Small Business Marketing from Charlie Cook

“Everywhere I look I’ve got competitors, from the large companies to other independent financial advisors like myself. What can I do to beat the competition and get more clients?”
Martha, Financial Services, San Diego CA

In 500 B.C. Sun Tzu had the answer; “Know thyself, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”

In war or business the key to success is to know your competition and understand the obstacles you need to overcome. Do you know who your biggest competitor is? Do you know who or what is stealing your prospects’ attention and keeping them from buying your products or services?

You may be surprised to learn that your biggest competitor isn’t the other firm in your town or is it the large corporation that sells similar products and services. If you guessed these, you’d be right that they are competitors but they’re not your biggest one.

Who then is your biggest competitor? Before I give you the answer, let me tell you a story.

During his first three years of high school, my son was not the student he could have been. All my explanations and entreaties about needing good grades to get into college fell on deaf ears. My wife and I tried discussions, lectures and everything else we thought might work, but we just didn’t have his attention.

Sound familiar?

The same is true of your prospects. Your biggest competitor isn’t one of the other companies that provide the same products or services. To start with, you need their attention.

Your biggest competitor and obstacle to growing you business is your prospects’ indifference!

Discover how to overcome your prospects’ indifference and generate more leads and sales >>

If your prospects aren’t responding to your small business marketing, you’re not capturing their –

– Attention
– Interest
– Time
– Trust
– Motivation to act
– Commitment

There are hundreds of thousands of people who could benefit from what you sell. Why aren’t they flocking to your door? Why aren’t you doubling your sales every year? Do you have the same problem with your prospects’ that my wife and I had with our son?

Halfway through his junior year, we took my son to see several colleges that were within his reach if he just applied himself. He liked what he saw and got excited about going to college (or was it just the idea of getting away from home?)

We got his attention by showing him the opportunities he could have if he improved his grades. We motivated him by giving him the information he needed to make the decision to work harder in school. The result? His grades went from mediocre to outstanding.

You can overcome your prospects’ indifference too by giving them the information they want in your business marketing. When you do their interest and motivation will soar.

Want to find out how to generate more interest from prospects and motivate them to buy? Use this simple online strategy to skyrocket your lead generation and sales.

Get the details >>

Use these six ways to overcome your prospects’ indifference.

1. Don’t just shout your name or your company’s name; tell your prospects how you can help them.

2. Before your prospects get distracted by another web site, another ad, or another task, grab their interest by making them curious about how much better off they’ll be with your product or service. In language your prospect would use, map out their concerns and tempt them with the solution you provide.

3. Your prospects want a solution. Use your marketing to demonstrate you can solve their problem. Giving away free tips, ideas or a test drive is one way to earn their loyalty and their business.

4. You want your prospects to trust you, so make sure they see and read great comments from your satisfied clients. Place testimonials throughout your marketing so your prospects can’t miss them.

5. Give your prospects a compelling reason to read or hear your marketing message, to contact you, and to buy from you today. If it’s possible to put off a decision, most people will. Include something in your marketing that will motivate your prospects to act right away, whether it’s an offer too good to refuse, or a time limit on an offer or both.

6. You wouldn’t expect a stranger to entrust you with managing their family fortune the first time they’ve read your name. Use your small business marketing to prompt them to email you, to call you, to get to know you and to trust you. Then help them to make a commitment even if it is for a first meeting or an entry-level product or service.

Your biggest marketing battle is to overcome your prospects’ indifference. Accomplish this, and you’ll attract all the clients you want. Do this, and you’ll be so far out in front you won’t need to worry about the competition.

Find out how to beat the competition and attract more leads and sales every month. I wrote The Insider Secrets to Attracting More & Better Customers and Creating Web Sites that Sell to show you exactly what to do to grow your business.

“There are tons of other people who provide the same services I do. How am I ever going to get more clients?”
Zach, Computer Services, MN

Whether you’re a computer technician, financial planner, real estate broker, copywriter, or other service provider, you’ve got lots of competition. There are plenty of other people in the same business going after the same prospects as you. Like Zach, you may be wondering how you’re ever going to get more clients and take your business to the next level.

One thing’s certain; you can’t expect to stand out from the crowd using the same marketing strategy everyone else does. If you want to transform your business, you need to first transform your marketing.

Imagine you raced cars for fun on the weekend. In accordance with class rules your car and everyone else’s had 75 horsepower and skinny tires. Further more every aspect of your car and driving strategy was highly regulated by these rules. Your acceleration and speed would be limited. Races would be very close and it would be tough to win.

Now imagine that the class rules were suspended and you dropped a 400 horsepower engine in your car, added big road gripping tires, you could modify it any way you wanted and there were no limitations on how you drove and, best of all, everyone else was following the old rules.

You’d have a big advantage. Your car would leap to the front of the pack and stay there. You’d bring trophies home every week.

Marketing the way everyone else does will keep your business stuck in the slow lane. Stick to a typical small business marketing strategy and you’ll get the same results. Want to stand out from the competition?

Stop doing what everyone else is doing and start using the strategies that help you stand out from the competition and get more clients. There are no small business marketing rules you have to stick to; it’s results that matter.

Discover what works to transform your marketing and your sales >>

Here are three ways to distinguish yourself from the competition and grow your business.

1. Target Your Market More Precisely
It’s a common marketing mistake to think that the more types of people you appeal to, the better. The opposite is true.

Your prospects are rarely looking for generalists. They want someone who has the knowledge and experience to provide the solution to their specific problem.

Be precise about the ideal clients you want to you serve. Define your target market by industry, by size, by length of time in business, by the problem you solve, etc. Of course, you want to make sure that your target market is large enough for your business to be highly profitable.

When you are clear about whom your products and services really help, you’ll attract more clients and you can charge more because of your specialization.

2. Position Your Firm As Experts
Your expertise and that of your competitors may be the same. You’ve all had many years of experience and are successful to varying degrees. So how do you stand out?

If you want your prospects to see you as an expert in your field, don’t expect them to seek you out on their own. Demonstrate your expertise and give them a reason to contact you.

Create a free, irresistible offer that shows your prospects how well you understand their problems and can solve them. Offer a free test drive, a free report on a relevant business topic, or a free consultation or estimate.

What are you waiting for? Why not find out the marketing strategies and techniques that will put you out in front of your competition today? Each day that you delay means more business lost due to out dated marketing. Discover the solution >>

3. Build Strong Relationships With Prospects
“Out of sight, out of mind.” Once you’re out the door, off the phone, or your prospect has left your web site, they’re going to forget you. They are going to forget you just when you want them to get to know you, trust you and think of you when they are ready to buy.

How can you make sure you have a stronger relationship with your prospects than your competitors do?

Stay in contact once a week or once a month. Give your prospects ideas they can use that continue to demonstrate your expertise and present them in a personal, engaging way. Your prospects are more likely to buy from the person they know the best.

Take Action to See Results
If you’ve been in business for a few years, you may have heard these three small business marketing ideas. Are you using them to grow your business? For many business people, these aren’t secrets or new ideas, but they have yet to put them into action.

Targeting, Positioning and Building Strong Relationships are three simple things you can do that the majority of your competitors, if not all of them, are not doing. Do these three things well and you’ll add more horsepower to your marketing and stand out from the competition.

Ready to put these marketing ideas and more into action so
you can bring in more clients and make more money? If you haven’t applied these ideas in the past it may be time to get an expert to show you what works and help you take your business to the next level. Start now >

Running your own small business or marketing department often means working long hours. Wouldn’t you like to cut back this summer, ease up a little, maybe take a few Friday afternoons off or get away on vacation? How can you do this and still keep – or build – marketing momentum?

You know that you could expand your business if your marketing was more effective, but you barely have time to keep up with your present workload, much less take on a whole new set of business marketing tasks.

How can you take your small business to the next level and work less?

1.Plan To Get More Done With Less Effort
Learn how to be more effective and efficient in marketing and managing your business. Start by taking time each week to assess your marketing plan to prioritize your next steps.

Take out your calendar and block out an hour once a week, preferably first thing in the morning, when you’ll give yourself a mental vacation from meetings, answering the phone, and email. Use this time to evaluate your existing marketing efforts.

Identify what to do more of, what to change and where to get help.
– What’s working and what isn’t?

– Where are you getting the best results?

– Which keywords are attracting the most prospects?

– Which marketing messages?

– What sequence of information results in the highest conversion rates?

– What follow-up strategy?
Etc.

2. Get More Attention With Less Effort
A common misconception is that small business marketing success is a result of plain old persistence. Most people think that using the same type of marketing message and advertising that everyone else uses will build their “brand” or grow their business.

Is using the same approach your competitors use helping you get all the attention you want for your business? Probably not.

Your marketing message may need a vacation, or even early retirement. Replace it with a message that clearly and succinctly explains how you help your clients. Prospects respond when you speak to their needs.

On average, my clients report that composing and using a marketing message like this increases the response rate to their marketing by 400 percent. That’s 4 times as many leads generated with the same effort.

Discover how to explain what you do and get a better response to your marketing >>

3. Generate More Qualified Leads and Sales with Less Effort
Getting attention is the first step in marketing; getting qualified prospects the second. You want more prospects so you can convert them to clients and increase sales, but you don’t have time to make more calls or write more emails or letters. But you can get more people to contact you and buy from you each month and reduce your long-term marketing costs.

Establish systems for prompting prospects to contact you. Then automate every function of your marketing you can.

I use a simple system of articles and newsletters to generate interest and stay in touch with prospects. To handle the 40-50 or more people a day who contact me, I have an automated response system to follow up with each of them.For people interested in my services, I have yet another system I use to determine the best follow up response.

Discover how to generate more sales with less selling >>

I leverage the web, related software and a set of proven systems to manage my marketing and my sales The result is that I can manage a continually growing enterprise with less effort. In the last 12 months, this marketing strategy has helped more than triple the number of visitors to my web site.

You can do the same by:
• Letting prospects know how you can help them get what they want,

• Using your web site to prompt at least 10 to 20% of site visitors to contact you,

• Following up each inquiry with a personalized automated response,

• Building your in-house list of prospects,

• Regularly demonstrating your expertise and the value of your services to your growing list of prospects,

• Doing all of the above using systems and automating repetitive functions.

Discover how to generate more leads and sales with your web site even when you’re on vacation >>

You deserve some R and R this summer – you can get it and still grow your small business with the above 3 strategies. Start by setting the time aside, making a marketing plan and a vacation plan so you can enjoy your summer and steadily increasing revenue.

Mike recently called from West Texas. He’d ordered two of my manuals and only had them for a few days, so I was surprised to hear from him so soon. Mike is a no-nonsense salesman with over 40 years experience under his belt. He told me that he’d recently signed on with a 56 year old company to help them ramp up their sales.

Mike sees a company with a great range of products that has barely scratched the surface of their profit potential. They’d made a couple of million in 2004 but hardly tapped into the market they could be selling to. What has been holding this company back? No marketing plan or sales strategy.

Mike bought the 15 Second Marketing guide and The Insider Secrets to Attracting More & Better Customers manual and less than a week later called to order Creating Web Sites that Sell. He’d quickly seen the benefits of the small business marketing strategy detailed in the first two manuals and realized that he’d need to learn how to use the company’s web site as part of his marketing efforts to achieve his revenue goals.

And he has set some audacious goals. Based on his analysis, Mike identified a potential for growing the business by a factor of ten.

Is your company like Mike’s?

Does your company have untapped profit potential?

Learn how to tap your revenue potential with the following two marketing tools.

Get the 15 Second Marketing Guide and explain what you do in 15 seconds or less.

Use this link to get The Insider Secrets to Highly Effective Small Business Marketing manual to attract a steady stream of clients.

Take a lesson from Mike.

1. Set Your Revenue Targets
Mike’s first step in his new position was to assess existing revenue, market penetration and revenue potential.

What did your business make in the last 12 months?

What level of market penetration does your business have?

What’s the potential for growing your prospect and client base?

What’s the annual profit potential for your business?

2. Don’t Rest On Your Laurels
Mike’s company is profitable; they could continue comfortably making a couple of million a year with their existing marketing. Or they could make much, much more with a better small business marketing strategy. For Mike existing revenue is a baseline, not the objective.

Is your marketing based on achieving the status quo?

Could you be making twice or ten times as much if you revised your marketing strategy?

If your marketing worked the way you wanted it to, how much could you make in the next 12 months?

Discover how to increase sales with your online marketing with “Creating Web Sites that Sell“. In it you’ll find a step-by-step guide to generating many more leads and sales with your web site.

Use this link to improve your Web Site Marketing.

3. Invest In The Future Of Your Business
Like Mike’s 56 year-old company, you may be just scratching the surface of your pr0fit potential. With the proper marketing strategy you could be making much more.

Want to learn how to tap the potential of your business?

Which marketing strategy and resources do you plan to use to help you reach your revenue objectives?

Even if you graduated from college many years ago, evaluating your performance on a regular basis can b e helpful. Each time you do you can use your grades as a guide to revise your business goals and next steps you need to take to achieve them.

Assess your business potential, set audacious targets and then get the marketing resources you need to reach or beat your goals. Who knows, you could be making ten times as much a year from now.