Online Marketing Changing Trends and Unchanging Principles
This next takeaway idea is changing trends and unchanging principles in online marketing and it’s also relevant to your offline business in whatever you’re doing
Changing Trends
The most common mistakes businesses make is this, it’s not the product or service you sell, yes you have to have a quality product or service, that’s a fact, you can’t sell rubbish, you’re not going to survive.
Most people think, do a good job, provide a good service and the people will come, that used to happen but it doesn’t happen anymore
Don’t Get Shingles!
Once upon a time, you put your shingle (sign) out the front and you might have put an ad in the paper, if you go back two generations, you didn’t need to put an ad in the paper, you just put your shingle out the front of your business and people just turned up and you slowly built up your business. I hate to give you the hard cold facts, but that doesn’t happen anymore!
Work on Your Business
You’ve got to work on your business, not in your business and that can be one the hardest mindsets to change for busy business owners, but very important for the longevity and profitability of your business.
1—You should be taking a break at least once a week, going away or just chilling out and just thinking about or working on your business, not in it!
2—And think of your business as a Sales and Marketing Company that happens to sell goods and services, easy to say but harder to do. But that’s really what you’ve got to do
I remember at one of the marketing conferences I went to in 2011, one of the speakers kept saying, “The money is in the marketing,” and I’m saying to myself, “Yeah, I know that.” The money is in the marketing, “yeah I know that,
but most of the business owners in the room did not realize the importance of what he was saying and in the end he was quite blunt and he said, “If you don’t believe that, well, get over it because the money is in the marketing.”
And this is absolutely correct., I can’t stress this enough, if you want to make a lot of money in your business you must focus on your marketing.
Seven Skills You Must Master for Online Success
1 — Clearly identify your market and your niche
2 — Create a no-brainer offer and remove the risk - one of the offers that we have with our Complete Turnkey Package, that is we’re managing all the marketing, we have a money back guarantee with the business owner
it’s about creating a no-brainer offer and removing the risk, the workshops I run, if an attendee feels that they never got one idea out of the workshop, I’ll give them a complete refund.
So, create a no brainer offer and remove the risk to the buyer, but also make sure that it has conditions that the buyer must comply with to minimize the risk from those that will abuse the privilege of your offer.
3 — Create great content to match the message to your market or audience,
4 — Create a great product
5 — Use the latest marketing tactics - even though the internet is growing at an ever increasing speed, it’s important that you keep abreast of the changes and I would suggest you team up with a Digital Marketing Agency to manage the process for you
6 — Value add, don’t discount - for example, if you discount that’s money straight off your bottom line profit, but if you value add, for example, a motel will sell breakfast and Internet access as extras for $xx
But if they offer those two services as part of the Room Price, in effect they are not selling the retail price, but their cost price which of course is significantly less than the retail price
Does it Work?
Yes it does, one of our clients is a Motel Operator and their target market was the travelling Corporate Representative
Who was the buyer? It typically wasn’t the rep on the road, it’s someone in the company that’s doing the booking.
What is their concern? Price and value for money, they don’t want the price to get out of control because if they leave it to the rep, the chances are they will book anything and choose extras, it’s not their money and even if it is a rep that has to pay for it themselves, they will be looking for the best value for money and no hidden extras
With this in mind we changed the meta description and title tag in Google (that’s the paragraph and heading you see in Google search results after typed something into the browser)
So we changed the paragraph to
“Motel in Bairnsdale, Corporate Budget Priced Motel, Complimentary Breakfast and Wi Fi all rooms Book Now”
The moment we changed it, the sales figures went through the roof because we answered their primary concerns right up and it got the buyer to click on the search result and then the website engaged the reader to navigate through the website, to look at all the rooms, read the reviews and reinforce the buying decision
In fact, they had 100% increase in bookings.
The online buyers were there, but our message was not matching their needs
7 — Measure and Fine Tune
We were measuring and fine tuning their outcome we could see that it wasn’t quite working, so we changed the message, matched it to buyers needs and the results kicked in.
In a later video I’m going to show you how to measure and fine tune your website and online presence.
Unchanging Fundamentals
The unchanging fundamentals,
1 — pain to pleasure, the love, greed, guilt, fear, pride are the primary drivers.
You cannot disregard them in your marketing and I’m going to expand on these shortly.
2 — build a highly valued product that addresses your buyer’s needs.
3 — find the buyers that are looking for your product and
4 — make them a no-brainer offer that’s 10 times the value - I’ll give you an example, there’s an engine head reconditioning company in Melbourne, the engine head is the bit on top of the motor, they were reconditioning the engine heads and apparently when GST was first introduced in Australia, I don’t understand the industry but the difference of the cost between a new engine head and a reconditioned engine head affected their sales overnight, their business was plummeting and on the verge of bankruptcy.
they called in a marketing guru who is a very, very clever guy, he came in and analyzed their business, identified their target market, which is mostly hardworking self-employed mechanics who trade hours for dollars, so they are limited in leveraging their profits
He created a no-brainer offer and a loyalty program for the mechanics, I think it was every 5th or every 10th engine head that a mechanic bought from them they got for free.
Instead of discounting each engine head, they gave away each 5th or 10th engine, the benefit to the buyer is they got a “FREE” one which for them was perceived as high value
the benefit for the engine head reconditioning company was
- loyal customers
- ongoing sales—the buyer had a reason to come back
- The cost of the “FREE engine head was amortized over the total sales to each Mechanic
Yes, it was a discount, but it was based on a loyalty based “discount” program
The business went from the brink of going bankrupt to a totally transformed business, they’re now one of the market leaders in Australia and I understand they’re now expanding in America
You’ve got to stand out from the crowd and not be another “me too,” You need to have a no-brainer offer that really makes you stand out from the “me too crowd”
5 — UpSell your existing customers more products, you have worked hard to build trust and earn their trust, so offer them more of your products or services
Diverse Marketing Channels
Changing trends is the diverse marketing channels that are available to and there’s YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon and iTunes and the list grows every day
So you can no longer just build a website and forget it, long term it won’t work, the market is changing and your buyers now have higher expectations, they’re wanting to watch a video about your product or service, they want mobile and tablet friendly responsive sites with clean graphics and easy to navigate and I’ll show you some of those little hints and tips in one of the future videos in this series
It’s very important you understand that Google wants good quality content relevant to the users search terms and that’s why I have been talking about matching your message to the market
Have you noticed when you type a search term in Google, a drop down box with a bunch of search results appears?
That’s what is termed as predictive behavior, artificial intelligence from Google and it’s based on what people like you are typing into Google and its predicting what you are typing in based on what other Google users are typing into their browsers
As you start typing that in, the order that they are sitting in gives you a clue to what people are typing in relevant to the initial search, it’s not an accident and it’s a great indicator for you to understand what people are really typing in
Plus, Google now wants deep, multi-page authority style websites, a simple one or two pages is no longer going to be enough
