We provide you the tools with PosterMyWall, and we also wanted to give you the expertise to run your business like never before. For that, we reached out to Allan Dib, a rebellious marketer, successful entrepreneur and author of The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money And Stand Out From The Crowd, Amazon’s #1 global marketing book.
Over the course of this blog post series, Allan will take us through nine steps to create a practical marketing plan that works for small businesses.
This is part 4 of the ‘How to create a marketing plan’ blog post series. If you haven’t read part 3, you should read that first.
Now, over to Allan.
Making it rain
Today is all about the sales conversion phase of our marketing process. This is all about creating enough trust and demonstrating enough capability to motivate your leads to become paying customers.
And I don’t know about you, but for me, there’s nothing worse than an aggressive salesperson. I realize they’re just trying to do their job, but in reality, they’re annoying and more likely to turn me off than have me buy their product or service.
You don’t want to be using aggressive sales strategies to pressure prospects to buy from you or attend your community event. It’s a turnoff and winning them back is going to require a lot of work. So trust is a significant barrier to sales.
Thankfully, positioning yourself correctly is an excellent way to make sales happen more naturally. To do this, you want to focus on educating your customers and providing value. It ensures that by the time you reach the point of a sale they’re already pre-framed, pre-motivated, and pre-interested. What you don’t want to do is position yourself as a commodity competing solely on price.
Profit comes from how you market yourself and having a professional online presence goes a long way towards building trust and interest.
Remember that customers buy with emotion, not logic. Most are terrified of risk. A way around this is to consider reversing their risk. You can do this by providing an outrageous offer like a double your money back guarantee or a try before you buy. What can you do to reverse risk for your potential customers or members?
I want you to ask yourself, “What is my sales conversion process?” This is square 6 on The 1-Page Marketing Plan.
Right, so once you’ve acquired a customer, your goal should be to turn them into raving fans for life.
And this is step seven in your marketing process: delivering a world-class experience.
If you want to create a tribe of raving fans, you need to
- continually wow them,
- make it easy for them to deal with you,
- develop a sense of theatre around your products, and
- build systems.
But what do I mean by systems? Here again, I’m going to use PosterMyWall as an example. They have systems in place in their backend to ensure that they deliver excellent service. When you need assistance, there’s someone on the line ready to help. Once your creative is set up for print, they check it and fix any unexpected errors like typos. Their posters and flyers often arrive well ahead of schedule. This is a function of business systems (clear processes and checklists for their team).
Testimonials about PosterMyWall service:
So once you’ve delivered above and beyond, one way to add more value is to become a voice of value. I wrote my book The 1-Page Marketing Plan to give small business owners the exact steps they’d need to take to create a marketing plan for their company. You really don’t need to do anything as drastic as this, but what I’m trying to say is creating a blog and delivering high-value content is just as useful. You could also create short how-to videos or share helpful advice on your social pages. As long as what you have to share will positively impact your audience.
Lastly, you want to use technology because it’s going to make your life much easier. It’s going to free up your time so that you can focus on selling more, and the best part is, it keeps working while you sleep. It doesn’t take holidays or lunch breaks. Examples of technology could be online payment systems, CRM (Customer Relationship Management software), online scheduling and other platforms that make running your business or organization smoother.
Like PosterMyWall, many of these tools offer a free trial package or an entry-level option. This allows your prospect to try the product before purchasing. When you deliver value upfront without incurring a cost to the prospective customer it’s much easier for them to decide to buy what you’re selling.
Now when employing various types of technology, I want you to think of it as an employee. What are you employing each piece of technology to do? For each, the same way you would with an employee, you want to set KPIs and monitor how the technology performs.
The systems you want to have in place are your marketing, sales, administration and fulfillment systems (these might just be checklists for each of these functions).
For example, a personal trainer might want to share healthy recipes or one free workout a month – this is something their customers can look forward to and try in their own time. If you own a coffee shop, you could make a note to get to know the names of your frequent customers and their preferred beverage. When they walk into your shop, you’re ready to ask if they’d like their regular or something different, and this is massively important to consumers because it makes them feel special. It says that you’ve taken the time to know them and what they like.
Before I go, let me ask you, “How will you wow your customers, and make it easy for them to deal with you? What systems will you put in place to ensure your customers keep coming back for more?” This is square 7 on The 1-Page Marketing Plan.
In the next blog post we’re going to take this a step further – turning new customers to returning customers.
