Before you waste your time and money on advertising, analytics, conversion rate optimisation or digital transformation, here are six secrets that will give you the biggest breakthroughs in your business and marketing.
1: Have a Great Product or Service
Advertising great Joe Sugarman has said repeatedly that the product (or service) is the most important part of the marketing mix.
If you don’t have something great then what’s the point? Nothing else matters.
2: A Hungry Crowd
This ties with number one, and is a bit chicken and egg as to which comes first. There’s no point having the best pie shop in town if people aren’t hungry.
In other words is there a market for your product? Is it one that will sustain and grow your business?
Without these two, your marketing and your business are doomed from the start.
3: Connections, Channel or List
Once you’ve found a hungry crowd (market) you need to identify who the people are who make up this crowd, where do they hang out and what’s the best way to reach them directly?
IE: Are you connected to them? Do you have an email list or a phone list? Can you get one or buy one? Can you build your own? Are they on social media? Is there a way to reach them directly via that channel?
The money is in the list, is a well known marketing truth, so you must build your list right from the start and then constantly nurture it.
The connecting, targeting and tracking options available these days thru digital media make this a lot easier than in the past so you should be able to build up good list reasonably quickly.
4: An Offer They Can’t Refuse
You must make them an offer that is so compelling that they’d be mad to refuse it. We’ve covered how to make irresistible offers in a previous post.
5: A Unique Value Proposition
A UVP has all sorts of names but it is what differentiates you from all of your competitors. What makes you the best?
Why should your customers buy from you and not your completion? What is the biggest benefit a customer will get from you?
It must be a benefit that your customer really values.
6: Strategy
How are you going to market your product? How are you going to get it in front of prospects? How are you going to sell it? Direct sales, cold calling, social media, digital advertising, traditional advertising, events, trade shows, special promotions, incentives, free trials, free quotes etc, etc.
If you're going to go with content and social media, then realise that it takes nearly two years to see results. Contently and Gary Vee have all stated this. In Perth you can watch this video from 6Q mentioning a similar time frame.
If you want results straightaway then advertising and cold calling are your options, even though they are expensive and inefficient.
Ignore Them at Your Peril
Once you get these six steps right, the rest of your marketing should flow seamlessly. In fact just getting the first two right is often enough to create a successful business.
Not getting them right will doom your business to less than ordinary results.
Unfortunately too many businesses and marketers pay lip service or even totally ignore these steps.
That’s because they take work, hard work. In particular the creative and strategic thinking work and that takes time.
Most people don’t like to think, they want to get straight to the action and start doing stuff.
This is especially true in digital marketing, where many people want to start using and implementing all the latest technologies and services – otherwise known as “shiny ball syndrome”.
Avoid “Shiny Ball Syndrome”
And shiny balls are what many marketers are selling you. Resist the temptation.
Get the above six steps right first before doing anything else. Do them properly and you will be way ahead of your competition.
