Posted by isaactobelen on Jan 17, 2012 in Business & Marketing | 0 comments
MARKETING 101
Here at IncreaseYourWorthNow.com we believe that in order for you to start demanding more, you need to be worth more. We also believe that part of Financial Literacy is knowing how to make money using skills you already have or are developing. You can increase your worth DRASTICALLY by learning a new skill (such as marketing). A skill that can actually make you a living if you commit to learning it. That’s of course if you like it. This section is designed to give you an insight on the topic of marketing. PLEASE NOTE: The form of marketing I will be sharing with you is called “Direct Response Marketing”. I will regularly post more detailed information about specifics on marketing on my blog, therefore be sure to check back. OK, here we go….
Marketing is one of my favorite topics. In my 3 businesses I am responsible for creating all my marketing pieces and campaigns. One of the reasons why I truly enjoy marketing is because, you can break it down to a science on how a specific group of people will respond to a specific advertisement based on their wants and desires. When you know this information, you can now sell anything you want. Learning how to proficiently market can give you the opportunity to start a home business, sell things online, sell things offline, or even start a new career consulting small businesses with information very few people know about. And guess what? You’re about to be introduced to this new and vital information for the New Economy.
So what is marketing, exactly? Marketing simply put…
Is delivering the right message, to the right people, at the right time. PERIOD. Anything else is just noise.
For the purposes of this site and blog we will be focusing on “Direct Response Marketing” . This form of marketing is used by most small business owners that have a limited budget and MUST track results. This form of marketing is the only way you will be able to compete against the “big boys” in your desired field interest. By becoming proficient at this you can climb your way to the top of fairly quickly by simply knowing what people respond to.
Just as an aside: The other form of marketing is called BRANDING. This is usually reserved for companies with deep pockets in which all they are interested in is creating a buzz or “awareness” of their product or service. Just to give you an example. When you see a billboard with a beautiful woman grabbing a man by his hair with a bottle of cologne in the corner, that’s branding. They are selling you the “desire” to be that man.
If you were to see an Ad for that same cologne where it says “$10 OFF with the purchase of $100 or more, good until the end of this month”. THAT’S Direct Response marketing ad. The vendor wants you to take an action based on his agenda.
What is Direct Response Marketing?
This form of marketing allows the customer to respond to an offer made by a vendor in a few different ways including..
- Calling in to get more information or placing an order
- Bringing in a discount coupon to be redeemed at time of purchase
- Submitting personal information in exchange for the information requested
- more.
This form of marketing allows the vendor to gauge his marketing efforts and results, by simply counting the number of responses to the offer he has made he can have an idea if that marketing effort is going to be profitable or not. For example…
Assume that you have a Sandwich shop and within the neighborhood where you are located there are 100 homes. You send out 100 coupons via mail and within 10 days you have 10 people show up with their coupon wanting to buy the juicy toasted sandwich you advertised. This means that you had a 10% response rate, right? 10/100 = .10 Now you do your numbers….
Lets say it cost you 50 cents to send 100 coupons via mail, that means you spent $50 dollars. That coupon was offering 10%off a $10 sandwich that you have in your shop. So that means you were selling your sandwich for $9. If 10 people came in and bought your $9 juicy toasted sandwich, you would have made $90 just on sandwich sales. Was this a profitable campaign? Absolutely. So now you know that for every $50 you put in, you can get $90 back. Now don’t forget that those customers are going to purchase am extra soda, cookie or anything else you may want to “UP SELL” them while they are there, which increases your transaction or purchase size. You have now created a sales funnel ( you can go here to learn more).
Now, in order for a direct marketing campaign to be most profitable, you must have these 3 things, no exceptions.
- An Offer
- Call To Action
- A Deadline
Going back to your Sandwich shop, let’s quickly create that coupon for your 10% off that we just discussed.
Line 1 & 2 The Offer :10% off their super sandwich
(This creates interest of your buyer)
Line 3 Call To Action: Bring this coupon to be able to save.
(This tells your buyer what he needs to do to receive your offer)
Line 4 The Deadline : Must come in before the date to take advantage of the offer.
(Tell your buyers that if he doesn’t act by X he will miss out on the offer)
You see how these 3 elements work together? You must create interest, once you have created interest you must clearly state what you want your prospect to do and finally you must state a clear deadline or urgency. Without this your prospect is likely to never take action. Most small businesses miss the mark when creating their marketing pieces. But you won’t, right?
Why Marketing?
In world where everyone has their guard up, creating an effective marketing piece can break the barrier between you the vendor and your prospect. This marketing piece can help education or pre-condition your prospect to trust you and eventually buy from you, making the sales process much smoother. If you have your marketing done right, the sales process ALMOST takes care of itself.
Looking back at the sandwich coupon, the person that decides to carry this coupon into your sandwich shop has “pre-sold” himself to buy the sandwich you offered. Now all you have to do as the owner is to make sure that his experience at your shop is the best he’s had. You create re-peat customers and referrals. That’s the power of marketing.
Marketing also creates leverage, rather than you having to do all the leg work to promote your product or service, you create Advertisements that do all the selling and telling for you. This allows your to multiply yourself as many times needed freeing up your time to do other things, such as servicing your customers and creating new opportunities for growth.
Marketing also allows you to create posture. When someone picks up the phone to call you rather than you calling them, or them walking into your shop, that changes the dynamics of a sale tremendously. You now have authority and are positioned to make the sale more effectively.
In a nutshell, marketing is your ability to create advertising pieces that grab your customer’s attention with “an offer”. once you have their attention you want to direct them on what to do next via a “call to action”. And finally, you want your prospect to respond in a timely manner therefore you must state a deadline or expiration date.
I briefly touched the surface on this topic with hopes to create more interest in you wanting to learn more and increase your worth by learning something new. I will be posting more detailed information about marketing in upcoming posts so be sure to follow and subscribe to be notified when new posts are made. The topics I will be touching will be… how to write effective marketing pieces, finding your target market (people who want, are willing and able to buy your products or services) and different forms of delivering your message to your buyers and much more.
Business Idea: Could you start a side business creating marketing pieces for local businesses that have no clue on how to do so?
To Increasing Your Worth,
Isaac Tobelen
Small Business Owner & Entrepreneur.
This is the first post of my personal development series. If you have looked and read around my blog, you know that I believe that personal growth will in almost all cases precede financial growth. If you truly want to me worth more, you must know your purpose, you calling, and be willing to share it with the world without shame. How do you discover your why? I’ll help you do that in up coming posts, but for now take some time to watch the video below, it’s well worth your time, you deserve this.
