Monthly Archives: October 2015

Marketing

How to Get Better Marketing Results – The Mind Shift


MarketingCommitting to change is not easy; it could be giving up sugar, working out, or writing a blog.  What needs to happen is a mind shift and learning how to change one’s priorities.  Once you accept the change, the results will start.  Without taking charge, you will never hit your marketing results.

ShiftIn baseball, we have what we call the shift. The shift is when the third baseman and shortstop shift and move towards the right field.  The pitcher now pitches the ball to the outside of the plate forcing the batter to hit the ball where 90% of the team is standing.  The outcome is typically an out.

I have personally found that if I want to make a shift in my life, I need to stack the odds in my favor to win. It may mean tossing out all the sugar in the house, giving up TV for a workout, or prioritizing my time better in the workday to advertise.

To become a better marketer, you have to incorporate the mind change and become proactive.  That means going to network meetings, calling clients, and increasing communications with past and future clients.  The marketing shift should be focused on solving customers’ core conflicts, not trying to sell them.

My father taught me that it is easier to sell to their needs, not to their wants.  We all have wants, but our desired requirements overwrite most of those wants.  This is true in business.  Show the client a solution to their problems, and they will listen.  Appealing to the clients wants only gets lookers, not sales.

My mind shift changes when I stop looking at a client as “How can they help me?” to “Can this person help somebody I know?”  When I did this mind shift, I found that I listened more intently to the client’s conversation, and listened for their needs.  This allowed me to connect with the client and offer a solution to their problem.  I found that looking closely to the client’s core needs allowing me to target my marketing better.  No longer was I solving all their problems, but seeking to address their core issues.

Did I win all of them as a client and make them a sale?  NO!  I’m marketing — which for me is the process of developing a relationship with the client. When the client calls to buy, that’s when I become the salesmen and take their order.  Getting an immediate sale is not the mind shift I’m looking to achieve when marketing.

Understanding the role of marketing is a mind shift.

 Like the 3rd baseman who finds himself in the mid-right field, the goals have not changed, its how we go about getting the results, which has changed.  If solving a client’s problem leads to sales, then the marketing goal is to focus on problem-solving.

Make the mind shift from sales to problem-solving, and your marketing ads will write themselves.

Marketing

It’s All About The Niche

Niche MarketingIn my early years of business, I first viewed marketing as a seasonal process and quickly realized that a successful business doesn’t stop marketing. It is a continuous cycle.

My solution was print ads. Let’s faces it that is one of the easy ways to market a business. Pay a graphic designer to make a pretty picture with your product, toss in some well-crafted text, and let the ad run for several months.

I’ve tried this and failed. The world of print media is much more complicated than tossing an advertisement in a paper. You have to know the readers’ demographics, the location of the ad, and you need a call to action that generates leads or sales.

I questioned myself. If advertising needs to be done continuously, how does a small business achieve its marketing goals with limited resources?

Several years later I found that to be successful in advertising you need to have a marketing plan.  Define who is your target audience. Is this a seasonal product? What are my customer demographics? Once I learned about my customer’s background demographics, a picture of who my target markets were developed.

Targeting a demographic creates a single target to go after. No longer are buckshot flying all over the target. You now are actively targeting a niche.

After carefully analyzing my entertainment business, I learned that I needed to niche market my business for entertaining at private events to birthday parties. I needed to go further. So I looked at the data. Where are my customers coming from? What is the age segment I am serving? Which gives me the greatest joy? Scanning my Google calendar, I realized that 1st birthday parties were the largest segment of my clients. I had found my niche – 1st birthday parties.

I learned that niche marketing is beneficial and profitable for small business.  I find that my website, copy, and marketing material are more comfortable with producing just because I can be particular on what I say.   I found that I spent a full day trying to make one advertisement work in multiple situations. I have seen that spaghetti web page that has no focus, and I struggle to figure out who is the demographic that they are trying to serve. I found my marketing, but apparently, they didn’t find their niche market.

Things I did to improve my niche marketing

  1. defined my audience
  2. defined my niche market
  3. became an expert and active in that niche market
  4. establish whether I could make a living off that niche financially
  5. I surrounded myself with other experts in that niche market
  6. committed resource/money to that niche industry
  7. made sure I addressed the niche’s core conflict