How to get skip the deception and B.S. And Jump Straight to results.

Who taught you about marketing your business? Chances are you have been misinformed, mislead, deceived even.

Let’s face it. Most business owners follow a process that looks something like this:

1. Have an Idea about a product or service.
2. Do some research to see if people (like) the idea. MAYBE
3. Start producing said product or service.
4. Wonder how to sell said product or service.
5. A Yellow Pages, Bill Board, Radio Ad, or (insert your first ad rep here), shows up and teaches you all about marketing and why their service is where you need to be.
6. You spend money you don’t have from resources outside you business (business isn’t making money yet) on ads you were “SOLD”.
7. They get poor or no results. If your lucky they get just enough business in to keep the doors open a little longer.

Here are the problems with this process.

1. You have no clue whether the market will “PAY” for your product or service, and for that matter how much they’ll pay.
2. That ad representative knows little to nothing about marketing. (They’ll argue that they do til death). If they truly knew how to market, they would likely not be in sales doing a hard sell on you!
3. You have forgot the key factor in every business transaction. Being able to answer the REAL question. “Where is the profit in this?”

Let’s face another fact. Your in the marketing business whether you like it or not. If you have a passion for your business it’s likely in the creation of your product or service. You’ve likely spent countless hours perfecting it. But without a consistent customer base, you will quickly become stressed and discouraged about being in business.

So what’s the answer?

My quick rules to understanding marketing that gets results.

1. There is no right or wrong media, just right or wrong uses of said media.

2. You must be able to measure results! Branding is for the BIG & DUMB businesses who through money around to see what works and calls everything else branding. Focus on measurable results, track ROI (return on investment)

3. Create a system! Or you can use mine (It’s very Simple – Research & Plan, Take Action, Measure Results, Improve, REPEAT. )

4. NEVER LEARN FROM A SALES REPRESENTATIVE! They are biased and can not tell you the truth and feed their families at the same time.

Where to start?  How do I get real results?

The best place for most small business to start is to learn Direct Response Marketing and Copy Writing.

Who do I recommend as a starting point for learning to do it yourself?

Author / Speaker / Copy Writer – Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer

Personally I’m a member of their inner circle group and love the tips, ideas and information they provide every month. I joined through this link https://gkic.infusionsoft.com/go/fgf2/ronaldskelton/ and thought I’d share it with you.

BTW… That is an affiliate link. I pay for their Gold program every month and get great ideas, information and samples from it.  If I include a link to a product that I use and they have an affilate program, you can bet I’m using that link… Hey, I’m an entrepreneur not a charity worker…  

What I don’t understand is why so many of you don’t have a plan to get them.

That’s why I created 99Dollarmarketing.com

Make no mistake about it, just writing a plan isn’t going to solve your problems.  You must work a plan.  If you have to choose between writing a simple plan (couple of hours) and posting a few ads or fiddling with social media..  you’re better off tinkering.

Now on the other hand… If you want results and you want consistency in those results then you need a solid strategic plan.  One that is simple and focused so that you can efficiently work the plan.

All to often I come across small business owners that have ads in the yellow pages, ads in the paper, ads on the radio and when you really look and listen to them, they all communicate a different message.   Here is the problem with that,  it takes multiple contacts with your marketing pieces (messages) to take a potential customer from stranger to paying client.  If every one of your messages are different and there is no common thread to tie them together, you lose the potencial compounding effect.

You wouldn’t build a house without a foundation.  Yet so many business owners advertise without a strategy.

What’s in a good foundational marketing plan:

Goals – Understanding where you want to get.

Benefits – Defined & documented for future use.  Make sure you know the difference between benefits and features.

Target Customer Definition-  Demographics and  Psychographics

Niche – “How you serve your target”

Unique Selling Proposition- Why you rather then your competitor

Brand Definition or Strategy- What you want said about you when your not there  (so much more to this one).

Marketing Tactics- What methods of advertising and promotion do you plan on using.

Tracking Return On Investment (ROI)- What methods are you going to use to track each of your marketing tactics for ROI

Pricing Strategy- How do you set the price of your product or service

Budget- How much of your time and revenue are you going to dedicate to growing your business.

Now some will argue there should more more, less, or different elements in a simple plan.  This is simply a starting point for businesses without a plan and quite simply sufficient for most small businesses.    For those of you who need more then a simple outline.   99Dollarmarketing.com is a series of easy to understand video lessons, on for each of the ten areas above.

In our next post we will start on how to work your strategic marketing plan.

Hello everybody this is Sara,  Ronald’s wife.   As you can imagine you can’t be around Ronald’s passion for marketing and drive to help the small business owner without some of it rubbing off… So I wanted to share a very interestingintegrated traditional +  social media campaign i’ve just seen…

I was enjoying a candy bar (Crunch) and inside the wrapper is a promotion code, phone number (1-800-392-4456) and the message to call to learn more about the code…nothing else…so curiosity peaked,  I called! It was a promotion for new movie (Cowboys and Aliens). A guy with a deep southern accent tells you all about the promotion (ye-haw cowboy!) and tells you to go to facebook.com to enter code for contest.  So I went to the Facebook fan page for Nestle Crunch and registered the code.  That’s 3 exposures to one product in just a few minutes time!  Oh and I had to give up my email address to learn if I won.  Overall the promotion was funny, entertaining, and effective!

We all know that it often takes more then 10 exposures to your product to make it stick with potential customers, and this one candy bar gave them three at once!  Good job nestle! Now us consumers just need to wait until we get an email to see if we won anything…anticipation keeps us checking to see if we did, and if we didn’t? well you can always check out one of their displays, scan the QR code with your phone to get more entries or buy another candy bar! Excellent social media campaign…plus a yummy treat…oh, my results: Sorry cowboy, you’re not a winner this time. Darn! 

Hey,  This is Ronald, I asked my wife Sara to share her find because it’s a great one and I was surprised at the excitement she had showing me what she had discovered.

Here is my take on this.   Look at the accomplishment, it went from “Print advertisement” = the wrapper,  to telemarketing = the 1-800 call, to social media where they not only got a Facebook like but her email address…

And …  Wait for it. …

This blog post.  Right….  When I blog about something it post to my Facebook fan page, ~ 1000 fans, my Linkedin page ~1000 friends, my linked in group ~10,000 business owners, and my twitter account ~62,000.

That’s 1 wrapper “print ad”  that got:  1 call, 1 email address, 1 Facebook fan page like, 1 blog post shared with about 74,000 people  
I think this is an awesome example of the power of integrated marketing.

Tell us what you think.