Is Your Marketing ‘Playing’ to the Right Audience?
What would happen if you went into stealth mode for a day while trying to market your skills?
Your mission: wow an indifferent audience of prospects while purposefully incognito and out of your comfort zone.
The goal: generate interest, traffic, and cash from an otherwise preoccupied crowd.
That sounds like a normal ‘stealth marketing’ day for an entrepreneur struggling to find and connect with the right customers. It’s easy to blame marketing, pricing, competition, and the economy. But we all know what happens when we play to the wrong crowd – under the wrong circumstances with the wrong message.
I want to take you back a few years to an experiment that Joshua Bell, world renowned violinist, helped stage as a social experiment. He dressed as a street musician playing for tips during the morning rush hour while giving a virtuoso performance in a Washington, DC subway station.
What happened? Continue reading
Not Enough ‘Ideal’ Customers? 5 Steps to Point You in the Ideal Direction
I make it a point to ask just about every business owner I meet. “Who are your ideal customers, and why?”
The responses usually lack clarity, to the point that it’s sometimes hard to tell what they do. Many owners seem to operate on a planetary scope, as in “we do everything for everybody”. Knowing how to pursue only ideal customers is common.
The hard part is believing its okay to exclude marginal prospects when what we really want is any new business. The conversation going on in the mind of the entrepreneur often goes like this: “If I get too specific and focus my target market and prospect base too narrowly, I’ll miss out on business and leave money on the table.” Sound familiar?
5 Steps to Begin Connecting with Ideal Customers
What these owners don’t realize is that by staying too general they are reducing their competitiveness, and success, by design. Reversing the trend always starts with a better understanding of the customer and what they value before leaping into more tactical marketing and social media campaigns.
Consider hitting the pause button and taking these five steps to begin to position/re-position you to attract more ideal customers to your business. Continue reading
Will ‘Collaboration’ be a Difference-Maker for You in 2012?
A question I hear often is, “What one or two things should I be doing differently this year to get better results?” Obviously there isn’t just one silver ‘growth’ bullet for all businesses. However, one sure fire strategy that most small business owners can benefit from is expanded use of strategic collaboration and joint venture partnerships.
What exactly does it mean to “collaborate” and what kinds of results can be expected? Recognize it as a ‘difference maker’ strategy for small business owners in highly competitive markets – which should include just about everyone. The benefits include access to expertise, resources, facilities, and tools that enable you to streamline, lower overhead, and achieve improved results for free or limited expense.
Getting Started and Assessing Goals
The first step is to take stock of your goals, with an eye to those that are a constant challenge to achieve. These are the places to look at for potential collaboration and strategic alliance opportunities because they are obvious areas for Continue reading
2012 Resolution: Get Focused — But is Revenue Generating Time Topping Your List?
Focus – or lack of – is a common challenge for many service business owners. Why is that? Is it too much business, too few skills, marketing chaos, or what?
I have my own sense of the root cause for many. Consider a business owner who is wearing the 3 big hats of:
- Operations and delivering on the primary service offering. This is usually why an owner is in business – to do or deliver the core skill and service.
- Management of the business. This is usually not the reason an owner took the leap to get into business, but is a necessary evil of endless paperwork, people, inventory, back office, and accounting to many.
- Generating revenue through marketing and sales. This is all about getting and keeping customers. Isn’t this the reason to be in business? Again, most business owners don’t go into the business to become professional sales people and they often view marketing as ‘costly chaos’ that doesn’t generate the desired results.
Managing the time grind between delivering the service and the marketing and selling of the service can be a huge Continue reading
3 Questions to Ask Yourself to Get Focused for 2012
The new year’s here and we want to start 2012 with laser focus on doing the right things to grow the business. It helps to have the proper mindset and approach to goal setting and ‘focus’ if you want to achieve a breakthrough. A good place to start is your comfort zone, and how it needs to expand to grow your business.
Here are three planning and mindset shifts that may help you focus on the right things to achieve that business breakthrough this coming year:
- What did we learn in 2011? As you reflect back on 2011, it’s easy to look at the obvious of what worked and didn’t, and what goals were reached or not. That’s a start, but it isn’t enough. Here’s the shift: ask yourself what assumptions you made going into 2011 about your customers, positioning, sales and marketing process, scalability, cash flow, and more. A glaring ‘goal gap’ can usually be tied back to faulty assumptions that need to be revisited. Continue reading
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