Does your marketing suck?  Wouldn’t you like to strap on your mind control helmet and make your target market sit up and listen to all the great things you could do for them?

There are times when marketing feels like black magic…or maybe rocket science, but the reality is there are proven and well-understood principles of marketing that, if followed, will get the right people raising their hands and asking to learn more about your product or service.

It’s not a silver bullet – these principles are fairly easy to understand, but they can be difficult to actually put into practice.  The good news is that you don’t have to be perfect off the bat – most of your competitors aren’t very good at marketing either (just look around at a lot of the marketing targeting you these days).  With a little bit of knowledge and effort, you’ve got a great opportunity to stand out and take control of your marketplace!

What are these tried and true principles?  Let’s take a look:

1. Have several marketing strategies active at all times

Your target market needs to see your message many times before it even sinks in.  Running multiple strategies at all times will make sure that message is out there and effective.  Ideally, a mature business would have up to 10 different strategies running at once – which sounds like a lot, but several of them are stuff you need to be doing no matter what (website, networking, etc.).

2. Focus your marketing message very tightly

This actually means two things – you need to have a very detailed idea of who your target market is and you need to understand their needs and the problems that you’re solving.  The more precise you can be with the message and the target, the more likely they will respond to it.

3. Have a consistent message across all mediums

Marketing is all about consistency.  The worst thing you could do is run a shotgun approach in terms of your message across different mediums (which is what happens when you don’t have an overall marketing plan).  In order for your message to sink in – you need to be actively promoting it and you have to be consistent across the board.

4. Have a very clear next step

You might have a great product and a really enticing marketing campaign, but if you don’t clearly lay out what you want your target audience to do, nothing will happen.  Do you want them to call you?  Go to your website?  Send you an email?  Visit your location?  Whatever it is, make it easy and make it very, very clear (painfully clear).  Are you frustrated that you’re not getting calls?  Maybe it’s because you don’t have a clear call to action!

5. Track where your opportunities are coming from

Marketing can be frustrating and expensive…especially when you don’t know what’s working and what’s not working.  If you have an advertisement that’s not driving any sales, you need to stop spending money on it – which you can only do if you know it’s not driving any sales!  Conversely, if you found a winner, it might make sense to double down and invest more.  There are lots of ways to track things, especially with technology options, but you have to make it a priority and plan it out ahead of time.

6. Make sure your message is Dramatically Different from your competitors

The path of least resistance when it comes to advertising is to look around and copy what seems to be effective from your competitors.  Unfortunately, that just means you look like everyone else and there’s no reason to pay attention to your message!  If possible, develop a Dramatic Difference when it comes to what you offer.  If you can’t reach a dramatic difference, then do whatever you can to stand out.

7. Focus on your existing customers first

Your best chance of success is to sell to people who already Know, Like and Trust you – your existing customers.  Are there are other problems you could help them solve?  What could you do for them to either generate additional revenue and/or make them love you even more?  Give them what they want and they will reward you and say great things about you!

That doesn’t mean not marketing to prospective customers, but you should have a weighted mix of activities that include upselling and cross-selling to your existing customers.

8. Stay in touch with past, current and potential customers

You must have a list of all your past and current customers and you should have a database of all your prospective customers who are in your pipeline.  And with those lists, you need to actively stay in touch with them on a regular basis.  That could be a newsletter, maybe a card in the mail or a regular ‘special’ offer you make…anything that keeps you top of mind when they’re ready to buy.

9. Give your buyers a Real Reason to Believe in you

The world is way too noisy these days and your prospective customers aren’t going to believe big claims of how you can help them…unless you give them some proof.  You could start with Social Proof – testimonials from your raving fans will get people to believe.  You could also offer a meaningful guarantee that shows the confidence you have in your product or service – make it a no risk or at least low-risk proposition and they’re likely to believe it’s real and give you a shot to help them.

10. Make sure you can be found online

These days, if I can’t easily find you online, then you may as well not exist.  Even if your business isn’t going to sell anything online, you need to be found online for the sake of credibility.  To most people, you don’t have a real business if they can’t find you on Google.  A professional, clean website is the starting point, but you should also have some presence on Social Media and you should understand how local search works (i.e. Google Places, Yahoo local, etc.).

Are you controlling your marketing?  Score yourself on how many of these 10 that you’re doing well with.  If you’re not doing well with at least 5 of these, it’s likely your marketing sucks!  Now, what would you like to do about it?  If you’d like a 3rd party perspective on how to get better from a trusted, licensed professional business coach – contact me for a free consultation.

Did I miss anything?  What marketing principles are you struggling with?  I’d love to hear your thoughts, share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

The Cloud…it’s everywhere!  You can’t walk down the street, check your twitter feed or shop (at Amazon) without hearing about the Cloud!  The Cloud of course is cloud based computing…basically it’s the ability to do stuff online without knowing the physical location of where all that computing magic is happening.

Cloud capabilities can include services (Google Apps is probably the most well known), data storage (I previously told you about Dropbox) and Entertainment (Netflix anyone?).  The Cloud is getting bigger every day and it’s opening up a bunch of amazing opportunities.

Check out these 2 really cool, cloud powered applications that will really rock your business productivity!

Free and Simple Online Meetings

First up is Join.me – a clear cut, simple screen sharing tool.  Here’s a description from their site:

So what is join.me exactly? It’s an impromptu online meeting space that happens wherever, whenever. It’s getting a second or third pair of eyes on your presentation from across the hall or across the continent. It’s instant screen sharing with anyone or everyone to get stuff done, quickly.

It supports up to 250 people at once, allows you to take control of a remote computer (think tech support) and doesn’t require a big download and application to stay on your desktop.  All that and it’s free and easy to use!

Even cooler – you can also use Join.me on your mobile device, letting you check out a new slide, document or whatever while you’re not at your desk!

File Sharing, backup and more

The other cool tool to check out is Egnyte.com.  Egnyte is an online file server, online storage, an FTP site (File Transfer Protocol), a file sharing tool and an online backup solution.  And it’s all in the cloud (no hardware needed) and it’s built for business!

I learned about Egnyte from a client of mine who needs to share lots of files with lots of different clients in a very secure and specific way.  A year ago, she would have needed to buy an expensive server and get it set up and maintained by a professional.  She was expecting to pay several thousand dollars to solve this problem

Instead she’s paying less than $50 /month and she gets a complete and fast backup solution as well!  It’s convenient, it’s fast, you can access all of your stuff (and all of your clients can access their stuff) from anywhere, all of your employees can be working from the most up to date document, you have built in version control and you don’t have to worry about a hardware crash losing stuff that can’t be replaced!

If you’re not sure how you’d set up Egnyte (it can be pretty tricky), you can contact my friend Mike Hill at MicroNetKC – he’s a local reseller and has helped other folks get it configured.

It’s pretty amazing what’s possible these days!

What cool cloud stuff have you seen lately?  Share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Sales is the lifeblood of small business success.  You can have the best product, the best service in the world, but without closing a sale, it doesn’t mean anything.  Unfortunately it can be difficult to get that sale closed, people may like to buy, but they don’t like to be sold.

With that in mind, there is one thing that you can do that will greatly increase your chances for selling success.  It’s counterintuitive and it can be really difficult to pull off, especially if you have a lot riding on closing the deal.  But it will work for any industry and any selling situation and it doesn’t really matter what your sales technique might be.

What’s the one thing that can make such a big difference?

It’s simple – You have believe and act like you don’t actually need the sale!

This came up the other day when I was talking to a friend of mine who had recently been referred for some work.  Unfortunately it really wasn’t the right kind of work and it was pretty clear that the potential buyer was going to be high maintenance.  Since it was a referral from a friend, he agreed to at least meet with the buyer for an initial discussion.

Knowing up front that he didn’t really want the work, he purposely tried to discourage the buyer from moving forward, letting them know he was kind of expensive – there were other, cheaper opportunities out there or that they might want to consider going a completely different direction.

Then a funny thing happened – he discovered that every time he tried to discourage the sale, the buyer became more energized and convinced that he was the help they needed!  In the end, my friend agreed to do the work and even charged a slight premium over normal rates (he could have charged more, but didn’t since it was a friend of a friend).

He didn’t need the sale and actually didn’t even want the sale – and yet the customer ended up closing themselves despite his pushback.  Why would that happen?

There are actually a couple of key reasons why this works:

1. You are in a position of power….

Think about the situation – you don’t need to make the sale, you don’t really care if it happens or not and that gives you a lot of control over the situation.  Additionally it gives you a lot of confidence – which makes you very attractive.  Everyone wants to hang out with the confident person who has it all going on!  Because you don’t need anything, you get to dictate the terms!

2. You using the Reverse Selling technique…

Whether you realize it or not, you are using a technique that David Sandler called Reverse Selling.  This Sandler technique is all about purposely pushing your prospective buyer away from the sale – here’s a good example from SitePoint on Reverse Selling.

This process actually does a couple of things for you – it makes you drastically different than most sales people who are anxiously trying to close the sale and the psychology of the approach allows the customer to sell themselves – here’s some more detail from an article by Andrew Wall:  You Can’t Sell Anybody Anything.

Of course this can work really well if you don’t actually need or want the work.  The trick is can you get into that kind of mindset when you DO really want the work?  It’s not easy and it takes some practice, but it can be done.

What do you think?  Have you ever used a reverse sell?  On purpose or accidently?  You probably don’t want to share your thoughts on this – but if you do, leave a comment below…or not…it doesn’t matter to me. 

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Sometimes it can really help to look at things upside down…or backwards if you want to find some answers!  The change in perspective generates a lot of ideas and be a valuable tool.

I’m talking about Reverse Brainstorming – a simple and powerful way to spark ideas that might get overlooked if you were coming up with a list of things you could do. 

The process is simple – isolate a problem that you’d like to solve…in the article above they used the example of ‘How can we improve patient satisfaction’.  Then you simply reverse the idea and brainstorm possible answers on ‘How can we make patient satisfaction worse?.

The reversal opens up all sorts of possibilities and often puts you closer to the situation.  Let’s try a different example hits most small business owners:  “How do I get more effective marketing”?

We’ll start by reversing the idea:

“How can I make my marketing less effective?”

Here are just a few ideas…unfortunately most of these are things I’ve seen with actual businesses – I imagine you could come up with a lot more!

• Be difficult to find online.
• Run marketing activities on a really inconsistent schedule…do it steadily for a few weeks and then stop for a month or two.
• Make sure your marketing talks all about how great you are…
• Don’t give the potential client any reason to follow up.
• Make it a challenging puzzle for the prospective client to figure out what the product or service is and who you are.

This is obviously an incomplete list – there are a lot of ways to be less effective when it comes to marketing, but it’s a pretty good starting point.

The next step is to look at the ideas that resonate, even a little and reverse them back into potential solutions.  This works especially well if you have a couple of people to bounce ideas with.

Example 1 – Be difficult to find online

Be difficult to find online is an easy reversal into ‘make it easy to be found online’.  Studies have shown that 98% of buyers go online to search for solutions for problems – if you can’t be found on those searches…then you don’t exist…and you’re not going to land any new clients! 

That doesn’t mean you need to build a $20,000 website and go all in for expensive Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, but you do need to understand who might be looking for you and what it would take to at least be a consideration when they’re searching.  Look into things like local search (here’s another good guide to local search) and the important basics of Search Engine Optimization.  There are a lot of effective things you can do that don’t cost that much money but can generate a great return.

Example 2 – Don’t give the potential client any reason to follow up

Sadly the examples of marketing materials out there that don’t give potential clients any reason to follow up are everywhere.  Open up a local paper or a magazine and I can guarantee you’ll find a ‘So What’ ad in the first couple that you look at. 

A lot of business owners are sold on the idea of ‘Getting their name out there’ as being useful in some way – but the reality is that unless you’ve got the advertising budget of Pepsi…or Budweiser…name recognition isn’t worth much and certainly doesn’t drive sales.

Let’s reverse it – “Give the potential client a clear reason to follow up”.  If you’re spending money on advertising, what outcome do you want?  Obviously you want more customers, but realistically, what’s the next step that you want that potential client to take?  Maybe you want them to give you a call.  Maybe you want them to go onto your website and download a report (giving you their email address and approval to market to them further).  Maybe you want them to try out a discounted or sample size of your product.

What ever the case is, once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want them to do as a result of the ad – then construct the message around convincing them to do that very thing.  Give them a strong call to action:  “Tired of feeling overwhelmed with your business and not making the kind of money you know you can make?  Contact Shawn today for a free consultation!” 

Not only do you need to be clear on what you want them to do, give them a reason to do it and make it exceedingly easy for them to follow through!

What could you turn upside down in your business?

Reverse Brainstorming works best with a small group, but you could do it on your own as well.  What issue that you’re facing would work really well with this process?  Share your thoughts below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

The world’s a pretty complicated place right now.  Politics are complicated, technology (although exciting) is complicated…business is complicated – but it doesn’t have to be.

I’m working with a couple of different clients on strategic planning and if we’re not careful it’s really easy to get bogged down into a lot of complications, to lose the message, to spend a ton of time and walk out with a plan or an idea that no one is going to really ‘get’ or be able to execute on.

Instead I propose that we consciously simplify.  Take a slow, deep breath…hold it for a few counts and then slowly let it out.  Do that again.  Focus on a simple streamlined approach in your business.

What would a simple approach do for you?  Think it would make a difference?  Here are the keys to the simple approach:  Simple is clear, simple is not easy and simple gets done.

Simple is clear

Communication is all about getting a message, an idea, from one person to another.  It’s not much of a leap to say that the more complicated the message, the less likely it is to be communicated effectively.  (ever played the ‘telephone’ game as a kid?).

On the flip side, a simple idea is quickly grasped.  It’s clear, it’s easy to share and people get it right away.

I really love this short video / article from Dan Heath and FastCompany on How to Write a Mission Statement that Doesn’t Suck!

He completely nails the complicating spiral which leads to an end statement that’s hard to understand and not effective.

Question:  Can you cut to the quick on what you do in your business and make it simple enough to put on a T-Shirt?

Simple is not easy

One of the reasons people tend to complicate things is because they don’t want to be perceived as trivial.  The reality is that the simplest ideas are usually the most effective and even though they’re simple, they’re not always easy to pull off.

Take iTunes as an example – it was built because people wanted to buy just the songs they wanted, when they wanted them.  It’s a simple idea…but to do it right required creating an entirely new business model and completely changed the music industry (and is changing software development in the App space as well).

Question:  What do your customers want that you could provide in the simplest way?

Simple gets done

The biggest drawback to complicated planning is that it’s very easy for things to get lost in all of the moving parts.  There are times when you need extremely complex plans, when you need a project management specialist and a waterfall plan that’s 1000 lines long.  But those are the plans that have a high rate of failure.

As a small business owner, you don’t have the resources or the time to handle very many failures in your business.

You need simple solutions.  You need the clarity of having no more than 5 key priorities at any given time so that everyone is clear on what is THE most important thing to get done.

You need a business plan that fits on 1 or 2 pages at the most…because that’s how things will actually get done.

Question:  What’s your key focus right now?  Can you narrow it down to a top 5?

Simple isn’t just better – for a small business owner it’s the likely difference between long term success and failure.  Do you have any examples of simple things you’re doing to move your business forward?  Share them in the comments below, I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

I’ve said it before, but we live in Interesting Times…sure there’s the downside of the economy and the constant drumbeat of all of the negative news out there, But there’s also an amazing upside – we are seeing things today that would have never been thought possible 50 years (maybe even 10 years ago).  In fact the overall progress that’s been made is nothing short of staggering.

In fact it’s mindblowing!

Want some proof?  Check out these 2 videos a couple of friends recently shared as great examples of amazing things that are going on.

200 Years, 200 Countries, 4 Minutes

First up is a fantastic video sent to me by my friend Mike Jones of the Jones Law Firm.  Mike’s a great attorney who primarily works with business owners, so if you’re looking for an attorney – I would highly recommend giving Mike a call.

Anyway, Mike passed along a fantastic 4 minute video from a guy named Hans Rosling – this is actually a clip from a longer BBC program called The Joy of Stats, but despite the nerdy title, there are a couple of really cool things to take away from this video.

If you can’t see the video – you can find it online here:  200 Years, 200 Countries

I am amazed at how he took a complex topic with a huge amount of data and boiled it down to a couple of minutes of simple, understandable video to tell an insightful story about how the world has changed in the last 200 years.  Can you imagine if that change continues over the next 200 years?

How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World

This second video was pointed out to me by my friend Joe Tierney from Umzuzu – Umzuzu works with small business owners and helps them figure out how to leverage cloud technologies and Google Apps to make things run better, faster and cheaper.  Absolutely give them a call if you are frustrated with technology or just don’t know what’s out there.  They do a lot of teaching and educating and can help you figure out what’s possible.

This video is a bit longer (13 minutes) and it’s from TED – I’ve mentioned before what a great resource TED is.  There are so many cool things you can learn on that site.  Anyway – this video is from author Clay Shirky and it’s basically about a by product created from the disruptive technology of the internet.  He calls that by product – Cognitive Surplus:

Here’s the link to How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World if the video doesn’t play.

One of the biggest reasons we live in amazing times is that we’re getting the chance to see the birth and evolution of the single most disruptive technology since…writing?  (I’m not sure what else to compare it to).  Think about all of the ways that the internet touches your life right now…and almost all of them didn’t exist less than 10 years ago!  And even cooler –  it’s creating unexpected outcomes like Cognitive Surplus, which really could (continue to) change everything.

I’m sticking with Mindblowing as my description!

What do you think?  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach