Next Level Marketing & Website Design Blog

Most sales professionals eventually learn that potential buyers start out price-conscious, but end up becoming value-conscious.  Value is the emotional perception of benefits over costs.  Benefits, in turn, are the combination of perceptions on price, quality and service.  The key to sales success, then, is to get the buyer emotionally involved by influencing those perceptions and to show the potential buyer why they are better off with the benefits and values your product or services offers.

We always start our sales training classes by asking WIIFM – What’s In It For Me?  The answer is not the features of your product but rather the benefits and reasons to buy.  The old adage is that a customer doesn’t come into a hardware store to buy a drill.  They come to buy something to make a hole.  Always start from the buyer’s perspective.

Next, we look at the cost-benefit ratio.  Since the purchase decision is based upon perceptions of benefits over costs, we focus on this ratio.  Where do we stand verses competitors?  If we are the low cost leader in the industry, we focus on this.  If not, we need to work on all those perceptions of value that the buyer may have.  We need to create as many reasons to buy from us as possible.

As we mentioned, the buying decision is emotional but often the strongest emotions are often based on past negative experiences involving service or quality.  It’s important to identify and draw these emotions out from the buyer. It can help move them off the status quo of staying with the product or service they currently use.  Ask questions to find out your potential buyer’s past dissatisfactions and show, better prove, that you’ll do better.

If your price is higher, help the buyer justify the higher price in terms of the value and benefits offered.  If you are in an acceptable price range, rarely is price the dominate factor.  If you fail to help the customer justify the higher price, price can easily be a dominate excuse they use not to buy from you when really it was the perception of insufficient benefits that was the real cause.

When you sell value – your best combination of quality, service and price – you will have more satisfied buyers than when you sell on price alone.  Even after a rigorous price comparison, buyers will rarely make a buying decision predominately on price.

Blogs are everywhere. Corporations, authors, industry experts and every day business people are using blogs as a valuable part of their marketing and PR mix.  Before trying to convince you that your company needs a blog, let me step back a bit and make sure every reader knows what a blog is.  A blog is a user-generated web site where entries are made in journal style and displayed.  The term “blog” is derived from “web log.”  They can be used for all sorts of communications but their primary uses are to express opinions, share information, and to have interactive dialogs on topics.  If you have something to say, and who doesn’t, blogs offer an interactive media format to express your message.  They are easy to set up and require no knowledge of coding by the content creators. Another important reason to start blogging is that blogging is an effortless way to build traffic to your website.  That’s right, the major search engines are looking for fresh content and rank webpages that are constantly changing, i.e. new blogs being posted, higher in rank than those that don’t change.  While this is not the only factor in determining your search engine ranking on searches, it is an important one, but search engine optimazation is a topic for another day.  The sheer speed of creation to interactivity with an audience and the inexpensive cost to produce a blog make blogging one of the most effective marketing tools yet created.

So Why Should Your Business Blog?

• As mentioned before, blogs can help you get better search engine placements. Search engines like blogs because they are frequently updated, have lots of incoming and outgoing links and are made up of words. Search engines look to match “relevant content” on webpages and blogs to the searches requested.  You can write about a topic on Monday and see it in the top 10 ranking on that subject a couple of days later.
• Blog software is so user-friendly that almost anyone can use them.  With minimal setup work by your marketing consultants at Next Level, you can post content, images, photos, articles and more to the Internet instantly.
• Journalists troll blogs for source material because bloggers often break stories before traditional media do. Posts in your blog can lead to increased publicity for you and your company.
• Blogs can build relationships and help bring in business. Blogs bring you closer to prospects and customers alike, who get to know you through your writing and are therefore one step closer to doing business with you. Most people prefer to do business with people like them.
• A blog can be seamlessly integrated into your web site’s e-commerce. That means you can sell products and services by pointing blog visitors to your site’s sales sections.

So How Have Other Companies Used Blogging?

Intranets
Blogs are great for Intranets that allow sharing of information within a company.

Corporate Newsrooms
Blogs are excellent for getting the official word out about your company, people, products and services.  What’s new?  Where is the company going?

Investor Relations
Blogs can be used to share public information to outside stakeholders.

Market Research
Blogs can be designed to allow for open feedback from and with customers that can lead to improvements in your company, products and services.

Event-Driven
Blogs can be short-termed and uses prior to events to communicate information.  For example, changing information about a nonprofit 10k fundraising race which your company sponsors or a seminar you are conducting.

Developer/Channel Partner Network
Similar to the market research blog mentioned above, blogs can be used to provide feedback from business alliance partners, suppliers and channel partners.

Industry Vision
If your people are leaders in your industry, blogs are an excellent way for them to express their visions for the industry and support that industry leader status.

Information
One of the best uses for a blog is to share information.  In today’s hetic world, finding information is critical.  By sharing information readers can use, you become a resource for them.

The benefits of blogs are many, the cost to set up cheap and the ease of use…easy.  For marketing, you will see improved search rankings, increased web traffic,  and quick adoption into the search engines. In the end, however, don’t forget the customer service benefits—any customer can appreciate honest, open communication.

If you want to grow your business, you must start by keeping your current base of customers.  In a multi-industry study by the University of Pennsylvannia’s Wharton School of Business, researchers found that companies who reduce their customer attrition by only 5 to 10 percent actually increased their profits by 25 to 75 percent, depending on the industry.  The U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs commissioned a study some years back on U.S. consumer behavior.  The results told us a lot about the level of unhappy customers typically within a business’ customer base:

• 96% of all unhappy customers NEVER tell the business.
• For every complaint received, the typical business has 26 customers with problems, of which six are “serious”.
• Of the customers that complain, between 54% and 70% will do business again with the company if the problem is resolved satisfactorily, 95% will return if the problem is resolved quickly.
• The average customer with a complaint tells ten people about it and 13% tell more than 20 people (here is where today’s social media can hurt your business).
• Customers who have their complaint resolved to their satisfaction tell five people about the positive treatment they received.
• Businesses where customers rate their service above average yield net profits on sales that are 11 times greater than businesses whose customers rate them below average.

These findings give us a great deal to think about. First, the complaints we hear are probably just the tip of iceberg. Second, we should encourage complaints.  Third, we should work hard to resolve them quickly to the customer’s satisfaction.

So if retaining your customers is the foundation upon which growth is achieved, why don’t companies do more to retain them?  Here is another important finding to support paying attention to customers – The Reasons Customers Change Service Firms:

• 3%    – Convenience
• 9%    – High Level Relationship Developed With Competing Company
• 15%  – Service/Price/Time
• 5%    – Miscellaneous
• 68% - Indifference

Research shows that most customers leave for indifference not price as many suspect.  If customers don’t receive the attention they believe they deserve or feel unimportant to your company, they will likely go away. 

Regardless of what industry you are in whether you sell to consumers or business-to-business, the customer is king.  Get to know them, know what they want and exceed expectations.  Make sure they know they are wanted and their business is appreciated or you may wake up with no customers some day.

I believe that everyone can do marketing.  If everyone can do marketing, why aren’t prospective customers lined up at my door? The answer is simple.  While everyone can do marketing, few do it well and even fewer in small and mid-sized businesses.  In my experience observing small and mid-sized businesses over the years, I have found some common traits that help explain why most people aren’t good marketers.  Here are a few of them:

Business Is Personal

Although marketing is a process, it is also personal.  It encompasses the observation of human behavior and the development of business tactics based upon the ideas generated by those observations.  Customers are not businesses.  Customers are people.  For example, you may sell to a large company but it’s the business owner or other people in the business that make the decision to buy from you.  They are the recipients of your marketing.  Always remember the human element.  Too many people approach marketing like a math equation.  If I do A + B the I will get C (customers). Yes, marketing is a scientific process but you can’t focus just on the process.  Business is personal and so must be your marketing. Focus on the customer.

On Again/Off Again Commitment

Are you one of those people who do marketing only when your forecast for sales shows a decline?  This is very common in smaller businesses or in businesses without a strong marketing or sales team.  Marketing is a 24 hour x 7 days a week x 365 days a year effort.  You cannot turn it on and off and expect optimal results.  Marketing builds upon itself if done correctly.

Expectation Exceed Resources

I had a business executive I work with tell me that she wanted to turn a $1 million information technology consulting firm into a $10 million firm in three years (without acquisitions).  Marketing takes both money and people to do correctly.  You can adjust the balance between money and people and the marketing tactics will change accordingly but you definitely need these two components.  The problem with the IT company executive’s comment was that she was dedicating very little money or people to marketing.  Her expectations were unrealistic given her commitment to marketing.  As a result she did not achieve her objective.  In fact, she fell far short and has now turned to Next Level for help. 

Start the year with a budget for marketing.  Dedicate the money. Dedicate the people to get it done.  In my opinion, part-time marketing people is a prescription for failure.  Base expectations for results realistically against these factors.

Talk to Much, Listen Too Little

To many marketing efforts of small and mid-sized businesses approach marketing from their paradigm.  Don’t believe me? Look at your own company brochure.  Does it list your products or services? Does it mainly talk about you?  Where does it talk about needs, wants and challenges facing your perspective customers?  I bet it doesn’t even mention their concerns.  It’s a natural mistake.  The most important person to us is ourselves.  As a result, we talk too much about ourselves and listen too little.  Our marketing reflects that imbalance.  We must turn the table in marketing and ask what’s important to the customers?  What’s in it for them?

Focusing Too Narrowly on New Customers

Most businesses focus too narrowly on increasing the number of new customers.  This is a mistake.  It is too narrowly focused and short-term focused.  Everything you do, the processes you use, the customer service perceptions you make, the image you portray to the community, etc., all have long-term effects on the ability of your company to attract, retain and profit from customers.  No, I am not talking about Marketing taking over the company.  Marketing, however, must look at every customer point of contact to find ways to exceed customer expectations, differentiate the company, and find additional revenue generating opportunities.  Marketing must look at better methods to ratin customers and make them advocates and marketing must look at new products/services and new channels for sales.  This concept is a little too complicated for this blog.  Just leave it to say that a common mistake is to focus marketing attention too narrowly.

Everyone can do marketing but not everyone does it correctly.  If you need additional resources or more help, check out our Resource library on our website.