Category: Entrepreneurship

Categories
Entrepreneurship Marketing Sales Uncategorized

4 Ways to Reinvigorate Slumping Sales

Slumps suck! Unfortunately, everyone hits them from time to time. They don’t have to signal the end of your business. They’re probably not a sign of incompetence. They’re not the world’s way of telling you to wake up from the dream of entrepreneurship. They’re the market’s way of saying it’s time to roll up your sleeves, dust off your idea book, and innovate your way out of the downturn. Instead of being the beginning of the end, slow sales can be a catalyst that reignites the fire of your motivation.

When sales plateau, you may be tempted to think something negative: that your initial success was due only to the novelty of any new business. Could that be the case? Yes. But often, it’s not. One major truth that eludes a lot of entrepreneurs is that novelty is always a factor in driving sales. If the initial novelty has worn off, that doesn’t mean it’s time to pack it in. It means it’s time for some more novelty! With innovative, attention-grabbing marketing, you can ride the natural roller-coaster of the business cycle back to the top.

When you recognize that you’re in a slump, it’s time to communicate, promote, and introduce a whole new audience to your product. Fortunately, there are some tried-and-true methods:

1. Have a Sale

Could it be that simple? Well, no. While having a sale is one of the oldest tricks in the book, it will only truly reinvigorate business if there’s a creative twist to it. This twist has to create a sense of urgency about your product, and generate real excitement. That’s why it should be time-dependent. Structure your sale so that the sooner a given customer takes advantage of it, the better the deal will be.

For example, you can place a specific time limit on a sale, such as a 48-hour sale, a 24-hour sale, or even a 12-hour sale. The shorter the sale, the more urgency it creates. One effective (and very inventive) sale model uses incremental pricing: slightly raising the price of your product as the sale goes on, creating a race among customers for the best deal. Outside-the-box entrepreneur Jason Zook’s Bumpsale software works this way; each time a sale is made, the price goes up until it reaches a maximum just below full retail. Everyone gets a deal, but the earlier, the better.

2. Host a Webinar

The new frontier in online marketing, webinars are the ideal way for online companies to drum up business. They are the best way to earn credibility, build trust, and generally prove the worth of your product to an audience. Not only do they build rapport with people, but (when done right), they lead to big sales conversions.

The key is to make the webinar as valuable as possible for your audience. Use webinars to showcase your expertise while giving your audience something they’ll truly appreciate. Be sure to use chat features to interact with your audience and answer their questions. Make it a group experience, and foster a real connection with attendees.

At the end of the day, people prefer to buy products from sources they trust. Webinars create that trust more effectively than any other form or marketing. Both myself and my partner here at The $100 MBA believe so firmly in the power of webinars that we’ve created a sister company, Webinar Ninja, which offers exclusive webinar software. To decide if webinars are right for your business, feel free to check out our free course on webinar hosting.

3. Sponsor an Event

Another great way to build up some hype, especially for physical businesses with real-world locations, is to sponsor an event. This can be done by online businesses as well; you’ll just have to find a venue. A decent party can go a long way towards generating buzz about your product, and lead to an uptick in sales. Invest in some food, some drinks, and some entertainment, and a party with as few as 20-30 guests can get your business’ ball rolling again.

Make your event relevant to your local community. Choose a venue that’s familiar and well-known. If you have a physical location, hold it there and use the event as a way to reach out to your neighbors. Consider sponsoring a charitable event, like a fundraiser for a local institution or a local family in need. The good will you build will come back to your business.

Too often, businesses throw big Grand Opening parties and are never heard from again. Sponsoring regular events can not only be a fun and effective way to build relationships, but a wise investment that keeps your product on people’s minds.

4. Launch Something

You can’t replace the original “newness” of the company you’ve already built, but you can inject some new newness into it! Launch something. Maybe it’s a new product. Maybe it’s a major add-on, plug-in, or alteration to an existing product. Any significant development has the power to draw new attention to your business and stimulate sales.

It doesn’t have to be drastic. Launching a new avenue of marketing can also make a big splash. Launch a YouTube channel. Launch a new podcast. Create a blog, if you don’t have one already. Even a radical redesign of your website can create a ripple effect, so long as there’s a fresh reason to check your business out. Short of a total rebranding, there innumerable ways to give your business a rebirth. Whichever you choose, include new, valuable content to reward those who check out your new development.

In martial arts, there’s a concept known as “beginner’s mind.” What it boils down to is the ability of someone who’s already well down the path to approach their development with the same enthusiasm and open-mindedness that made them start training in the first place. Entrepreneurs can apply this idea when their new business isn’t so new anymore, and the danger of stagnation is looming. Look at sales plateaus not as setbacks, but as challenges. Learn to enjoy the dynamic struggle of reinvigorating your sales and breathing new life into your passion. If you can learn not to fear the low points, the highs are right around the corner.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Marketing Uncategorized

Spoil Your Subscribers

If there’s one word that can sum up my approach to marketing independent businesses, it’s this: give. Give and give and give, asking nothing in return, and if your product is right, all that giving will come back to you. The key to modern online entrepreneurial success is to stand out and prove yourself by giving valuable content to your audience.

That’s not to say you’re running a charity. Every act of giving (in this context) is an investment. By consistently offering value to your audience over a long period, you’re earning their business. It’s counterintuitive, I know. You work to produce valuable content- content that costs you time and money- and then you give it away without recouping your expenses. It sounds like the opposite of a smart business model. It sounds like flushing resources down the e-toilet.

It’s anything but.

There are other factors, but on the whole, I firmly believe this: the success of an independent business and the volume of its sales rise in direct proportion to the quantity and quality of free content given away. It’s worked for us here at Business Republic, and it’s worked for some of my most successful colleagues. A commitment to quality content marketing can give your business a huge advantage in our endlessly crowded online marketplace because it builds genuine trust, loyalty, and meaningful branding.

Advertising vs. Trials vs. Content Marketing

When we advertise, we simply make an argument for our merits. When we give to our audience, we prove our merits. We take the risk out of the process for the customer by assuring them of our competence, not by asking them to believe in it. This doesn’t only make sales offers far more tempting, it makes future sales easier by building a stronger relationship.

The free idea validation course at the $100 MBA is a good example. It’s the kind of thing we sell, but we give it away. Yes, we “lose” something when we offer it free of charge, in the sense that the costs of creating it aren’t replenished by its sale. What we gain, though, is every potential customer who knows that our product works for them. They don’t suspect it based on advertising or a small sample of our product. They find out first hand.

How is this different from a free trial? For one, it’s permanent. There is no expiration date on our audience’s ability to access our free content. Also, the idea validation course is just one example of a wealth of free content we’re constantly inviting subscribers to enjoy. This blog, our videos and webinars, and all the other content we produce is a never-ending stream of beneficial gifts to subscribers.

Maybe it takes a month. Maybe it takes a year. Maybe a given subscriber never buys a thing, but recommends our services to someone else. Regardless, the free content more than pays for itself in the amount of overall sales conversions we score by putting it out there. Spoiling doesn’t work right away, but it works for us.

Purposeful Spoiling

Our free content isn’t a side project. It’s part and parcel of our overall sales strategy. It’s built into our projections for overhead. Its creation is a permanent fixture in our schedule. We’re not offering afterthoughts or mere enticements. The free content is self-contained, and doesn’t require the customer to buy anything else to make use of it. It comes with absolutely no strings, unless you consider the opportunity to occasionally make sales offers a string.

“Occasionally” is the key word. When utilizing content marketing, it’s just as important to limit your sales offers as it is to be generous with the free stuff. Not annoying our audience with incessant offers is just as much a part of how we spoil them as the free content is. Our subscribers can attest to the fact that we send multiple emails a week, but we only make between 3 and 5 actual sales offers annually. I like to think that that ratio of content to offers is something that proves our good intentions. It builds the kind of trust that creates lifetime customers rather than one-time sales.

When spoiling your own audience, be sure to be genuine. Make your emails personable, honest, mercifully short, and above all, valuable. Prioritize what it is you’re giving them, rather than the effect you hope all this giving will eventually have. Yes, the emails are relationship-builders for you. Yes, you want it to lead to sales. For the subscriber, however, each email should be primarily a value-delivery system. What they get out of it has to take precedence. What you get out of it will ultimately come from the subscriber’s conscious, informed choice.

Getting it Right

When a company spoils their subscribers, the eventual sales offers don’t feel like a pitch or an advertisement. What they feel like is what they are: a new level in a genuine relationship. The company/customer relationship is like any other in that actions speak louder than words. Week after week of valuable content without intrusive or annoying sales pitches represents action, not promises.

A great example of this approach is pjrvs.com. Paul Jarvis’ freelancer-guidance service is a great product, but he doesn’t expect anyone to take that on faith. If you’re a writer or other “creative” looking to market your skills on your own terms, subscribe to his email list and see what good content marketing looks like. Justin Jackson is another business-guidance guru who takes the same approach. Their content-based approach to earning sales opportunities, along with our own, is a model for how to profit from honestly-earned trust. That’s why they’ve both been featured as guest teachers on the $100 MBA Show podcast.

I’ve also seen content marketing done wrong. I won’t name names, but there are endless examples of businesses who take a subscription as an invitation to fill their subscribers’ inboxes with junk mail. These businesses are the reason Google blessed us all with the ability to filter “promotions” out of our lives. Badgering, incessant sales offers that give the subscriber nothing may get you a few apples, but offering real value plants a tree. In any relationship, the party that asks for everything finds themselves alone. Business relationships are no different, and work best when they’re reciprocal.

In a nutshell, I believe in creating a solid product, spoiling your subscribers with free quality content, and letting word of mouth do the rest. Like Paul Jarvis and Justin Jackson, you can use this formula to build up the kind of reputation that makes an independent business sustainable.

Understand that business is a long-term endeavor. Take the big-picture approach, and be comfortable with the fact that success is built over time. Your goal in spoiling your audience is to create lifetime customers out of a relatively small number of people, rather than throwing ads at a wider audience and hoping to nab immediate sales. It takes patience, but it pays off handsomely.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Leadership Uncategorized

Learning From Success: 3 Methods

We always hear about the value of failure, and how much there is to be learned from our mistakes. Recently, the early failures of entrepreneurs have become almost fetishized, with crushing defeats worn as badges of honor and credibility. Some business writers have even expressed alarm at a sort of cult of failure, worrying that a healthy desire to avoid failing is being replaced by an excess of comfort with it.

I think a good counterbalance to that is to spare some focus for success, which can be just as valuable a teacher. With all the emphasis on learning from our defeats, it’s as if we’ve forgotten how much insight can be gleaned from victory! Success can easily teach as much as failure, provided that success was earned, and the reasons for it understood. By seeing success as being at least as great a teacher as failure, we can build ourselves into the expert business people we want to be.

The key is to react to success with the same healthy motivation with which we react to failure. We (hopefully) see failure as a challenge to improve ourselves. Success can be exactly that, too- a call to action, a revelation about what needs to be done next. When I think about success, I find we can utilize it in three main ways:

1. Learning what worked. You might file this one under “obviously,” but it’s important to be specific. Learning how to identify the roots of success is no simple matter. It takes time, diligence, and experience to figure out exactly what led to a breakthrough in product development or a major uptick in sales. It’s not always easy to know which among several factors had the most impact, or if a certain combination of things were greater than the sum of their parts.

Whatever it turns out to be, double down on it. Once you have a good idea of what worked, figure out why it worked, and develop it. This is the only way to confirm your analysis of what worked, and extrapolate the positive impact going forward. Where had you devoted extra resources? In what order did the chain reaction produce a big result? Understanding the whys and hows of success is crucial to reproducing it without becoming stagnant in your efforts (more on that in #2).

Use analytics and customer feedback as your listening posts. Whatever it was that worked, your audience will let you know about it one way or another. Comments, emails, and most importantly statistical analyses will tell the tale of how your breakthrough happened. Was there a spike in traffic to a certain page or link? Was something shared through social media at an abnormally quick rate? The key is in the numbers. The analysis takes work, but when it sharpens your sense of what works, it’s worth it.

2. Recognizing the impact of change. Most successes are the result of some kind of innovation. Someone decided to change things up, and it produced a noticeable effect. This is related to, but different from, simply “learning what worked.” It’s recognizing that no approach, no idea, is permanently successful. It means that after you’ve identified what went right, you’ve also got to recognize that eventually you’ll need to change things up again, in order to keep growing.

When we first launched the $100 MBA Show, our innovation was in offering concise, democratized business advice. We thought that would work because it was different- but eventually we knew we’d have to be different in a different way. Eventually, we started adding Q&A weekends, guest interviews, and book reviews. We’ll continue to add new innovations to the podcast, because we know that today’s innovation won’t carry us through tomorrow.

By committing to flexibility and keeping your ideas of what makes a great product fluid, you stay on the offensive in the battle for customers. By recognizing how an innovation led to success, you can start to plan your next one. Most of all, you can learn to anticipate what parts of your business approach are in danger of growing stale, and adjust accordingly.

3. Handling success mindfully. When success strikes, the way you deal with it can either increase or limit your chances of repeating it. When the breakthrough came, did you allow it to make you complacent? Did you allow excessive confidence to slacken your efforts for the future? Did you thank the right people, and share the rewards of that success with them?

Success should be celebrated, but in a way that inspires future success. I like to put an arbitrary one-day limit on celebrations when Business Republic reaches a new milestone or makes a splash in our industry. We take the time for high-fives and back-pats, and then we get back to the mission. We see each success as one piece of a greater overall effort, one that can’t be forgotten in the rush of victory.

Success offers us our greatest chance to practice humility, calm and mindfulness. It also helps us hone our ability to stay focused when good news makes it seem like we can afford to take our eyes off the prize. Success isn’t meant to simply be enjoyed; it’s meant to be parlayed into more.

Spiking the football is fine, but the game isn’t over ‘till it’s over. Take the time to reflect on the overall mission of your business, those big-picture goals that made you want to be an entrepreneur in the first place. Channel your successes into the fulfillment of that mission statement. By staying reflective, and not being overwhelmed by your own wins, you turn each bit of good news into a stepping stone.

After all, success is a terrible thing to waste.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Leadership Uncategorized

Why Storytelling Skills Make You a Better Business Leader

This post written by Laura Montgomery first appeared on The Economist on October 29th, 2015. This is the first of our collaboration series with The Executive Education Navigator.

“Storytelling” has become a ubiquitous buzzword in the business world as the marketers’ pursuit to weave the most creative and compelling narratives about their brands and products races on. Let’s take a look at why this has become such a hot topic, and what you can do to become a stronger storyteller yourself.

Why businesses need powerful narratives

Storytelling is being increasingly utilized for building customer loyalty externally, as well as for motivating internal stakeholders and developing stronger connections among employees internally.

Why are stories the chosen tool to achieve these aims? Because they serve as emotional “handholds” for communicating the complex information that we seek, explains storytelling expert Frank Rose. “You can memorise data, but to have it change opinion and behaviour you need story,” says Rose, who co-teaches an executive-education course at Columbia Business School on storytelling strategy.

The art of storytelling in a digital world

Here’s a quick, well, story to illustrate Rose’s view on storytelling strategy: Back in 2006, as a journalist for Wired magazine, Rose interviewed director James Cameron, who was filming Avatar at the time. “He told me the best way to think about the story was as a fractal experience,” recalls Rose. “The casual viewer could enjoy the movie on a basic level. But for the more intense fan, the meaning could unfold in unlimited powers of ten, all within a unified experience.”

Rose likens Cameron’s approach to cinematic storytelling to contemporary media – a fragmented yet unified universe where we can tell stories that allow greater or lesser degrees of involvement.

Key ingredients of successful storytelling

You can find stories almost anywhere you look in a company – an earnings chart, a corporate timeline, a client testimonial. The real challenge is to develop stories that are true, interesting and engaging to your unique audience. Whether the end destination is on billboards or in boardrooms, Rose highlights four key qualities of compelling stories:

1. Originality

Do an honest inventory to discover what is unique about your brand or company – its founding, evolution and vision for changing the world.

2. Authenticity

What does your company stand for? How do leaders and employees feel about the business? Try to focus on real people and genuine emotions.

3. Empathy

Even when a story is about your company or product, the customer should always be the focal point. How does who and what you are translate into customer benefits?

4. Consistency

Finally, it’s crucial to define a singular voice and tone you will use to tell your story across various media and platforms.

The only question that remains is: What stories could you be telling?

—

About the author:
Laura Montgomery is an independent higher-education consultant.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Leadership Uncategorized

3 Smart Reinvestments Into Your Business

The growth of your business depends on your ability to maximize each gain. That’s why knowing how to reinvest profits is a must-have skill. Profits are great, but without reinvestment, they’re partially wasted. As in so many aspects of business, the long-term view is most important. With smart reinvestments, you can make your regular gains exponential in their effects- and support the growth of your business for years to come.

After paying overhead, employee salaries, and yourself, hopefully you have something left over. It’s a good idea to build reinvestment funds into your business plan, and set a target for what you’d like to have on hand to accomplish your reinvestment goals. As for what those goals should be, I’ve found that smart reinvestment falls into three basic categories:

1. Investing in yourself. Take some of those profits, and add some tools to your own arsenal. By furthering your own education and skill set, you create a stronger business for the long haul. You also add value to your own product, especially if your product is informational or educational. When I worked in education, it was mandated that teachers go through a certain amount of professional development every year. That’s because in education, as in business, the professional that isn’t developing is stagnating.

For example, here at Business Republic I’m particularly glad to have reinvested in one particular skill of my own: public speaking. As my business-education ideas were bearing fruit, I realized that between podcasting, webinars, and speaking engagements, my whole future depended largely on mine and my partner’s communication skills. We signed up for public speaking training with Michael Port and Amy Mead. Now, I don’t only consider that training worth every penny, I consider it a real factor in the subsequent growth of our business.

The key was in identifying what training would provide a tangible, measurable impact on that growth. It’s not about simply taking classes in any old skill; it’s about finding skills you can apply directly to your business plan. Port and Mead’s course was a demonstrably good investment, measurable in everything from podcast-induced traffic to payments for speaking engagements. It’s clear that this reinvestment added customers and helped generate sales.

Whatever your business is, identify the skills that you’ll need most- be they web design, writing, coding, or rock climbing. Every cent you spend wisely will come back to you in revenue.

2. Investing in someone else. Of course, no growing business can move forward without a strong team. Ideally, your business grows to the point where you’ll needmore people to take on the workload. Those personnel investments may be the most important ones you make. The key is to hire for specific skill sets, particularly the ones that aren’t your personal forte.

That may mean hiring a social media specialist who understands the whims of Facebook better than you ever could. It may mean hiring a web designer to take your site beyond the standard templates available to amateurs. It may mean hiring writers and editors who can articulate your vision even better than you can. You can even hire remote virtual employees with no geographical limitations. Whatever they do, your new hires will free you up to focus on other, bigger things.

By investing in specified help, you can focus on new projects, new products, and new horizons for your business. Again, make sure that the contribution from this kind of reinvestment is demonstrable and measurable. If you hire wisely, the difference your new employees make should be reflected in revenue- even to the point where they pay for themselves.

3. Investing in the business itself. Finally, that extra revenue might best serve your business by a more direct investment in equipment, infrastructure, or even marketing. The advertising budget can be increased to widen the search for new customers. The website can be improved in its functionality or design. For a physical business, a remodeling or equipment purchase can breathe new life into your location. Even buying new computers or software could make a dramatic difference.

As always, deciding what to buy for your business comes down to maximizing the impact of the dollars you invest. Pay for that bold new storefront if it will make your business stand out on a crowded street, not because it looks cool. Get those new laptops because they improve productivity- only if they would improve productivity. Something as simple as your wardrobe could be a worthwhile investment; just be careful that it’s a business investment and not a personal one. It all comes down to the specific goals you want your reinvestments to help materialize.

Which reinvestment strategy you pursue will depend on the priorities of your business. Make a list of the most important improvements, the ones that you and your team predict would generate the most revenue. Invest in those first. Once your business is growing steadily, you can even rotate between the three types of reinvestment.

Sometimes, what pays off may surprise you, as well as what doesn’t. Track the progress of your reinvestments, and use that data to inform your next ones. Learn as you grow, and grow as you learn.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Uncategorized

Is Your Dream Too Big?

Cold, hard reality: we all need a dose of it from time to time, and sooner or later, we all get one. If you’re lucky, you’ve got people in your life who administer those doses with compassion and respect. These mentors, friends and teachers don’t pump you up with “yes man” enthusiasm, or fill certain orifices with the smoke of blind optimism. They tell you the truth. They measure your dreams against the actual world we live in, with all its possibilities and limitations.

As someone who guides budding entrepreneurs, I’d hate to be the guy known for bursting bubbles. But sometimes, a bubble is obscuring our view of more realistic possibilities. Sometimes what’s inside the bubble, the core of your dreams, is set free when that sucker pops. Sometimes the bubble just needs to be deflated a bit, so that it can fit through reality-sized doorways. Dreams can be too big. Dreams, in fact, can hold us back as surely as obstacles.

How do you know if you’re dreaming too big in business? How can the dangers of over-reaching be avoided? I think it comes down to differentiating between dreams and goals, and replacing one with the other.

Dreams vs Goals

Dreams are something beginners have. They’re vague, they’re grand, and they’re usually well out of reach. They’re in the realm of fantasy rather than action, and they’re often unattainable. Like literal dreams, their relationship to your actual life is tenuous at best.

That doesn’t mean they’re not useful.

Goals are the product of dreams. They’re what you get when you reach into a dream, pull out its essence, and apply it to the reality of the business world. They can be big, but they come with a path to realization. There are steps that lead to their completion, and those steps are actionable. While dreams are limitless and beautiful, you can have a goal when you’re awake!

To illustrate the difference further, here are some typical dreams:

I want to be rich.

I want to see the world.

I want to do what I want, when I want.

These are tempting. They’re invigorating. They’re also unspecific. They’re so vague, in fact, that no realistic steps can be envisioned to achieve them. They are so poorly defined that at the end of the day, they’re not of much use. They’re something people think about while they’re drifting off at their desk- the one they use at their real, unfulfilling job. They’re simply not actionable, which makes them almost pointless.

Goals, on the other hand, look like this:

I want to be financially independent, to afford my life as my own boss.

I want to see Europe and the American West.

I want to retire at 55.

I want to feel like I’m teaching people something useful.

These are actionable, achievable, specific goals that a person has a legitimate chance of completing. They are destinations to which roads exist- roads that are accessible. These things can happen, and not in the way that winning the lottery can happen. They will happen, if the right plan is formed and executed.

That’s not to say that dreaming doesn’t have its uses. The key is to bridge the gap between dreams and goals by analyzing your dreams for the goals that are hidden inside. For example, being “rich” is a dream. But ask yourself: what’s “rich?” Why do you want to be rich? How would being a millionaire actually fulfill you? Of course the money itself wouldn’t do a thing; it would only give you access to some means of achieving your real desires.

Maybe you love the beach, or you’re fulfilled by travel, or there are people who you want to support financially without stressing over bills. Maybe you just want to do work you consider meaningful. These “whys” behind the dreams are the foundations of achievable goals. By examining the deeper motivations at the heart of your dreams, you can uncover real-world possibilities.

From Dreams to Goals

To establish your real-world business goals, start with your dreams. You can even write them down, no matter how wildly unrealistic. Then ask the question: why? Why do you dream of what you dream? What is it you really want? Then ask yourself what it would actually take to fulfill those desires. This can be done in monetary terms. Make a list of the core things that would satisfy your most grounded, reasonable wishes, and write down what they would cost in dollars. What would the mortgage on that beach house be? How much would two good trips a year cost? What is the literal price of supporting yourself or your family while still saving for emergencies and retirement?

The numbers may surprise you. Often, the cost of what we really want out of life is far less than the millions we fantasize about. When we whittle the excesses of our dreams down to what’s really important in the broader view, it all starts to look pretty attainable. Honest, basic fulfillment doesn’t usually take billions. It may only take a few hundred thousand, or fifty thousand, or the same amount of money you’re already making, but made independently rather than as an employee. It all depends on your own vision of happiness.

Once you’ve calculated the literal cost of your life goals, convert that to sales goals. How much product would you need to sell per day, week, month and year to hit the numbers you’ve established? What do you have to do to make those quotas? How many steady customers would support your sales goals? You may only have to serve a few thousand people to get what you need. Now you’ve stopped dreaming, and are ready to start doing.

Daring to…NOT Dream

Converting dreams to goals isn’t about being timid or hedging your bets. It is not about settling. It’s about chasing something that’s defined and attainable enough to actually catch. It’s about deciding what’s truly important to you and insisting on having it. It’s about choosing real change instead of nursing disappointment with fantasies. What you really want and need may be closer than you’ve dared to hope for.

So can you dream too big? That depends on you. You can dream too big if what you’re chasing is so detached from reality as to make it a counterproductive pursuit. You can’t dream too big if you’re willing to see your dreams as a starting point from which you can identify goals. From goals, you make plans. With plans, you create steps and deadlines, and start plotting your way to success.

In the end, the usefulness of dreaming comes down to authenticity. Authentic, successful business people don’t chase pipe dreams- and they don’t sell products that encourage other people to. Beware the “entrepreneur” who offers the moon and the stars, or who sells promises of a lifestyle. Those of us in the business of education know that success isn’t something that can be bought or sold. The product is tools and knowledge. The empowerment comes from within, from a place of honesty and realism.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Marketing Uncategorized

3 Must-Know Principles of Marketing

Marketing: it’s a mysterious and somewhat vague term. Many new business people aren’t quite sure what it actually means. Does it refer to advertising? To building web traffic? To branding? The answer is that it’s none of those things, but also all of them. It encapsulates your entire business’s approach to gaining customers. If your marketing strategy is too narrowly focused on any one aspect, it misses the point. Likewise, any one thing you do that isn’t done with marketing in mind can take your business off track. That’s why it’s important to develop a comprehensive strategy.

Marketing is the way you bring people to your business, but that’s only leading the proverbial horse to water. To make them drink requires more than simply “getting your name out there.” It requires building intrigue in your business in a way that earns you the opportunity to sell. It’s making people aware of your business, but also making them want to learn more. It’s not simply promotion. It’s the first step in a relationship.

I’ve learned that good marketing comes down to a certain mindset. This mindset involves defining the role of your business in a customer’s life, rather than just “chasing” customers and trying to sell them something. It may sound a bit sentimental, but a business that focuses on relationship-building as a marketing strategy creates customers that are loyal, proud, and ultimately your best advertising.

In taking this approach, I use three simple strategies:

1. Solve someone’s problem. This is basically step one for any business that hopes to succeed, yet so many budding entrepreneurs miss it. The first key to building a business that will attract interest is to position your product as the solution to a problem or an alleviator of pain. Yoga instructors alleviate the pain and weakness of an unfit body and an unsound mind. Car dealers alleviate the pain of commuting or the pain of social inadequacy. The $100 MBA alleviates the pain of an entrepreneurial spirit being held back by a lack of formal business education. Whatever you sell, it needs to be an answer, not just a product. By addressing a genuine problem in a customer’s life, your product becomes more valuable than its retail price.

2. Go for depth, not width. I used to be a teacher, and later an administrator. In education, there’s a real problem with curriculum that’s “a mile wide and an inch deep.” It’s when teachers are forced to cover so much content, and there’s so much information to be memorized, that students only understand it at a superficial level. Being able to name and date every battle of the Civil War is great, but a far more useful skill is to be able to discuss why it happened and what its effects were.

Marketing has a similar problem, with businesses trying to reach out to so many customers, but only on a superficial level. By blasting simple ads onto social media, or in newspapers, or on highway billboards, businesses aren’t connecting with anyone, they’re simply “getting their name out there.” That can only take you so far.

A better approach is to build deeper relationships with less people. Yes, less people. Casting a net full of holes won’t get you much fish, no matter how wide it is. But if you offer your time, some valuable content, and a genuine connection to a smaller group of people, you’re more likely to turn them into regular customers.

By the numbers, “deep marketing” to as little as 500 people, when done right, is worth more than an ad seen by 5,000 people. This is where content marketing comes in; even if you’re selling a physical product, it’s imperative to create informational and instructional content. Blogs, videos and webinars are offered free of charge, and your reputation grows. By producing and giving away content to a targeted audience, you forge a connection. You gain credibility and trust, and that ultimately turns into sales.

3. ABM (Always Be Marketing). Effective marketing isn’t something you do once and consider accomplished. It’s something you’re doing all the time, and is reflected in every aspect of your business. It’s the key to continued growth. By integrating marketing into all of your business practices, you’re ensuring a future for your company by building on the reputation that draws new customers in.

Again, this is why I’m such a strong advocate of offering valuable content. This blog is something that people find informative, helpful, and ultimately valuable (or so I’d like to think). It’s free content, as are the videos, guides, infographics and e-books we offer to anyone who’s interested. A given consumer may read the blog and not buy anything, but we’ve earned his or her trust. Maybe they buy something down the road. Maybe they refer others who are ready for our full services. Whatever happens, the content drives our marketing by building a more loyal following than any advertisement can. We know that when you offer value, you create intrigue, not just awareness.

That’s why I like to think of marketing as the art of building lots of little relationships, as frequently as possible. This is what distinguishes it from mere advertising. While advertising has its role, reality isn’t Mad Men; people aren’t truly moved to action until they feel a connection.

Good marketing takes practice. It’s a cumulative skill, one that’s developed over the length of an entrepreneurial career. As your business evolves, your ability to market becomes more and more sophisticated. There’s no final, perfect strategy. There’s no formula. There’s just being yourself, and getting better at it every day.