How we deliver a marketing message is critical to the success of any business. In my post on developing a marketing system I said there are three critical components to any marketing system:

1. You need a product or service.
2. You need a marketing message to communicate.
3. You need a delivery system.

Today we’ll look at delivery systems. How you take that finely crafted marketing system and deliver it to your potential customers is vital to your success.

There are hundreds of ways to deliver a marketing message. On my website you’ll find a list of marketing channels that have been successfully used by others. Which ones are best for you?

In working with hundreds of businesses I’ve found that most only employ two or three of marketing channels. We don’t need to use them all, but we do need to find out which ones are the most effective.

Imagine that your business was on main street. Think of the marketing channels as doorways into your business. The more strategically placed doorways you have, the more ways potential  customers can find you and come in.

Now if the doorways into your business were only on the side and back of the building, think how many customers you are missing. Many just wouldn’t find you. Obviously in my example you would know enough to put a doorway onto main street. But in real life we don’t always know which marketing doorway is best.

Remember in my last post on developing a killer marketing message, I said the only way to know if it was an effective message was to test it. The same applies here. Test the different marketing channels to see which are most effective for you. You’ll likely have an idea of which should work best, but until you test them, you can’t really know.

If you’d like to read more on marketing channels and delivering your marketing message to your ideal customers, I’d highly recommend the book Changing the Channel by Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby. It’s a great read and will really help your thinking on this.

I know it’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it. Customers are harder to come by during this economic downturn and we must all learn to be more effective in our marketing or we’ll see our sales shrink and risk failure of our businesses. These are techniques that should always be applied, in good markets and bad.

Greater market share, growth in sales, and better profitability are there for those who do. What are you waiting for?

Track your results. What’s the point in coming up with what you believe is a great marketing message if you’re the only one who thinks it’s great!

I meet many business people who think they have a great marketing message but unfortunately their customers don’t. How do I know? Their sales are going down and they are having a harder time finding customers. People vote on your marketing message with their feet.

There are three marketing fundamentals you must always abide by:

1. If you can’t track the results, don’t do it.
2. If it didn’t work the first time, don’t do it again.
3. Never get married to any one marketing message or ad.

It’s all common sense really. Why would you spend money on something unless you knew you were getting results? Would you keep taking your car to an auto mechanic who never fixed the problem? Would you continue on a diet that wasn’t working? Obviously not, but yet many throw dollars at advertising, websites and marketing efforts that they have no way of tracking.

You can break all marketing or advertising into two broad groups – image advertising and direct response marketing. One can be tracked and the other can’t.

Image advertising is what you typically see from big companies. The focus is on the company itself, why it’s so great and why they are better than their competition. You see the billboards, magazine ads, and so forth. They promote their brand, logo and tag line. Very impersonal and not very trackable.

Direct response marketing takes a different cut. Here you are more concerned with what the customer wants. You aren’t selling to the whole world, but to a finite set of ideal customers for your business.

You present the benefits of your product or service, as they apply to the customer. You put yourself in their shoes. You show them what it will do for them, how it meets a need or desire, or solves a problem they have. The process becomes personal, you are helping them. It’s much more likely the customer will pull out their checkbook and buy from you. You solved their problem or satisfied their desire.

Your goal with direct response marketing is to get DIRECTLY with your targeted customer (be it in person, through an ad or website), and seek an immediate RESPONSE to buy your product or service, because you met the need or solved the problem.

You aren’t throwing up a billboard or hoping someday your brand or tag line will impact them to buy. You are going right to them, showing them how you meet their needs and solve their problem today.

Don’t let your small business marketing plan be a glorified business card. Those cards simply say:

• This is who I am.
• This is what I do.
• Here’s my phone number.

Nothing compelling there, yet if you evaluate most small business marketing efforts, including their websites, that is exactly what they do.

Direct response marketing says to the customer:

• I know what you desire or the problem you need solved. I identify with you.
• The solution is … (give not only the features but more importantly the benefits that meet the need).
• I’m the best provider of this solution (your USP)
• Take action right now to get what you desire or to have your problem solved.

Which path will jump start your marketing?

Next time I’ll show you how to deliver your marketing message effectively. For now, make a commitment to track results. This means doing away with most image advertising in your business and moving to trackable direct response marketing.

If you need help contact me or someone else you know who can guide you through this process. More sales are waiting!

Your marketing message is vital. Last time I covered developing a marketing system. Today you’ll discover how to develop a killer marketing message. To do this you will need to understand five things:

1. What is your product or service?
2. What are the features of your product or service?
3. What are the benefits to your customer?
4. What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?
5. Who is your ideal customer?

The first two are the easiest to figure out for most. You know your product or service and what its features are. The features are what the product or service is or does. It’s the third item that gets a little tricky. What the the benefits? Not the benefits to you but to the customer.

The hard part here is starting to think from the customer’s perspective, not yours. What is the benefit of your product or service to your customer? People buy benefits not features. It reminds me of that old saying “people don’t buy drill bits, they buy holes,” and it’s true. Unfortunately for many business owners it’s really hard to start thinking from the customers point of view.

One good way to start doing this is to use the magic phrase “so that”. Take a feature of your product or service, add “so that” and finish the sentence. Here’s an example: Our drill bits are titanium tipped SO THAT you can drill 60 percent more holes before replacing them. The feature is the bits are titanium tipped. The benefit is the last longer and I don’t have to spend money replacing them as quickly.

For each of the features of your product or service, try to come up with at least three benefits. It will help you with the next step, developing your USP. Most owners struggle with coming up with the benefits but it will change how you communicate with customers and generate more sales!

Your USP is what sets you apart from all your competitors. It is a concise statement of why your company is the one the customer should do business with. It’s what makes you special. Why is this important? If nothing sets you apart from your competitors, you won’t get any business.

A USP isn’t “we have the best prices”, “we’ve been in business for forever”, “we’re the best”, or “we are your hometown provider”. Nearly everyone says these things and they aren’t why customers buy anyway. If price becomes the deciding factor, then everyone will slowly drive each other out of business as price cutting becomes the only way to compete.

Once you have your list of benefits, go through them carefully. Start to see which benefits stand out most significantly. These will lead you to the development of your USP.

Back in the early days of pizza delivery Dominoes developed a killer USP – “Fresh hot pizza, delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed!” Think about the benefits communicated in that short phrase. No one was doing a good job of pizza delivery at the time. Their benefits of “less than 30 minutes guaranteed” set them apart from all their competitors.

I know that developing a USP is difficult, but it means the difference between mediocre profits and a highly successful business. And in this economy can mean the difference between success and failure. Take the time to do it. Get help if you need to, but don’t brush over this one.

I wasn’t going to include the fifth point, knowing who your ideal customer is, but I’ve found that too many business don’t know this one. You can’t write a marketing message to a concept of a customer. It has to be written to an actual customer to be effective.

Think about who your ideal customer is. Who are your best customers now? Come up with specific people. Then take these people and pull them all together to develop the picture of what your best or most ideal customer looks like. Once you’ve done this, make sure that any marketing messages you write are written to this person. You’re message will be best if it is written to a real person, your ideal customer.

Your USP is most effective if it appeals to your ideal customer. As the next few days and weeks go by, keep revising and improving your definition of your ideal customer. As you do you will be able to hone in on your USP and improve your marketing messages.

Next time I’ll cover how to deliver the marketing message, but for now, get to work on developing a killer marketing message. As someone once said, “the only difference between a $20 bill and a $100 bill is the message on the paper!”

The first step in developing a marketing system is to understand the process of selling anything. There are three critical components:

1. You need a product or service.
2. You need a marketing message to communicate.
3. You need a delivery system.

We know that most people spend the bulk of their time on their products or services. It’s what they do and they are comfortable doing it. But without a marketing message and delivery system all you are is an order taker. You hope that people will buy from you but have no organized, systematic way to bring them in.

Once you are in business and have a product or service to sell, you must think about what the marketing message is that you want to communicate. Certainly you’ll want to make sure propects know what the features of your product or service are, but better yet they need to know the benefits to them.

Often business owners only think about what it is that they offer, not what the benefit is to the customer. Let’s face it, we as customers don’t really care about the features as much as what the product or service will do for us. Our benefit!

Many companies may be selling the same benefit to customers. In order for your marketing message to be successful you’ll need to tell the prospect why your delivery of benefit is better than the next guy’s. We call that your unique selling proposition or USP.

Your marketing message needs to communicate both the benefits you will provide and your USP, why you are the go to company to get this product or service.

Now that you have a product or service and have developed a powerful marketing message you must have a delivery system. How will you get that great marketing message out to prospects? Here are some possible delivery systems:

• Newspaper ads
• Coupons
• Telemarketing
• Yellow pages
• Direct mail
• Radio promos
• Website
• Email campaigns
• Pay per click ads

You can check out a more comprehensive list of marketing channels on my website.

In this series on developing a marketing system I’ll show you more on developing a marketing message and an effective delivery system. For now remember that both are vital. If you have a crummy marketing message it doesn’t matter how effectively it is delivered – it just won’t be effective.

Likewise, the greatest marketing message in the world that is delivered poorly won’t generate any results either.

Can you tell me right now what your marketing message is? Is it focused on benefits and your USP? Have you tested your delivery systems to find the most effective ones?

If you haven’t given time to seriously developing your marketing message or testing your delivery systems, you’ll want to catch the next few posts to see how.

Marketing is vital to the success of your business, especially in an economic downturn. Even if your product or service is the absolute best in the world, few will buy it without marketing.

I was visiting with a client of mine and he said “how come there are so many people out there who know less than I do and yet their businesses are more successful?” It’s because those successful few know how to take any product or service and reach prospects better than others. They understand marketing.

Let’s face it, over the last few years, until this economic downturn, most businesses did no marketing. The average small business succeeded despite themselves. They were order takers. Their marketing plan was no more organized than someone with a blindfold on throwing darts at a target they couldn’t see. Let’s look at two definitions of marketing.

What marketing is NOT:

Marketing isn’t name recognition or brand awareness. It isn’t getting your name in front of thousands of people. It isn’t creating an image that you or your product are the best. It isn’t going to network meetings and social events to meet prospects. It isn’t putting an advertisement in the local paper. It’s not going golfing or taking others to lunch. It’s not having a website, a cool business card, or really nice brochures.

Yes, but those are the things that many believe are marketing. Trouble is, none of those things are really very effective. Let’s look at a new definition of marketing and begin to understand what it really is.

What marketing IS:

Joe Polish defines marketing as a “diversified group of systems that automatically deliver ideal prospects” to your business, and he’s right. These ideal prospects are people who are showing up already interested and motivated to do business with you. They are qualified prospects who WANT to do business with you. That’s the kind of prospects we want. But the key here is to have the diversified group of systems that bring them in with little work or selling on your part.

When you look at the definition of what marketing is not, you see many of those activities take your time and involvement. Wouldn’t you rather have a set of systems in place that market your business with as little of your time as possible and bring in those qualified prospects who are predisposed to buy from you?

In the next few posts I’ll walk you through some of those systems and help you understand how to do real marketing. It will energize your small business and bring you real success.

Marketing and advertising costs are often the first to go in a difficult economy. Fewer customers, fewer buyers mean fewer dollars coming in and the obvious choice is to cut expenses. Isn’t it interesting that marketing and advertising costs are the first to go for many a small business. Perhaps it’s because business owners think they bring minimal results and so no big deal.

Without marketing or advertising your revenues will continue to fall. With no effort to bring in more customers, especially when there are fewer customers to be had, the more quickly your small business will crash and burn. Maybe the thought is that the economy will rebound shortly and the customers will be beating your door down again. My advice – don’t hold your breath.

In a down economy the one thing you can’t eliminate is marketing. However, it is a great time to revisit what you are doing for marketing. Remember the 80/20 principle I discussed last week? Likely 80 percent of your marketing time and dollars are only producing 20 percent of your results. There is the waste to cut.

On the other hand, 20 percent of your marketing time and dollars may be producing 80 percent of your results. Here is the catch, do you know which 20 percent? Maybe you do, intuitively, but for most of us the only way to know is to test the results.

You should never spend even $1 unless you can know what the results will be or can at least test the results. What is the point of spending $10,000 on a website, advertisement, flyer, or other marketing effort unless you know that you will get more than $10,000 back in new profits? Don’t throw your money away.

I have talked to many business owners who have spent thousands of dollars on their websites and never gotten a customer from it. I have talked to many business owners who have spent thousands of dollars on newspaper advertising, brochures and flyers and couldn’t tell me whether they got enough new customers or profits to justify the expense.

Make the assumption that Pareto is right and the majority of your efforts are producing only minimal results. Then analyze and test those marketing efforts to find the small number that are the real winners and further capitalize on those while cutting back or eliminating the others.

The benefit? You’ll cut costs and increase revenues. Can’t think of a better combination, can you?

While reading The Referral Engine by John Jantsch I came across an interesting statistic. It shouldn’t have been a surprise since I see it in the lives of so many small business owners, but here it is: it’s estimated that two-thirds of businesses get more than half of all their new customers by referral. That’s a big deal. Most companies are getting more than half of all their business by referral.

If that’s true you’d expect the companies are diligently working at creating the referrals since it’s so significant. I mean you are … right? Good for you if you have a detailed plan to accomplish this, but reality is most don’t. Only about 20 percent of businesses make any effort to generate referrals.

We talk about online marketing, print marketing, advertisements and so forth, but one of the biggest success drivers in most businesses is the simple referral. Referred customers are the very best because they come in predisposed to do business with you. Someone has told them how great your are. They are ready to buy.

Given the choice we’d all love to have most if not all of our business come from referrals. Nothing else converts prospects to customers quite so well.

Over the next few weeks I’ll give you some ideas on how to drive referrals in your business. In the meantime I recommend you get a copy of The Referral Engine and read it. It’s a real eye opener about one of our best marketing tools. If we just sit around and wait, hoping someone will be referred to us, we will miss so many opportunities.

Here’s some ideas you can start thinking about. Is your business referable? Want more referrals, be referable. A business has to be worthy of being referred. Look at some of the following:

• How is your customer service?
• Do you treat customers with respect?
• Do you do what you say you are going to do – on time?
• Do you say please and thank you (mom said this would be important)?
• Is there some special about your business that gets people excited about doing business with you?
• Is your business truly excellent?

Start thinking about what you can do to over deliver on your promises to customers. Make them thrilled to do business with you. They’ll share that wonderful experience with others getting you more customers.

If you really believe you are the best, you bring real value to your customers, you’ll begin to ask for referrals so that you can provide that same great experience to others.

Marketing is a science. Yes there is some nuanced art in it, but it is a science with measurable results nonetheless. Are you using good common sense and researching what has worked for you in the past so you can duplicate those results in the future?

What do I mean? Here are some examples:

Do you advertise store promotions by email? Have you tracked which of these email promotions actually get opened and then clicked-through for details? Have you checked to see if those products actually sold during that promo period?

Do you have an e-commerce site? Have you watched traffic spike in certain months and then gone back to try to determine the “why” so you can do that again? Why not?

Did you have an unusual number of service requests after a particular mailing or advertisement? Did you even pay attention?

Did you run a Google Ad Word campaign in just one way, or did you try rewording the heading a few times and resubmitting? Did you track results?

Much of your marketing efforts are wasted wheel-reinvention. You have answers but you haven’t asked the questions at all. Because of this you are throwing marketing money away. Sometimes results are based on things you can’t re-create (like weather), but usually they are the result of something you can try again in the future.

Keep detailed records of your sales campaigns, your email promotions, your discounts, your advertising. Note those that were successful and any special circumstances that may have impacted them, and set up a calendar reminder to run the same or similar promo again in the future. Be careful though. Too much repetition and your customers will stop responding.

When it comes to small business marketing, you really cannot track too much. In the end it saves you time, though, because you are not reinventing your marketing wheel!

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I’ve relayed a lot of information to you about small business issues: marketing, branding, legalities, human resources and management. I think it is time for a summary of the key components you should really be sure you are aware of and practicing. You should be building a business and not a job and your business should support your personal dreams. Here are ten things every small business owner should know and act on:

1. What your USP is and why it’s important. If you don’t know what makes your business unique in some way and why customers should come to you and not your competitor, than how should they? Nail this down.

2. That you must have aptitude in addition to passion. Passion is important but if you are out of your league in terms of skills, your business may be sunk. Make sure new endeavors do not involve a huge learning curve. Passion, aptitude and USP are the ways to success!

3. That marketing no longer goes one way-it must be relational. Billboards, yellow page and newspaper ads are one way marketing. People demand more these days. Blogs, websites, video, podcasts, social media, in-person networking and exemplary customer service are the way your potential customers want to be approached.

4. How to use a video camera and why it’s important. Smartphones and tablet computers like the iPad are changing our world. Are you going to keep up or are you going to be left behind? Grab a video camera and tell a story. Get your nearest teenager to help with editing if necessary. But take this important next step.

5. How to incorporate time off to stay innovative. The first few years of starting and operating your new business were probably grueling and you may have set bad personal habits during that time. You must incorporate healthy habits including adequate sleep and time off to continue to innovate and thrive.

6.  What truly motivates employees. It is the rare employee in a rare position who is motivated by just money and/or discipline. Do you know how to motivate your team?

7. What are your calls to action? If a viewer of your website or printed material is not encouraged to DO something, they leave. End of story. Is there a newsletter sign up, a video to watch, something to encourage comments or a special promotion. Do you even know what a “call to action” is? Time to brush up on this!

8. How to measure and compare marketing efforts and why it is important. You have to have a system of measuring so you know if you are wasting your marketing dollars on a particular campaign or method. Don’t run one, run several and always measure their success or failure. Be prepared to try something different as needed.

9. Who should be on your personal success team. Your team should include a top-notch mentor or coach, a qualified CPA and attorney you trust. Additionally, you should have a strong relationship with your banker.

10. What customers want.  They want to be noticed, cared for and have one or all of their problems solved. That is really it in a nutshell. In what ways could you do this better? Always be looking for the answer to that and you will always be ahead of your competitors.

QR codes are everywhere, but if you are like many people, you haven’t really noticed them on all kinds of products and in various places. QR=”quick response” and the Japanese are the creative force behind them. Developed back in 1994, they are exploding in all kinds of ways. I recently stopped to look into a shop and noticed one of these codes on their window. With a smart phone QR code app, I could scan this (they’ve signed up with Google Places) and get all kinds of information about the store! Right there… When a QR code is used in this way, it is called “mobile tagging”.

While QR codes were originally designed to identify parts in automobiles, their use has been growing daily as an ideal partner for the web and smart phones. You can find QR codes on business cards, on promotional and marketing products, on physical property (as mentioned above), geolocation tagging is using QR codes and many companies are offering discounts to folks who scan their code.

How can you get a QR code for your business? It is surprisingly easy.There are several online QR code generators and they vary.  Kaywa is offers you the QR code image that links to your website and not much more. Stickybits allows you to print out QR code stickers (and offer your code on a lot of other products like apparel as well!) and incorporates social networking. iCandy allows you to generate and then track and view stats when your code is scanned.

Take a few moments and consider how you might use a QR code for your small business, do a bit of online research into other companies practices, and then go and generate one!

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