Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Identify and Research Your Ideal Market


Before you can identify your perfect market, you must be able to answer these two questions:

·      “What am I selling?”

·      “Why is it special?”

Try answering this out loud, and as you do, explain what it is, how it works and what it can do for your potential customer.

Why does your product deserve to become the “best of the best?” In order to finally answer that question, you need to answer the following questions:

  • What is your signature product?
  • What does it do?
  • What is its biggest benefit for your customer?
  • What is its one unique feature?
  • Why is it special?
  • Who are your top three competitors?


Now don’t worry if you aren’t 100% clear on all of your answers. These questions will just give you an indication of where your potential problem areas are so that you will know where to start to clear them up. 

Once you are able to do that, then it’s time to target your market.

Start by analyzing both the primary and secondary sources of your demographics:

  • A “primary source” would be people you contact directly through polls, surveys, conversations, test samples – your customer; suppliers you might need; shipping agencies (if shipping is a consideration); government agencies you might need to pay fees to or deal with.  With primary sources, you do the legwork yourself.  You could also include dedicated forums in your primary research, if your niche is an online one and/or you are selling digital products, services, Apps or software.
  • A “secondary source” would be statistics sites like Alexa or Quantcast.  These two sites are free and provide detailed demographic information. If you study your results carefully and click on every link, they can be goldmines of data.  (Look for links like “Get Details” or “Show More” – and check out the sidebar widgets and menu tabs and sub-tabs for more options.)


You can also check additional secondary sources for more information about your competitors and ideal customer through:

  • Government publications and website
  • Trade magazines
  • Industry newsletters
  • Niche-focused magazines
  • Other sites such as Google Trends
  • Google autosuggest keywords that people have used to search for niche-related products with
  • Seeing what is trending on hot social media-sharing sites such as Pinterest and YouTubeChecking out authority sources such as eHow.com or Ask.com



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Thursday, March 26, 2015

Branding Your Business

If you are looking to have a strong identity against your competition, as well as establishing your signature product or service into your perfect market’s mind, then you need to pay more attention to branding your business.


Most people who undertake business branding for the first time have the tendency to throw themselves into the process a little too late.  Why is this a bad thing? Since their branding is imperfect, their understanding of what they were trying to do is imperfect.

Let’s look at one of the giants in the industry – Coca Cola. Until recently, when Apple passed them up, Coca Cola had a 13 year run as the “Best Global Brand.” They had an estimated $78 billion brand value, and world-wide they led the market with over 3,500 different types of soft drinks.

Now you may not be as big as Coca Cola, or be as recognized around the globe, but you can create a strong business brand that your target market will instinctively turn to.
By implementing the following steps in the exact order, you’ll be able to set up your branding correctly: 

1.  Identify your ideal, paying market through thorough, informed research tactics and techniques
2.  Target this market through each individual customer in the most effective manner
3.  Name your business or product correctly, choosing a name that is catchy, strong and easy to read, say, visualize and use.
4.  Focus on the key elements of branding to create:
  • Household familiarity
  • Brand consistency
  • Customer acceptance 
  • A unique edge over comparable competitors

     5.  Implement effective strategies, promotions and tactics; all aimed at a measurable branding      goal

    6.  Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and strategies, as well as your brand strength

    7.  Refine your strategies and focus, narrowing your brand target and increasing your returns

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Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Dialing For Dollars: Using Telemarketing To Grow Your Business



In a previous chapter I revealed several ways that you or your staff can increase your sales, appointments and overall sale opportunities by changing the way you answer your business phone. In this chapter, I will discuss the tried and true method of generating prospects and customers using telemarketing. In recent years, telemarketing has gotten a bad reputation because of a few bad companies misusing the technique; however, it is still a very effective marketing strategy when used properly.

There are three important parts to effectively using telemarketing to generate business. The first important key to your success with telemarketing is your list of prospects that you are calling. Your success using this strategy is directly determined by your ability to contact the right type of prospect in the first place. The easiest way to do this is to use your current customer receipts and surveys to discover all of the information about your best customers. Then you can use that information to compile a customer profile. After you have created a customer profile, then it is time to create your list. This can be done by calling a company like Infousa.com or Usadata.com and asking them to compile a list of prospects who match the same criteria as your ideal customer profile.

 Once you have a list of prospects to call, then your next step is to create an effective phone script. However, in order to create an effective phone script, you have to determine what the goal of your sales call will be. You can choose to write a phone script that sells your product over the phone or you can use the phone script to set appointments for prospect's to come into your business. After you determine the goal of your phone call, then you need to record or write down the transcript of a face-to-face presentation that you or your sales staff has recently conducted. This will allow you to use a proven sales script when you are on the phone with prospects.

 The last step in an effective telemarketing campaign is your ability and willingness to follow up with your prospects on a regular basis. When it comes to telemarketing, you must be willing to call weekly, monthly or even daily in some cases in order to have a chance to earn their business.
            
Following these three key ingredients will give your telemarketing campaign a great chance for success. Without using the key ingredients I listed for you, your telemarketing campaign will most likely be doomed to fail before you even begin. If done properly, telemarketing could be another tool that you have in your arsenal that can help drive prospects into your business.


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Wednesday, March 18, 2015

The Importance of Online Reputation Management (Part 3 of 3)


The Importance of Online Reputation Management

Controlling Your Online Reputation

Now, it is a very straight forward concept to go about monitoring your online reputation, but sometimes when you have let it go for a while it can be very hard to fix. You just want to act like the customer that is digging deep to find reviews about your business. Most of them will be in plain sight, and you don’t have to worry about anything that is tucked away in the search engine.

So you want to go ahead and search for reviews on your business and just take note of any of the negative reviews that you got. You want to make sure, no matter how old they are, that you try to interact with that customer and make them happy again. You just want to try to change their outlook on your company. But you want to at LEAST show that you care about your reputation by trying to fix things.

Once all of your negative reviews have been taken care of, you want to maximize the amount of positive reviews you get. So like I said before, giving the customer something in return is going to be the easiest and fastest way to getting tons of great reviews.

Customers are always asking, “Well, what do I get out of it?” This cuts that question right out of it, so they are almost forced to do something for you, since you went out of your way for them! Plus, even if you are paying up to $10 per review, you are still going to attract PLENTY of other customers to more than make up for that cost!

There’s always those business owners that ask me, “Well, can’t I just go online and make up my own reviews?” Well, YES you COULD, but… DON’T EVER DO IT! This is very unethical and it only takes one slip-up to get caught in the act. These review sites track your IP address to make sure things like this don’t happen and if they catch you, they will ban your business from their network for good.

Plus, everything you write usually looks about the same whether you think about it or not, so it would end up looking very suspicious even if you got these reviews to stick. We never recommend doing anything like this. Instead, you should just focus on getting your current customers to give you a good review.


As you can see, monitoring your reputation is a crucial aspect to your business’ success, and could potentially cause your business to fail if not done properly. So why would you let your business’ integrity be in the hands of a customer that you probably didn’t even get the pleasure of speaking with? I know I wouldn’t!


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