I attended a seminar the other day at a local trade show and one thing that they mentioned almost in passing that inspired me was the critical concept of “selling your successes”.
Hmmm… “Sell your successes” – What could that mean?
Simply put, when you walk the talk, talk the walk. Adjust your marketing and sales conversations and materials to reflect how your product or services helped someone achieve what they wanted.
Now how do you do this? Well here are 3 techniques that when applied effectively can lower your marketing costs & energize your business.
1. Let ‘Testimonials’ Pave the Way
To best illustrate this technique, let me share with you a line that I use often that goes something like this: “If I tell you that I’m great at what I do, at best you’ll take it with a grain of salt, but if an unbiased third-party tells you that I’m great at what I do, you’ll tend to believe them. In other words, people tend to give more credence to what someone else says about you rather than what you say about yourself.
So use every opportunity to gain testimonials about you, your team, your product, your service, or your business in general. Collecting and effectively using testimonials should become a key marketing strategy for your business.
2. Using ‘Stories’ to Get Your Point Across
Storytelling has been around since the beginning of mankind and when used properly can illustrate your point better than almost any other way. Stories have the power to capture and engage the listener in a softened manner – not the hard selling approach that people typically run away from. Stories also have the unique ability to take complex ideas and make them easy to understand – without a dissertation on the subject.
My best advice here is to model other great storytellers. Take one of my favorites for instance, Mark Victor Hansen. Just look at his Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. Essentially each chapter is a story effectively illustrating a point that touches, moves, and inspires its readers.
So you may be tempted to say, well that’s easy for him, but I’m no Mark Victor Hansen. Now maybe you potentially are or aren’t, however my point is, that this is a very learnable skill, people aren’t born with it. They develop it by continually practicing and honing it.
3. Sharing ‘Case Studies’ to Illustrate what’s Possible
Case studies are a sure-fire way to give your prospect a mental picture of what’s possible for their business should they engage you help. These are particularly great for those prospects who need to see it themselves in order to believe it. Case studies illustrate tangible solutions – they tend to instill a deeper level of confidence in your prospect that you can get it done for them. Essentially, you have a track record of success to draw upon.
Now when using any or all of the 3 techniques just discussed, remember that just like telling a joke, timing and delivery are critical to their success. For example placing a testimonial in your sales letter in just the right spot where you are looking to establish credibility is key to getting your prospect to keep reading.
These techniques can also play a critical role in humanizing your business and its offerings – placing real people behind your messages. For example, instead of pounding a prospect with every possible service you offer and the features and benefits of each, try using a short story to simplify a complicated solution that you implemented for a similar customer. Or how about using a relevant case study in a sales presentation illustrating how your service helped a client with similar needs to the prospect you’re presenting to.
Try integrating these techniques into your everyday marketing and realize the positive residual effects they can bring.
© 2006 Online Marketing Muscle -- All Rights Reserved.
Sell Your Successes: 3 Techniques That Can Lower Your Marketing Costs & Energize Your Business
Your Home Business - Saving Money & Cutting Costs
Running a home business is the ideal path for some entrepreneurs who just want to have more flexibility in their lives. But, in the initial stages money can be tight so how do you ensure that you have a lean, mean fighting machine?
Make Your Home More Energy Efficient - Lag your boiler and insulate your loft. It is actually frightening how much heat is lost through the roof. Buy some thick curtains and close them when the sun goes down. Many local councils offer grants to make your home more energy efficient. Why not give them a call today?
Buy energy saving bulbs & turn the thermostat down by just one degree. Just doing this could save you over a hundred dollars a year. Always turn the light off when you leave the room and never leave appliances on stand by.
Shop around for the best utility suppliers as some offer great deal if you buy all your energy from one place.
Cut Costs on Your Office Supplies - buy basic items in bulk and you could save quiet a bit of money. Ordering your stationary online and receiving credit could also aid your cash flow.
Use price comparison sites when replacing old equipment and look for the most energy efficient models. Printers use a lot of ink so buy one that you can buy cheap generic ink cartridges for.
Save Money on Your Phone Bill - the market for telecommunications has never been so competitive and you could save a bit of money by just changing your supplier. If you make a lot of national calls pay a little extra every month, and get all your local and national calls free.
Use companies like Skype to make and receive free calls. They provide this service by allowing you make calls through your internet connection rather than more traditional means.
Send and receive faxes via your computer rather then printing them out and using an old fashioned fax machine. Better still do all your communication via email!
Most of the tips above are very quick and easy to implement for most home businesses. Some could start saving you money straight away whilst others reduce costs over the longer term and make your business a lean mean fighting machine!
Startup Costs For Homebased Business
Just about everyone jumps on the web with a web site without realizing all that is involved. It's the horse and the cart. Recently, we tested a new way of solving the primary reason people, especially homebased business or work from home moms and dads, look to the Internet as a fast and easy way to generate income.
Traditionally, the first thing you think you need is a web site. But if you look at sites such as Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo!, you realize that a person doesn't need a website to make money on the Web! Savvy sellers take advantage of auction and direct sales sites to sell their wares with little to no cost. These smart marketers have the right idea! Marketing is first.
For others, how to make money on the Internet and what to do first is a mystery. So they follow the pack and search for a web designer. Unfortunately, some are left with little funds to attract buyers to their shiny new website. And so goes the tale of a million sites on the Internet that don't work, don't pay for themselves, and certainly don't generate the income a work at home mom hopes for.
One of the biggest obstacles is the copy on a web site page. Both search engine optimization and persuasive sales copy require additional funding in addition to web design and development. Nearly all novice web owners who we come in contact with don't realize that they have to provide the content for their web pages. It's usually an unpleasant surprise to find out that web designers don't write copy although someone on the company staff may provide this service. It calls for an extra fee.
Our solution to this conundrum is to start with your marketing objective and then develop the pieces that deliver the objective. For example, when you want to sell teddy bears, look for a domain name that includes teddy bears in the URL. Next, discover who wants your teddy bears and how you're going to let these buyers know about your bears. Then, make a list of why your buyer would want to own your teddy bear more than your competitor's teddy that looks a lot like yours. Once you have this basic information, consider all the parts you need to invest in to bring your offers to market on the Internet.
Here are some rough numbers: Your domain name from Network Solutions is $35 per year. If you're well funded, you might want to start with a web plan, about $1500. Copywriting is next and for a 12-page web site, you are looking at $2-300 per page, that's an average of $3060. A quality 12-page business HTML web site, including web design and development runs about $1500. All this expense and you have not sold your first teddy bear yet. Opt for a good web host, not those cheapy hosting services. In fact, it is a good idea to go with the hosting service your web designer prefers. Not all servers work the same, and you reduce the development and maintenance time and avoid paying your developer for more time when she is intimately familiar with the server tools. A reliable web hosting service costs $20-30 a month depending on the server space your site needs and the bandwidth used from all your web traffic.
If you are like most new web owners, you had no clue that all this was needed. There are still a few more steps to consider. One is the number of pages associated with your website. Twelve pages is a healthy number for most small business people to start with, but that can hardly support all the keywords you have to generate free web traffic. Plan on adding more keyword web pages as time goes on. Consider a competitor site with 100 search engine optimized web pages all devoted to selling teddy bears. Your site will struggle getting a top ranking against this big guy.
Two, is the big enchilada. Internet marketing. And this is where most of your funds go, and it's where most new web owners fall down. Even cutting all the corners, there is usually little left for marketing. And a lot of the time, new web owners are shocked and dismayed with the outpouring of money up to this point and dig their heals in at spending any more, especially when Internet marketing is a mystery for many.
Internet marketing involves several options. The most widely recognized is search engine marketing. You have probably heard the term. Another common marketing practice is CPC or PPC. Cost Per Click or Pay Per Click can be tricky and can drain your credit card quickly. It looks easy, but trust me on this, there is nothing easy about direct response copywriting and that's what placing ad copy on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! requires. There is a method to determining how much to invest in a CPC bid. So don't rush in, write a few ads, and wait for visitors without knowing what you are doing.
It's a wonder so many people jump on the Web without finding out about all these costs, but they do. I guess it looks easy, but if you have invested hundreds, even thousands, and have yet to recover your investment, you know it is not easy. You don't know why. You only know, you keep trying different things, and you continue to wait for the big return. All you have to do is the smart thing upfront to save a lot of money and get good results in a decent amount of time. Hire a good Internet marketing company who can help you get the outcome you want. You will save a lot of time, frustration and money overall.
Business Start-up Costs
If you are considering starting your own business, then you have no doubt considered the investment required for various business start-up costs. The first thing you need to do is find a market that your business can be successful in. Next you must look at approximately how much it will cost you in just basic business start-up costs; business licenses, lawyer consult fees and form preparation fees, accountant fees/accounting programs, inventory costs, business insurance, leases, and utilities are just a few of the standard traditional business start-up costs. You must also consider how you are going to support yourself and your family while you venture takes off; this could be at least two to three months, and you want to make sure you can pay your mortgage, all your bills, feed your kids, and have a little extra left over for incidentals, in addition to business start-up costs.
If you choose to not have a physical location for your business, you may want to consider offering your goods and services via a website or mail order catalog. This is a great way to reach a large audience all at once, but business start-up costs associated with this mode of doing business can be expensive as well. By the time you pay someone to create your website, host it, register your domain name, and start a merchant account, you have made quite an expenditure, unless of course you are capable of building your own website, which many people are. Yahoo! offers web hosting, domain name registration, business email, and store front options for a very reasonable price worth checking out. This is a great way to save on some of those business start-up costs that could otherwise break the bank.
The traditional way that business has been conducted in this country has changed dramatically since the advent of the World Wide Web, opening the door for a number of new ways to conduct business. You no longer have to have a physical storefront address to sell your goods or services, a rather archaic point of view. More and more people are buying goods and services on the internet, which is a great place to feature your business while keeping your business start up costs at a minimum. You don’t need to lease that 900 square foot shop for $2800 a month to sell what you can sell just as easily with a website and a little marketing campaign. Business start-up costs do not have to be astronomical, in fact, they can be quite the opposite. You can visit a number of online sources that offer an abundance of information on business start-ups costs and links to essential sites that can help you get your business up and running!
Cutting Costs For Your Travel Business
In order for your travel business to be profitable, your revenue must exceed your expenses. A way that you can begin to increase your revenue is to look for ways to lower your expenses.
Look over your current expenses and place them in one of two groups: one are expenses you cannot do without (like utilities, Internet access, etc), the other is for expenses you may be able to lower or eliminate. Here are tips to help you with your costs.
Travel and Fun
The areas where many home businesses can begin to whittle down expenses are with travel and fun. For example lower the cost of holiday purchases by purchasing less expensive but better gifts like engraved or logo stenciled marketing tools that also cross-promote your business: not pads, stickie pads, pencils and pens, magnets, etc. And discuss travel perks, packages, discounts and coupons with your local travel agent or an online agent who has great packages or plans to offer you.
Needed Expenses
Annually take a look at your monthly and other regular expenses like utilities, office meeting space, Internet access, etc. Take at least one to three days total and comparison shop all of them for better rates and packages to service your in more efficient financial ways.
Also seek ways to cut back on using so much; using too much utilities like power for all the computers, phones and other gadgets that may be able to be turned off in the night time to save on energy bills. Lower your heating and air conditioning, too.
And recycle where you can. Use the back sides of printed papers for note taking and daily phone notes and calculations that can be keyed into the computer later.
Buy in Bulk
Another good way to save on your travel business expenses is to buy in bulk – either taming up with another entity, a neighbor who also has a home-based business, or working via a wholesaler. When you cut out any middle people – like drop ship coordinators and retailers, you can help lower your expenses.
Also try to use what you have. See about revising what you have on hand or learning how to re-package it with something else – like upgrading old software instead of buying new.
In summary, it is all too easy for business expenses to spend. Watch your costs and cut what you can!
Cutting Down Your Business Costs
Cost-cutting is a valuable exercise for any business, but it's all the more important if yours is a small company with a narrow profit margin. When you cut costs you increase your profitability and make your business both more flexible and more secure.
One way of cutting down your business costs is to take advantage of free stuff. You'll be surprised how much free stuff is available to businesses through government and corporate schemes. Once you start looking, it's easy to find free stuff, with several major websites dedicated to listing the sort of free stuff which your business might benefit from.
If you can't find free stuff to suit your requirements, the next best thing is cheap stuff. Many business owners don't realise just how much more cheaply they can obtain stuff by buying wholesale. When you can use a lot of one product at once, or if you have room to store it for ongoing use, buying wholesale is almost always the best option. Wholesale goods can cost as little as half the standard retail price. Indeed, one of the benefits of owning a business is that it then becomes easier to buy items wholesale for your own home, thus reducing your living costs.
Cheap stuff for businesses can also be obtained through auctions. Both online and traditional auctions are well worth checking out. What's more, when you participate in auctions you'll often have the chance to talk about and promote your business to the wider community. Auctions can be a great way to cut your business costs whilst simultaneously raising your business profile.
Have you ever purchased business equipment you only needed for a small period of time? You could have just borrowed the equipment from someone else or rented the equipment from a "rent-all" store.
Another useful tip it to make a list of business supplies or equipment you'll need in the future. Keep an eye out for stores that have big sales. Purchase the supplies when they go on sale before you need them. If your business equipment and supplies don't need to be new, buy them used. You can find used items at yard and garage sales, used stores, used stuff for sale message boards and newsgroups etc
10 Effective Ways To Reduce Your Business Costs
10 Effective Ways To Reduce Your Business Costs
1. Barter
If you have a business you should be bartering goods
and services with other businesses. You should try to
trade for something before you buy it. Barter deals
usually require little or no money.
2. Network
Try networking your business with other businesses.
You could trade leads or mailing lists. This will cut
down on your marketing and advertising costs. You
may also try bartering goods and services with them.
3. Wholesale/Bulk
You'll save money buying your business supplies in
bulk quantities. You could get a membership at a
wholesale warehouse or buy them through a mail
order wholesaler. Buy the supplies you are always
running out of.
4. Free Stuff
You should try visiting the thousands of freebie sites
on the internet before buying your business supplies.
You can find free software, graphics, backgrounds,
online business services etc.
5. Borrow/Rent
Have you ever purchased business equipment you
only needed for a small period of time? You could
have just borrowed the equipment from someone
else or rented the equipment from a "rent-all" store.
6. Online/Offline Auctions
You can find lower prices on business supplies and
equipment at online and offline auctions. I'm not
saying all the time, but before you go pay retail for
these items try bidding on them first.
7. Plan Ahead
Make a list of business supplies or equipment you'll
need in the future. Keep an eye out for stores that
have big sales. Purchase the supplies when they go
on sale before you need them.
8. Used Stuff
If your business equipment and supplies don't need
to be new, buy them used. You can find used items
at yard and garage sales, used stores, used stuff
for sale message boards and newsgroups etc.
9. Negotiate
You should always try negotiate a lower price for
any business equipment or supplies. It doesn't hurt
to try. Pretend you are talking to a salesman at a car
lot.
10. Search
You can always be searching for new suppliers for
your business supplies and equipment. Look for
suppliers with lower prices and better quality. Don't
just be satisfied with a few.
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