like they are getting personal attention and keep them from blocking your number!
With the success direct mail marketing has had, and the availability of computers, these can be used as a powerful marketing tool for your success. Telemarketing is best for high priced, high margin products/services.
Here are the key steps to putting together a highly effective direct mail marketing program:
- List all benefits customers will get from the purchase of your products and services.
- Pick the single most powerful benefit out of that list.
- Build an attention-getting headline around that benefit. Remember to use emotion -fulfill the desire to be young, wealthy, desired, popular, or successful.
- Develop a sales letter using the headline you created to grab attention, provide information, and motivate customers to act.
- Put together supplementary items, such as a brochure, order form, reply envelope, or note that encourages them to read the letter.
- Rent or purchase a mailing list.
- Compare the cost of mailing vs. cost per order.
- Continue to test and refine your direct mail marketing plan.
You can see how direct mail marketing can help you find a local or even country-wide target market to send letters or postcards to and draw in new clientele and customers. Fine-tuning your marketing campaign will bring better results and therefore lower the overall cost of the campaign.
To be successful in telemarketing you need to:
- Put together a plan, so you know exactly what you want to accomplish during the call.
- Develop a list of topics to discuss and the questions you want to present around these topics.
- Input verbiage checking to see if you are calling at a good time.
- Include enough questions to keep the conversation interesting, but not too many to sound like you are interrogating.
- Start with broad questions and narrow your focus as the conversation continues.
- Offer feedback to show them you are paying attention and appreciate their time.
- Don’t insult their intelligence or manipulate them.
- Listen first, talk second.
- Be relaxed and conversational.
Telemarketing doesn’t have to be the trauma it’s made out to be. You can put together an honest, personal, and effective telemarketing campaign that is endearing, informative, and gets the job done. Think of how you would want to be treated on a marketing call. Ask your friends and family what they hate most about the telemarketing calls they get and work hard to craft your plan in a better way.
“When selling by telephone, you have approximately thirty seconds to convince the customer to listen to you. You need an opening statement that captures their attention, conveys who you are, what you want, and why the prospect should listen.” Jay Abraham
It’s easy to see how direct mail marketing and telemarketing can positively affect your business by bringing in new customers and increasing the level of awareness about your products, services, and company branding. Our GUIDED TOUR offers the resources and tools you need to work through these processes and put together the best marketing plan you can.
Turn Prospects into Customers Overnight!
Today I’d like to talk about how to turn prospects into customers and retain them for future marketing. While your marketing is doing its job, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:
- Inviting
- Informative
- Enjoyable
The biggest fear of most new customers is the dread of buyer’s remorse. You want to avoid this at all costs and this should be mitigated if you’ve provided a quality product/service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made.
However, this can still occur. There are two ways to deal with this:
- Offer to refund money-no questions asked
- Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product
These offers alone will also mitigate buyer’s remorse because the customer will trust you more, just for offering these things.
There are a number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:
- Offer a special price as an opportunity for you to test the market.
- Offer a lower price with the reason of pushing inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s’ braces, or another tangible reason. Customers love that this makes you feel so much more human.
- Offer a referral incentive.
- Offer a smaller, more inexpensive product first to build trust.
- Offer package deals.
- Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
- Offer extra incentives-longer warranties, free bonuses if ordered by a set date.
- Offer financing options, if applicable.
- Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
- Offer special packaging or delivery.
- Offer “name your own price” incentives.
- Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
- Offer a trade-up or upgrade to something they already have.
- Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.
The options really are as limitless as you make it. You can use these or other ideas to find what works the best for your business, products/service, and target market. Remember this…
“By making it inviting, easy, informative, non-threatening, educational, inspiring, and fun to do business with you, you’ll loft your company above the competition.” Jay Abraham
Need help with figuring out the best strategy for converting prospects into customers? Our GUIDED TOUR gives you exclusive access to the mountain of resources and tools, along with information from some of the greatest marketing minds on Earth.
Lessons I Learned from Paris Hilton
Today we’ll talk about shameless self-promotion. That’s right, I said it! Shameless! After all, we are learning from Paris Hilton here.
It’s all about self-promotion! Self-promotion comes in many forms and you can use different tactics to get your name out there. Look at politicians! Talk about self-promotion and in some not so discreet ways, at that. But, seriously, consider some of the major superstars we all know. Madonna, Donald Trump, Howard Stern and Bill Clinton, just to name a few.
We all self promote. Did you raise your hand in class to show the teacher you knew the answer? Of course! That’s self-promotion. This is the kind of self-promotion we are talking about. With dignity, class and the knowledge to back it up. If you self-promote only to prove you don’t really know what you’re talking about, you’re going to lose business.
Natural self-promoters are the former and I want to tell you about the three major traits they have and use to build themselves and their businesses.
- The first is position. You need to position yourself around people who can make a difference in your life. You need to do this frequently. You need to wake up every morning and ask yourself “Who can I meet today who will make a difference in my success?” In fact, go a step further, write it in big, bold letters and tape it on your bathroom mirror.
Also consider:
Who can help me meet my goals?
Is it a prospective customer/client? A colleague with contacts? An association with key members who may become prospects?
Don’t settle into interacting with the people who are the easiest to access. You need to reach outside your comfort zone and there you will find a wealth of new connections that will bring you great success.
- Now, let’s talk about Style. No, this doesn’t mean you need an Armani suit to bring in more business (though, let’s be honest-it wouldn’t hurt)
What this really means is how are you different from your competitors and others in your industry. What makes you memorable with customers?
If you are meeting a lot of people and they don’t remember you once you leave the room, you have a serious problem! This means you have an opportunity to present yourself in a more memorable way.
There are lots of little subtle changes you can make. Reassess your:
- Business cards
- Company message
- Your picture
- Your wording
Maybe even, your hairstyle (of course, now we’re back to the expensive suit, but it really works!)
You get the idea. There are lots of little ways you can work on making your image and business more successful. Also, consider how you sound on the phone and how you great people at meetings or other events. Think about your 30-sec elevator speech.
- The third trait of natural promoters is repetition. You can’t say it once and leave it at that. Successful self-promoters say it as many times as they need until they get a response. Would you remember a commercial for Coca-Cola if you only saw it once, no! You see it over and over and eventually you head out to the store.
You, also, have to make multiple impressions on those you are networking with in order to build brand awareness. Repetition is in direct connection with positioning. Once you find people to network with, reach out and find hundreds more who can help in your success as well.
