What’s your price strategy? Not only does your pricing impact your profitability, it can also support or undercut the brand you’re trying to build.
Learn why the average business can raise prices 10 – 20% without seeing a dropoff in sales!
The purpose of your marketing is to generate qualified leads.
But there’s a lot more to building an effective marketing system than a one-sentence objective may indicate. There are a multitude of different opportunities, strategies, concepts, and tactics that you can leverage.
As an analogy, consider the game of football.
The object of the game is simple – score more points than your opponent. But within a football team are many different players, playing positions with different purposes that serve the overall goal.
Every football team has an offense, designed to score points; and a defense, designed to keep the opponent from scoring. But even within each unit, there are many different smaller groups with different objectives.
On offense, it starts with the linemen. Their job is to physically hold the defense back, creating time and space for the quarterback. The quarterback must take the ball, scan the field, and throw a pass to a receiver. Those receivers must be fast, strong, and able to run away from the defense. At any given time, there are 11 teammates on the field, all very different from each other, with vastly different skills, each with different assignments, all working towards the same objective.
When it all works together, it’s fun to watch. But if any one person on the team fails to do their job properly, the team is compromised and the objective might be lost.
Your marketing is the same. There four main components, all serving the common goal of generating qualified leads, but in very different ways. If any one of them is underperforming, it’s hurting your business.
The four main parts are Branding, Referral Generation, Client Retention, and Cold Lead Generation. Below is a brief overview of each of them.
Branding
Branding is a concept that confuses many business owners. So here’s a simple working definition for you: Your brand is how your business is perceived by the outside world. Branding is the process of shaping that perception.
It’s defining “who you are” for the rest of the world to see and understand. Done right, it lays the foundation for your entire business. Branding includes visual elements like your logo and your color scheme, but it also includes your story, your unique selling proposition, your market positioning, your pricing strategy, and more. It’s your identity.
An effective brand positions your business as unique, memorable, and highly valuable. A strong brand attracts your target clients and customers magnetically to your business.
Referral Generation
Many business owners don’t take referral generation seriously – or at least, they don’t consider it a function of marketing. Instead they see referrals as something that happens organically as a result of providing good quality service.
It’s true that referrals can happen organically, but there is a whole lot you can do as a business owner to drive referrals. It takes intentional thought and strategy, but it’s worth it. At Spotlight Branding, most of our initial growth came through referrals from satisfied clients. As we grew into a seven-figure business, we’ve invested resources into many other forms of marketing, but referrals still play a key role in our growth.
As we dive into referral generation, I’ll share the strategies and techniques we have used to drive referrals – rather than just sitting back and hoping they happen.
Client Retention
Why are we talking about client retention in an article about marketing?
Because nothing is more difficult and more expensive than creating new clients and customers for your business. It takes significant time, effort, and resources to win new business.
It’s much easier and much more affordable to continue to win business from your existing clients and customers. Depending on your business model, that may involve moving your clients into monthly continuity programs. It might be selling your products to the same customers repeatedly.
Regardless of your business model, the reality is that it’s much harder and more expensive to win new clients, than it is to repeatedly engage clients that you’ve already won. And there’s a whole lot that you can do, from a marketing perspective, to keep your clients happy, engaged, and coming back again and again.
One of the most consequential breakthroughs that we had at Spotlight Branding was transitioning away from “one-off” services like website design, and instead creating continuity programs which included website creation, but was packaged with other continuous marketing services. Rather than getting paid once by a client, we are now paid each month on an ongoing basis. That’s a big deal.
Cold Lead Generation
Cold lead generation refers to creating new leads, from scratch, in the marketplace. This is where many business owners want to start with their marketing, but I consider it the fourth and final part of an effective marketing strategy for a reason.
Cold lead gen includes a wide variety of channels – pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, billboards, direct mail, commercials on TV, and much more. It’s a simple concept: you use some sort of media to generate leads, and when you figure out a formula that creates leads at an acceptable cost, you can ramp up your spend and grow rapidly.
But, figuring out viable lead-gen strategies usually requires a significant investment and significant amount of trial-and-error. It’s expensive and it can be risky. For that reason, until you’ve optimized the first three parts of your marketing system, I don’t recommend spending much money generating new cold leads.
However, once you’ve dialed in your brand, your referral strategy, your retention strategy, and you have the financial resources to invest… cold lead generation is like pouring fuel on the fire. It’s how you scale your business – fast.
You don’t have to wait for outside sources to designate you as an expert – you can manufacture your own authority!
Every business should have a blog. It’s a great way to engage with customers and clients, and it’s an easy place to begin manufacturing your own authority and building a stronger personal brand.
What can you learn from Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson?
In this episode we’ll break down personal branding strategy and explain how a powerful personal brand can bolster your business and help you make more money.
In my business, one of the major breakthroughs came when we focused our marketing on a specific niche – aka, solo law firms. That decision to narrow our niche led to immediate, rapid growth and enabled us to break the seven-figure mark.
Is it time for you to do the same?
It’s easy to get so caught-up in the day-to-day management of your business that you lose sight of the big picture.
Today, it’s time to fix that. In this episode I’ll talk you through a simple process for conducting competitor research. You may be surprised at what you discover!
How does your business stack up against the competition? What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do you differentiate yourself?
In this episode I’ll share with you the strategy that I used to position my business as unique and distinct from our competition – and show you how to do the same.
As business owners, it’s important that we learn and speak the right language.
I’m not talking about English, French, or Spanish. I’m talking about the unique language and culture that your target customers share. What are their fears, their hopes, their dreams?
When you learn to speak the right language, your marketing works better.
This is Part Two in our series on effective messaging. Click here for Part One.
Here are five key concepts to remember as you sharpen your messaging:
1) It’s not about you – it’s about your customer. Effective marketing tells a story, and every story has a hero. The mistake most business owners make is that the hero of their story is themselves and their business. But to create a truly compelling story and marketing message, your customer has to be the hero. Your role in the story is the trusted guide – think Yoda, Gandalf, or Mr. Miyagi – that is helping your hero overcome the obstacles, defeat the bad guy, and ultimately live happily ever after. One of my favorite authors, Donald Miller, wrote a book called StoryBrand which explores this idea in depth. I highly recommend it.
2) Focus on the benefits that your business creates, not the features and specifications. Apple does a great job in this area – their commercials never focus on the technical specifications of their devices. They don’t talk about processor speed or motherboards or anything technical. Instead they focus on how Apple products make their customers feel. Innovative. Cool. Creative. Resist the temptation to talk about how everything works, and instead focus on how your products or services are going to make life better for your buyers. Again, customers don’t want to know how the sausage is made – they just want to know that it tastes delicious!
3) Speak the right language. Remember our poor astrophysicist, struggling to explain the complexity of the universe to an average joe? They’re both speaking English, but it might as well be two different languages. At Spotlight Branding, we work with lawyers who often have a similar problem. They’re so highly educated and so focused on the complexities of their legal work that they sometimes forget how to talk to the general public. Most business owners make similar mistakes. You need to make a concerted effort to think like your customers and clients, to speak like them, and to write like them. If you don’t already have this ability, you need to develop it quickly. The best way to do this is to immerse yourself in their world. Subscribe to the magazines they get. Go to the events they attend. Watch the TV shows they watch, read the books that they read, listen to the podcasts they listen to. This can be the difference between your message resonating perfectly, or being completely incomprehensible to your target audience.
4) Paint a clear picture of success and failure. What good things will happen to your buyers as a result of your products and services? Will they feel better, look better, save money, make money? Will they experience new opportunities and adventures? Will they gain respect and status? Create more security and safety? What deep, emotional wants and needs can you meet for your clients? Conversely, what happens if they don’t hire you? Are they putting themselves, their family, their stuff at risk? I always prefer to focus on the positive, rather than the negative, with my messaging. But there is a time and a place for clearly defining the stakes, good and bad. Depending on your industry, you may need to spend most of your time talking about the disasters that could befall your customers if they don’t hire you. The appeal of home security systems, fire alarms, and most forms of insurance is entirely based on avoiding bad outcomes, and effective messaging will clearly make this case.
5) The more specific and targeted you can be, the better. Your audience is going to be more engaged if they feel that you are talking directly to them. I pay more attention if you address me as a Minnesota Vikings fan than as a football fan, and even less attention if you address me as just a sports fan. But even sports fan is better than nothing! If you already target a very specific niche, this won’t be a problem for you. But if your target market is broad, you may want to develop sub-messages for various demographics. At Spotlight Branding, we target solo and small firm lawyers exclusively. If we ever decided to pursue customers in different industries, such as financial services or real estate, we’d probably create a separate website and separate messaging to focus on each industry separately, rather than lumping everyone together.
BONUS: A Simple Formula to Create the Perfect Magic Statement
The struggle to clearly communicate what you do is more obvious when you’re out networking and somebody asks you what you do. So many business owners just don’t know how to answer this question effectively! Often, they know that they don’t have a good answer, which is why so many people get nervous about networking in the first place.
So here’s your simple formula:
I help [PERSON] do [THING] so that [GOOD THING HAPPENS and/or BAD THING DOESN’T HAPPEN.]
As a criminal defense attorney… I help people who were charged with a crime to fight the charges and stay out of jail.
A CPA… I help successful business owners pay less in taxes so that they can keep more money in their pocket and take better vacations with their families!
A basic budgeting app… Our app gives young professionals more control over their money and helps them make financial decisions with confidence and clarity.
Who do you help?
How do you help them?
And how does their life improve as a result?