In the real estate world, there’s a phrase that is eminent to selling a home. This phrase is “location, location, location”. Your location alone can help you to get more new customers without pulling your hair out over marketing. I’m a believer that if you have a great location, you can really attract and bring in new and recurring customers on a daily basis.
Here’s an example of what I mean. I’m someone who likes to workout on a regular basis, and I would like to join a gym. Luckily, there’s a fitness gym about 5 minutes away from my house that I can go in and workout on a weekly basis. Without this gym, I would be stuck with dumbbells trying to find weird exercises to sculpt and tone my body.
I mention this because without this gym location, I would have to drive around 20 minutes to get to the nearest fitness gym. But with this gym right here in my small town, it’s a perfect situation with me. This is the benefits of having a business in a location that has a lot of people, because you’ll get more new customers.
So when assessing your business, is your business in a location that is easily assessable? Is it in a place behind the scenes that makes it incredibly hard to find? How visible is your business? If you’re in a place where it’s tough for people to find you, then you have to go above and beyond.
Put up banners in front of your building, hang up posters in the window display of your business, and you may even want to hang up signs on the edge of the road near your business. This is just more ways to get some publicity for your business outside of advertising.
With the right location, you’ll get walk-ins on a daily basis. Now imagine if you combine this technique with paid advertising. Can you imagine the results you’d be getting? You business could experience a surge of new prospects and customers than you can possibly handle.
Whatever you do, wake up every morning and put on your marketing suit. Have the intention everyday that you will do whatever it takes to make your business succeed, using a combination of location and regular advertising. When you rely on walk-ins alone, you’re missing out on a huge portion of the customers that you could be getting.
Your location should be considered as another marketing tool in your business. Along with this, you should be using techniques such as direct mail, post cards, yellow page advertising, newspaper advertising, and etc. This is something that you should be doing in your business if you really want it to succeed. Pull out all the stops, and watch as your business explodes.
Even if you’re on a limited marketing budget, you can still combine location marketing with other marketing strategies that will help you to boost your income. So get started today, and watch as the sales come in.
Do you feel like you’re doing your best to market your products and services? If so, then you should know that there’s only a small number of marketing techniques that will really help to push your business over the top of the pile. How do I know this? Well simply because I’ve tried almost everything in the book, but only a few of them ended up working well for me.
Partially, my math had something to do with it also. When it comes to marketing your business, you have to know how to do the math to make it work for you. There are many mathematical principles you need to know before marketing your products and services. These 3 principles are: The cost per lead, the cost per sale, and the average lifetime value of a customer.
In my opinion the most important figure in the list is the “average lifetime value” of a customer. This number shows on average how much money your average customer or client spends with you over the course of the lifespan with you. If this number is something like $1000 or $2000, you should have no problem paying $50 – $100 to acquire a customer.
For some business owners, this math is something that sounds too risky. But when you think about it, going into business is risky. You never know when your business will rise or fall, and some people feel that having a business is more riskier than having a job… despite the fact that many jobs are getting outsourced overseas.
So it’s in your best interest to know what the average lifetime value of a customer is so that you can structure your advertising around this math. Now depending on the kind of ads you are running, your numbers will vary. But math’s effectiveness is never in doubt. In short, all you have to worry about is how much it’s costing you to get a lead, and then how much it’s costing you to close a sale.
This will tell you whether you’re able to continue marketing while breaking even, or if you’d rather get a customer knowing that you’re losing money on a sale – but will eventually turn a profit when selling to them on the backend. No matter how you approach your business, you need to be able to turn a profit from each 100 leads that you acquire.
This will take some testing, but you should follow up on your leads at least once a month to keep them in the loop for your marketing offer. You don’t have to hire a marketing consultant or agency to run your campaigns for you. And with a lot of these agencies, they try to promote their business via brand advertising versus direct response advertising.
I won’t go into detail about what direct response advertising is and why you should be using it, but it’s something that you should definitely consider if you want to get on top of the pile with your sales and profits, and with taking over the marketplace.
If there’s one thing that you don’t want to do, it’s to continue to use outdated marketing techniques that don’t work for you. But part of it is not your fault. There are still business owners out there still promoting these ineffective techniques, when they could be using other techniques like direct mail to get their message out the masses in one large quantity. Plus, the lists are targeted.
If the idea of marketing makes you sick to your stomach, then you should know that a lot of people feel the same way as you do. But regardless of how you and other business owners think, you have to do marketing right if you want to make a killing in your business. And luckily, these correct marketing concepts aren’t hard to implement at all.
In this article, we will go over some of the most ineffective marketing strategies that you can do in your business. I highly suggest that you stay away from these techniques so that you don’t end up losing a lot of money in the process. Are you wondering what these techniques are? Great! Here’s the first technique that that you want to stay away from:
1) Cold calling
With cold calling, all you’re doing is finding a group of people who have something in common in relation to the product or service that you’re selling. The downfall of this way of thinking is that out of all the people that you contact, almost none of them will respond to you.
Most of these people are so busy that they don’t even have 30 seconds to spend on the phone talking to you. They could be eating a sub sandwich instead of talking to you, so you have to keep this in mind. Cold calling is hard and extensive, and really eat up a lot of your day – especially if each day is ineffective for you. My advice is simple: stay away from cold calling, no matter what the “gurus” say.
Here’s another ineffective strategy:
2) Going door-to-door
You often see this happen when someone arrives at your house trying to sell you a pack of encyclopedias, or a jehovah’s witness, or if someone is trying to sell you insurance, or if someone is trying to sell you a $2000 vacuum cleaner. Believe it or not, people still do these things even in today’s economy.
The fact of the matter is that you will get an incredible amount of “no’s” rather than “yes’s”. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if you visited 100 homes and none of them bought from you. This is just a bad strategy to be doing if you want to make more money in your business.
Hopefully you can take these tips to heart and start using them to push your business into the right direction. Don’t follow these ineffective techniques, they will only cause you to lose more money, and will waste a considerable amount of your time.
Most users consider their mobile phone number to be more personal and private than their email address, and are more careful whom they share their number with. Which is why they get fewer marketing texts than they get emails.
This question of trust can be a huge advantage when it comes to SMS marketing. Fewer shared numbers mean fewer businesses have these numbers, resulting in fewer business-related text messages being received by the phone owner. so they are less likely to be bored by them, and respond better than to an email.
This obviously means that if you plan to use SMS marketing you have to gain their trust.
So, the big question is, how do you get existing and potential customers to trust you with their mobile phone numbers? It all comes down to persuading them they will benefit by receiving special offers. Like email, SMS marketing does not convert well to a new, cold customer who knows nothing about your business. However, it is hugely effective when used to drive business to past and/or
Harvesting Their Numbers
How persuade them to give you their numbers, and contact them on a regular basis? It all comes down to getting them to trust you with the information. The two main methods are indirect and direct.
An indirect way to get the numbers is to ask for them for purely practical purposes: confirming appointments, vehicle service date reminders, receipt of an item they have ordered, etc. Customers will find this service very useful so a very effective way to get them to give you their number. But, and a very important but, if you plan to market to them too you will need their permission to do so. Otherwise you may stand accused of breaking data-protection laws, and be in big trouble.
The direct method involves getting your customers number explicitly to be able to tell them of special offers and promotions. This may be more difficult than the indirect method of acquisition, but does mean your SMS marketing is totally permission driven.
Have a form on your company website requesting visitors mobile phone numbers. This is an extremely effective method as these numbers can then be directly fed into your numbers database, enabling you to use in your automated marketing campaign.
Retaining Their Numbers.
To ensure your customers allow you to send them text messages you must be absolutely certain they are happy with the offers you are sending them, otherwise they will ask you to stop. This means that to comply with the law you must stop. Customer satisfaction is the golden rule to maintaining your permission based data base of numbers.
Another golden rule is to ensure that you do not abuse their trust by sending texts too often, making sure the offer is likely to appeal to them when you do. A couple of times a month is usually an acceptable level.
Be sure that you abide by all the data protection laws that apply in the country you are sending to. Different countries have different data protection laws regarding privacy and security, so make sure you do proper research before setting up a SMS text messaging marketing campaign. Do that properly and you should have no problems sending out effective, customer friendly and legal text messages your customers are happy to receive and respond to.