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Tag: Marketing

How to find your perfect market niche

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Harry Browne was one of America’s most successful salesmen, and he only worked 15-20 hours per week. He believed sales were natural. He passed away some years ago, but he passed along the following information he called the secret to sales success. I wanted to start this
module with his analysis because it is so fundamental to sales success. We will have other articles later on additional information.

Before you spend money on marketing and advertising, you have to find your market niche, and that niche is in the mind of your customers. Following is a condensed view of Harry’s sales secret.

The customer is the object of the sales process because the only reason we produce anything is to have things to consume — to use and enjoy because of the happiness it provides. So the one who consumes an item is the one who judges its worth.

It’s the customer’s values that count. His preferences, through the prices he is willing to pay, and your success depends on the value others place on your products and services. Also, since the customer has limited resources, he is not willing to do something unprofitable to himself.

No one willingly does something unless he’s decided it is his most profitable alternative because no one has unlimited resources. There is a shortage of funds, and everyone’s desires always outnumber resources, so everyone is choosing.

So half of the success story is: you will succeed if you are providing people what they want.

However, many people produce what they think people would like and be willing to pay for, but they are wrong. People seek happiness, and happiness is relative. Each person has a different concept of what will bring them joy. Their mistake is making the judgment based on their values to determine what other people will want. It’s not what you want that determines what other people will buy — it’s what they want that matters.

You have to make it your business to find out what people want – not what you want, and give it to them. Also, find out before you make your offer. We will find out how to do this in a sales call in another article. The net of this is that your niche must include the buyer’s values and the price the buyer is willing to pay as part of your niche — not just demographics.

 

Outbound Marketing – Its Importance and Benefits

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Advertisements come in all sorts of formats and delivered to the audience through many different methods. You see them on TV, billboards, newspapers, magazines, flyers, e-mail campaigns, banners, and website pages, or perhaps you hear similar things on radio and
podcasts. And then there are direct calls from salespeople. These advertisement formats are parts of sales strategy, commonly referred to as outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is meant to be interruptive as the audience is involuntarily exposed to the advertisements. These advertisements are directed at particular audiences as opposed to large, more general audiences.

Why It Is Important for Business
The main objective of outbound marketing is to acquire as many sales leads as possible. For startups looking to get on the map, there are very few (if any) marketing strategies that can reach more targeted people in a shorter amount of time. Small businesses generally don’t have the budget to buy advertisements on primetime shows, but they can reach their target audience via email or direct messaging. It is an affordable yet effective outbound marketing strategy anyone can use.

Outbound marketing, despite its antiquated status in the modern business landscape, remains essential for both new and established companies. For new companies, outbound marketing is vital to spread the word of their existence and what they have to offer. It helps companies develop “first contact” with potential customers. The more-established businesses also utilize the same method to introduce changes or new products to customers.

In the old days, outbound marketing mostly happened on print media, including newspapers and magazines. Now that people rarely, if ever, buy newspapers anymore, emails have become the prominent medium of choice besides TV. However, the former is much more affordable, and the result is almost certainly more measurable.

Advantages of Outbound Marketing

Familiarity is a valuable benefit of outbound marketing. People of all generations have grown accustomed to product advertisement broadcast at regular intervals on TV and radio. The audience knows that there are going to be advertisements in the middle of a broadcast. To some extent, people understand the companies behind the products provide the money to fund the show itself. In a world of social media, direct messaging and email newsletters are even more useful. Social media acts like channels to bring targeted customers to one place. People follow your account because they are interested in what you have to offer. Moreover, direct message and email always carry a personal touch, which is an indispensable element in any marketing effort.

Important Ways To Improve Your Direct Mail Marketing

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For some, direct response marketing seems old fashioned. It is not. It’s just getting more effective. More than 80% of marketers credit email as their most vital channel for customer acquisition so email marketing is not going away anytime soon. New trends are emerging that will help you increase leads and conversions and improve your relationship with your prospects and customers. For example, Personalization is becoming more and more important and you need to learn how to target potential customers and target your messages to them.

We need to gather more information about our target audience from the analytics we get from previous mailings. Also, segmenting prospects by demographics, expertise, decision-making level makes your message more personal. Are the recipients active or inactive, opening or not clicking through at all, etc. Some people are going back to plain text emails because they appear to be more personalized.
Ask for more information from responders and you will get more information allowing you to get more personal on the next mailing.

Mobile messaging is becoming more important. Mobile messages have a higher open rate and responses are much faster and easier. You can also use more casual language and people search differently when looking for information. Often in sentences rather than keywords. Lots of people are moving away from typing.

To be more effective, try to integrate your email marketing with other marketing efforts so prospects are getting a consistent message from the phone, email, website, and social media. Build a relationship with your target prospects. Show them content that tells them you are an expert and understand the challenges they are facing.

And finally, test and test again including subject lines, time of mailing, different calls to action, using emojis in subject lines (some people get much higher open rates with emojis), embedded video and graphics. You have your lists and you are continuing to add to these lists, so now is the time to experiment especially when the cost to do direct response marketing is so inexpensive. It’s a great way to build a pipeline of prospects.

 How To Tell Your Company’s Full Story, To A Stranger, In Seconds

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 How To Tell Your Company’s Full Story, To A Stranger, In Seconds

 

The Full Story….. In Seconds?  Sounds Impossible, But It’s Not, And It’s Painless

Potential customers want to know what your product is and how it solves their problems, and you only have a minute or two to convince them that finding out will be well worth their time.

Explainer Videos

Here’s how. Explainer videos are an extremely effective way to tell your overall story, from problem to solution in condensed time and in a special format that captures and holds their attention until they have heard your full story.  

Plus, if your company could benefit from this powerful marketing tool, you can now get one produced for a few hundred vs a few thousand dollars.

Potential customers want to know what your product is and how it solves their problems, and you only have a minute or two to convince them that finding out will be well worth their time.

Explainer videos are an extremely effective way to tell your overall story, from problem to solution in condensed time and in a special format that captures and holds their attention until they have heard your full story.  

Plus, if your company could benefit from one of these powerful marketing tools, you can now produce one for a few hundred vs a few thousand dollars.

Whiteboard Animation

By definition, whiteboard animation is a video that shows the process of physically drawing a story using marker pens on a whiteboard (or whiteboard-like surfaces). While the objects are still images and often attached to texts, diagrams, or additional items, the drawing process itself is recorded (animated). The result is a series of drawings displayed in sequence and added with narration.

Whiteboard animation is similar to a video explainer. Think of them as a bridge between traditional videos featuring real-life objects and a conventional slideshow presentation. It is more sophisticated than the latter but it offers more or less the same visual effects as the former.

Conclusion

If you want to tell your story in just a minute or two, videos are a good way to do it. You don’t even have to be there to do it. Also, the person viewing the video can also forward it to others. They can also be very cost-effective. You know your story. Think about writing it in 100 to 200 words. You can start with your value proposition.

 

 

 

 

In Our Video World, Whiteboard Animation Is Growing Rapidly

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The vast majority of modern whiteboard animations are created automatically using computer software, eliminating the need for manual drawings. It has now become a widely popular format for online marketing contents distributed mainly on YouTube and social media. People use whiteboard animation videos for various purposes including business presentation, how-to-use instructions, and of course online marketing to explain what the product/service is, how it works, and why it solves the problem for the prospect.

One of the biggest advantages of whiteboard animated videos is its budget-friendly production, at least when compared to traditional videos. The main elements are the script and animation, which will then combined into one digital file, animated, and timed.

Despite the absence of real-life objects, whiteboard animation is still categorized as videos as far as digital marketing is concerned. Now that YouTube is a dominant platform – to the point where it is considered a search engine of its own – it only makes sense for online marketers to maximize the use of videos in their strategies. Cisco predicted that by 2022, video contents will comprise 82% of all IP traffic at both consumer and business levels, and global video traffic will grow four-fold from 2017.

Video Whiteboards Keep The Viewer Engaged From Beginning until the End

Video has always been the most powerful format to deliver online content. People are more attracted to the dynamics of the combination of audio and visual treatments than to texts or images only. Viewers are more engaged and they receive or remember the information better because videos are usually more direct and conversational in nature.

A common style of whiteboard animation is comic-strip. It is a familiar visual format; therefore viewers unconsciously exert much less effort to relate to every object shown. The simplicity and vivid visual progression of whiteboard animation, where information is delivered in a logical drawing sequence, also help make viewers voluntarily more engaged and attentive. The wasteful wandering of attention is minimized, making it an effective content delivery format.

Very Affordable Production

Cost depends largely on quality, but it is safe to say that whiteboard animation is much less expensive than conventional videos. There is no need to hire actors because the characters are drawn (by human or software), the audio can be added later with voice-over, and everything can be done on the computer so you don’t have to build any set or background.

Using our Staff-On-Demand (our global freelancers) you can get a finished explainer video in color for a small fraction of the normal studio charge.  

 

Why Create A Whiteboard Animated Video

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Whiteboard animation is a fantastic way to introduce your company, brands, and products to the audience at large. It is less expensive than conventional videos yet more effective to keep viewers attentive and engaged. Production is also easier because the animation is almost entirely made on computers; the characters are drawn and the narration (voice-over) can be added later approaching the final production step.

If your goal is to find the best format to deliver your message, online video is certainly the best format to deliver your message. People are more attracted to multimedia content and inclined to share them on their social circles as well, especially when the video provides valuable honest information and answers their problems. Whiteboard animation offers the affordability of every startup’s needs and the promise of ROI by generating more sales.

There are DIY programs available to create whiteboard animation so you can distribute them to your YouTube channel and social media accounts. When it comes to online marketing, however, DIY whiteboard animations will most likely fail due to their poor production quality and the lack of optimization (making sure they fit all platforms).

Although you can create the animation using specialized software to save even more money, hiring a professional video company is always the better option. Now, with our global Staff-on-Demand program, you can get a professional whiteboard animation created at a fraction of the cost charged by most video studios. You can also get a fixed cost based on your requirements.  In addition, you also get:

Quality

The most obvious advantage is quality. They have all the talent and the tools to produce high-quality whiteboard animation and offer their expertise for the entire process. Since you intend to use the video as a marketing tool for your business, you want it to be enjoyable, easy to understand, and on point. The video is also a representative of your company, so you should aim for the best possible quality.

Efficiency

Without helps from professionals, you have to handle all the works yourself. Even with pre-made templates available from popular software, it would take hours (if not days) to get the job done. Also, some templates are just too common – they are used by thousands of others – when what you need is something authentic and unique to stand out from the crowd. A professional video company is filled with trained scriptwriters, illustrators, music engineers, animators, and voice-over talents to name a few. In other words, the company can handle the entire production process.  

Online Visibility

You should also make sure the bundled package consists of not only the whiteboard animation video but online visibility optimization. This means the final video is constantly monitored to generate data including views, conversion, and basically whether or not it is effective in many different platforms. Adjustments and optimizations are made accordingly based on the data.

What’s The Shape Of Your Pipeline?

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Jeff Hoffman wrote an article where he talks about the shape of your pipeline. Individual salespeople generally have a good handle on their pipeline. But management does not, Management needs to keep watching the shape of the sales funnel as a metric in order to get a better understanding of the pipeline and the status of the people in that pipeline, 

What is the shape of your pipeline? 

Do you use the traditional funnel, broad at the top and then gets continuously more narrow as it gets closer to closing? Let’s say there is a  statistical relationship of 3x the number of leads to closes. Therefore, salespeople need to get 3x the number of leads to closes if they are going to meet their quota.  

However, a better-looking funnel is shaped like a  champaign glass, which is wide at the top and narrows quickly down the stem to the base. Thie idea, of course, is to qualify prospects quickly so you can get rid of poor-prospects and have more time to work on real prospects. Naturally, this requires a well-designed qualifying system, But, it would be well worth the time an effort it takes to get that qualifying system. Then multiply that by the amount of  quality sales time gained,

The real prospects are in the stem of the champagne glass. These prospects have a 1.25 statistical probability of closing. Therefore, in the lower stem, you need 1.25 real pre-close prospects to meet a closing sale. And, much more time for the salesman to work on these potential prospects to meet his quota.  

Make an illustration of your pipeline because it’s an easy way to see where you are, and then keep track of the numbers (leads vs. closes) over time so you can plan your sales forecast more accurately and with less consternation.

If you know someone who needs to change the shape of their funnel, forward this post to them. Maybe it will help. 

 

 

Maybe Your Product Is Great

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Maybe your product is excellent, but your message is not. Instead of focusing on features and functions, focus on what the customer wants.  

If you are talking to people who are interested in listening to you, Maybe you should stop selling and start giving information that will help the customer do his job, solve his problem, fulfill his “want”.

Most buyers have a budget. Maybe they don’t want to spend their budget on your product, but the result of buying your product?

If you know someone with a flat sales curve, tell them about his blog. Maybe it will help. 

 

Great Temptations

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 Don’t Be Tempted

When you tell your story to prospects who want to hear it, you are tempted to “stretch” the story a little to improve it.

Peter Theil, the Venture Capitalist, assumes most people say their product performs 20% better than it does.

So he wants to invest in companies with ten times better products than the competitors.  

We don’t know if 20% is the right amount of exaggeration, but it does bring up an important point.

We are exposed to so many competing stories 24/7 that this “standard” exaggeration may no longer work.

Today, you will get caught, your audience will tell others about your overkill, and you will end up the loser.

Remember, a story that resonates with people who want to hear your story are likely to believe it is true.

They will find instances that reinforce this truth, called cognitive bias, and tell others.

How can you prove your product, service, or value proposition is true (metrics, testimonials, studies, case studies, referrals, etc.)?

How Do We Know What To Believe

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In his book, All Marketers Tell Stories, Seth Godin talks about understanding why people buy the goods and services they do, He states that: We believe things that aren’t true …or many things that are true, are true because we believe them. 

In other words, we believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulling truth. For example, why do people buy bottled water when they can get it for free?

One reason is that we have moved beyond buying things we need and have moved to buy things based on our complexity of wants. If you believe that bottled water is better and you want better water, you happily buy it and also enjoy the statement the product makes to others.