Every time I hear about the bailout I can’t help but wondering, “Where’s my $700 billion dollar bailout? Hey, I’d even be happy with just a couple billion.”
Unless you work for one of the Wall Street firms or banks that created this crisis, you know that you’ll never see a dime of the proposed bailout. And in fact you and your children and their grandchildren will be paying for it.
What can you do to bailout your business in these tough times?
I’ve owned boats all my life, small motorboats and sailboats, and periodically passing rain storms fill the bottom of the boat with water. This makes the boat sit low in the water and go slow. The obvious solution is to bail the boat!
Let me ask you one question?
Who do you think ends up bailing my boats?
I do. Over the years, I’ve been responsible for bailing my boats. If I didn’t they’d sink.
While Wall Street may be looking for and getting a bailout, the only one who is going to bailout your small business is you. But I bet you knew that already.
If you want to bailout your business, and put in on the track to success, the simple answer is find out what works. Find out the fastest way to attract clients, keep them coming back and maximize your profits.
Recently I mailed my subscribers an offer of a free report in exchange for answering one question. The response was terrific. I got thousands of people to download the report and got tons of data about what people are looking for. But then I got one person who wrote in and asked,
“How do you use your marketing to get people to contact you?”
Didn’t he see how I got him to contact me? Was I being too subtle?
If you haven’t done so already, sign up to get the 7 steps to build your business and increase your profits. It’s written for small business owners and marketers and it’s free, at least for now. Use this link to claim your copy >>
Am I being too subtle? Sign up before I start charging for this exclusive report.
- Charlie
Small Business Marketing Based On Results Not Opinion
Allstate has a commercial currently running that poses the “What If…” question. I can’t remember each one, but they included:
- What if someone rear ended your car crashing your car into another car?
- What if you had an accident with a car that was worth over $60,000?
- What if a friend borrows your car and trashes it… are you covered?
- What if a branch falls on your car… re you covered?
etc.
You get the idea. At the end it makes you wonder - heh am I covered?
If you have the youtube link to this video, please let me know.
(Want to view other great video ads? Here’s the best video commercials I’ve found >>)
Now ask yourself:
- What if when you sent out a mailing, instead of getting dozens of responses you got hundreds, or when you reviewed your web sales instead of just a couple of sales you saw thousands.
- What if your marketing actually worked?
- How much more money could you be making?
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- Charlie MarketingForSuccess.com
Were your sales stagnant last year? How was the first quarter of 2008?
What’s the problem? Is it the economy?
With all the news about the mortgage meltdown, sinking real estate values, rising unemployment and warnings of a recession, it’s easy to feel anxious and pessimistic. But don’t assume that your slow sales can be blamed on a faltering economy.
It’s true that banks are tight about lending and your customers are cautious about spending, but that doesn’t mean you can’t continue to grow your business.
There are profits to be made in any almost all economy, even in areas you’d think would be the hardest hit.
During the last week of March I took a vacation with my son in British Columbia to check out Revelstoke, a new Canadian ski resort. At a time when real estate values are sinking, the economy is slumping and the ski industry is stagnating, someone had the audacity to open a new ski resort.
And even crazier, the proposed resort isn’t anywhere near a population center. It’s at least a five-hour drive from the airports in Vancouver or Calgary. For many U.S. and Canadian residents, it’s more or less inaccessible. It took us over 18 hours to get there from Connecticut.
As you drive up the recently graded dirt road to the mountain, you see no condos, no golf course, and no model ski homes. Other than some amazing ski terrain and two new lifts, the place is more mud and vision than reality. (We went cat skiing but here’s a video of heli skiing)
So what happened when they put their first real estate offering on the market?
It sold out in 2 hours!
How? With some great marketing!
What’s the secret to creating a huge demand and successful sales campaigns?
I’d hired a driver to get us home from our return flight in the middle of the night. On the way, our driver told us that his business was down by over 50% from last year. The following day, I talked to another limo service that was growing steadily at 10% each month.
The big question is,
Is the economy to blame, or is it your marketing?
Conventional wisdom has it that your sales will fall off in a down economy, but that will be true only if you let it happen.
One of my clients came to me for coaching after laying off all his employees as a result of sinking sales last year. We retooled his marketing plan and wrote a new marketing message. One month later, he told he he’d never brought in so much new business in such a short period of time in the eight years since he’d opened for business.
If you’re using the economy as an excuse for not growing your business this year, think again. Sure, it’s easier to grow a business when money is plentiful. But when spending shrinks, the truly successful separate themselves from their peers and keep their businesses growing.
These people are leaders who see even the most challenging situation as a problem to solve. They look for answers and then take action. If you’re a leader, you can make your business more successful in almost any type of economy by getting the knowledge you need to grow your business.
Others look for someone or something else to blame for their problems or misfortune. “Blamers’ let themselves get stuck. Blaming others and looking for excuses is a way to avoid fixing something that’s broken.
Building relationships with prospects and earning their business by staying in touch over time is a great way to gradually ramp up revenue. But what do you do if you want to make the sale today?
“Is there online data about how much I can make with my web site?”
I wish there was a simple formula for computing how much your online business will or could make. But, to my knowledge this type of web site marketing data doesn’t exist.
Typically web site owners want to know: What percent of people who come to my site can I expect to buy and how much money can I expect to make for every 100 visitors?
The answer to these web site marketing questions is that online selling isn’t a one step process, as you’ll see below.
1. With a well designed and written web site you should be able to convert 10-25% of vistiors to prospects, people whose contact information you have and can build a relationship with.
2. With a well executed follow-up program you should be able to convert 10-25% of your prospects to buyers.
So far this translates into 1-6% percent of site vistors becoming buyers.
3. How much you make with your online sales is dependent on the cost of your products and how well you upsell buyers. Each time someone is about to make a purchase, you should be able to motivate them to spend 50% more with an effective upsell offer.
4. The bottom line is the gross sales you bring in is determined by your conversion rates and the effectivness of your upsell strategy.
If anyone has supporting or conflicting data please add your comment and let me know.
- Charlie Cook
Small Business Marketing for People Who Want Results
How can you improve your web site marketing with your emails?
A client, I’ll call Sarah wrote me today with a online marketing puzzler. She’d done a controlled test with two different promotional emails (both written by professional copywriters) and two different sales pages for the same product. Her results showed a clear winner, actually a combination of one copywriter’s email and the other’s sales page, and wanted to make sense of the data.
When I printed both emails and landing pages out the answer was obvious. One copywriter was off the mark with his promotional email, it was to obscure. The other copywriter’s email was stacked full of benefits, basically saying I’m so and so and I suggest you buy this product - when matched with the other copywriter’s sales page which took the same tack, my client had a winning combination.
What was unique about the email / landing page combination that worked to bring in the most online sales?
With one pair there was a synergy, both reinforced the other, just what a promo and landing page need to do to make your web site marketing work.
When you create a smooth path for the reader to follow where the language and style of the promo and the landing page match each other, you get more sales. When there is a disconnect between the two, people get understandably confused and don’t buy.
Makes sense doesn’t it?
Do your promotional emails and sales pages and or landing pages reinforce each other or fight each other? If you want to improve your website marketing and grow your online business, make sure they’re working together to create a synergy that helps move prospects to client status.
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Every day I get dozens of questions about small business marketing. In order to answer these I’ve set up part of my site to give answers to common small business marketing questions. Here are the links:
Which is more important, small business marketing or small business sales?
What percent of sales should marketing bring in?
The marketing department of course thinks they are the most important. Or talk to a sales person and they think marketing is a bunch of silliness and that the real work is closing the deal, or selling. Who is right?
To grow your business you need both marketing and of course sales.
Your small business marketing creates the context for sales. Marketing gets your prospect’s attention, helps your prospect understand how your products and services can help them. The better your marketing, the easier it is to close the sale.
Imagine you were in sales and you had the choice between making cold calls all day long or making follow up calls to prospects who had already indicated an interest in your product and were ready to buy. Which would you want to do? Of course following up on hot leads is far preferable to making cold calls. You’d have a lot more success and sales.
No marketing and you’ll have to work hard to close a few sales.
With effective marketing you’ll generate a flood of leads and close a ton more sales.
So which is it, marketing or sales. To grow your small business you need both!
- Charlie Cook
Want to know the one idea that will make the difference between making your web site a success or a failure?
Of course you do.
Your website has one purpose, to get people to contact you, whether it is to buy from you or to give you their contact information so you can follow up and get them to buy from you later.
So what’s the secret to writing and designing a small business web site that sells?
Your web site and every page in it are ads.
So what?
Each page of your site should be written and structured to work as a well written ad. It should get your prospects’ attention in the first 3-5 seconds, keep their attention for the next 10 seconds most people spend reading ads, and get them to contact you. Both the visual elements and copy need to work together to create a path for your prospect to follow so they view these elements in the order you want to do what you want, buy from you.
Does your small business web site do this? Does it grab your prospects’ attention and then in less than 15 seconds explain to them why they can’t live without your products or services and motivate them to contact you?
If it does you are proably making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars from it. It it doesn’t work like a well crafted ad, stop wasting time and money and discover how to increase your marketing and your online sales with Creating Web Sites that Sell.
- Charlie Cook
