Small Business Digital CoachGROW REVENUES BY 25 TO 100% OR MORE IN 90 DAYS OR LESS while reducing advertising cost and effort

What’s that?
It’s the opposing streams of 2 strongly influential instructions under which most of us must conduct life and business. The first instruction comes from life, and the second comes from within us.

Both are unyielding, unrelenting and uncompromising.

The first says,

“No Pain, No gain”

… and comes to us from the outside world, from the elements, from other people. It is externally imposed and externally enforced. Shirking this instruction will quickly lead to failure and poverty on multiple fronts.

The second says,

“Pursue pleasure, avoid pain”

… and it comes to us from within. Left untamed, it’s voice will ring so loudly as to drown out all extraordinary effort from which extraordinary character is born and without which there can be no relative expertise or value. Following the leading of this dictum too casually will lead to enduring regret.

The foundational forces of your productive destiny – the market reality & the psychological reality are in conflict. No wonder you have a difficult time going directly and consistently toward your goals. There’s an internal conflict between what you have to do to succeed, and what you want to do to succeed.

I first began to appreciate the extent of this problem when I was coaching real estate investors who wanted to expand beyond the 4-property limitation imposed on them by conventional real estate financing. These soon-to-be creative real estate investors often started off on the wrong foot by asking, “How can I do enough to get maybe one property a month, without doing all the rest of that stuff”?

..And by “all the rest…” they meant the whole, entire business of “marketing, networking, studying, inspecting, planning, selling” etc!

I had to turn away at least one memorable prospect who just didn’t get that economic life outside his “boss makes me do it” world depends on people doing everything possible within legal and ethical boundaries to meet their goals.

Trying to play the “effort police” by looking for just the right amount of hard work to get minimally acceptable results is what gets most of us in trouble. Through the millennia, wise men have shared with whoever would listen, that the path less traveled, that narrow way that leads to earthly paradise, is the path of focused, unadulterated hard work.

4. Not framing communications with Lifetime client value in mind
The concept of lifetime client value comes from the world of relationship marketing and is often a difficult one for owners of small-small business to accept and operate by. It depends on the the ability to retain customers through strategic relationship marketing, and as such, comes with a price tag (on the front end) which many small businesses feel they can’t afford to pay.

If you are struggling with making marketing decisions based on customer lifetime value, then this step is not for you. However, note that you are also passing up the ability to gain clients through the cheapest and most effective ways of gaining new clients there is… referrals from current clients.

Referred clients are far more likely to refer others, more likely to spend more, stay with you longer and cost less to manage than others. If you want to pass that up, that’s up to you!

For you who knows the value of knowing the lifetime value of your customers, it is imperative that you begin to set expectations of a long relationship right from the beginning and repeatedly throughout your communications.

Dan Kennedy is one of the best I’ve ever seen at continually communicating the expectation of a long-term or lifetime relationship. Every subscriber to his newsletter is repeatedly given positive examples of other clients who have gone on to buy more, do more and make more money because they have moving up the relationship ladder with Dan Kennedy.

You must define the relationship ladder which you hope to escort your clients up, and then begin to infiltrate your communications with positive examples that convey those expectations.

5. Not communicating through multiple channels and media
Once upon a time, small businesses had an excuse for ignoring the various channels that existed to reach potential clients and current customers…those days are over. The same leaps in media and communications technologies that have greatly increased consumer choice have also increased marketing noise.

You no longer have the choice to ignore the many low cost or free ways you should be communicating with your marketplace. An accurate assessment of your average client value will also give you a framework to determine appropriate marketing, sales and advertising spend so that as much as possible, you “do it all” when it comes to marketing.

This is the way to wipe the floor with your competition.

6. Not restating your uniqueness at every communication with clients.
It’s a common mistake for small business decision makers to give up on an effective marketing message/campaign long before the marketplace grows tired of it.

“Never let your customers forget about what makes your business special and how many ways they benefit from continuing to be customers of yours”.

People do not care about you. They do not think about you… and if you give them a chance, they’ll forget how happy they have been with you and for how long. My advice to you is to make sure that you don’t give them that chance to forget.

Avoiding these common marketing communications strategy mistakes by adopting a few simple practices can save you a lot of advertising grief while helping you build an absolutely memorable and profitable small business.

Here are some basic steps to avoiding these mistakes:

1. Develop a USP and review your USP at least once every 2 years (6 months to a year if you’re in a rapidly evolving niche).
2. Commit to analyzing your average customer value and expected customer lifetime value.
3. Commit to creating a high-contact relationship marketing system with clients, prospects and referral centers.
4. Commit to creative restatement of these 3 elements in your marketing communications:

• Your USP
• Expectations of lifetime engagement through positive examples
• Repeated reminders of what you have done for them and why being a client is special

1. Not tracking the effectiveness of your unique selling proposition (or not defining a USP at all).
2. Not creating a client engagement curriculum
3. Not following up at crucial impression points
4. Not communicating for lifetime value
5. Not communicating through multiple channels and media
6. Not restating your uniqueness at every communication with your clients/prospects.

In the paragraphs below, I’m going to tunnel down with a few points on each mistake and what action steps you can take to minimize their occurence in your strategic marketing system.

1. Not tracking USP effectiveness over time
I’ll first assume that you’ve made an effort to define and articulate a unique selling proposition or differentiating proposition in your business. If not, you need to read my article on “An effective USP”.
If you do have a USP based on the 3 considerations of your business strengths, the market’s desires and a competitive vacuum, then you need to keep an eye on your marketplace over time to verify that the customers haven’t moved on from that attribute, or that your competitors haven’t caught up to make your USP completely ineffective as a differentiator.

Nordstrom’s built much of its business on uniquely excellent customer service, and it worked…but in recent years many of its high-end competitors have stepped up to deliver the same level of customer service as Nordstrom’s, therefore weakening their value proposition.

I remember once watching an episode of a restaurant makeover TV show where the proprietors were struggling to stay open. Of all the problems they had that had to do with food, decor, design, staff service, etc, the most important problem (the core constraint) turned out to be a strategic marketing problem:

12 years later and there was so much competition in that niche, in that neighborhood, that they could hardly believe it as the Makeover chef spread out the map for them to see. All this happened while they weren’t looking. They were to busy running their restaurant to notice that their USP had been taken out from right under them by their competition.

2. Not creating an engagement curriculum
Articulating a USP does not just involve creating a USP slogan or positioning statement. It involves the additional steps of cataloging the series of facts about your business that support the assertion made by your positioning statement, and the articulation and packaging of these supporting facts into such channels as your sales scripts, voice mails, certificates of authenticity, 20 point promise statements, etc.

The features of your products or services, the facts about your business, the ideas behind your processes or approach and the package names given to your products or services, all these things make up the foundation of a communications curriculum and plan which you can deploy through continuously through such things as newsletters, postcards, seminars, tele-seminars, print ads, etc.

3. Not following up at crucial periods
There are certain moments in your prospect conversion process or in your relationship with your clients that deserve special attention if you are to imprint them definitively with a lasting and favorable impression of your business. Some of these moments include:

• After they respond to a lead generation piece or overture
• Immediately after the first sales presentation (as well as subsequent ones)
• Immediately after first purchase (as well as subsequent ones)
• Immediately after mistakes are made by you (especially after mistakes are made)
• Immediately after payment has been made by customers (this may depend on your business)

These are special periods when you can differentiate your business from your competitors and build a Dan Kennedy-style “fence around your herd”. Too many businesses miss out on the opportunity to create an emotional connection in these highly memorable “hot spot” scenarios. Help your clients remember a unique customer experience that you provided them.

For instance, in my case, “I take small business owners on a field trip through their own business where I show them 16% growth or more in 16 weeks or their money back.”

I recently pondered the difficulty small business owners have with describing their business in a way that stands out from the pack. Usually this problem is more pronounced when a business owner has not seriously worked on developing their Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

The USP is the differentiating idea that justifies what makes a business, product or service uniquely valuable to the marketplace. It is an expression of the competitive advantage that causes a business to survive in the short run, and thrive, in the long run.

A recent need to update this blog brought my attention to the WordPress “web hosts” page. It really highlights the dilemma faced by many advertisers when they have to share the stage with their competitors.

This is really no different from any other “Red Ocean” marketing platform like:

1. A Yellow Pages Listing crowded with your competitors
2. Google Search Engine Results Pages crowded with your nearest competitors
3. Online local directory listing results
4. Portal Website advertising results pages (i.e. “Wedding photographer” on TheKnot.com)

…and many other such platforms.

The ability to create a headline concept is vital to separating yourself from the crowd in such environments. All your verbal business card is a highly mobile, highly customizable headline for your mobile sales script (or networking script).

One of the most interesting verbal business cards I ever heard was from a Jay Abraham seminar audio in which one of the participants said,

“I make loans to dead people”!

Now that’s a headline that keeps attention. How could anybody resist asking, “How”?

Well, it turned out he was in a niche of the mortgage business lending to probate estates.

I hope this helps you think about your own business in a new way, gives you new ideas for making your listings and ads more competitive, and helps you rescue dollars you’ve already spent on advertising.

Before you spend hundreds of dollars on an internet copywriting course that may or may not be effective for your ultimate purpose, there are a few questions you should ask yourself about your website, your product/service or your brand.

And if you’re patient, I’ll share a wonderful resource to help you…

I’ll tell you about the best FREE internet copywriting course around! (Don’t worry, I didn’t produce it!)

If you’re like most people who search for internet copywriting resources online, you’re probably working on:

1. Launching a new website.
2. Launching a new product/service on your website.
3. Adding a monetization stream to your website for the first time.

The very first step you must undertake even before you sign up for any “Copywriting for the web” product is to define the target web visitor profile for your web site or page.

I have created some questions that can help you with this:

• Who is it you most want to visit your website or web page?
• What problems, desires, habits, complaints, fascinations does she have?
• What words and phrases does she use to describe these problems, desires, habits, etc?
• Where does she meet like minds online and offl?
• Who do she admire or detest?
• What organizations does she belong to?

These 6 questions above can help you define a pretty accurate profile of the person you hope to speak to online and help you craft effective an message.

The next major consideration is to decide the action you most want web visitors to take. I refer to this as “Most Desired Action Step”.

Defining the most desired action step keeps you from sending your website visitors mixed messages. Nailing down your ideal website visitor, and successfully drawing them to your site will do you no good if your web site copywriting confuses them. From your headlines to sub-headlines, bullet lists, pictures and picture subtitles, every element of your content must lead to the most desired action step.

Finally, you must consider the medium; the web. Writing for the web differs from any other type of copywriting in at least 2 ways:

Traffic generation
Web visitor reading habits

Some of my past clients have initially struggled with the following insight which I find I often have to repeat to internet newcomers:

“A web page may be the only ad copy delivery medium in which the words used not only convert prospects into customers, but actually have a hand in attracting the prospects in the first place. This is accomplished through the magic of search engine marketing with keywords.”

Keywords and keyword phrases are the terms web users type in to the search engines to look for information. For instance, you may have found this article by searching for “Internet copywriting course”… a keyword phrase.

If you intend to drive traffic to your website through the search engines, your web copy will have to include the keywords and keyword phrases likely to draw your target audience. The process of creating web pages that effectively attract traffic from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc is known as Search Engine Optimization.

Unless, you intend to make a heavy investment in alternative ways of generating traffic, you must pay close attention to optimizing your copy for the search engines.

Apart from considering the search engines in your copy, the last point you need to keep in mind is how the online medium changes reading behavior. Research has shown that online visitors do an awful lot of skimming and prefer to read online copy in bite-sized chunks.

Your writing style, use of short paragraphs, bullets, graphics and other elements become more important than ever. There are many mistakes to be made…

and that’s why I was so pleased to find out that…

Dr. Ken Evoy’s Internet Copywriting Course is now free!

If you don’t know who Dr. Ken Evoy is, let’s just say you’ll be in for a real treat. He’s one of the most accessible CEOs in the world, but more importantly (for you), he’s the guy who virtually revolutionized internet business in 1999 with the landmark E-book (now updated), Make Your Site Sell!

In this article, I’ll be sharing a simple but powerful framework for making difficult business choices such as:

• What kind of business do I want to be in?
• What market niche or what type of customers should I focus on?
• How can I know when to quit my market segment or even quit my business?
• …And much, much more.

No matter what type of business, organization or product you’re preparing to launch, this framework can help you think through your choices and give you enough reasons to keep the faith when times get tough (as they invariably will).

If you’re at the launch phase of a business or product concept, you may already be aware of a need to focus your idea a bit better.

Here are a few signs that your business/organization or product launch concept might need some fine-tuning:

1. People get a blank or glassy-eyed look after you’ve explained your concept.
2. You seem to change your basic ideas about your concept about once a week.
3. It takes you more than 2 minutes to explain the main premise or benefit of your concept.
4. Your business, organization or product ‘does everything for everybody’.

If any of the above apply to you, then you desperately need to narrow your focus, and fine tune your vision for launch.

The simplest way to do this is by asking yourself 4 simple questions:

1. What is the problem I’m seeking to solve?
2. Who has the problem I’m seeking to solve?
3. What is my particular approach to solving this problem?
4. Am I passionate about solving this problem, and why or why not?

Answering these four questions can immediately direct and focus your vision so that the resulting business plan, product launch or grant proposal is both marketable and viable.

For non-profit example, instead of saying:

“We help youth of all ages develop self-esteem and character by involving them in leadership training programs”.

You could say:

“We aim to reduce rates of suicide and attempted suicide in Denver area boys ages 12 to 15 through training in the fine arts”

In the above example, you have…

THE PROBLEM: Suicide and Attempted Suicide (incidents and rates of incidence)
PERSON WITH PROBLEM: Denver boys 12 to 15 (maybe who have attempted suicide or talked suicidally)
HOW YOU SOLVE PROBLEM: Through delivering a fine arts training curriculum covering instruments, comedy, sculpting, etc.

The example above can be adjusted to apply to virtually any for-profit business or niche.

In the last 48 hours, I have consulted with both non-profit and for-profit organizations that used that general framework to solve the challenge of making strategic planning decisions of what types of organizations they will be and whom exactly they will work with (or work for).

By re-framing your strategic planning challenges into a problem-based approach, you give focus to your plans, your subsequent market research and the eventual design of your business operations. By doing your planning in this sequence, you ensure that your concept or organization is not irrelevant (a solution looking for a problem), and that your concept is both viable and sustainable.