Click on video above to see and hear Rhondalynn in action.
You may be surprised to hear that 95% of your prospects don’t really understand you message. You have to understand that your potential customer is simply in pain (in some aspect of his life) and he is looking for the solution. So he has come to you… and what do you do?
Let’s take a look at your last ad, press release, email or even the home page of your website. If you are being honest, I would bet that more than 60% of the prime real estate here is focused on YOU – your brand, your product/service, what you are doing and why you are doing it. And if you are using visuals they are probably of your products, your machinery, your location or even YOU.
And if you are like most business owners, the last 40% of your time and space is spent trying to cram as many words as you can into this bottom section to let your prospects know just how much you can do. In my experience, most of you are spending way too much time trying to impress your audience with fancy words and descriptions.
Here’s the bad news – you’ve already lost your potential customer. In fact, you put him to sleep about 2 minutes ago.
Your brain accounts for 2-3% of your body’s mass but uses 25% of your body’s energy. This is a very important fact to know if you are trying to influence or persuade others. Your brain is the 2nd most energy consumptive organ in your body – if you don’t give it what it needs, it will control your thinking. For those of you who are hungry right now, you know exactly what I am talking about.
From a survival perspective, the brain doesn’t like to use more energy than it has to. If you can make it easier for your customer’s brain to grasp your message, process it quickly and decide, you are more likely to get a YES.
Just for fun, I would like to introduce you to one of your customers… well, at least the decision making brain of one of your customers.
The part of your customer’s brain that decides is the same brain that you and I share with this crocodile. This part of the brain is solely focused on what? Survival, that’s right. Does Mr. Crocodile care about your brand, your products, your photo or your features and benefits? No. Does it care about win/win? No. It is solely focused on itself and physical survival. This part of your customer’s brain gets triggered within 30 seconds and is permanently tuned into the WIFM (what’s in it for me) radio station – constantly scanning to protect itself from pain or death.
So what does this mean for you? To the extent you understand the pain of your customer and are here to help him solve it, he will listen to you or read what you have to say.
Let’s come back to your marketing message for a moment. How can you use this insight for your next ad, press release, email or your website?
First, you are going to stop wasting your most valuable real estate talking about your products, your background, your brand, your philosophy or who you have been certified by. Your clients do not care. If this box represents 100% of the time and space that you have to get your message across right now, you need to spend 80% of it:
– Showing your customer you understand his pain
– Recreating his pain
– And offering THE solution with proof you can deliver
This means that you should never waste it with a lame opening statement like “Introducing our new spring line”, “welcome to our newsletter” or “here are our latest clearance items”. While important to you, they mean nothing to the part of your customer’s brain that decides. They are like a bedtime story for your customer.
If you are using photos or video, and I highly suggest you do for reasons that we will cover in a session together very soon, you want to select visuals that support what? That’s right – recreating or demonstrating you understand your customers pain. This is not the time or place (if you are an electrician for example) to show a picture of you and your van. That photo is about you and not your customer’s pain. Remember your customer is tuned into WIFM radio station.
Also, if you are going to feature your brand or logo, it does not belong up here in this important 80% area.
That leaves only 20% for your call to action and contact details, which is plenty of space if you have captured your prospects attention up top in the 80% zone.
Do you remember when I made the bold claim that 95% of your prospects don’t really understand your message? As you can see, the reason for that is really very simple – your customer has come to you in pain (in some aspect of his life) and his crocodile brain is solely fixated on finding THE solution. This part of his brain, which is responsible for decision making does not have the time or patience to sit around reading or listening to information that is all about you. If you don’t capture his attention in the first 30 seconds with something that is relevant to his pain, you’ve lost him. He can’t possibly understand your message no matter how clever or funny it is because he’s not even paying attention – his reptilian brain has already moved on to look for the solution that will keep him alive or cure the pain .
I want you to assume for a moment that you are dying of thirst. Would you be willing to sit for an hour while I substantiate my credentials, talk to you about why I started my company and educate you on the value and qualities of my pure spring water? Or would you simply get up, walk across the street and find the water that you need to survive?
What if you were dirty and itchy? Would you be any more willing to listen to me focus on my brand or my product for an hour? How long would it take before you just got up and found something to wash yourself with?
And what if your house were on fire? Would you kick back and read 3 pages of stuff on my website about how great my water is or would you rather find someone right now who can help you put out the flames?
The bottom line is this – the quickest way to connect with your customer and get the attention of the decision making part of his brain is to let him know immediately that you understand his pain and can cure it. If you do this well upfront, he will listen to whatever it is that you have to say.
This insight will help you go from boring your prospects to convincing them and that’s good for your business.
Today, I’ve got a major challenge for you. I want you to take a look at what you are currently spending on marketing – whether it’s on brochures, your website, pay per clicks, PR, newspaper, direct mail, social media etc. – and I want you to slash the total budget by 20%. No matter what you are selling and where you are selling it, I guarantee that you won’t miss that 20%. And there is a very good reason for that. 96% of the people who see your message right now, don’t get it anyway. You are spending thousands of dollars each year on sales and marketing materials to increase your sales and the vast majority of your prospects don’t understand your message – so they can’t possibly recall it and buy from you.
So with the money you just saved in your pocket, we are going to take a few minutes right now to re-engineer your message and give you a much better chance of getting through and being understood. The good news is this – it is not going to cost you much to take the time right now to create a message that helps more of your prospects to say “yes”. And if more leads say “yes”, the money you do spend on sales and marketing is going to increase your sales.
To prove my point, I’d like to make you an interesting offer – I can either give you $50 cash right now or a piece of paper where I will write the net present value of a five year annuity at a compound annual interest rate of 10%, adjusted for CPI. Which of these sounds more appealing to you? Which would you rather take right now? Which of these can you take now, put in your wallet or spend it at the shopping centre?
Unless you are one of those very rare individuals who can calculate in your head the value of my second offer, I’m willing to bet you’d rather just take the $50. And that makes a whole lot of sense, because everyone knows what $50 is and what it is worth. There’s nothing confusing about it, is there?
The part of your brain that makes decisions is not interested in working hard to figure out what my message means and what it’s worth. That part of your brain is looking for something that is tangible. And if you’re unsure about whether a message is tangible or not – ask yourself “would a 6 year old understand it?”
Think about it – if I offer you a $50 note or an orange, you don’t have to think very hard about it to figure out what I am offering you, do you? Both of them are equally easy to understand. As soon as you see it, you know what it is and you know exactly what you can do with it. $50 will buy you enough food to cook a meal and the orange is good for you – it’s tasty and you can eat it. There are no directions and no heavy thinking required to make sense of what I am offering you. Your new brain doesn’t have to do any thinking (and wasting time) to get my message.
So what does this mean for you, your message and your customers? If you are making it hard for your customers to understand what you do and whether they are getting a good deal, you need to spend some time right now making your offer more tangible. Ask yourself “does my message include a bunch of big words, fluff and jargon?” Could it be boiled down to something that a 6 year old could understand? What do you need to do to communicate it more clearly to increase your sales – t0 help your prospects to be able to say “yes”? Can you simplify the words that you use or introduce photos or props to get your message across faster?
Now, I think you can guess that coming up with a simple, succinct message is a lot harder than being lazy and throwing together an ad full of useless, complicated information. A good rule of thumb here is to remember that you should be working harder to craft and simplify your message than your prospect has to in order to decipher it. Someone has to do the hard work – either you are committed to doing it before hand or your customer will need to think about it.
Now if you are serious about saving money and you want to increase your sales, you won’t spend another cent until you stop, take a good hard look at your materials and do whatever it takes to make your message tangible. You don’t have to spend more money to chase find customers. What you really need to do is take the complication and confusion out of your message so that more of your prospects can say “yes” now.
If you don’t know what you are doing, social media can become a nightmare
“With great exposure comes great responsibility.”
Without a doubt, social media marketing is the great equalizer. Until the arrival of WordPress, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, big business had an unfair advantage. Any business could of course create a website but few had the resources and knowledge to capture global exposure and sales.
Most SMEs had to settle for direct mail, local newspapers, networking, pay-per-clicks etc. because they simply could not compete with the big budgets of the big brands. In most cases, the advertising mediums with the biggest reach and frequency – TV, radio, online banner and outdoor – were out of the grasp of the average small business.
Social media marketing changed all of that.
With social media marketing, anyone can create an online presence and broadcast their uncensored views or talent worldwide, for less than $500. People like Justin Bieber and Lily Allen went from middle class obscurity to millions of fans and multi-million dollar careers virtually overnight due to social media.
Neilson published stats show that the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blogs. What this means is that you, I and your prospects now spend 25% of our time (around 12-15 hours a month) visiting these types of sites. And unlike the consumption of other types of media, social media is doubling year on year, it’s inexpensive and it’s now available 24/7 on mobile devices.
And therein lies the problem.
Good and bad news, whether true or untrue, can spread online like an epidemic. As opposed to advertising (which is initiated by you), a large percentage of what is said in social networks (and social media marketing) is contributed by people outside of your organization. How do you keep track of every single thing that is said or written about you? It’s almost impossible to monitor and control where and how your brand is mentioned online.
That’s why social media marketing has the potential to boost your reach and sales exponentially, but it could also easily bring out the worst in your company. With this in mind, what do you need to consider and do in your business to mitigate the risks?
1. Social media marketing is for social interaction
The focus of traditional marketing and advertising is on lead generation and sales. However, in social media marketing, it’s all about engaging with others, exchanging information and creating relationships. In order to excel in the realm of social networks, you will need to offer value upfront (to gain followers) and then focus on getting to know them and understanding their needs.
Prospects and customers are more interested in the interaction they have with you than they are on the deals or special offers. If you don’t engage with your followers on their terms, you risk doing more harm to your brand than good. Think of how many people and businesses have asked you to “like” their brand, re-tweet a message or join their mailing list in the past 24 hours? We are inundated with brands talking at us in social media and it is getting harder to create an impression and persuade us to act.
2. Look for opportunities to turn around customer experiences
You will discover more in one week about your brand in social media marketing circles than you will find in a year of traditional research. People don’t censor their opinions when they share with their friends and you are likely to hear a lot of stories of how you have fallen short of expectations. All of this is a very good thing because it means that you have a direct opportunity to make it right. Of course, you have to be listening and you need to have a strategy on how you will deal with it. In the absence of these 2 things, you are actually worse off because the story will spread like wildfire and it will carry a much greater weight since it is shared among friends.
Most will mistakenly view social media marketing as a great place to sell more stuff. It is actually a far better place to listen to what your customers are saying and take action to turn bad experiences into positive ones.
3. What is it really costing you?
On the face of it, social media marketing appears practically free. However, when you factor in the time it takes to produce content across various mediums, cross- promote it, reply to followers etc., it could easily turn into a full time job. Your time (or the time of a team member) is valuable and needs to be measured against the returns generated by the online activity. Return on investment online is a function of both tangible and intangible factors.
In my experience, far too many small businesses are getting caught up in the hype of social media marketing without a clear understanding of the real cost or return. Why spend hours a day posting and interacting online if you can generate a better response by speaking directly to your customers or asking for a referral? Social media marketing only promises you can talk to more people for less money, it doesn’t guarantee that anyone will listen or that you will earn the same return on investment that you could receive elsewhere.
4. Be clear about your brand and branding strategy
Prospects often need to see the same message many times before they will decide to take action. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make is to overload your audience with too many messages because you are trying to be all things to all people. Repetition is the key to retention. In order to be remembered and acted upon, your message should be consistent across all channels including your social media marketing. This means that wherever your prospects and customers see you, they have to experience your brand and your message in the exact same way. This can become difficult when you are trying to manage multiple platforms and respond to what is happening in real time.
It pays to have a very clear strategy before you embark on social media. Social media marketing is not like traditional advertising channels – it is very fluid and dynamic. As such, circumstances can change on a daily basis and you need to outline ahead of time what your key messages are and how they should be communicated consistently to your audience.
5. Social media marketing is not for everyone
Who manages your social media marketing? If it is not you personally, does that employee or part-time contractor understand what your plan and overall strategy is? In many cases they may be the most direct links to your target market and everything that is said by them on your behalf will have far reaching implications for your brand and company.
If they are responding to a disgruntled customer or worse, an insane person who is just trying to create trouble, do they know exactly what to do to diffuse the situation? If the situation gets out of hand, at what point do you find out and become involved? Do you have the means to take action and protect your brand if matters get out of hand or you become the target of defamation?
The reach and potential of social media are great – so are the risks. While it may seem harmless and fun on the surface, the capacity to do irreparable harm to your brand is very real. Social media marketing needs to be entered into with a very clear plan. It’s not something that you should delegate freely or allow to run unmanaged.
Start first by monitoring what is said about you and your brand online. There are many free services online which can assist you to do this. Take some time to investigate what your competitors and other well known brands are doing in this space. Then, once you understand the key platforms and what you hope to gain on each by participating, you can begin to create a community of followers with confidence, control and safeguards.
I recently purchased a pair of authentic Vintage Versace sunglasses online and was amazed at the number of fake designer sunglasses and handbags advertised on the internet. In fact, there are more videos and websites dedicated to promoting and avoiding counterfeit products than there are sites selling genuine designer items.
What does this tell you?
The market for rip offs and counterfeit items is huge. According to fashionistas, editors and bloggers in the industry, the total spending on fake or “knock-off” designer goods eclipses the amount actually spent on the real thing. In fact, if you see someone on the street with a Versace, Hermes or Fendi bag, there’s only a 1 in 100 chance that it’s authentic. Customers prefer replicas.
So how does this impact you and your business?
Unfortunately, many consumers would rather invest a little to give the appearance that they appreciate quality. The fakes are inferior, but many customers choose them anyway because they want to maintain a facade. They want the quick fix – the easy path to looking successful but few want to make the necessary investment of time and money, required to BE successful.
In order to stand out in a marketplace where imitations and charlatans are plentiful, you need to do the opposite of what your competition is doing.
Where their message is confusing, yours must be simple.
When they are selling features and benefits, you must present the solution.
Where they are focused on their brand, you must identify your customer’s pain and cure it.
Where their claims are unsubstantiated, yours must be tangible.
There will always be a long list of vendors and products to satisfy the insatiable appetite for “almost authentic”. And in the end, the purchaser will always get exactly what they paid for. If you continue to compete based on price alone (or intangible claims), 99% of your customers will continue to assume that you are not the real deal either.
Rest assured, your potential customer will continue to be in pain no matter which replicas and quick fixes she purchases in the meantime. Eventually, the pain will become so acute that she will seek out your genuine solution. Make it easier for her to find you by having a clear message that helps her to decide and say “Yes.” Help her to know that you are authentic – put a fair price on what you do, provide tangible proof your solution works and then deliver on your promise.
Solutions are like diamonds, precious and rare. Fakes are like dry leaves in the fall, found everywhere.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6586136
4 solid strategies to stand out and attract more free media exposure
Media outlets constantly search for stories and people who will captivate the attention of their audiences. What this means for you and your organization is that today is the best time to reach out and earn your share of the millions in free publicity that is available every single day.
How do you impress the media and stick out in a sea of wannabes?
First and foremost, don’t waste their valuable time. Virtually, every media outlet is operating with fewer staff than they had last year. This means that they still have the same pressing deadlines and space to fill but they don’t have enough staff to do it.
If you want your pitch to stand out amongst the thousands that hit their inbox today – it has to be memorable, relevant and thorough.
Here are my TOP 4 Tips to guarantee you attract attention no matter what product or service you are selling.
1. Be Newsworthy. You can never hope to “make the news” if you have no idea what is going on in the news. The media is not interested in your product or service. What they are interested in are celebrities, politicians, sports stars, scandals, natural disasters and other headline news. If you want to be featured, you need to make what you do relevant in the context of what is happening today in the news. Tie what you do to someone or something that is newsworthy and you will become the go-to-expert for top shows, magazines and newspapers.
2. Tailor Your Story. If you don’t read a particular publication or follow a show, chances are that it will be almost impossible for you to hit the target with the editor or producer. They get thousands of pitches every day – if it doesn’t fit squarely within what they do, they will simply toss it in the garbage. It is better to send out 2 custom pitches a day that are carefully crafted than 100 generic emails or faxes that are too broad to appeal to anyone.
3. Create your own news. The other day I got a call from a national news organization who read my pitch that 1/3 of the population suffers from insomnia. They immediately wanted to interview me. Now, insomnia has been around since the beginning of time. Why did it become a pressing national news story on Tuesday at 9am in Melbourne? 1/3 of the general population is a lot of people. If something affects a lot of people, it becomes newsworthy. The trick to garnering media attention is to take some aspect of what you do and make it tangible and real (as a problem) to the lives of many.
4. Follow the story and add to it. If you watch carefully you will notice that the media tends to follow a hot story for an extended period of time. Take for example Claire Werbeloff, the chick-chick-boom girl, who became a Youtube sensation around the world for lying about the events leading up to a Kings Cross murder. Even though she had no talent, connection to the crime or evidence, we were forced to endure more than 4 weeks of national coverage on her (not the crime). She eventually went on to be featured in Ralph magazine and was offered work with Channel 9. To emulate this you need to track the pulse of hot news stories and be on the lookout for opportunities to enhance the coverage by contributing insights and expert commentary. When it comes to breaking news, the media is on the look-out for related subjects which add to the story or new angles that are fresh and captivating.
Media outlets capture eyeballs with news and they are not in the business of selling your products or services. By following the news and becoming newsworthy, you will increase your chances exponentially of being picked up and featured.
The good news is that media outlets are constantly searching for stories and people who will capture and captivate the attention of their audiences. What this means for you and your organization is that right now (TODAY) is the best time for you to reach out and earn some of the millions of dollars of free publicity that is available every day.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3142180
