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Easily give your Brand a Concrete definition and watch all of your Marketing explode

September 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The Power of Branding Speedometer

To improve your marketing, define your Brand.

People seem to believe Direct Response marketers don’t like Brand marketing. That we’re somehow arch-enemies in the world of advertising.

That’s just not true.
We directs love great branding.

And there’s a simple reason for this.
It works.

Within a month or 2 of starting internet marketing for a new client, we can tell if a business has a strong local brand. The search volume relative to population, click-thru rates on those clicks, and even conversion rates of the website all give us clues to the strength of your business name in your local market.

Defining Branding

When you ask most people about branding they start thinking of broadcast media, logos, and slogans.

However…

Are your service trucks and the decals painted on them part of your branding?
Are your uniforms?
Is your website?
What about how you answer the phone?
Is the quality of your work?
Can your pricing be part of your brand?
How about your team culture?

Yes!
All of these are part of your brand.

So what is branding? Flint McLaughlin of MECLabs has the best definition around:

Brand is the aggregate experience of your value proposition.

I love branding because the data shows that it works. In other words, if you have a great business that delivers a truly unique product or service in a way that retains customers, then getting results from any form of advertising is a whole lot easier.

Recently a company came to my home to clean my carpets.

They cultivate their advertising by building up relationships with locally influential people, like my realtor friend who referred them to me. That’s great marketing.

They come to my home and about 45 minutes later I notice they are packing up so I go to check on things. They forgot about my area rugs that we discussed twice. They also never let me know they wouldn’t move anything. Not even the chair in my office (on wheels).

From my perspective as a marketer, their marketing DID work. I DID hire them, however their branding was very poor.

The worst part is, they did a great job, had a fair price and were very personable.

Just a few quick tweaks could transform this business…

Imagine how much more effective every dollar they spent on marketing would be if they:

  1. Introduce themselves and explain exactly what they are doing today and that they don’t want to move things that are valuable so if there is anything they need to clean under, please move those now.
  2. Double-check with you before wrapping up that everything is done to your satisfaction.
  3. Share a handout with their invoice that includes a list of all of their services. (I overheard them talking about a tile cleaning job, yet they never once offered to clean my tile.)

They did ask me how often I cleaned my carpets and then recommended I clean them every fall and spring.

Fat chance I’ll ever remember that.

Instead, they should have said, “You seem to be happy with your fresh, clean carpet and since you’re a new customer, in 6 months Bonnie in my office will give you a call, remind you it’s been 6 months and get you a 10% discount on your next cleaning. As long as we come out every 6 months you’ll always get your 10% discount.”

How many people get their carpets cleaned regularly every 6-months?

Imagine the impact on that business from offering this one service.

The lifetime value of each customer would sky-rocket which would allow the owner to spend more in marketing to acquire each new customer.

THAT is branding!

Branding is setting an expectation.
The strength of your brand is in how well you foster that expectation.

Branding cannot exist without a Value Proposition

Your Value Proposition

Great branding requires a unique value proposition.

If you want to improve your marketing and get better results, where do you start?

You could call me and I guarantee my team will get you better results online, however we will ask for your value proposition (also called a Unique Selling Proposition).

Most marketers will never ask you for this.
Most “brand experts” fail to understand that a brand cannot exist without a value proposition.

This is great news!

This means that 90% of your competitors are never going to define their value proposition and therefore will never be able to create a lasting brand.

MECLabs has developed a simple way to create your value proposition by answering 1 question:

If I’m your ideal customer, why I should do business with you rather than your competitors?

Can you answer that question?
If not, go to your calendar right now and schedule 2 hours this week to sit down, block out all interruptions, and figure that out.

Great Marketing Starts with a Great Brand

In the early 1900’s, legendary direct marketer and author of My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising, Claude Hopkins, took on Schlitz Brewery as a client.

Here’s what Claude had to say after visiting the brewery:

I saw plate-glass rooms where beer was dripping over pipes, and I asked the reason for them. They told me those rooms were filled with filtered air, so the beer could be cooled in purity. I saw great filters filled with white-wood pulp. They explained how that filtered the beer. They showed how they cleaned every pump and pipe, twice daily, to avoid contamination. How every bottle was cleaned four times by machinery.

I came back to the office amazed. I said: ‘Why don’t you tell people these things? Why do you merely try to cry louder than others that your beer is pure? Why don’t you tell the reasons?’ ‘Why,’ they said, ‘the processes we use are just the same as others use. No one can make good beer without them.’ ‘But,’ I replied, ‘others have never told this story. It amazes everyone who goes through your brewery. It will startle everyone in print.

So he put their story of quality control and purity in print and as a result they jumped from 5th to tied for 1st in market share.

Often your Value Proposition isn’t something completely unique. It’s just something that you communicate more clearly than your competitors.

Clarity always beats persuasion!

Branding isn’t fuzzy

I’m an engineer so I don’t do wishy-washy and touchy-feely very well.
Which is why I love great branding.

It’s precise.
It’s direct.
It’s crystal clear.
It’s measurable.
It can be tested.

When you understand that your brand is the aggregate experience of your value proposition and you have a great value proposition, you understand there are plenty of ways to test and measure the power of your value proposition.

It’s easy to measure the power of a value proposition in Google Adwords Click-Thru-Rates, A/B Split-tests on websites, email headline experiments and even in conversations with customers.

That, however, is the easy part.

The hard part is for your entire business to deliver on the expectation created by your advertising by living your brand.

To your branding success,
Bryan

Filed Under: Business Books, Business Psychology, Ethical Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Can you boil down your business strategy to one sentence?

September 20, 2011 by 2 Comments

A few days ago I was talking to a school teacher friend about my several businesses…

Business Brokerage
Google Adwords Lead Generation
12-Month Business Tune-up

She was amazed at how many hundreds or thousands of dollars people would pay for me to help them with any of those things. The idea that a business would be willing to pay $100 or $200 for a lead that MAY become a new customer was a bit hard for her to swallow.

The thought that someone would pay thousands of dollars for a SYSTEM to consistently generate web leads made more sense.

The fact that savvy business people will regularly spend thousands of dollars for a business coach to provide “advice” seemed like a fantasy to someone working in public education.

“How can you get people to pay that much money!?”

My answer is one simple sentence…

I always deliver several times more value to my clients than they pay me.

She still didn’t quite follow “value” so I broke it down with a bit more detail:

As long as I can increase sales, decrease costs, or increase the business owner’s time (the most valuable item of all) more than they are paying for my help, they’ll gladly pay and tell their friends about it.

Wouldn’t you?

When I was in college I attended a speech by a corporate America CEO who had a different way of expressing his goal for delivering value to his company. He said:

My goal was to always be the most underpaid employee of the company where I worked… And also be the highest paid employee.

I attended dozens and dozens of similar seminars in college and I still remember that concept… If you can do the same for your Business-to-Business clients, you’ll always have a thriving business and ecstatic clients.

To Your Success, Bryan

P.S. If you can’t already, it’s time you boil down your Unique Selling Proposition to a single sentence. Contact me for a list of the 4 questions you need to ask yourself to create that USP.

Filed Under: Ethical Marketing, Leadership Tagged With: , , , , ,

Small Business Marketing – Strategy/Clarity

March 21, 2011 by 1 Comment

My last marketing blog discussed the importance of your company vision, mission, and culture on both your marketing and overall business. Now you need to separate your business according to your 3-5 primary revenue streams. More streams then that and you’re probably diluting yourself and not effectively controlling each. Reference Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins and Winning by Jack Welch for more reasons to keep focused on a few key revenue streams.

Separating revenue streams is relatively straight-forward, however developing your Strategy and Clarity for each stream is a bit more work. The reason for separating and developing a unique strategy for each is that, more often then not, each stream has a different type of customer. As quick and obvious proof of that fact, if your business caters to residential, commercial, and industrial clients, you’re well aware that the way you handle, communicate with, bill, and market is different for each one.

For each revenue stream, the Strategy/Clarity stage include 3 things:

  1. Target Customer – Who is your ideal client?
  2. Unique Selling Proposition – What separates you from all competition so you no longer can compete on price?
  3. Positioning Strategy – What position do you currently occupy in the consumer’s mind? How do they view your business?

Of the 3, defining your Target Customer is the easiest. To do this, go through your database, pick out your top 10, 20, or 40 best, most profitable clients, and figure out what they have in common. Even better yet, pay them (in goods and services or even cold hard cash) to answer a detailed survey to give you an excellent picture of who they are, what they do, and where else they spend their money. Once you have this information do 3 things:

  1. If a non-competitive business regularly pops up as a place where your top customers spend their money, approach that business owner and try to setup a partnership.
  2. Develop a simply, yet crystal clear “picture” of your perfect client similar to Trader Joe’s, “unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.“
  3. Empathize with and put yourself in that target person’s shoes before developing any marketing. Talk to him directly.

Once you have that picture of your target customer, gather information from all of your competitors via their websites, public marketing, and a mystery shopping service like teleXpertise. Gather all of that information and determine where the hole is… In other words, what do your perfect customer’s want that none of your competitors are offering? By now you see where this is going; this will be your Unique Selling Proposition. Simply put, your USP makes you so unique that you no longer have any businesses who can compete with you on price. You can often do this by offering additional services, warranties, products, guarantees, or features with your package that your competitors can’t match.

The final step is your Positioning Strategy and this one is the most challenging as we’re literally trying to read people’s minds. Right off the bat, you need to separate these (in addition to revenue stream) into people who are currently customers and people who are not. An existing customer should have a better picture of who you are and what you do and so have a more defined position in her mind than someone who has never purchased from you. In your customer survey of your top 10-40 customers, you need to ask questions about why they decided to work with your business and how they learned about it. Ask what they tell friends and family about your business. That’s the true picture of how they perceive you… Not by what they tell you, but by what they tell others. As for finding out what non-customers think about you, you have to ask them. That includes prospects and complete strangers you meet. When you meet someone new and they ask what you do for a living, once you tell them your business name, ask them what they’ve heard about it. Most people aren’t going to tell you anything negative so keep that in mind. To find the negative, search Twitter, Yelp, Ripoffreport.com, and Google for your business. Within the constraints of a small business marketing time and budget, we don’t really have the ability to get beyond those few pieces. However, if you’re interested in learning more about positioning check out Jack Trout and Al Ries’ book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

Now that you have an idea of what position you occupy in the minds of others, do 2 things:

  1. Determine if your Position Matches the needs of your target customer and your USP. In other words, if people see you as the low-cost solution and your USP is to be the best service provider, there’s a disconnect. Your options are to either revise your USP to match the position of your business (which is the far simpler and easier option and what I recommend) or start re-positioning yourself (which is complicated, costly, and takes a lot of time).
  2. Consider the position you occupy in your customer and potential customer’s mind when developing any new marketing. In other words, you know everything about your business and all of your competitors and you need to forget all of that. It’s called “the curse of knowledge” and you have it.

Here’s the bottom line… As a small business owner or leader, you don’t have a $100 million marketing budget or even a $1 million marketing budget so you need to make every dollar count. To get the most out of your marketing dollars, you first need to track everything, beyond that if you know and talk directly to your target customer, from the position you occupy in her mind, with a Unique Selling Proposition that will be important to her, you’ll be far ahead of your competitors.

To your Targeting, USP, and Positioning success, Bryan

Filed Under: Business Books, Ethical Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to fix your business FAST – Part 4 – Improve Marketing and Sales

November 16, 2009 by 2 Comments

For most businesses I’ve encountered, the greatest improvement in marketing would simply be to start tracking your ROI. In other words, you need to know your cost/lead and cost/sale for each marketing project. I address this concept in detail in my blog on Scientific Advertising.  Keep in mind that simply asking your customers “how did you hear about us?” can be somewhat futile (though it’s better than nothing). Michael Corbett suggests simply watching your sales to see if they go up with your current marketing or stay flat. To me that seems like a rather unscientific approach since that doesn’t tell you which marketing produced the results and there are  more factors than marketing alone that can affect sales.

There are a handful of marketing books in my Recommended Reading section, in addition to My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, so I’m not going to directly address the difference between good and bad marketing. After all, no one knows exactly what will generate the best response until it’s tested and measured.

That being said, here are a few marketing pointers in addition to knowing your numbers:

  1. Have a Unique Selling Proposition that sets you apart from all of your competitors. In other words, create a niche only you can fill.
  2. Know and understand your target audience. You can have the best offer, and the best advertisement in the world, but if it’s directed to the wrong audience you’ll get zero results. Spend the most marketing time on getting your message to the right people!
  3. Keep a detailed customer database so you can cross-market constantly. If someone has bought from you once before, they are MUCH more likely to buy from you again. If you don’t have a database (or your not using the one you have) change that immediately!
  4. Offer a guarantee. If your products are either more expensive than most, or can’t be touched by the consumer prior to purchasing (such as with internet sales) you MUST have an iron-clad guarantee to assuage their fears. This must demonstrate that you’re the best and the customer has nothing to risk.

Since we’re looking for quick fixes, I’m going to stop the list there. If you do those things, you’ll notice results almost instantly.

On the sales side, you need to again, learn your numbers. Am I getting that point across fully yet? 🙂 Whether you realize it or not, in your sales cycle, there are many steps. Let’s take a retail clothing store for example. What are the steps a shopper takes?

  1. Window browsing – How do we get them to actually walk into the store? A lot of retailers put up blinds behind the window manequins so people have to actually walk in to see what else is available.
  2. Entering the store – How do we get them to spend time looking around? Depending on your clientelle, music can make a huge difference as to whether they hang around a while or not.
  3. Perusing certain racks or aisles – How do we get them to see the most we have to offer? Most retail stores put the clearance and discounted rack at the back so you have to walk all the way through to find the great deals.
  4. Trying clothes on – How do we get them to go to the dressing room? Keep in mind, people can only try on or buy as much as they can physically carry. Make it easy for customers to carry more with helpful sales associates and people will buy more. Paco Underhill addresses this in magnificent detail in Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping.
  5. Buying – How do we get them to come back? Are we getting their name and email address for our database?

So why do we break that up into so many steps? Because if you don’t, you have no idea which steps you need to improve. I’ve heard of a retail store that learned that around 80% of people who try something on will buy it. So they didn’t work on directing people to the cash register, they worked on getting potential customers to the changing rooms.

Every business has a series of steps in their sales cycle. You need to learn and track each of those steps for your business and then systematically improve the conversion rate for each one.

That was  a retail environment, so let’s consider a service based business. What possible steps do we have for them?

  1. Inquiry – via phone, web, or walk-in
  2. Service Pitch/Presentation – Are you skipping this step? If people call your plumbing business and ask what it costs to unclog a toilet, do you just tell them or do you first tell them why you are their best option with your guaranteed time, flat-rate billing, and professional staff?
  3. Price Quote/Estimate – Are you building value along with this quote (particularly if it’s in writing) to back up your pricing?
  4. Commitment to Purchase – If the commitment isn’t made immediately are you leaving them PLENTY of information to convince them you’re their best option? My business has a 24 page “leave-behind” packet for just such instances.
  5. Delivery of Service – Are you delivering exactly what you said? Particularly if you only get paid once your service is complete.
  6. Payment – Do you have simple payment options and are you asking for payment immediately upon completion so as not to tie up your office staff trying to collect money?
  7. Follow-up – Did you get their name, phone, address, and email for your database? Did you call or visit them again after completion to make sure they were completely satisfied? Did you ask for testimonials or referrals?

As you can see, there are a lot of steps in this process as well and at any step along the way you can lose potential clients. That’s obviously why tracking the number of customers who make it to each step is so important!

A couple of things you can do to help improve each step in the process:

  1. Have excellent training for each person involved in sales including detailed scripts, role-playing, and NLP training.
  2. Incentivize and develop some competition. People like to know someone else notices that they are the best at what they’re doing.
  3. Have an outside company shop your business and report back what they find.
  4. Record phone calls, conversations, and customer interactions (after checking with your lawyer of course) to look for opportunities for improvement.
  5. Provide on-hold and/or in-store marketing over the speaker system. I know the “blue-light” specials weren’t enough to save Kmart, but I’m not claiming that’s all you need to do for your business either. 😉
  6. Create your story portraying your commitment to customer service, quality, community involvement, and excellence. Make it available in your store, restaurant, business, and on your website. People love buying from places where they feel a part of something.
  7. Include testimonials everywhere! Put them in your store, on your website, in your marketing, on your thank you cards… heck, you can even put them on your receipts.

In my experience with over 100 small businesses, I don’t know of anyone, myself included, who is doing all of these things well. In my defense, I do know what I have to do and one-by-one I’m crossing them off of my list.

We’re on Part 4 right now so you should have quite a long To-Do list written down, right? If not, go get a piece of paper and a pen, review my last 4 blogs and start writing. After I post my last blog on this topice (Part 5) you’ll now have a complete list that you can prioritize and start addressing.

To your sales and marketing success, Bryan

Filed Under: Business Books, Ethical Marketing, Team Building Tagged With: , , , , ,