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After dealing with SA clients for the past 8 years this principle in business still stands.
3 Simple Ways to Grow Your Business from Darryl Comley-White Market Magne on Vimeo.
Everyone wants to grow their business and achieve their goals but times are tough.
Here are 3 ways you can benefit from the assets you already have in your business.
- Increase Prospects
- Increasing the amount of leads you or your sales reps see will obviously increase profitability. The problem is that once we start struggling in sales our efforts diminish as we get demotivated and frustrated.
- The truth is that lead generation is an activity driven numbers game. Setting high targets and rewarding effort will help motivate the team to get going again.
- Increase Average Client Spend
- The more your client spends the lower the acquisition cost becomes and as a result profitability increases.
- Answer these:
- Is your team up-selling correctly?
- Are they identifying additional sales opportunities?
- Are you able to package your products and services in a way that is appealing to buyers?
- Increase Repeat Purchases
- The gold in your business right now is your current and past client base.
- Consider the following:
- How do you get your clients buying from you again and again?
- Do your clients know of alternative products and services you offer?
- Are you only looking for new business and neglecting your current and past client base?
- You know it costs 60 less to market to past clients than to try find new business….
Looking for help in building your business?
Contact Market Magnet Now and I will sit with you at no charge to find ways of building your business.
Everyone is a web designer. Some are cheap some are way over priced…
I describe in its simplest form what web design is and how this impacts your business.
Enjoy!
Loading Time about 45 seconds.
Web design from Darryl Comley-White on Vimeo.
To Discuss Your Website Needs
Web design involves many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include:
- web graphic design;
- interface design;
- authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software;
- user experience design
- and search engine optimization
Our Team covers the different aspects of the design process to fulfill the end user experience and maintain the integrity of the marketing desires of our clients.
The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing mark up (code), but this is a grey area as this is also covered by web development.
We believe in prioritizing the functionality of your website that is aesthetically pleasing to the target audience. You see, a website must be good looking but a site that looks good (or pretty) that does not generate business is of little use. Our goal is to design a website that generates leads and encourages the visitors to continuously return to the site for news and updates but more importantly to get a response. We want them to take an action that will let you know that they are interested in your products and services.
Sales staff can make or break a business: they are the front end representation of the brand. Are they representing the brand in a way that would make a brand manager proud?
Most often not.. For sure, in the presence of management and directors staff are on their best behavior. Whereas day to day, complacency place a major role in the lack of personal branding and carry through of the corporate identity.
I am sure you may be familiar with the saying:
I work for money if you want loyalty get a dog…
How do we encourage sales staff to become true brand ambassadors?
Here are a few ways of getting the most out of sales staff:
- Be an example by getting your hands dirty too.
- Uncover their day to day issues within the work place and find solutions.
- Be sensitive to their personal and family needs as people generally only work to support themselves and their families.
- Lead with encouragement and not a dictatorial style, it’s the best way to get people to do what you need done.
Sales Staff are either key players in the revenue generation of the business or a dead weight that the top performers drag along day-by-day.
There is nothing more satisfying for a sales manager or business owner to see a team of sales staff actively prospecting, gaining momentum and generating revenue. Besides being a reflection of good leadership and management skills the flow of commission is inspiring too.
Getting your sales staff to work as a team is essential to their overall performance. Once they realize that they are a team that not only competes with external competitors but with each other, leveraging their own ambitions is at the forefront of the motivating factor that will drive them to succeed. This will also weed out the sales staff that are those dead weights. Sounds cruel, but carrying dead weight not only strains sales figures but motivation and reputation too.
Wanting to get the most out of your sales staff?
There are only 2 activities in any business that deal with generating revenue…
SALES AND MARKETING…
Sounds obvious but examine your daily activities and determine how much time you actually dedicate to each.
There is no doubt that preparing your books for year end is vital but without focusing on sales and marketing there won’t be too much to show in your financials.
It makes me wonder how and why so many businesses shut the sales team away in the room far down the passage on the other side of the building to get on with selling when they need consistent mentoring and management.
For the most part sales teams know what their targets are and usually have a good knowledge of the products and services on offer however, most fall way short on efficient day to day sales activity.
Whose to blame.. No one really.
Mentoring a sales team takes a great deal of time, energy and effort and often an internal person assigned to do so has more than enough on their plate. Finding new exciting, motivating or inspirational sales techniques is seldom top of their agenda.
Sadly this makes the mentoring process of sales teams seem rather fruitless.
Imaging knowing that all the hassle of keeping your sales team in top form is no longer your problem and that the quality of the content generates scalable results… Far more accessible than you may believe!
Here are a number of points that will help focus your sales team and their efforts:
- define their daily activity.
- help each staff member realize that they are in charge of their own income.
- have tracking and accountability measures in place.
- equip staff with the necessary tools.
- team up members that complement productivity and result.
How do you define success?
Most people, sales people in particular, beat themselves up for constantly being on the brink of failure. Where as their real failure is missing the opportunity to recognize successes in both great and small circumstances.
Earl Nightingale, a pioneer in the audio development space has a simple yet profound description that changes the perception and challenge of ‘pie in the sky success’,to be more practical and realistic in its individual approach.
In his recording ‘The Strangest Secret’, Earl describes success to be the working towards a worthy ideal. Notice how it is the working towards the ideal that determines ones success and not necessarily the achievement of it.
This worthy ideal spans all walks of life and is driven by the passion you may have towards a particular calling, career, task or goal. Earl gives the example of a mother striving to be the best mother possible, the school teacher working to always teach to the best of her ability and the sales person giving their all. The mere fact that a meaningful effort is applied is significant enough to be recognized as a success.
To illustrate this form my point of view, here are a few examples of my successes:
- I succeed at being ethical in my work.
- I work hard to meet targets
- I finish major canoe races like The Duzi Canoe Marathon
- I work hard at making my marriage happy and life giving.
Notice how most of these success examples seem infinite, and that’s because they are.
You see, my successes are driven by my goals and I succeed by constantly working towards them. There are always ups and downs in the pursuit of a worthy ideal but the real success is in not giving up or letting go.
What is your success?
List all the areas in your live where you are working towards a worthy ideal.
If you have none let the establishment of a worthy ideal be your first success.
Recognizing successes, great and small is the starting point for achieving great goals in life.
There are a couple of factors that determine the level of success of a social media campaign. The most important being what you determine a successful campaign to be and the platform used as your social media basis.
Retail has the added advantage of having a destination for clients and consumer appeal but the B2B market often lacks both. If you are expecting a surge in sales from a social campaign you may be disappointed. The most important aspect of social media within the B2B market place is the initiation, development and consistency of a conversation. It is said that social media is the new word of mouth and yes can generate sales but not specifically or directly.
If you can maintain the conversation whilst engaging potential and existing clients you are well on your way to spreading the message of your brand.
Remember that the objective of any marketing campaign is to help your prospects and clients make an informed purchase decision. Social media can facilitate this objective and be reinforced by the support of the community that has had an enjoyable experience with your business and hopefully recommend you to their social community. These recommendations can be influenced by your encouragement to the community by some or other motivating factor, these could be discounts, competitions or some other offer of added value to your brand.
Nothing could be better for ranking your website in search engines.
Every client and company I deal with wants their website ranked high in Google. This makes sense, as websites that rank well are more visible to potential clients. What few people realise is that to rank well in Google and other search engines such as Yahoo etc your website needs 2 elements that will increase its performance.
Content is king!
Google favours websites in excess of 100 pages, in fact a site 300 pages is even better. This means that for your website to perform well you need a ton of relevant and frequently added content. The interesting fact about content is that Google sends out what is known as ‘spiders’ that scour the web pages worldwide to find out what’s new on the millions of websites out there, known as crawling the web. This is beneficial if you make use of the frequency these ‘spiders’ visit your site. If nothing new happens on your site these ‘spiders’ visit your side almost every thirty days. On their next visit if they discover something new (mostly test based) they will half the time until their next visit – roughly 15 days later. Again, if something new happens within the period between visits the time is halved this continues until Google visits your site in minute intervals. This means that your site will be indexed far quicker. Now the amount of content required may seem impossible to develop. There are methods however that will make this content creation possible.
Remember – Grow your business without wasting money on advertising.
Take the free marketing assessment and I will throw in a free consultation that will help you further.
Free Marketing and sales assessment
Marketing your business is on going.
Every time you ‘stop’ marketing you need to restart.
Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of guerilla marketing teaches that your marketing needs to be like a circle with a beginning and no end, not like a line that has a start and ends in the courts of bankruptcy.
This means that you need to consider pre and post-sale marketing. Once a sale is made the deal should not be considered closed or won. There is definitely a form of success; this success needs to be seen as the beginning of a profitable long-term relationship.
Developing relationships with clients sets the platform for further transactions. If your offer is not unique or if your competitors are very active and regularly poach your clients, you need to build better bonds with your prospects and clients to prevent them form being lured away.
Relationship building is time consuming but well worth the effort.
Systemizing your relationship building may include systems like CRM and Constant Contact Management. These help you automate relationship building that results in securing long-term and profitable clients that are loyal to your brand, company and bank account.
Keep your marketing momentum, automate your marketing and build your business.
Ranking high in Google requires a fair amount of planning and much more attention than one expects. The SERP (search engine results page) is a competitive space and becoming even more so.
Previously I wrote about content being king and the fact that Google favours websites in excess of 100 pages and 300 pages to be even more preferable. The next strategy that generates better results in the SERP is inbound authoritative links. An authoritative link is a website that contains content that has some relation to yours linking to specific pages on your website. You may be able to convince a handful of people close to you to exchange links, whether relevant or not is debatable, as part of your link building strategy.
Google ranks websites that have in excess of 30 000 relevant incoming links. It may seem impossible to gain such a number of authoritative links pointing to your website but the odds are in your favour if you implement a simple yet effective web strategy.
Based on content creation that you already have or that can be constructed for you and distributing it to the correct channels and automatically building links pointing back to your website.
Tied in with your content strategy, link building will boost your position in Google.
How guerrilla-marketing tactics will help grow your business
For as long as marketing and advertising has been the driving force behind big business, smaller companies have tried copying their marketing strategies with results that are less than desirable. This results in the general opinion among small business owners that marketing is expensive and does little to generate business.
These general options are true. So true in fact that the majority of small business owners have become so jaded by their own marketing activities that they have chosen not to market their business. Other business owners have heard stories of failed marketing attempts and they too shy away from actively growing their business.
Why?
Everything you know about marketing is wrong! That’s why!
How can I say that everything you know about marketing is wrong? Look around, look 
at the marketing you see every day. We are bombarded by TV commercials, radio adverts, billboards and print advertising and as a result this is how we have now learnt to market our businesses. This could not be further from the truth as to how we should be marketing our business.
The type of marketing we have become accustomed to has its origins in the 1950’s. This was before TV had been launched in South Africa and the two largest advertising mediums were radio and print, although nowhere near as competitive or costly as it is today. The 1950’s is known as the era of the brand builders. Brand building worked off a simple formula adopted by advertising agencies, used even in today’s era of marketing and advertising. This formula is so simple and yet out of reach to smaller businesses as the cost escalates in to the millions. The brand building formula, ‘C&R’ is how they base all their advertising and marketing expertise. C&R translated into laymen’s terms is Creativity and Repetition Advertising. Simply put, develop a creative catchy advert and repeat it so many times that it sticks. Almost like throwing mud onto a wall. If it is dirty enough some will remain behind and leave a lasting impression.
It is frightening how many millions this type of advertising can amount to, keep in mind that advertising is only one element of the vast array of guerrilla marketing tactics at our disposable. Here is a brief example. A number of years ago I was involved with a large corporate advert in the motor security environment. They commissioned a budget of R3 500 000 for the production of their advert. The ad was cute and portrayed the essence of the company and the service provided to the public. Excluded in that hefty production bill was airtime fee across the variety of TV channels in SA. This amounted to a whopping R4 000 000, which delivered three months of airtime. The company then ran short of budget for the second half of the year and decided to rebroadcast the same advert for another R4 000 000, with far less effect. In total R 11 500 000 was spent on the ad campaign and not one sale could be tracked from the ad campaign.
Can you see how you have been trained to believe that TV, Radio and Print adverts are the way to market your business? As a small business you can market yourself for far less and generate generous results.
Jay Conrad Levinson coined the term Guerrilla Marketing in 1984. He is known as the father of Guerrilla Marketing and is considered a pioneer with his take-no-prisoners approach to marketing for the small and medium-size business owner. Jay has authored and co-authored over 35 books, selling more than 20 million copies worldwide. His skills and marketing tactic have become part of the curriculum in many universities worldwide as they recognise that the standards of marketing have changed.
Adopting Guerrilla Marketing Tactics into your business is key to growing your business at an affordable marketing budget. There are over 100 marketing weapons, according to Jay, that should be considered when planning a marketing activity in your business. One of which is database marketing, using technology as a delivery vehicle.
Before any marketing takes place you need to establish the type of business you are in. You may be a service provider, you may sell products, you may be in manufacturing, hairdressing, plumbing or retail. Which ever it may be, know that your primary business is marketing: marketing your products and services. Marketing is one of the only two activities that drives revenue, the other being sales.
The aim of Guerrilla Marketing is primarily to explore the untapped assets within your business. Those assets are your marketable entities that can and should be used to expose the benefits of doing business with you.
Of the 100 Guerrilla Marketing tactics, around 60 will cost nothing to implement into your daily marketing activities. These can be used in their simplest form, and stem from what is known as the ‘inner reality’ of the business.
The ‘inner reality’ of your business is everything you and your business stand for. This could be the based on service excellence, owner and staff expertise, your guarantee (also known as risk reversal), time in business and other elements that make you stand out from the crowed of competitors.
Taking what we now know from your ‘inner reality’ and matching it to the ‘outer perception’, the experiences and opinions your clients have of your business, is the basis for the development of your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Your USP becomes your superior promise to your clients and prospects of that which they will experience with your business based on other clients’ experiences as well as the ethos of your company.
Once your USP has been well constructed and implemented throughout all communication channels, the competition your audience faces is narrowed as they realise that you must be the obvious choice to do business with based on the superior promise you offer. You must be able to back up your USP with testimonials and references that have been blown away by your offer and service. There you have a number of Guerrilla Marketing tactics in place: testimonials, references and a compelling USP.
One of the most obvious Guerrilla Marketing tactic is known as phone demeanour. This baffles most business owners yet is so simple to implement and get right. Your telephone is the first port of call to your business and so often the people operating the switchboard perform so poorly that every caller must wonder why they have called in the first place. Make sure that every telephonic communication presents the best possible experience for the client. This goes for your voice mail as well as leaving messages on other peoples’ answering machines.
One of the most obvious Guerrilla Marketing tactics, which is usually underutilised, is your business card. Many business cards deliver the least amount of detail, which should be considered a waste of paper and print. Your card should inspire and motivate the prospect to take some kind of action. Next time you are at a networking event presenting your business take a good look at the variety of business cards you receive and separate cards those that move you from those that are not grabbing your interest. Then decide what needs to change on your card. Picture your card as a mini portable billboard that advertises your company.
Spot the other guerrilla activity? That’s right, networking. There are obviously the good and the not so good networking events. Choose those that relate closest to your industry and learn the dynamics of effective networking. This will help to grow your list of potential buyers and even suppliers. Keep in mind that there are always sellers at networking events and very few buyers. This is however, a very good way to initiate relationships for future marketing.
That brings us to another guerrilla marketing activity, relationship marketing. People like to buy from people they like and trust. The fact that they entrust their hard-earned cash into your offer means that some kind of working relationship needs to be established to ease the risk of the business transaction. There are many relationship tools available to small business owners that ‘automate’ the relationship process. These tie into other tactics such as email and digital marketing.
Guerrilla Marketing is everything you do, from the way you answer your phone to your dress code and appearance. It is any contact you have, or anyone representing you, with anybody or company.
Your marketing should start and have no end; it needs to been seen as a circle of events that continue year in and year out. These events should be structured on your Guerrilla Marketing calendar for easy reference and measurement. Every marketing campaign should be structured around your marketing plan. Jay developed the seven sentence-marketing plan which delivers direction and accountability to your marketing efforts. This plan outlines the promotion, benefits, audience and budget of every campaign. Following these basic fundamentals of small business marketing will help your company generate sales and profits without spending unnecessary money on advertising.
If you want to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing call Darryl Now for a free, no-obligation exploratory session!
This session will help you put the right message in the right sequence to increase the responsiveness to your marketing efforts.
Darryl Comley-White
For the past 8 years Darryl and his team at Market Magnet Consulting has helped hundreds of businesses and individuals grow their bottom line profits without spending unnecessary money on advertising. www.marketmagnet.co.za