What you’re forgetting to include in your marketing budget, a salesman’s biggest mistake and why your best salesman won’t be a paid employee but someone who actually pays you. Pay close attention to the following rules.
Marketing is nothing more than a complimentary product. But what’s often accepted as marketing is actually a very specific part of the broader picture that needs to be taken into account in order to build a strong brand. A brand’s success is often seen as the direct result of its marketing budget, but as a firm that specializes in marketing and sales, one of our most common suggestions is to take part of the budget and invest it in the things that are really important. Do you have a pen and paper ready?
The best restaurants in the world don’t market themselves
If your product is good, people will come. If you are the best at what you do, you don’t need to sell yourself – it’s enough for you to speak about it naturally and people will want to work with you. Marketing efforts may speed up the process and bring you income as you continue to grow but in the long run, it’s the general experience that will get people to keep coming back again and again.
The lesson: It may sound banal but it needs to be said – focus on quality and don’t compromise on anything. The rest will come on its own.
The best salesman is your audience
Writing about yourself doesn’t hurt, but in an age when every person with a telephone is an independent media organization, people will always prefer to hear from your customers. You used to search for a plumber in the phone book but today when you want to get an amazing product or skilled professional, the first thing you do is search on Facebook (or Google).
Our advice: Invest in your reviews. Ask customers to leave (objective!) reviews – in exchange for an incentive perhaps – and don’t forget to try and promote the positive reviews. And if it’s a landing page, don’t forget the “social proof” part. In the end, that’s what works better than anything else.
First rule in sales: Don’t sell to someone who doesn’t want to buy
One of the main stumbling blocks you’ll have to get over with your customers is the desire to reach out to audience that aren’t natural consumers of your product or the service you provide. You might try to do this with the thought that they have more potential or that they will produce more for you than others. But reaching out to this kind of audience means educating them about the market – and that’s not something you can do in one or two campaigns. It’s a very long expensive step-by-step process.
Our advice: To be blunt, it’s best if possible, to know who your audience is before getting started. And if you decide to go with the less-natural option, take into account that you’ll need a lot of patience and a substantial budget.
Having customers is being in a relationship
Just like in a romantic relationship, the most expensive thing is getting a new customer and that’s why you want your customers to stay around for a long time. That starting point that you always need to remember is that there’s a person on the other side whose looking for a solution for some need or another. Sometimes you’ll succeed is giving him a jackpot solution or service and sometimes you’ll leave him with a pile of frustration. How you respond in case of the latter will heavily influence your relationship with him. What’s more, it’ll influence your relationship with other customers.
Our tip: Relationships are complicated, so in this case we have two tips:
1. Choose wisely: Take the appropriate customers to work with you and if you have the privilege, don’t take those you already think you’ll have problems with before getting started. Don’t waste too much time, money and frustration on the wrong customers. Drop them before any damage is caused.
2. Invest in him/her! Don’t treat your customers like numbers. Tell them that they’re important to you, spoil them with perks, communicate with them in language they can understand and most importantly, make every effort for them to feel satisfied, even at the cost of a small loss in the short term in order to gain in the long term.
So, what have we learned?
It’s pretty simple: When thinking about marketing for your business, consider the entire picture. Start with who you are, who your customers are and how you or your product look in their eyes – the messages are only the last step. You can read more on the subject here. And if you manage to make just some of these tips a reality, you’ll have to invest far less in marketing itself. Of course if you have questions, we’ll be happy to answer!