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Tweetables:
Selling is about solving a problem. [Click To Tweet].
Create proven templates. [Click To Tweet].
Think through the customer’s point of view. [Click To Tweet].
Set out a strong, compelling hook. [Click To Tweet].
Aim your efforts at your target audience. [Click To Tweet].
Do you prefer text? here you go…
James Schramko here and welcome to the Wealthification module about marketing.
Marketing Defined
Marketing is really important for your business because this is what helps you generate sales.
You could describe it as locating a group of people who are interested in what it is that you have available for them and you have to be able to reasonably access them.
Commonly Used Marketing Channels
The two common channels that you would use to make people aware about your product would be the b2c or the b2b channel
b2c is sometimes called retail and that is where your business is dealing with the end customer, so business to customer. The other channel is business to business, this is where your business deals with another business who may in turn deal perhaps with a customer and that’s called wholesale.
Now there are few little differentiators here. b2c, business to customer – the retail channel, is generally a little bit higher priced, a little bit lower volume, a little bit better margin. To get that extra margin you’ll have to deal with more individual customers and there’ll be quite a high service need and generally a cost of selling and a cost of servicing that customer.
With business to business or the wholesale channel, typically, you have a higher volume of sales but a low margin and quite often you’d be dealing with the same customers over and over again. You might have a lower service requirement if you are dealing with the same people because they get used to your system.
Both of these channels are rather competitive so you need to be pretty sharp about what it is that you’re doing. So let’s talk about some of the refinements here.
What Is Selling?
Selling is a subset of marketing and selling could be viewed simply as the process of change from one situation to a better alternative situation and that’s what’s happening to your customers.
When they buy from you, they are buying because they feel they’ll be better off. If they’re hungry and you’re selling burgers, then they will pay you money for your burger so they can feel satisfied.
In other words, selling is about solving a problem.
Now with marketing, you can have people coming in to your store already knowing that you sell burgers and they literally just order it. That means you’ve done a fair bit of marketing. With selling, perhaps they’ve come to your store but they really don’t know all about it. So you have to tell them things to help them understand why your burger is going to be good for them and help them with their hunger. So the more marketing you do, the less selling you need to do. The less marketing, the more selling you need to do. There are different channels for selling and we’ll talk about traffic in just a moment.
Product Selection
First up though, let’s talk about product selection.
Our goal as business owners is to figure out how we can package our product that will help the customer understand that we solve a problem for them. That they’ll actually pay for. So what can we teach them? What can we help them understand about our product without packaging and without pricing? How can we place it right where the customer needs it?
We want to make deals with people to put our product right in front of their customers. There’s a few ways to do this, one way is to have an affiliation or do some sort of partnership, other way is to buy space in other people’s store or to place our product inside someone else’s customer base. Especially digital products, it’s quite easy to do. Packaging is very important in particular things like naming your product and helping it relate specifically to a target audience.
The Art Of Negotiation
Sometimes in the selling process, you’ll have to do some negotiation.
You might negotiate with your customers in terms of price, you might negotiate in terms of quantity or in terms of supply or deliverables – which is actually what you deliver for the amount they pay you.
The best tips I can give you about negotiation are firstly, try and put yourself on the same side of the table as the customer and help them see that you actually are looking to get the same outcome that you want something to move forward. So for that reason, I would generally avoid a loggerhead, which is often created from having an ultimatum.
Generally ultimatums fail so you are better of to have a little bit of leeway and remember that if you can’t negotiate a good deal, perhaps you both turn into losers. So what you want to do is to find the win-win scenario that helps everyone feel that they’ve got what they need from the deal and quite often by putting yourself on the same side of the table as the customer, you get to that outcome.
It’s also good to not give anything without getting something back so you have some mutual investment in the deal. If there are things that you can use in your favor such as genuine time limits or genuine quantity limits, that will definitely increase your ability in the negotiation.
Make It Easier With Templates
One of the easiest ways for marketing to be very effective is to have proven templates.
These come in different forms. What I prefer to do in my business is to have my websites reasonably templated so that all of the key elements are there to make sales and for that reason, you might have some kind of checklist or script that helps you get all of the keypoints.
The keypoints will be things like an attention getting headline, some really good bullet points about the benefits and how they relate to the customer to solve their problem. You’ll have a strong call to action. You’ll have elements of risk reversal – which means reducing the risk that the customer takes. That may be a type of guarantee, it could be a trial period, it could be a low introduction price. But there will be certain prompts and touch points. I also have a product called sales video profits which is a collection of these key points.
Use The Right Language
For face to face selling or recorded message selling or even frequently asked questions on a helpdesk or web page, you can use word tracks.
This is using the right language of the market that has the positive outcome built into the phrases so there’ll be certain words that you say when you’re talking to somebody that are more effective than other words. It’s good to perhaps record yourself saying these things and then use those as guidelines for your sales messages. When you’re training a direct sales team or even if you are making website copy, they should mirror a natural conversation that is optimized for great outcomes. The words that you say make a huge difference.
An example of this might be, instead of saying to a customer, ‘no problem’ which is actually a double negative; you could say ‘yes, we can do that.’
Zero In On Fears And Frustrations
The key points you want to make in your marketing message are to address the customer’s fears and frustrations.
A lot of our marketing tends to be self-facing we’re always saying, “welcome to our website” or we do this or we do that but the customer doesn’t really care. What they care about is, can you solve their problem? Can you fix their fears and frustrations? So we need to be customer focused and we really do need to step in the customer shoes and put our copy towards them. One of the easiest ways to do that is of course is to use the words ‘you’ and ‘your’. In that way, we’re forcing ourselves to think about it from the customer’s point of view.
The Authoring Process
A great way to have a sustained marketing effort is to create an authoring process
Authoring process is the description of taking ideas and turning them into content and then having that content put on to the marketing material.
So for this process, I use a tool called Evernote. Evernote allows me to collect my ideas and then take those ideas and put them into different forms of content.
Different Forms Of Content
The sort of content I use are slides, images, press releases, mind maps, videos, software, books, text in the form of articles. I make MP3s, I make membership sites, PDF reports and white papers, and news advertisements. So we take our ideas, we put out the content and we get ready for the customers to arrive.
Making It Work: The Hook
Now what makes it work is a very strong compelling hook.
And the simplest way to look at this is like the cheese in a mousetrap. It’s attracting our audience. It’s absolutely irresistible proposition for them to come along and investigate what it is that we’re talking about.
Have A Good Offer
Once they get there, we have our offer and the offer is what it is that we actually deliver and how we’ll solve the problem for the customer.
You could think of it as positioning. We want to position our solution as the best solution that the customer can take and the customer will consider everybody else’s solution and they’ll also consider the option of doing nothing whatsoever. So our offer has to be good and has to be compelling.
Stories That Sell
A great way to communicate your offer is by way of stories. Metaphors are very strong way of selling because we can all relate to it and we can put ourselves in this position.
I’m going to give you a metaphor here about a good marketing process. It really is like going fishing with the right bait, in the right place with the right equipment and we can reel in the fish and that’s like reeling the customer with good marketing. See how we place ourselves in the story and we understand the outcome and it’s clear.
Make It About The Customer
The most important thing of course is to really focus in on the customer.
Think about your target audience. Who are they? What are they thinking about? What fears do they have? How do they communicate? What sort of language do they use? Create a little profile for them and aim your marketing material and your sales processes in your word tracks and your stories at that particular target audience and the more clearly you can define this, the easier it is to have your marketing work.
Bringing In Traffic
The next step of course is to drive traffic to your offer.
For an online business like mine, traffic would look like this. It would be a combination of telesales, videos, press releases, lists like email lists, direct marketing lists, pay per click, search engine optimization, speaking, affiliates, webinars, iTunes, Facebook and Twitter. And they’ll all be driving traffic to my offers which will be on my websites.
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