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

Yesterday I had a business brainstorm with a very impressive entrepreneur and general manager of a successful restaurant franchise right here in Colorado.

One of the things that came up during our conversation was the subject of taglines for business, product or programs.

A tagline or USP slogan is a short and memorable (hopefully) encapsulation of the unique value that a product or business delivers to the market place. It is not a USP (unique selling proposition), it is only part of a USP because a USP at its best should include a mini-argument supporting the claim or promise that is made in the tagline or slogan.

An effective tagline is important because it acts as an ambassador for your core selling argument. It helps you get the best response out of every advertising and marketing campaign, and helps you get the maximum number of referrals to your business possible, as well as boost the profitability of those referrals.

A good tagline or USP slogan should continually reinforce the central marketing promise or argument you want your business to be making in the marketplace. At its best, it provides your referral centers and referring clients with a ready-made and viral script for why others should do business with you.

In my opinion, the best taglines all successfully convey a believable promise regarding something the marketplace cares about. The first line of this article is from the product branding of Rice Krispies cereal, and that phrase has illustrated the longevity and power of an effective tagline since it was introduced in 1933.

The most compelling USP slogans encapsulate all the attributes of a good USP. These attributes, derived from Rosser Reeves in 1961, are as follows:

1. It must communicate a specific promise, offer, or beneficial claim to the consumer.
For example (GEICO: “15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance”)

2. The promise, offer or beneficial claim must be something unique. To quote Rosser Reeves, something the competition “either cannot, or does not, offer.”
For example (FedEx: “When your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight”)

3. It must be compelling enough, strong enough, to move people to action. This is even more important in today’s world than ever before because today’s consumers are absolutely inundated with choices in media they consume, in marketing pitches and in engagement options. An example of a tagline that cut through the clutter and snatched attention was the phrase that yanked Domino’s Pizza upward and into prominence (“You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less — or it’s free.“)

Invest time, thought, money and effort in a system for finding the core strengths and core uniqueness of your business or products. It will pay off when you uncover a selling argument that meets the 3 conditions above. Once you have that selling argument or USP, coming up with a tagline that pops is just a simple hop, skip and jump away.

Till next time.

In his article, “Dead Men Don’t Blog”, he made a point that many internet publishers and marketers might agree with. He essentially points out that many of us have built web-based archives of our personality, our plans, our dreams and our intellectual property, without thinking about what happens to it all if we pass away.

I had actually been thinking about this a lot lately. Ever since my father passed away last year (that’s him in the picture on the left – My wedding day and he wanted his “Kalabari tuxedo”), I’ve wondered what to do with his archive of books, writings, papers (including written on newspapers – think “a beautiful mind” if you ever saw that movie).

You see my father was a scholar, minister, war-time rebel, developmental activist, government official and many other things during his time. He was most of all a thinker and writer. Apart from published scholarly works, he wrote tons and tons that were never (and may never be) published.

It wasn’t even hours after he died before close collaborators and friends in the academic world were reminding me that we should not toss out his work. In his case, it’s a bit easier because these materials are physical, and therefore easier to find (but not easier to organize, digitize or store).

Unfortunately it may end up costing thousands and thousands of dollars to archive, organize and store this material.

I’ve also found that I’ve picked up my father’s penchant for thinking and writing. I have notebooks and papers, poetry collections, business principles, theories and ideas all over the place. I know that if I died today my wife would not even know how to find all my websites.

I recommend you read the Ray Edward blog post, and let me know your thoughts here as well. What do you intend to do?

As for me, I’m going to create a backup system listing all my domain names, account info, etc.
I’ll also begin to create a system for re-organizing all my notebook content into separate notebooks for separate subjects…especially the money ideas. There are multiple million dollar ideas that I’ve removed from my brain and left lying around on notepads, and looseleaf binders all over the place.

We’ll see how it goes.

“The goal of marketing is to obtain competitive advantage” –
In my opinion? No good!

Another source says,

“The goal of marketing is to drive sales” –
In my opinion? Better, but not there yet!

In my opinion the ultimate goal of marketing as a business function is to turn the process of turning a profit from an art to a science, from guesswork to system, from happenstance to algorithmic certainty.

Seen this way, competitive advantage is a by-product of good marketing and not it’s goal, driving sales is only part of the goal.

A business is merely a system that turns a set of inputs into desired outputs (profit). Marketing can help even out the variance in the performance of this business system by bringing predictability to revenue flows (systemized lead generation, continuity membership programs, etc) and predictability to prospect conversions.

Integrated marketing systems, automated marketing systems and internet marketing systems are all examples of how predictable marketing messages and behavior (delivered by systems), and predictable performance (such as those of robotic websites, autoresponders, etc) can create predictability of revenues and profits.

If marketing in your business has not been streamlined and integrated in such a manner that it can be referred to as a system, you should do so today… your business will be better for it, and so will your bank account.

It really illustrates the “hassle-free” earning power that can be generated when you combine database-driven content websites with an Adsense income model. If you’ve ever thought about creating and monetizing a so-called “Adsense site”, you want to check this out. Enjoy!

AdSense millionaire from Hendrik Kleinwaechter on Vimeo.

Here’s the huge take away:

If you think carefully about what pieces of absolutely useful public information is wasting away on government and municipal websites (even corporate websites) all over the world, and you figure out how to package them for relevance to the marketplace, you may be just one more step away from a fabulous hassle-free income online.

The idea age label borrows from the practice of naming periods according to the dominant technology used – so we have the “stone age”, the “bronze age”, the “iron age”, the “digital age”, and now…

The Idea age.

Mere access to information is no longer a big deal. Information is overwhelming today. Today people are running for refuge from the information avalanche. They are looking for ideas.

Ideas organize information into a value set. Ideas are the expression of information made useful. Ideas are what information looks like when it is packaged based on a preference and connected to a benefit or useful framework.

The idea is the dominant technology of our time. Software is composed merely of ideas. And that’s why I call our current era the idea age.

Here are some idea age trends that could seriously impact your business over the next few years.

1. Change is happening at the speed of thought – FAST!
2. The rate of change across the board is increasing!
3. The Idea Is The Primary Currency Of Today’s Marketplace!!
4. The Marketplace is innundated with Ideas!
5. People are increasingly stressed by the avalanche of ideas!
6. People are responding by either making very fast or very slow decisions!

This method of selling is particularly popular in the financial services, professional services and software/technology environments. However if you apply the concept broadly, you might see that physicians and many, many other specialties, often engage in consultative selling.

It’s an approach that’s especially useful when:

• You hate to sell, but must sell (if you want to eat, or if you want your children to eat).
• There are long sales cycles in your industry (6 to 24 months from initial contact to sale).
• You sell big-ticket, high-dollar products or services (which might result in long sales cycles or not).
• You sell to corporate buyers (who may have to defend their purchase decision to the top-tier).

Here are a few tips on applying the power of consultative selling to your business:

1. Research the top “core” and “perceived” problems of your target customer

Your customer’s main problems must be at the foundation of your marketing communications with them. Nothing else is as important as getting this philosophical approach right. The core problems are the “deeper than obvious” issues that may be affecting your customer’s industry or marketplace as a whole. They may be issues that your customer is to busy with “day-to-day” to solve.

The perceived problems on the other hand, are the problems that the customer sees clearly and is worried about or annoyed by.

2. Create a Free or Low-cost “diagnostic tool” for your prospects
This could be a “Treasure” or “Trash” Audit, a discovery questionnaire, a discovery interview, a troubleshooter tool, decision matrix.
These tools are designed to sensitize the client to the issues that you will make more explicit further down the line. Are they wasting money? Are they stumbling around prime opportunities? Your audit or discovery tool will transition them from a pre-cognitive PWP (“problem? what problem?”) state, into greater awareness of the “perceived” challenges, and into potentially transforming awareness of the “core” problem.

3. Give before you receive
One of the best ideas to come out of marketing in the last 150 years is the idea of “sampling”. Giving a client a taste of what they will get. The consultative selling approach is embodies this idea in the service industry. However, even in product-centric industries, a sales professional who communicates superior knowledge of the customer’s circumstances and challenges will confer some of that superiority to the product he or she represents. A free consulting session is one of the most common applications of “Give before you receive”.

4. Become a Patron of The Prospects and Clients In Your Marketplace
We get our English word “patron” from the Latin word, “Patronus” meaning “patron saint”.
The Merriam-webster online dictionary defines “patron” as,

“a person chosen, named, or honored, as a special guardian, protector, or supporter…”

Your prospects and customers will see through any attempts to apply “consultative selling” techniques without adopting the mindset and approach of a consultant – a patron. This means digging into their conditions, their industry, their decision matrix.

Far too many professionals and entrepreneurs pay lip service to consultative selling by reducing it to its less comprehensive cousin “question-based selling”. They are not synonymous.

Question-based selling is transactional; focused on “a step” in the process of selling. I see true “consultative selling” as philosophical, and based on the “patron” concept.

Looking for Personal assistant…

Must live in SE (South east) Denver in the area about near the University of Denver.
Must be proficient with using Apple mac computers/applications
Must be proficient with FileMakerPro.
Must be available Tuesday – Friday 10am to 2pm
Must have good phone skills
Able to do some light cooking when necessary (breakfast and lunch)

Simply devoting 2-3 hours each month to asking a few questions can help you substantially increase your revenues and profits.

One of the simplest but most paradigm shifting questions you can ask yourself is,

“What is my business”?

My answer to this question is:

“A business is a moving matrix of relationships and abilities leveraging other portfolios of relationships and abilities.”

This definition is a variant of a definition given by Dr. Venkat Venkatraman, a leading business thinker, who instructs business leaders to…

“…look at a corporation as a portfolio of abilities leveraging a portfolio of relationships.”

In consulting with prospective clients, I’ve found that when I share this definition with them, it allows them to see all kinds of new profit centers and new permutations of their business that lead to “soft innovation” and increased profits.

As often as possible, you should ask yourself some of the following questions.

What business am I in?
The truth is that no matter what business or industry you’re in, you are first and foremost in the marketing business. Any business owner who doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t apply the lessons of this conclusion will fall victim to a market twist and turn (or an economic downturn) sooner or later.

Could I create a new category by adding or subtracting something?
The excellent book “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, takes a look at how some companies have managed to create businesses completely outside the “red ocean” (heavily competitive categories), by essentially creating their own category.

Cirque du soleil is a particularly memorable example of a business that has created a “competition-free” zone for itself for decades now by creating a category that is neither completely high performance art, or circus, but a hybrid of both. And so when businesses within both categories were competing each other to death, Cirque du Soleil just kept expanding to greater and greater heights.

In the Internet business systems niche, SiteSell is another such “Blue Ocean” company (in my opinion). Neither simply a web host, nor a website software provider, nor a membership-based internet education platform, but all those things and more at a very affordable price. (Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Sitesell, a company whose products I absolutely believe in).

Could I create new uniqueness or advantage by stripping something out?
There’s also the possibility of creating a unique company by stripping out most of what other competitors typically include so that you end up faster, leaner, more efficient and more affordable by giving the marketplace only what it wants and leaving the rest out.

To a certain extent, this is how Southwest rose to prominence during a time when airlines where offering full service and other amenities, Southwest came through with stripping out the decorations (i.e. meals on short flights) and amped up the customer service combined with more affordable flying.

Could I re-arrange my whole service delivery (operations) and communications (marketing) around what is currently only a small component or profit center in my business?
This is what I call the “Tail That Wags The Dog” Strategy.
In Seth Godin’s book “The Free Prize Inside”, he discusses the curious phenomenon of buyers often making their purchasing decision based on some seemingly tangential attribute of the product/service they eventually chose. The “soft innovations” (according to Seth), that constitute “the second reason to buy the thing”.

I can’t help but think about a spa within 10 minutes from my house. I first noticed it when a hot pink limousine full of screaming teenage girls (or what I presume to be screaming teenage girls…it could have been aliens), rolled past me… I later discovered they were coming from a sort of Spa where girls could really get their birthday treatment with all their closest friends.

As you might suspect, the limo ride has become the highlight of the day!!