Chapter 7: Do These Things to Generate Sales Now
Build and Create a Social Media Strategy
One of the most compelling strategies to see quick results is through a comprehensive social media strategy. By now, there are many social media platforms to inform the marketplace. Let’s take a look at the most popular platforms and their communication objectives:
Incorporate these basic objectives and metrics into your 90-Day Business Growth Plan:
Create and Send Sales Letters
With the popularity of online marketing, particularly social media, traditional sales letters are greatly underestimated. Well, I will tell you that I wrote sales letters to targets (25 in each) within the five verticals that I specialized in. I generated a 6 percent response rate (the number of clients responding to my letter), which equated to seven clients responding. Out of the seven clients that responded to those letters, four became clients that represent about $1,000 a month apiece. All for a printed letter and a stamp! Now of course, there is a strategy to the success of sending sales letters.
Your sales letter should be well researched. Identify the organization’s problems, needs and interests. So you may say something like, “My organization has helped organizations similar to yours improve their cash flow.” The letter should address what you have been able to successfully accomplish and relate it back to how you will utilize this experience to garner similar results for the prospect.
Briefly discuss a larger problem that your business solves and that your prospect shares, such as small business growth and economy. For example:
The success and growth of our nation is contingent on emerging small businesses, thus it is critical to provide them with the tools necessary for growth. The success of these organizations is contingent upon our outreach to garner financial support of corporations and private sponsors.
At the top of your sponsorship proposal, provide a striking (or alarming) quote or statistic headline that gets the attention of the prospect. This headline should be something that is impactful to the client. See the example below of a company marketing after-school fitness programs to schools and community centers:
“The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake."
—First Lady Michelle Obama
Lastly, add a postscript in bold to the bottom of your letter. The postscript should be a “lapel-grabbing” statement of why a sponsor should support your event. The rationale behind the postscript lends itself to the headline. Once a reader opens your letter and reads your headline, typically before they start reading the body, or shortly after, they look to the bottom to see who sent the letter. There appears your postscript. All of these tactics are designed to get your sponsorship letter read among the hundreds of letters that are skimmed and/or tossed daily.
Now that I have shared the components to include in your sales letter, here is a sample sales letter that I have used successfully over the years:
Build a Robust Email List…It’s GOLD!
The ability to connect with your customers on a regular basis is paramount! It enables you to connect with them at the critical moment that they may be struggling with a problem that your service and/or product may solve. It allows you the opportunity to showcase your expertise within your industry and presents the opportunity to educate your customer, simultaneously showcasing the skill that you ultimately want to provide to the client for a fee. Email marketing is a powerful medium for delivering messages directly to your target audience. Gigaom Research states that marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention.
Email lists are useful when your business runs a special promotion and if you own a brick-and-mortar storefront; it improves your call-to-action to bring customers into your store. It makes connecting with customers during the holidays and special occasions a snap. With the onset and momentum of social media, some felt email marketing to be obsolete; however, there are power statistics that prove to the contrary. Direct Marketing Association reports that email marketing yields an average 43000 percent return on investment for businesses in the United States. Furthermore, Hubspot states that companies using email to nurture leads generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads and at 33 percent lower cost. The benefits to email marketing are boundless. Email marketing can be done in-house and improve overall productivity. Smallbusiness owners estimate that getting an extra hour in their day back from doing their own email marketing is working $273 per hour back to the company.
There are many email marketing companies on the market. I personally recommend Aweber http://www.aweber.com/easy-email.htm?id=455722. Aweber, like many others, allows you to create beautiful, professional-looking newsletters with powerful email marketing tools. Email campaigns can be easily automated with their drag-and-drop editor. Businesses can send a sequence of automatically delivered emails and Aweber has expert customer service. Lead-capturing sign-up forms can be quickly and easily generated through Aweber and the code can be easily copied to your website personally or with the use of a developer.
Launch a Crowdfunding Campaign
Crowdfunding has become a powerful tool in helping small businesses grow their business and maximize their full potential. If this is done right, one will see that there are various aspects in a business, such as products and services, that can reap the rewards.
Sometimes, people will donate to an online platform because of a worthwhile cause they are supporting. Other times, they will want to invest in a company and in this way they can buy a share in the business. An example of something you can invest in is green energy. This has become huge over recent times, and a company like Abundance Generation has seen much growth by allowing investors to visit their wind farm.
Another method of crowdfunding is where people are able to donate in a project, but will only get billed once they see their project is starting to pay off. An example of this is Spacehive, which allows people to fund a park in a community of their choice.
This can work well if the business has planned their project and has the research set out. You have to be prepared for questions that investors might throw at you. People who are open and are able to engage will go far in this sort of environment.
Crowdfunding is an alternative to the traditional approach of getting loans and quite possibly going into debt. One will also be able to see rewards as you become known through social media. You will be able to see this when you release a product and there are people who fund it, stating that it is a good idea. Often this will go viral.
Here are the top six crowdfunding platforms:
There are many of these platforms that you have to experiment with, but starting with the top ones is always a good idea.
Sell Your Product or Services on an Online Marketplace
Although I discussed this briefly in the first chapter, it is worth mentioning again as it was a huge part of my 90-day success. While online marketplaces can, at first, seem saturated and daunting, it is a key strategy to launching, growing and/or scaling your business. If you are in the business idea and research phase, it is a great way to test a product or service with a network of existing shoppers within a targeted category. Listing in a category informs your competitive research by enabling you to evaluate your competitors. How are they different? What makes them successful or unsuccessful? This allows you to create a unique selling proposition and set yourself apart.
Aside from providing valuable research on your competition, online marketplaces allow you to test your product and/or service for viability prior to making a substantial investment. Most of marketplaces offer the ability to promote and sell your product for free with only a commission taken upon the sale of your product. Some online marketplaces, like eBay, allow you to create an online store and charge you a monthly fee for a set amount of products.
Selling within an online marketplace drastically reduces your initial advertising and marketing spend as most all of the networks have a selling framework already built in. Most make great use of social media shares (why building your social media network is so critical) to help business owners reach their target market and grow their business.
Not only does this strategy prove successful for new businesses in the testing and launch phase, it is also an effective strategy for businesses looking to scale. As a business increases its sales channels, the average revenue and order volumes increase.
The same holds true with professional service-focused sites such as Fiverr and People Per Hour. The commission you pay (20 percent of the sale with Fiverr & $36 a month with People Per Hour) to expose your services and brand to millions in the marketplace is a small price to pay compared to the thousands of dollars to advertise in print, on radio and on TV.
Bottom line, fees are inevitable, but your revenues, when your strategy is executed correctly, far outweigh the fees charged.
Write an E-book
So, of course I could NOT conclude this e-book without first telling you to write an e-book! Over the years, the e-book has varied in popularity from the prospective of its financial value to an overall enterprise. Like most all of the strategies I have implemented and suggest that you implement, it requires a very strategic approach to achieve maximum value.
E-books have numerous benefits in addition to just adding revenue to the bottom line. First, it gives you credibility. Whether you sell a product or service, e-books give you the platform to show your knowledge within the industry, about a product, etc. In other words, it gives you the ability to “strut your stuff,” ultimately positioning you as a subject matter expert. Your e-book can then be utilized as part of your presenting portfolio to gain speaking engagements, host workshops, and provide coaching/consulting, ultimately adding additional revenue streams to your business. The e-book allows potential clients to take a glimpse at what you have to offer prior to buying. The most successful business models are those that allow customers to try before they buy.
Secondly, e-books are one of the best vehicles to improve SEO. As your e-book gains popularity (again, you start by giving it away; think free downloads) and people start to download it, the particular topic makes its way up the Google rankings, referring clients back to your site or landing page. This action not only increases your revenue stream from the e-book, but exposes these clients to the additional products and/or services you offering. To gain traction, I sent copies of my e-book to my colleagues that could derive value from my services, gave it to all of my current and past clients, and listed my e-book on Free-ebooks.net.
Growing your business and living the life of your dreams is not just a dream, but very much a possibility when following a proven formula designed for success. When I began my business growth journey, I grew my business to a point that nearly replaced a six-figure income in less than a year following the same steps that I have journeyed and brought to you in this compelling e-book.