Hey everyone,
Welcome to part 2 of Your Irresistible Offer.
Today's will be pretty short. It's a brilliant article by Robert Middleton about creating offers that have more substance to them.
Enjoy!
_____________
Avoid The Grammy Factor
Robert Middleton
www.actionplan.com
I admit it. I watched the Grammy Awards last night. The whole thing. Let me give you a very quick rundown:
There were wall-to-wall musical performances. Some awards were given out. Heartfelt thank-yous were offered. Everyone looked beautiful. But the show is already fading from memory.
The Grammys, like most award shows, value style over substance. Lots of flash and glitz and "look at how passionately wonderful I am." It all gets a little overwhelming after awhile as one thinks, "But I don't even listen to this kind of music, anyway!"
However, I took away a valuable marketing lesson that I'd like to share with you: Most marketing messages are much like the Grammys: the substance is missing.
Everyone's trying to get the perfect marketing message, the perfect look, the perfect mind-blowing information that will compel prospects to respond in droves.
But it usually falls flat. Why?
Because it's often missing the most important thing of all: What the client actually gets from working with you. Don't think this is all that important?
Let me tell you a story...
One of the people in my current Marketing Action Group had been struggling with her marketing message. Nothing was really working. But finally she applied some of my ideas on creating a marketing message and told someone the story of a recent client success.
And the immediate response was: "Wow, I need your services. Will you work with me?"
And the great thing is that it wasn't a fluke. Now almost every time she uses the message, people want to work with her. Hey, her message was so great that I even decided to work with her!
How do you create a message with substance? Here's a 5-step process that will work for you.
1. Identify your ideal client
Your message will not work for everyone. You need to be clear exactly who your message is for. Who can you help the most? Who do you understand the best? Where do you have the most experience? Think all of this through and develop your message specifically for this ideal client.
2. Identify a client challenge
What does your ideal client want to do but doesn't know how? What's missing for them? What are they struggling with? What is confusing or frustrating for them? Clearly articulate this: "I work with these kind of clients who have this kind of challenge."
3. Identify a service and outcome
What specific service could you offer to address the client problem and provide a desirable outcome? Keep it simple: "I offer this kind of service and when clients use this service they will get this result." A service without a promised outcome is a wast of time.
4. Prove you can deliver the outcome
If you haven't offered this service before, then find an ideal client and perform it for them. If you need to cut your price or even offer it free to validate the outcome, so be it. But you need to be confident you can produce that outcome consistently.
5. Use your story as your message
The most powerful marketing messages are simple stories that demonstrate that you delivered a desirable outcome. "This was a client who came to me. They had this frustrating challenge. I implemented my service. These were the results."
This is the process my Marketing Action Group participant went through. She now has a reliable marketing message that's all substance, no style. She doesn't have to worry about perfect words or the "magic phrase." She just needs to tell her outcome story and get a positive response. Every time.
The actual response you get will depend on who your clients are, the depth of their challenge, their interest in getting an outcome, the actual service you develop and the kind of results you can deliver consistently.
But I promise you that if you follow these five steps to the letter, you'll emerge with a marketing message that's a quantum leap beyond what you're using now.
And that will always translate into more clients.
COMING NEXT:
Next week sometime I will send you the third in the series focusing on the most critical strategic mistake that conscious, green and holistic entrepreneurs make in their marketing . . .
Showing posts with label and community-minded entrepreneurs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label and community-minded entrepreneurs. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Your Irresistible Offer - "Why Should I Bother?" - Part 1 of 19
Hey everyone,
It’s an innocent enough question:
“Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”
This is the first installment of the "Your Irresistible Offer" series of emails. Approximately once a week you will receive my latest thoughts on how you can make your business more irresistible to your ideal clients.
Before we get into the mechanics of creating an offer - let's take a look at what an Irresistible Offer is and why it is the heart of any marketing you will ever do.
Let's get right to it:
Every purchase is essentially an investment - and the prospect wants to know - “what’s the Return On Investment (ROI)? What do I get for my money? Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”
Can you tell them?
* * *
To quote Seth Godin, “In the coming years, there will be more clutter, not less. There will be more interactions between customers, not less. There will be more upheaval, more inventions, more technologies, and more fashions, not less. And consumers have always wanted more than they say they want anyway ...”
In short - expect a lot more competition in your industry - not less.
“Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”
When people ask this question, they want a real answer - not hype. Not slick marketing or fancy salesmanship. It’s a straightforward and totally legitimate question.
* * *
Sadly, all too often business owners create their products and services and then ask themselves, “now, how should I market this?” It’s much more powerful to start with the marketing first and ask yourself, “what is it that they want and need - and how can I give that to them?”
We need to start with the offer. The steak, not the sizzle.
I thought I would start off this series of emails with something really special.
It's hard medicine - but it's good for you.
* * *
An Edited Summary of the book:
Free Prize Inside!
by Seth Godin
Here's the quick definition of a Purple Cow: a product that's remarkable.
“Remarkable" simply means that a customer is willing to make a remark about it. If you can create memorable products, people will talk about them. If that happens, the word will spread and your sales will grow. That explains the success of most every fast growing company of the past ten years.
Lowering you prices without doing anything else is a game for desperate people lacking in imagination.
Most of the time, people are looking for marketing to serve as a magic elixer. They want to know how to use marketing techniques to make the business they've chosen work more profitably with the customers they're targeting. They want to change better-that commodity prices for their commodity products. They usually believe that it is the job of marketing to focus the spotlight on the things they've already decided to sell.
People want marketing to solve their product problems.
But today - it's all marketing because the product or service is the marketing. Marketing is no longer a separate division. It's the whole company. We’re living in an era where the real marketing happens inside the product, not in the ad pages of a magazine.
I say, if your product is not distinctly different, don't come up with better ads. Come up with a better product.
The simplest, fastest way to grow is to make your product remarkable. To make it worth talking about. If you make your product your service, your school, your church or your career worth talking about, the word will spread.
The only thing that leads to real growth is person to person conversation, word of mouth. And these only come about when you do something truly remarkable. Differentiation is not, by itself, remarkable. To be purple, you have to be more than different. You must be extreme. You must be on the edge.
Ask yourself: Are you invisible? Or are you remarkable?
In the world of the Purple Cow, where the product is the marketing, the winners are the people able to champion remarkable ideas and make them happen. And the astonishing revelation is this: Innovation isn't just fun, it's free!
If you can't make your product remarkable by changing the utility of the product or service, you must do it by one of three things . . .
1. creating a story: A story that transcends the utility of the product and instead goes straight to the world view of the user. See my book, “All Marketers Are Liars” for more information on how to do this.
2. by adding a free prize, a bonus, something extra, something worth paying for. What really works? No surprise, it's the soft stuff. The commonsense, creative stuff that requires initiative and curiosity, not an advanced degree to do. Most successes, though are actually the result of what I'll call soft innovation. Stuff like fast lube job shops, cell phone pricing plans and purple ketchup, or
3. by changing the way someone feels about what you do.
Here’s the good news: It turns out that there's a huge amount of inertia left in almost every category. Every product, service, feature, benefit is open for improvement. There's nothing that's finished, nothing so complete that it can't carry another free prize. No, not carry a prize, be transformed by a prize, transformed so completely that the product category finds new life.
Don’t Be Average:
Most companies focus on creating average products for average people.
The goal in Edgecraft is figuring out what people really want to buy, what they want to talk about and then giving it to them.
So, what you need to do is add a second benefit, a new edge, something your product or service does that is truly remarkable. You can only do that by going to the edges.
You must go all the way to the edge. Accepting second best doesn't make sense.
• Running a restaurant where your the free prize is your slightly attractive wait staff isn't going to work. They've got to be super-models or weightlifters or identical twins. You can only create a free prize when you can go all the way to the edge and make something remarkable. (note; the white hot essence, you need to fan it.) You don't create a better restaurant by serving better food. You can do it by serving remarkable food, or a remarkable location, or a remarkably famous chef. You don't build a better car but building a faster car, you do it by building the fastest car, or the least polluting car or the biggest car.
• Ergonomics that are slightly better are useless. Your product only becomes remarkable when you define the users experience.
• Ten percent more stock is invisible. When you have triple or ten times the stock of the competition (or 1 percent of their selection) people will notice. (note: be obvious)
Your innovations only matter when you can deliver an overwhelming distinction. Being somewhere near the edge is a very market-centric, self-aware thing that marketers do when they think people care enough to really dig deeply.
You can't achieve rapid growth by being just a bit better that the competition. It's not enough to get people to switch. You'll be ignored in favour of the incumbent.
The bottom line: If people aren't blown away, they won't talk about it. If they don't talk about it, it doesn't spread fast enough to help you grow.
Many people don't want this to be true. They don't want innovation to be the only path to growth. They believe that the market should reward earnest efforts at incremental improvement. Alas, it doesn't matter what you want... what we see is the market rewards innovation.
* * *
I know - it sounds intimidating and perhaps impossible.
But I assure you it's not. This series of emails will break down exactly what you need to do to get from wherever you are now to being 'absolutely irresistible'.
That's it for today.
It’s an innocent enough question:
“Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”
This is the first installment of the "Your Irresistible Offer" series of emails. Approximately once a week you will receive my latest thoughts on how you can make your business more irresistible to your ideal clients.
Before we get into the mechanics of creating an offer - let's take a look at what an Irresistible Offer is and why it is the heart of any marketing you will ever do.
Let's get right to it:
Every purchase is essentially an investment - and the prospect wants to know - “what’s the Return On Investment (ROI)? What do I get for my money? Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”
Can you tell them?
* * *
To quote Seth Godin, “In the coming years, there will be more clutter, not less. There will be more interactions between customers, not less. There will be more upheaval, more inventions, more technologies, and more fashions, not less. And consumers have always wanted more than they say they want anyway ...”
In short - expect a lot more competition in your industry - not less.
“Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”
When people ask this question, they want a real answer - not hype. Not slick marketing or fancy salesmanship. It’s a straightforward and totally legitimate question.
* * *
Sadly, all too often business owners create their products and services and then ask themselves, “now, how should I market this?” It’s much more powerful to start with the marketing first and ask yourself, “what is it that they want and need - and how can I give that to them?”
We need to start with the offer. The steak, not the sizzle.
I thought I would start off this series of emails with something really special.
It's hard medicine - but it's good for you.
* * *
An Edited Summary of the book:
Free Prize Inside!
by Seth Godin
Here's the quick definition of a Purple Cow: a product that's remarkable.
“Remarkable" simply means that a customer is willing to make a remark about it. If you can create memorable products, people will talk about them. If that happens, the word will spread and your sales will grow. That explains the success of most every fast growing company of the past ten years.
Lowering you prices without doing anything else is a game for desperate people lacking in imagination.
Most of the time, people are looking for marketing to serve as a magic elixer. They want to know how to use marketing techniques to make the business they've chosen work more profitably with the customers they're targeting. They want to change better-that commodity prices for their commodity products. They usually believe that it is the job of marketing to focus the spotlight on the things they've already decided to sell.
People want marketing to solve their product problems.
But today - it's all marketing because the product or service is the marketing. Marketing is no longer a separate division. It's the whole company. We’re living in an era where the real marketing happens inside the product, not in the ad pages of a magazine.
I say, if your product is not distinctly different, don't come up with better ads. Come up with a better product.
The simplest, fastest way to grow is to make your product remarkable. To make it worth talking about. If you make your product your service, your school, your church or your career worth talking about, the word will spread.
The only thing that leads to real growth is person to person conversation, word of mouth. And these only come about when you do something truly remarkable. Differentiation is not, by itself, remarkable. To be purple, you have to be more than different. You must be extreme. You must be on the edge.
Ask yourself: Are you invisible? Or are you remarkable?
In the world of the Purple Cow, where the product is the marketing, the winners are the people able to champion remarkable ideas and make them happen. And the astonishing revelation is this: Innovation isn't just fun, it's free!
If you can't make your product remarkable by changing the utility of the product or service, you must do it by one of three things . . .
1. creating a story: A story that transcends the utility of the product and instead goes straight to the world view of the user. See my book, “All Marketers Are Liars” for more information on how to do this.
2. by adding a free prize, a bonus, something extra, something worth paying for. What really works? No surprise, it's the soft stuff. The commonsense, creative stuff that requires initiative and curiosity, not an advanced degree to do. Most successes, though are actually the result of what I'll call soft innovation. Stuff like fast lube job shops, cell phone pricing plans and purple ketchup, or
3. by changing the way someone feels about what you do.
Here’s the good news: It turns out that there's a huge amount of inertia left in almost every category. Every product, service, feature, benefit is open for improvement. There's nothing that's finished, nothing so complete that it can't carry another free prize. No, not carry a prize, be transformed by a prize, transformed so completely that the product category finds new life.
Don’t Be Average:
Most companies focus on creating average products for average people.
The goal in Edgecraft is figuring out what people really want to buy, what they want to talk about and then giving it to them.
So, what you need to do is add a second benefit, a new edge, something your product or service does that is truly remarkable. You can only do that by going to the edges.
You must go all the way to the edge. Accepting second best doesn't make sense.
• Running a restaurant where your the free prize is your slightly attractive wait staff isn't going to work. They've got to be super-models or weightlifters or identical twins. You can only create a free prize when you can go all the way to the edge and make something remarkable. (note; the white hot essence, you need to fan it.) You don't create a better restaurant by serving better food. You can do it by serving remarkable food, or a remarkable location, or a remarkably famous chef. You don't build a better car but building a faster car, you do it by building the fastest car, or the least polluting car or the biggest car.
• Ergonomics that are slightly better are useless. Your product only becomes remarkable when you define the users experience.
• Ten percent more stock is invisible. When you have triple or ten times the stock of the competition (or 1 percent of their selection) people will notice. (note: be obvious)
Your innovations only matter when you can deliver an overwhelming distinction. Being somewhere near the edge is a very market-centric, self-aware thing that marketers do when they think people care enough to really dig deeply.
You can't achieve rapid growth by being just a bit better that the competition. It's not enough to get people to switch. You'll be ignored in favour of the incumbent.
The bottom line: If people aren't blown away, they won't talk about it. If they don't talk about it, it doesn't spread fast enough to help you grow.
Many people don't want this to be true. They don't want innovation to be the only path to growth. They believe that the market should reward earnest efforts at incremental improvement. Alas, it doesn't matter what you want... what we see is the market rewards innovation.
* * *
I know - it sounds intimidating and perhaps impossible.
But I assure you it's not. This series of emails will break down exactly what you need to do to get from wherever you are now to being 'absolutely irresistible'.
That's it for today.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
BUSINESS FEATURE: GreenMaven.com - The Google for Green Products and Services
From: Melissa.Mansfield
I thought you all would be interested in a website I''m working on with my Earthsite partners Joey Shepp and Stacie Wickham. It''s GreenMaven.com, a green search engine that allows you to enter any search term and get the green result. It searches a database of 5,000 websites that have been chosen for their focus on environmental and social values.
It''s great for greenies like us ;) who already know what we''re looking for, but don''t always want to deal with the gazillions of useless results that Google might pull up. And it''s great for newbies who know they want eco-friendly socks, for example, but don''t know to search for bamboo, organic cotton or hemp socks.
So, please check out the site and give a try! Also - make sure you submit your businesses so that our searches will turn up results from your sites. And, if you have a chance, any feedback from the green business perspective would be very appreciated.
(I''ve copied and pasted the press release below so you can get the more formal pitch, and some more details.)
Thanks!
Melissa
[b:4d3723160b]Green Search Engine makes \"going green\" easy[/b:4d3723160b]
[i:4d3723160b]GreenMaven.com searches websites screened for environmental and social values[/i:4d3723160b]
San Francisco, CA - March 15, 2007 - GreenMaven.com is the world''s most comprehensive \"green search engine\" which allows users to search the Internet for trusted websites and news related to environmental and social values.
\"People want to go green, but they often don''t know where to start or even what questions to ask,\" says Joey Shepp, founder of Green Maven. \"Green Maven makes searching for all things green as easy as using Google. If you search for socks, you get organic socks. If you search for cars, you get hybrid cars. Our mission is to make it easy for mainstream to go green.\"
Recognized in TIME.com''s Top Ten List of Best New Websites of 2006, Green Maven uses Google''s recently released Co-op Search technology to make searching fast, easy, and relevant.
\"Going green has never been easier than with Green Maven,\" reports Lee Ettleman, TIME.COM. \"Editors at the site hand-pick web pages and news items related to the environmental movement—about everything from eco-friendly cities to organic socks—that can then be searched using the Google tool on the homepage or browsed through using a directory.\"
Launched in late 2006 by a team of Green MBA graduates, Green Maven has reached a total of 5,000 websites since its launch. GreenMaven was designed with Open Source software by the leading sustainable website development firm, Earthsite.net, developers of Urth.tv and GreenFestivals.org.
Visitors can search on GreenMaven.com, or they can take the green web with them by installing an easy browser plug-in. Businesses who want their sites included in the green search engine can submit their URLs to Green Maven''s team of editors for approval.
GreenMaven.com is responding to a growing segment of the Internet community searching for news, products and services that match their environmental and social values. By making it easy to \"go green\", GreenMaven.com is making a green lifestyle available to everyone.
###
GreenMaven.com founder Joey Shepp is available for interviews. For more information, contact Stacie Wickham at (415) 259-4664 or info@greenmaven.com.
* * *
a blog for green business marketing, eco-business marketing, ethical business marketing, conscious business marketing, sustainable business marketing, and community-minded entrepreneurs who are struggling with their cashflow, not attracting enough clients and have mixed feelings about marketing - www.tadhargrave.com
I thought you all would be interested in a website I''m working on with my Earthsite partners Joey Shepp and Stacie Wickham. It''s GreenMaven.com, a green search engine that allows you to enter any search term and get the green result. It searches a database of 5,000 websites that have been chosen for their focus on environmental and social values.
It''s great for greenies like us ;) who already know what we''re looking for, but don''t always want to deal with the gazillions of useless results that Google might pull up. And it''s great for newbies who know they want eco-friendly socks, for example, but don''t know to search for bamboo, organic cotton or hemp socks.
So, please check out the site and give a try! Also - make sure you submit your businesses so that our searches will turn up results from your sites. And, if you have a chance, any feedback from the green business perspective would be very appreciated.
(I''ve copied and pasted the press release below so you can get the more formal pitch, and some more details.)
Thanks!
Melissa
[b:4d3723160b]Green Search Engine makes \"going green\" easy[/b:4d3723160b]
[i:4d3723160b]GreenMaven.com searches websites screened for environmental and social values[/i:4d3723160b]
San Francisco, CA - March 15, 2007 - GreenMaven.com is the world''s most comprehensive \"green search engine\" which allows users to search the Internet for trusted websites and news related to environmental and social values.
\"People want to go green, but they often don''t know where to start or even what questions to ask,\" says Joey Shepp, founder of Green Maven. \"Green Maven makes searching for all things green as easy as using Google. If you search for socks, you get organic socks. If you search for cars, you get hybrid cars. Our mission is to make it easy for mainstream to go green.\"
Recognized in TIME.com''s Top Ten List of Best New Websites of 2006, Green Maven uses Google''s recently released Co-op Search technology to make searching fast, easy, and relevant.
\"Going green has never been easier than with Green Maven,\" reports Lee Ettleman, TIME.COM. \"Editors at the site hand-pick web pages and news items related to the environmental movement—about everything from eco-friendly cities to organic socks—that can then be searched using the Google tool on the homepage or browsed through using a directory.\"
Launched in late 2006 by a team of Green MBA graduates, Green Maven has reached a total of 5,000 websites since its launch. GreenMaven was designed with Open Source software by the leading sustainable website development firm, Earthsite.net, developers of Urth.tv and GreenFestivals.org.
Visitors can search on GreenMaven.com, or they can take the green web with them by installing an easy browser plug-in. Businesses who want their sites included in the green search engine can submit their URLs to Green Maven''s team of editors for approval.
GreenMaven.com is responding to a growing segment of the Internet community searching for news, products and services that match their environmental and social values. By making it easy to \"go green\", GreenMaven.com is making a green lifestyle available to everyone.
###
GreenMaven.com founder Joey Shepp is available for interviews. For more information, contact Stacie Wickham at (415) 259-4664 or info@greenmaven.com.
* * *
a blog for green business marketing, eco-business marketing, ethical business marketing, conscious business marketing, sustainable business marketing, and community-minded entrepreneurs who are struggling with their cashflow, not attracting enough clients and have mixed feelings about marketing - www.tadhargrave.com
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