Chapter Eight
P.U.M.P. Up Your Profits Your Own Customer Catcher Strategic Action Plan
We talked about a lot of different parts of your marketing. We talked about a launch of your product or service, your radio show, your book, whatever it is that you are doing.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to actually put all of the things together, the strategies, the list building, the publicity, the referrals, and the copy message? How are we going to tie it together?
The biggest challenge that most people have is implementation and execution. Tied to that challenge is the action plan is too complex and too overwhelming.
You know, the 2-inch thick marketing plan that never gets implemented versus what I like to have is one or two page project sheet. What I use is a mind map.
Jay Abraham, founder of the Abraham Group, Inc, said, “The fact is everyone is in sales, whatever area you work in you does have clients and you do need to sell. Now the best type of marketing is marketing that makes the sale.”
Imagine, if you will, someone getting one of your sales letters in the mail and phoning up and buying or going to your Web site and buying without any human interaction.
That is the ideal piece of marketing. That is a premium piece of marketing where you have the ability to actually get the prospect, the client, the customer to take action without further human interaction.
Whether it’s a Web site that has audio and video on it or it’s a direct mail postcard that drives them to a landing page that has a special one-time offer. These are all types of things you can do.
I’ve seen marketing where it’s just a continual communication, but it’s a road to infinity. There is no call to action. There is no asking for a purchase.
Selling seems to be a dirty word to some people and selling feels the most uncomfortable when it’s not done right, when it’s not helping the prospect make a decision.
If you can focus on buying criteria, helping people establish a methodology of their own for evaluation and purchasing, most of the time they are going to buy from you because you have helped clear up the confusion of deciding between a product or a service, deciding whether or not to listen to your radio show, deciding whether or not to purchase your book.
This also applies if you are a professional or a doctor, whether or not to refer you to their friends, whether or not to continue the services. Whatever it is, you are in sales, and in order to do that you do need a process: A, B, C, all the way to Z, close the loop and get the sale.
Now Steve Jobs, certainly an innovator in the technology industry, famous for starting Apple, coming back to Apple and now we have the iPod and Apple TV and all sorts of wonderful things.
Steve Jobs said, “A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”
It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is, and maybe your sales process, if the product and service that you are delivering doesn’t match the expectations that you set up in the end. You are going to have a short life for your business or your product or your service.
We really need to still focus on the quality and improvement, take that feedback. Anytime we have a challenge, anytime we have friction between us and the marketing process or the delivery process, how do we smooth that out? We have to ask ourselves those questions.
Doesn’t it make sense to improve, listen to your customers, so you can make the next customer, including those customers who come back to you to buy more, happier the next time around? Focus on quality as well.
Jay Leno, certainly a comedian but also some wisdom coming from this humor, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish, and he will eat steak.”
What that’s about is the ability to control and influence, maybe not control, but certainly influence decision-making processes by creating situations and environments where decisions are made.
Whether it’s painting a picture or story telling, how to use story telling, how to focus on the pain and then you have the solution and then you have the only solution and you are THE solution.
That’s what we are going to focus on in this chapter: creating that situation and how we can do that.
Wouldn’t it be great if you have a marketing plan and a sales plan, and I’m adding that word in there because again I want you to focus on the asking for the money, asking for them to take out their credit card, make a commitment, and make a decision?
Wouldn’t you like to strive for more ease in the sales and marketing process through your personal sales and marketing plan?
I think you can by leveraging the Internet, leveraging all sorts of technology today, testing and tracking, the ability to see what headlines people respond to.
All of those things are available very affordably, some of them even free and certainly at the snap of a finger.
Begin With the End in Mind
Let’s start with the objective. Begin with the end in mind. Lots of people get caught up in the excitement of starting a business, starting a radio show, they’ve written their book, they have a publishing deal, but then they find out the publisher is not marketing the book. How can we market the book, the product, the service, ourselves?
We get caught up in the excitement of, “Well, I need a Web site,” and now I call a Web designer. Now I’m talking about a banner and colors and the logo and it’s very exciting, and it’s a creative process and it’s really a fun whirlpool to get caught in.
And certainly being wooed by people who are inviting me to lunches and talking about how they are going to sell your products and services and so on. Offline is enticing as well.
But really what you want to know is what the quantifiable results are? Do you want 20 new clients a month? Are you looking for $10,000 in sales a month? $50,000? A quarter million dollars in sales? Is that gross? Is that net? These are really the numbers.
I think it’s just as important to look at the number of leads. If you know that you can convert anybody you get on the phone two out of ten times, maybe you can improve that to four or five or six out of ten times.
But let’s say you know what you current conversion rate is. Once you have somebody on the phone you have the ability to convert, let’s be nice and make the math easy and say 50%. Ten people contact you, you get five new clients.
Depending on the price, depending on the amount of time it takes you to deliver each of those products, if you are a consultant you may only need one client every quarter.
If you are selling books you certainly want to be moving 500 a day. What did Harry Potter just move? Actually, I think they are the first ones to do a million a day.
Those are concrete types of milestones and targets you want to have.
Next is qualitative results, and this is the quality of the customers, perhaps, if you are a consultant or a coach. You’ve written a book as a lead generation tool. What are you doing to make sure you get the quality of clients that you would like?
I think we all know or have heard of clients that end up making the company lose money. It’s 100% your responsibility in setting up the expectations for the prospects as customers and then, two, having the ability to deliver the goods. You certainly want to tie those two things together.
Sales Versus. Marketing
I’ve mentioned sales versus marketing, and you really need to take a look at the question, “How are they different and how do they work together?”
Well, marketing is really bringing the person to the front door. If you can imagine for a retailer, it’s getting them to stop walking down the sidewalk or drive to the mall and come to your store because there’s a reason to get there.
It’s really getting them there is what marketing is all about. Sales, however, is about closing the deal.
Now this isn’t high pressure, reverse close, alternative close, Ben Franklin close, or hammering down on the people. “Give me your money” and putting the pressure on. This is just really the buying criteria.
If you’ve never purchased a snow blower before and somebody asks you to go buy one, your partner or your boss says, “We need a snow blower.” Well, you are going to work with a sales person who asks you the most questions that educate you at the same time.
“Are you in a dry climate or a wet climate? Is your snow therefore heavy and wet or is it dry and powdery. How big of a space are you going to be using the snow blower for? Is it a half a mile long road, is it a driveway, or is it just off your front step and walk because you live in a town home and you could use an electric one?”
You really want to get the buying criteria. What do I need? What don’t I need? How am I going to get the most value?
And if you have been in lots of situations where you’ve met sales people, aren’t you attracted to the one who sort of down sells and says, “You really don’t need all the bells and whistles, it sounds like you need this,” and they direct you to a value-based purchase, not selling you the Cadillac when all you really need is the little zippy car to get you from A to B.
You really want to take a look at your sales steps outside your business and see how you have integrated your sales and marketing. How they are related is marketing creates an anticipation of the experience. Marketing creates the desire for them to enroll themselves in the sales process.
The best marketing is marketing that already has them enrolled in the sales process prior to them phoning you. If someone is phoning you and saying and the first question out of their mouth is, “How much?” then your marketing has not done its job yet.
Marketing is the continual education of people to take action. You continue the education around the product or a service. This is why the Internet is great where you don’t have to pay, relatively speaking, to educate people who may eventually be disqualified and never buy from you.
The better your marketing, the more they enroll in the sales process, and then when they phone you they’ll say, “I’m just about to buy your product or service, but there are a couple of questions I just wanted to clarify before I give you my credit card number.”
Don’t you want to be an order taker instead of a fact teller? We all want to be order takers, or certainly I know I do, anyway. You have to know there’s ways to do that.
Relationships Are Powerful
How can we put the tactics into a plan? The most powerful thing here is relationship.
What kind of relationship do you seek with your sales approach in personal marketing? And the strategic marketing that I aim for is the hot dog theory of marketing. If you remember, this is where I talked about setting up your hot dog cart outside a stadium.
Somebody else paid for the stadium, someone else pays for the marketing, the professional sports team, to draw all those people there. But if you get a relationship, the permission to have your hot dog cart beside their stadium, beside their event, leverage off that enthusiasm and that event and that’s the power.
It’s the relationship that gives you the ability to be present where there are customers that you can both share.
Identify Your Target Market
So the marketing part, describing your company, everything you write on your Web site, that’s how you wish to be perceived. You want to use those words, use that copy, to identify what your target market or vertical is.
What target market or vertical do you wish to be present? These things you really need to figure out, especially the target market and vertical prior to initiating the tactics. No sense putting an ad in just any magazine if all you sell are waders to fly fishermen.
This is like saving and investing your money in things that aren’t going to work. What are the specific actions you actually must take to form the strategy you planned?
My strategy is to sell waders to fly fishermen in the Northeast for a fair value price. I don’t want to be shipping nationally. I’m only selling regionally. I am going to use wholesalers so my strategy is regionally based, specific product, in a tight niche.
It’s not just fishing; it’s fly fishermen inside the fishing industry. Now the tactics are going to start. I’m going to buy an ad in a specific magazine, on a specific Web site. The actions I take to execute my desired strategy and reach my objective.
Where am I going to spend my time? Who am I going to talk to? I’m going to talk to wholesalers who already have a customer base of fly fisher people. I could talk to the bush plane people who fly the pontoon planes in and out of those special lakes and the secret areas.
Certainly at networking events and meetings and all the other regular marketing things, it is important to make contacts that also interact with my target market.
The Mind Map Tool
How do we get started in developing our plan? A great way is through the use of the mind map tool. A mind map is a tool that people use to engage in what I call popcorn thinking. You take a blank piece of paper and you brainstorm on it.
There is software that helps with this process. It is called Mind Manager and you can find at MindJet.com.
A mind map is a fast start marketing plan. This is what I take a look at when I sit down with a client usually and say, “How can we go from zero to 100 miles per hour in marketing in 60 seconds,” and it would involve these things.
Utilizing the Internet
You can’t have a discussion today without considering being on the Internet. If you don’t have a Web site, then most people aren’t going to take you seriously.
With your Web site, take advantage of a subscription signup. Using the Internet, you really need to do your list building. Gather that list of people who are raising their hand, saying they are interested in your back pain solution; they need an area where they can sign up.
Now the system I use is www.HandsFreeBusiness.com. The most useful and powerful tool that I use in Hands Free Business is the subscription signup field.
When you first go to CustomerCatcher.com and you see, “Give me a minute and we’ll share tips,” it asks for a name and an e-mail. That’s the subscription box.
Now in terms of what you are going to provide for that, a one-time special report or you can do a newsletter or e-zine, another name for an electronic newsletter fairly well-known now and used by people on the Internet.
If you can sell a membership, even if it’s $7.95 a month or $22.95 a month, you can sell it right there. Or you want to get their name and e-mail to give them information on a special deal for your membership program then you should take advantage of that.
Take Advantage of Multimedia
I highly encourage you take advantage of multimedia. Flash files are the name of the software now and tools used to compress video, and when you see moving animation on Web sites. As we get more and more people with high capacity, digital Internet connections, Flash is very useful.
Video clips are highly powerful. You can see the face of you or your spokesperson which leads to credibility.
If you have a bunch of video and you want to put some of it online, but you don’t want to pay any expensive download and streaming cost, remember there’s a free resource for you. It’s www.YouTube.com and there are others too! What a wonderful world, yes?
Others give you free unlimited downloading of your video. You just upload them to that site and there you have your professional video!
You can use that and then embed it on your Web site. Without getting too technical, if you go to www.CustomerCatcherTV.com, you can see a video there.
Audio spots are another way to utilize the Internet. If you are doing Internet radio, podcasting, or just having audio files on your site then that’s another way to add emotion to your site and your marketing. Certainly take advantage of that.
Again, you can have another company pay for the distribution of YOUR marketing! How about Apple? Thanks Steve Jobs for iTunes. Do a search for yours truly using the keywords “Customer Catcher” or “Martin Wales” to see some fun, audio marketing for yourself.
Write Articles
Next are articles. A lot of people talk about articles and pushing them out, and they don’t use enough articles on their own Web sites. The advantages of articles on your Web sites are you are making them keyword rich for search engines.
Search engines have these things called spiders that go through your sites and basically analyze the data and the words on there, so when people type in “fly fishermen waders” they are going to end up on my landing page for fly fishermen waders if I have used keywords correctly.
To help with this, I’m going to write articles about how to maintain the rubber so it doesn’t get holes in it, about how to keep my legs warm in a cold stream even though I have un-insulated waders and so on.
Case studies on Web sites are hugely popular. People want to see case studies. These are different than testimonials. Case studies really have the formula of here’s a problem, here’s a general solution, and here’s a specific solution through your client’s eyes.
So your client would say, “I had a problem; I would always fall down and break my leg.” The general solution is lower body exercises strengthen legs and support the bone.
The specific solution is coming into my physiotherapy clinic where we teach you using non- mechanical exercise things like big rubber balls and elastic stretching surgical tubes and things like that. That’s what makes our program unique.
Also, do not forget to always include a call to action. The biggest mistake here is that people skip the call to action either within the article, which you can work into the article depending on the editor and how subtly you work it into the information.
Beyond “The Storefront Syndrome”
A lot of people make what I call the storefront mentality syndrome mistake. Storefront mentality syndrome is just having one Web site. Now in some cases this is an appropriate strategy.
However, most of the time for small to medium-sized businesses, independent professionals, coaches, authors, and so on, it’s good to have more than one Web site and definitely more than one way to get to your Web site.
You can have that regular home page, “Welcome to my home page,” kind of mentality but really you want to have more than one. Envision offline a large store like Neman Marcus versus a convenient store like 7-11.
Neman Marcus usually has one big location that might take up half a city block or a whole city block in any given city. On the other hand, 7-11 has many locations throughout the city.
Do you want to be the Neman Marcus and hope they come to that one location, they get to the third floor and they find the brown shoes, or do you want to be a 7-11 type where you have multiple opportunities?
Web sites are Internet real estate. It is an important strategy to have multiple real estate or Web sites on the Internet where people can find you through different means.
On the Internet people type in keywords and they expect to find just what they typed in when they click through on a link in a search engine. Anticipation really needs to be created and added when you are moving along here.
Outside links and affiliates are also helpful. By being part of a community, supporting other people, not always necessarily an affiliate link where you get paid a commission for referring people but just by growing the community, growing the trust and relationship with your audience, you are going to have the ability to do that using outside links.
Affiliate programs for example, Amazon an affiliate program, pay pennies per book, but it’s still an affiliate program. There are other ones that pay 50% or even 100% where you recommend their e-books and so on.
Utilizing Email
Another strategy separate from Web sites is email marketing where you use an auto responder series or a single broadcast.
Auto responder series are a multiple email series, hopefully an intelligent email series that gradually educates the customer, but it can also just be the way that you use the technology to set up your newsletter to go out each month.
With a single broadcast there is a one-time, “Oh, by the way I’m doing a special teleseminar on Tuesday night, check it out, and listen in.” I use www.HandsFreeBusiness.com for that.
Internet Connections
Live hosting, forums and groups, blogs are definitely hot. Bloggers, as they are known, people who blog every day, are being used. Again, integrate your online and offline.
I got a quote from Jay Leno today. He has somebody, Ross the Intern, who does a little comedy bit at the beginning of some of the shows, but he then immediately says, “Go to NBC.com/tonightshow” and you can click on his link and see what he is typing about.
It’s developing a relationship and interactivity with the product and service, which, in this case, is a television show. But you can do it with a teleseminar, with your book, with your business.
Your own affiliate program is another way to build connections in the Internet. This is obviously where you have other people recommend your products and services. The beauty of these things is you only pay after the sales are made.
So if somebody sells your book for you and they sell it for $40, you don’t pay them the $10, you don’t pay them until after the money is in your account.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization: That’s the ability to make your site appear higher in the search engine rankings.
Google, for example, on the left-hand side those are what’s called natural search engine rankings. On the right-hand side is pay per click which we are going to touch on in a second.
But the higher you can get in the natural search engines the more likely you are to increase your sales and your marketing ability.
Link sharing helps with search engine optimization. Link sharing is where you and I know each other and we trade links to our sites. There is no monetary relationship, necessarily. There is just a link capability.
The algorithms and all the wonderful mathematics and invisible things that go on behind search engines do weigh, link sharing, depending on the sites they are linked to.
Because it’s a black box and behind a curtain we don’t know exactly how that works and people debate about that all the time. I don’t tend to focus too much on things I can’t control in my business.
I do focus on things I can control. Like referring people to Web sites through link sharing to me is usually more effective than trying to play what they call the “Google dance” in the search engine optimization field.
Online Advertising
Now certainly this is something you need to keep an eye on if you are using a pay per click campaign, and that’s where on the right-hand side of the Google page, for example, where you would pay per click.
Now you pay per click regardless of whether the person stays on your site for one second, 30 seconds, or ten minutes. You pay regardless of whether or not they buy from you.
This is investing your money in something that could cost you a lot and not get you a lot of results. Definitely be careful in your pay per click campaigns.
You can limit the amount you spend per day. You can limit the geographies that are advertised to. The best resource that I know for pay per click is Perry Marshall. He is great with Google AdWords and that kind of stuff.
Next is e-zine ads, if you don’t have an e-zine but you know someone else who has an e-zine, often these are very affordable text based links inside people’s e-mail e-zines. And also you can have text based or banner ads inside their HTML based e-zines as well.
Web magazines, that’s where I’m referring to more Web-based information where you can purchase anything from classified ads, display ads, boxes, banners, high rises are those tall thin ones on either side of the Web page. You’ve seen them online.
If you haven’t, definitely get online and check out the advertising available. Banners generally across the top or the bottom are still very effective. Although they take a knocking in the Internet marketing media they could still be very effective if designed properly.
Don’t forget, you can use any of those things, digital magazines, e-zines, Internet radio and TV as well. So take advantage of these things. You don’t have to be the person in the video. You can hire a spokesperson. You could hire a host for your radio show.
That was a quick overview of how the Internet can work for you. This is a plan, a checklist, a tick machine. Keep these things in mind and prioritize which ones you are going to do first.
Don’t Forget, Relationships Matter
Wouldn’t you be pleased if your marketing could be on auto pilot online? Every time I make a dollar with a click that certainly motivates me and makes my day. It’s stimulating when you can use marketing to make sales and there is no interaction.
Having said that, I must add a caveat: There is a trend today to hide behind the Web site and to try and make the Web site do everything. There is still nothing better than eyeball to eyeball, handshaking business, creating a relationship.
The biggest deals online are made offline. What that means is I still want to meet the person. I still want to see who I am doing business with. I want to see the product or service. We do the handshake, we make the deal, and then the implementation and making it happen.
We certainly leverage the power of the Internet and its productivity and possibility. Even though there’s heavy focus on the Internet for marketing, please don’t forget the power of the telephone.
Use your voice mail, respond to calls, and answer the phone yourself. All these sorts of things are very powerful today.
In fact, even more so because it has become rare as people do hide behind the Internet, whether they are big business or whether they are a small medium-sized business that just really doesn’t answer their e-mail personally or their phones as well.
Formalized Referral Programs
Prior to the Internet I would say formalized referral programs were probably the number one way to increase any business.
If I asked you and you were amongst 100 other business people at an event what is the number one way to get business, 80% of the audience usually says referrals. Yet they don’t spend 80% of their time or their marketing investment on formalized referral system.
Formalized means you are focused on it. The referral program is something that you build into your marketing so from the time you first meet a prospect they are aware that you have a referral program.
They are aware that they could benefit from recommending others to your product or service. You need to educate your clients, prospects, business associates, family and friends about your formalized referral program.
In a nutshell a formalized referral program is clearly understood benefits to the customer for referring someone, and it’s also clearly understood benefits to the person they are talking to do business with you.
Often the one that comes to mind right away is a discount. The new customer gets a 25% discount off their first purchase and the existing customer who referred you gets 25% off their next purchase.
It is future selling an existing customer and attracting a new one and it’s coming out of new sales, so it’s not a heavy marketing expense. It doesn’t get any more complex than that.
Most people don’t execute marketing because they make it complex. They are just not doing the simple things they need to do.
The Master Steps
It is interesting that in ballroom dancing, in martial arts, there are usually six master steps or moves that need to be practiced every day. They are not necessarily exciting. It’s just a continuous thing.
In basketball, it would be a free throw shot or a three point shot, taking 100 to 200 shots a day from the free throw line. In martial arts, it is practicing certain kicks. In ballroom dancing, it is the basic cha-cha move.