This month I’m helping you get a big return on every marketing dollar you spend from now on. All too often I see business owners go to market without a strategy. They take an occasional ad in a trade journal, sponsor a little league team, buy advertising at the local chamber, put an ad in the yellow pages, or create a flyer or a direct mail piece. They try these various marketing activities for a while and when they don’t seem to bring in more business, they drop them and try another.
It’s haphazard marketing and it doesn’t work. Worse yet, it costs you money and doesn’t give you the return you should expect. You can and should expect that nearly every dollar you spend on marketing brings you more business and more profit.
Don’t go to market without a strategy. Over the next 4 blogs, I’ll walk you through how to create your marketing strategy. First, you’ll determine your USP, your Unique Selling Proposition. If you don’t know what makes you different or special, you have nothing to compete on but price.
Next you need to know who you’re marketing to, i.e. who your Target Market is. If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, how can you expect to reach them? How do you know where to find them and what to say to connect with them? I’ll walk you through how to clarify your target market.
The final step in your marketing strategy will be to create your guarantee. Don’t run screaming into the night over this! It’s a myth that customers will rip you off by taking advantage of your guarantee. Offering a guarantee increases your customers’ confidence in your product by reducing any risk they perceive. It builds trust. You get to choose the wording and I’ll walk you through how to do it.
All too often people try to go to market without nailing those key components down and it nearly always results in spending a lot of money with little or no return.
Determine Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
Your USP is the one thing that is truly different about you, or at least the one thing that you can promote as being different. Ask yourself, “What is it that makes us stand apart from the rest?” Once you know this, tell the world and tell it loudly.
A Successful USP Is:
- Truly unique
- Exciting to your target market
- Something that will get people talking
- Something that can’t be easily copied, or if it can be, it’ll be an obvious rip-off
Maybe your product or service has unique features that people care about. Maybe you offer attractive products or services that no one else does or you have a “special ingredient.” Your USP could be that you install and deliver for free.
If you’re a seafood restaurant, you’d be hard-pressed to stand out. But if you had live entertainment, free drinks from 5 -7 pm, and the best view in town, that would be worth promoting. One of my manufacturers received positive comments from a customer regarding their ability to re-engineer a product to significantly reduce processing times and improve the end product. It has become his USP and it really resonates with his target market!
If there’s nothing unique about you, people will only buy from you because of convenience or price, nothing more. You’ll never be able to raise your prices–if there’s anyone doing it cheaper, people will buy from them. If you don’t know what makes you different or special, how can you possibly convince a potential customer you are?
Next week, I’ll walk you through exactly how to create your USP. There are a number of questions to ask yourself and I’ll share a tool that’ll help you create your USP quickly.
If you’d like to get more of my marketing strategies, you’re invited to my FREE webinar, coming up on Nov. 7 at 12:30 pm EST.
In just 60 minutes you will…
- Find that “sweet spot” that your competition knows nothing about
- Use that “sweet spot” to instantly attract new clients whenever you want.
- Separate your business from all of your competition.
- Find out the quickest and surest way to become UNIQUE in your market and DOMINATE your competition.
- Learn how to get your customers to LOVE you and keep coming back OVER and OVER
- Discover how to find your niche market and watch your profits and revenue skyrocket while you work fewer and fewer hours
