COVER CONTINUED ...
only look at today. Last year, we had a campaign that, on the surface, was kind of a flop. We spent $20,000 in marketing, and our immediate return was below our minimum number needed to redo that campaign. But within 90 days of the campaign, we had picked up not one, but two larger clients, and ended up with nearly $1 million in new annual revenue, with more new business still coming in from that campaign nearly eight months later. So many businesses leave tens of thousands to millions of dollars on the table because they simply will not invest money in follow-up. YOU CAN DO SOME MARKETING THAT IS STRICTLY DIRECT RESPONSE AND SEE GROWTH, BUT YOU HAVE TO ALSO NURTURE (AKA BRAND BUILDING). Branding is a negative word for many, but when you are nurturing, that is exactly what you are doing — advertising and not expecting a direct ROI. Nurturing/branding are part of business, and you need those components if you want to grow. If you insist only on direct response, you will hit a cap on your business and be unable to grow any larger. This cap comes much faster if you’re a local business. YOU HAVE TO CONSISTENTLY ADD AND TRY NEW MARKETING. In marketing, you build on the successes, tweak the failures, and you’re always on the lookout for something new. But NEVER cancel successful If you’ve ever studied copywriting, you’ll know that fear is a powerful motivator. People are always looking to avoid pain. The gurus tell you that when you’re trying to sell to someone, you’ll get a better response if you focus on people’s fears over their desires to gain. Humans are more likely to buy something if it helps them get rid of a pain point than if it simply gets them more of a positive outcome they’ve already experienced. This is why you see so many presentations that are doom and gloom. If that was my selling style, I may tell you, “If you don’t get a newsletter now, you’ll lose all your customers and be bankrupt!” If I could make you believe that (and, of course, the above statement is totally true, and you should BUSINESS TOOLBOX
your competitors are not interacting with them). If you generate the lead offline, you need to get all the info and also interact with them online. This is the multimedia strategy that is working right now. All the largest and most successful companies are using it. Amazon is now sending postcards and has physical locations. Facebook and Google both do direct mail and exhibit at tradeshows. Everyone who is having success on any kind of scale uses this strategy. Why aren’t you?
marketing to try something new. If you don’t have the budget to test the new thing without canceling even a moderately successful old thing, find another expense to cut that isn’t in marketing. If you have a campaign that isn’t working, and after tweaking it still doesn’t work, then you cancel and try something new. Never cancel because the next shiny thing or good salesperson is doing their job and closing you. WE LIVE IN AN ONLINE AND OFFLINE WORLD So many people are way too caught up with online- only marketing. They think it is cheap, easy, and the answer to their prayers. That is all BS. If you want to succeed, you need to have an O2O strategy, which stands for online to offline and offline to online. Simply put, if you generate the lead online, your goal should be to get all the info you need to also interact with them offline (in a vacuum where
You don’t have to listen to me, but ignore this at your own peril. If you don’t adjust to the truth about marketing as it sits today, someone is going to come in and kick your butt, or best- case scenario, you will tread water. Business won’t go down much, but it also won’t grow much.
– Shaun
CONFESSIONS OF AN ENTREPRENEUR
enough to get you to drop everything and beat a path to my door.
drop everything to get a newsletter started, so that you’re still in business next week), you’d do just about anything to get started with us and not lose your business, wouldn’t you?
The amount of power that fear has in our decision-making process is crazy, but I don’t want this to be a copywriting article. Instead, I have a serious question for you. If fear is
controlling much of what we buy outside of the norm, what else does it control in your life?
If I told you that you should get a newsletter
because it will get you more referrals, despite the fact that virtually 100 percent of business owners
This is applicable both personally and professionally, but I’ll focus on the professional perspective.
Seriously, think about it. What big decisions are you allowing
say they want more referrals, that isn’t
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