Posted By PC Hay on December 19, 2008
When times are good, it’s easy to just go with the flow when it comes to marketing your company, but when times are tough, it becomes critical to make it easy for people to do business with your company. It’s during these challenging times that your competitors are going to do everything in their power to grab all of the remaining opportunities they can find. It’s up to you to ensure that you earn as many of these opportunities as possible by making it easy for prospects to choose you over your competitors.
The first and biggest mistake most people make in their marketing is focusing on features instead of benefits. Perhaps your company sells quality cigar humidors and your marketing materials boast about their air-tight seal, exotic hardwood construction and Spanish cedar lining. While that is certainly important to a true cigar connisuier, what really matters to them is that these features provide the benefit of ensuring their cigars maintain the proper temperature and humidity, which is crucial to their flavor. Most people won’t “do the math” to figure out what the benefits are on their own it’s your job to inform them. Another thing you should know is that most people make their decisions based on emotion and then use intellect to justify their decision after the fact. Trigger the right emotions by focusing on the benefits and you’ll have a powerful advantage over your competitors.
The second mistake most people make in their marketing is focusing on the quantity of people they reach with their message instead of focusing on reaching the right people. If you reach 100,000 people and manage to convert 10,000 of them into customers, you have probably wasted a lot of the money you invested to reach them. On the other hand, if you reach 1,000 and manage to convert 200 of them into customers, you have invested your marketing dollars much more effectively because the first example demonstrates a conversion rate of 10% while the second achieves twice that. This may seem counter-intuitive because the sales volume in the first example is much higher, but when you focus on quantity over quality:
* Your sales staff will have to work significantly harder to convert less than ideal prospect, so their effectiveness, as well as your profit margin goes down.
* Your customer service staff will have to work harder to keep less than ideal customers happy, taking time away from your loyal customers.
* You lose focus and your core business suffers, resulting in dissatisfaction from an increasing number of customers. This can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.
The more precise you can be in targeting your prospects, the more effective your marketing will become. Rather than marketing your company as just another HR firm, you could instead market it as an HR firm that specializes in helping restaurants to meet their HR needs. Your marketing efforts will become more effective when you focus on a niche because rather than sending out bland, generalized marketing materials to prospects in various industries, you can send out marketing materials tailored to their specific needs. With this kind of focus, it also makes the decision easy when a restaurant owner needs to decide between your firm, which intimately understands their needs, and another more generalized firm.
Another mistake people make is confusing their prospects. Regardless of how complex your industry may be, you can usually distill the basic information about each of your products or services down to one or two pages. If possible, you should also offer three or four standardized packages so that your prospects can quickly see if what you offer is a fit for their needs. This will save you time and energy during the sales process by quickly weeding out the prospects who aren’t a fit, and giving the rest a solid starting point.
When developing your packages, be sure first to make them sufficiently different from each other. Second, be sure to structure them so that the value increases more dramatically than the price, which helps your prospects to justify investing in your more expensive packages. If your spa offers a level one package that consists of a thirty minute long massage and aromatherapy for $45, and a level two package that consists of an hour long massage and aroma therapy for $90, you won’t sell nearly as many level two packages as you could if you added something additional. It could be as simple as a facial, a manicure or even a small gift bag. The idea here is for the value to increase more than the price so that the logical decision is the more expensive option.
What else can you change in your marketing to make it easier for people to do business with your company?
Category: Marketing Tips |
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Tags: customer support, economic, marketing, maximize profits
