The learning center

Marketing can be incredibly confusing. Most people don't really know what it is, they just know it can be the answer to their business prayers.

But simply implementing marketing into your business won't result in success. You need to first understand what marketing is, and then have a plan of action.

So let's start with what marketing is. And this is the simplest, most jargon-free, definition of marketing you’re ever likely to come across:

What Is Marketing?

If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying ‘Circus Coming to the Showground Saturday’, that’s advertising.

If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion.

If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that’s publicity.

And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations.

If the town’s citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that’s sales.

And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing.

Learn How To Market Your Business Successfully

But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

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Other Marketing Definitions

Marketing is a series of activities and processes that a business or brand takes to promote their product or services to their ideal customer. These are the people most likely to buy what they're selling.

Marketing encompasses research, strategy, advertising, social media engagement, and selling.

The point is to educate, inform, and move a prospect closer to a sale.

Why Your Business Needs Marketing?

It's simple, really. If someone has never bought from you, how do they find out about your product or service?

Unless you've got a robust referral system in place, they're unlikely to have heard about your business.

And they're most likely not going to buy from you.

So, if you want people to take a closer look at your business, and spend their precious dollars, you need marketing.

It's what you do to attract your ideal customer.

Now you need a strategy to get them to like you and do business with you. We've got the perfect solution. You need direct response marketing. Click the link for more information.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on How to Create a Lead Magnet that Converts in 6-Steps. As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to attract high-quality leads and you can automate much of it.

Much of the time we spend here is devoted to discussing strategies for rapid business growth through marketing.

However, I’ve found it’s just as important to learn from mistakes as it is to follow good advice.

In this article, I’ll outline three of the most common marketing blunders made by small and medium-sized businesses.

These three “stupid” marketing strategies have killed many small businesses. Left unchecked, they could kill yours.

So here's what not to do.

Want to know what is the difference between marketing strategies and tactics? We've broken it down here so you can have all the facts before you invest time, money and resources into marketing your business.

Also, check out this blog to see the hot marketing trends for 2022.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

#1 Stupid Marketing Strategy – Not Tracking Advertising Return On Investment (ROI)

John Wanamaker, one of the marketing greats, famously said:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

While this was understandable a century ago, when it was first said, it should be a crime to say today. Yet the reality is that most small businesses do little if any tracking of advertising.

Not measuring where your leads and sales come from and not tracking ROI on ad spend is the mark of the amateur. We all have at our disposal the technology to quickly, easily and cheaply track advertising effectiveness.

Tools such as toll-free numbers, website analytics, and coupon codes make this trivial. Remember what gets measured, gets managed. Be ruthless with your ad spend by cutting the losers and riding the winners. Obviously, to know what’s losing and what’s winning, you need to be tracking and measuring.

#2 Stupid Marketing Strategy – Going Too Broad

Who is your target market? If you tell me “everyone,” then I know you haven’t properly thought this through.

Trying to target everyone, in reality, means you’re targeting no one. By going too broad you kill your “specialness” and become a commodity bought on price.

By narrowly defining a target market whom you can wow and deliver huge results for, you become a specialist. A specialist is someone sought out, respected, and most importantly trusted.

When you narrow down your target market, you naturally decide who you’re going to exclude. Don’t underestimate the importance of this.

Excluding potential customers scares many small business owners. They mistakenly believe that a wider net is more likely to capture more customers. This is a huge mistake.

Dominate a niche, then once you own it, do the same with another and then another. But never do so all at once. Doing so dilutes your message and your marketing power.

Read this article to Find Your Niche & Dominate It.

#3 Stupid Marketing Strategy – Wasting Money On “Branding” When You're A Small Business

So many small businesses waste huge sums of money on “branding.” They see their large competitors do so and think that this must be the path to success.

I explain in explicit detail here why this is crazy.

Here’s a short illustration. Think of yourself as a hunter and your marketing dollars as firepower. You need to use your limited firepower wisely so that you can successfully hunt, come home victorious, and feed your family.

If you start randomly firing in every direction, you’re going to startle and scare off your prey. You need to be targeted and clever if you wish to be victorious.

Of course, some people will argue with me and say that “getting your name out there” is the way to go.

Unless you’re a large business like Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola, or similar then it’s likely you can’t afford to burn tens of millions of dollars on fuzzy marketing like “branding” or “getting your name out there”.

Rather than “getting your name out there”, you’ll fare much better by concentrating on getting the name of your prospects in here.

Time To Craft Your Marketing Plan

As a small or medium-sized business, you need to get a fast return on your marketing spend.

Putting your comparatively tiny marketing budget into fuzzy marketing is like the proverbial drop in the ocean. You need a plan.

The game of mass marketing, branding, and “getting your name out there” type of marketing can only be won with atomic bomb scale firepower.

If you’re a small to medium business, that’s not a game you’re equipped to play.

If you’ve found yourself engaging in any of these stupid marketing strategies, now’s the time to stop, re-evaluate, and change course.

Whenever I speak to business owners, the topic of conversation invariably turns to marketing. When I ask how they market themselves, “word of mouth” almost always comes up as the primary or only form of marketing they rely on.

This used to shock me but now I’ve come to expect it.

Whilst word of mouth marketing is powerful, and an important part of your marketing plan it’s an extremely slow and unreliable way of building a business. Assuming you do everything right, it can take many years, even decades, to build a successful business on the back of word of mouth alone.

Word of mouth or referral marketing is the business equivalent of a free lunch. Sure it’s nice when it comes your way and you appreciate it, but do you really want to rely on it to feed your family?

By being solely reliant on word of mouth, you’re putting the fate of your business in the hands of others. Essentially, you're hoping they like you and remember you often enough to regularly send new business your way.

This is an extremely dangerous path to be on. Instead, now’s the time to start building a much more robust marketing system.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

Building An Unbreakable Marketing System

Having only a single source of new business is extremely dangerous. Being unable to control that source makes it doubly so.

I advocate having at least five different sources of new leads and new customers. This is called lead generation. You can read about the benefits here.

Added to that, I recommend that most of these five sources be in paid media i.e. they cost you money to market yourself. The reason paid media is so important is twofold.

1. It's Extremely reliable.

If I pay a newspaper to run my emotional direct response ad, there’s a high probability the ad will actually be run. It’s much harder to get reliable and consistent lead flow from free marketing methods such as word of mouth.

2. Paid marketing Forces you To Focus on Return on Investment (ROI).

If a paid marketing method is not working, you cut it. You don’t waste further time or money on it. Whereas when the marketing method is free, such as with word of mouth, we tend to be less ruthless and often end up wasting huge amounts of time because we didn’t have to pay anything upfront. However, there’s an opportunity cost which, if careful analysis is done, often translates to a surprisingly large amount of real money.

The art and science of being able to consistently turn a dollar of paid advertising into a dollar or more in profits through direct response marketing will make your business resilient and can help you turn the tap on to rapid business growth.

Boosting the Reliability of Word-Of-Mouth Marketing

While we don’t want to be solely reliant on word of mouth, we do want to amplify it’s power and increase it’s reliability where possible.

One of the best ways I’ve seen this done is by straight out asking for referrals from customers for whom you’ve delivered a good result. It’s amazing how many business owners hope for referrals yet rarely ask for them. Something as simple as:

“Mr. Customer, it’s been such a pleasure working with you. If you know anyone who’s in a similar situation as yourself we’d love you to give them one of these gift cards which entitles them to $100 off their first consultation with us. One of the reasons we’re able to keep the cost of our service low is because we get a lot of our business through referrals from people like you.”

See what’s going on here:

• We’re acknowledging them and appealing to their ego.
• We’re not asking them for a favor but instead offering something valuable they can give to someone in their network.
• We’re giving them a reason why they should give us referrals – a reason that directly benefits them.

You could also look at affiliate marketing. This is another great way to generate referrals to your business.

Systemize Your Word Of Mouth Marketing Strategy

By putting a system around generating referrals, we’ve dramatically increased the reliability of word of mouth marketing. And while not everyone will give you referrals, many will and it sure beats just silently hoping.

Relying on the goodwill of others is not my idea of being an entrepreneur. By creating multiple sources of new leads and increasing the reliability of word of mouth marketing, you take back control of your lead flow and build a solid foundation for rapid business growth.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on How to Create a Lead Magnet that Converts in 6 Steps. As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to acquire leads for your business and build your authority.

If you're new to marketing, you might be wondering why you don't want to position your business as a commodity?

Whether you’re selling freshly baked bread, accounting services or IT support, the way you market yourself will have a dramatic impact on the clients you attract and the amount that you can charge for your services.

Position your business as the best price or lowest offer, and you'll attract price hunters. Here's why that's a bad deal for your business.

Marketing Positioning - It's not about the product

A commonly held belief is that “it’s all about the product” i.e. if you have a better product or service people will automatically be more likely to buy from you and pay you more for it.

While this is true to some extent, the law of diminishing returns comes into play when your product or service reaches a “good enough” level. After all how much better can your IT support or accounting services or bread be than that of your competition?

Once you’ve reached a level of competence, the real profit comes from the way you market yourself.

How you position your business can determine the type of customer you attract, and whether they stay long-term or short-term.

How Much Money Does A Violinist Make?​

How much does a world-class violinist make? Well, that depends on how he markets himself.

Have you ever heard of Joshua Bell?

He’s one of the finest classical musicians in the world. He plays to packed audiences all around the world, making upwards of $1, 000 per minute.

The violin that he plays is a Stradivarius violin built in 1713, currently valued at $3.5 million. This particular Stradivarius violin, being close to 300 years old, is renowned to be the most beautiful sounding violin ever crafted.

So, here we have the finest violinist in the world playing the most beautiful violin ever. It’s safe to say that Bell, as an musician, is the best at what he does.

At the height of his career he was approached by the Washington Post to participate in a social experiment.

They wanted him to play at a local subway for an hour, during which thousands of people would walk by and hear him playing.

So on the morning of January 12, 2007, Bell played through a set list of classical masterpieces with his violin case open.

Can you a guess how much the finest violinist in the world, playing a beautiful $3. 5 million violin made in hour?

A grand total of $32. See for yourself:

The finest violinist, playing the most beautiful instrument made a meager $32 from his “customers.”

The same violinist played in a Boston concert hall a few nights earlier. It was a performance where audience members paid $100 or more per ticket. During that event, he earned over $60,000 per hour.

The same talented musician, playing the same music on the same violin, yet in one instance he earns $32 an hour and in another, he earns $60,000 per hour.

What made the dramatic difference? In a word – positioning.

Positioning For Profit

If you’re a professional musician and you position yourself as a subway busker, your “customers” will treat you as such and pay you accordingly.

Conversely, if you position yourself as a professional concert performer you attract a totally different customer and once again get paid accordingly.

In other words, people will generally take you at your own appraisal – unless proven otherwise. Of course, you can’t cheat by positioning yourself as a professional musician and then show up and be unable to perform at a high level. The same is true regardless of what business you’re in.

If you’ve got a quality product or service, what’s stopping you from positioning it at a much higher level – offering it a premium price and attracting a much higher quality of customer? Resolve to stop positioning yourself as a commodity and competing solely on price. The result to your bottom line will be phenomenal.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on What is Direct Response Marketing? As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to market your business.  

So many business owners just don't get marketing. They waste time and dollars on adverts that just aren't going to engage their target audience. If you want to catch their attention, and grow your database of leads then you need to hone in on their problems.

You want to target their pain. To do that, you need a plan. Let me break it down for you.

Become Your Prospects Pain Relief

You’ve got a splitting headache. You open your medicine cabinet and start rifling through your museum of half-used tablets, creams and vitamins only to realize you’re totally out of pain relief medication.

So you rush down to your local pharmacy in the hope of getting the tablet that’s going to give you the relief you so desperately need.

Do you worry about the price? Does it even enter your mind to shop around and see if you can buy the same product cheaper at another pharmacy? Unlikely.

You’re in pain and you need immediate relief. In fact, even if the tablets were priced at double or triple the normal price, you’d probably still buy.

The usual ways of shopping get thrown out the window when we’re in pain. The exact same is true for your customers and prospects.

The problem with Selling features & Benefits?

So many times businesses talk about “features and benefits” rather than speaking to the pain that the customer already has.

How much selling does a pharmacist need to do to sell pain relief medication to someone with a splitting headache? Very little I suspect.

The same is true whether you sell TV’s, cars or consulting. You have prospects and customers who are in pain. They want pain relief, not features and benefits.

If you’re selling me a TV, you could sell me features and benefits by telling me it’s got four HDMI ports and 1080p resolution. This will mean very little to most people.

However, imagine instead you target my pain point which is bringing it back home, unpacking it, and spending an infuriating number of hours trying to get it working properly with all my other devices.

Instead of price discounting and positioning yourself as a commodity, why not offer to deliver it to my house, mount it on the wall, ensure the picture quality is spectacular, and make sure that it works perfectly with all my other peripherals.

Now you’re giving me pain relief and price becomes less important than if you’re selling me a commodity with a list of features and benefits.

Comparing Apples with Oranges

In the above example, even though you might be selling the exact same TV as your competitor, if you package it up in a way that takes away my pain – then you’ve won my business.

It’s also much more likely I’ll become a raving fan and refer others to you because you weren’t just the vendor of a commodity. You were a problem solver.

Now it’s an apples to oranges comparison. How do you compare this to “it’s got four HDMI ports and 1080p resolution”?

Selling features and benefits is the best way to turn your prospects into price shoppers who view your product as a commodity bought solely on price.

Your goal is to be a problem solver, pain reliever, and turn any comparison with your competition into an apples-to-oranges comparison.

What's Your Cure?

Remember people are much more willing to pay for a cure than for prevention. Targeting existing pain rather than promising future pleasure will result in much higher conversion, much higher customer satisfaction and lower price resistance.

Look for pain points in your industry and become your target audience's source of relief.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on What is Direct Response Marketing? As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to market your business.

What is risk reversal and why should you consider implementing it into your business marketing?

It’s natural to always try and present your business in the most favorable light possible when marketing yourself.

However, this often leads to one of the most common marketing blunders – discussing only the positive aspects of doing business with you.

Avoiding the elephant in the room – the risks associated with buying from you, is a rookie mistake.

So part of your marketing plan needs to include how you'll reverse the risk of buying from your business.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

Risk Reversal Overcomes The Fearful Amygdala

The amygdala is the fear part of our brain. It governs our reactions to events that are important for our survival. And it stimulates fear to warn us of imminent danger.

If you’re being followed at night by a suspicious looking individual and your heart is pounding, that’s your amygdala doing its job. That’s good.

However, the amygdala in your prospect’s brain can also stop them from buying from you. That’s bad.

When a prospect considers buying from you, their amygdala is making a judgment call about the potential risks involved.

The risk being evaluated by the amygdala may be as trivial as a bad tasting latte. Or it could be as severe as an untimely death on an operating table.

Either way, the risk evaluation is always going on in the background. As a business owner and marketer you need to understand that.

If you skirt around this issue in your marketing, you allow the amygdala in your prospect’s brain to run wild and potentially kill the sale.

Given that this risk evaluation will happen whether you like it or not, why not participate in it.

Give yourself the best chance of addressing any potential deal breakers before they get a chance to damage your bottom line?

You Can Reverse Risk By Telling Them Who It's Not For

Traditional selling tells us to overcome objections. However, in reality, objections are rarely voiced.

Instead in polite society, we say nonsense things like, “let me think about it.” Our amygdala is actually screaming “let’s get out of here.”

Part of the job of good sales copy is to tell potential prospects who your product or service is NOT for.

There are three very good reasons you should do this.

1. It filters out people who aren’t part of your target market or those who wouldn’t be a good fit for what you have to offer. This ensures you don’t waste your time on low-quality or low-probability prospects. It also reduces refunds and complaints from customers who misunderstood what they bought.
2. It immediately makes it more credible when you tell them who this product is for. It feels much more even-handed when you cover both angles by telling them who it is for and who it isn’t for.
3. The prospects who it is for will feel the product or service is much more tailored to their needs. Versus if you had said your product is for anyone and everyone. It feels more targeted and exclusive.

How To Implement A Risk Reversal Strategy

You’ve set the scene by telling them who it’s not for. Now you need to address the risk element for the prospects who are a good fit.

The first time I saw tasting spoons at an ice creamery, I finally realized just how truly risk averse we all are.

Here potential ice cream buyers hold up a queue of people behind them while they taste test several flavors with tiny plastic spoons. All this is to ensure that the flavor of ice cream they commit to buying doesn’t disappoint.‍‍

This needs to be more powerful than  like “money back guarantee” or “satisfaction guaranteed” something ordinary and lame like “money back guarantee” or “satisfaction guaranteed.”

By having something to lose if it doesn’t work out, you have an easier path to the sale. You’ll much more easily avoid alarm bells set off by the amygdala in your prospect’s brain.

A practical example Of Reversing Risk

Sometimes the best way to understand risk reversal is to see it in action. So here goes. If I’m wanting to hire an IT company for my business, what sort of things might I fear?

• Are they going to send some junior technician who’ll fluff about for hours as he learns on the job while I get billed a premium hourly rate for the privilege?
• Are they going to be available when I urgently need support?
• Will the problems they fix continue to recur?
• Are they going to bamboozle me with geek speak when I request an explanation of work performed or needed?

A risk reversal guarantee for this type of business might look like:

“We guarantee that our certified and experienced IT consultants will fix your IT problems so they don’t recur. They’ll also return your calls within 15 minutes and will always speak to you in plain English. If we don’t live up to any of these promises, we insist that you tell us and we’ll credit back to your account double the billable amount of the consultation.”

Compare that to a weak and vague guarantee like, “satisfaction guaranteed.”

Is this kind of guarantee risky?

Only if you consistently do a crappy job. If you are committed to giving your customers excellent service and train your staff accordingly, then there is almost zero risk for you.

More importantly, there’s almost zero risk for your prospects. This will make closing sales much easier.

Indeed the law often requires that you provide warranties as to the quality of your products and services and make things right if they fall short.

So given this is likely already a legal requirement, why not up the ante and make it a feature you promote in your marketing?

In Closing

A smart entrepreneur will look at their business from the eyes of a fearful, skeptical prospect and reverse all the perceived risks so that the path to the sale is much smoother.

This will also result in customers who are much more sticky and who won’t fall for your competitors who by comparison seem much more risky to deal with.

How can you implement The Risk Reversal Strategy in your business today?

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on What is Direct Response Marketing? As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to market your business.

In this article, I’m going to take you through three simple steps to implementing direct response marketing in your business using a strategy I call “The Visible Target Technique.”

I passed high school mathematics, not because I understood any of it, but because my uncle kindly tutored me long enough and often enough to help me pass the final exam.

Uncle Abe had a frequently used catch phrase to indicate there was a better way of doing something, “You’re not wrong but that doesn’t mean you’re right.”

That’s exactly the phrase I would use to describe what most small to medium businesses do with their marketing. But what do I mean by this?

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

Gain Leads By Treating Your Advertising Like An Investment

How you invest your money affects your financial success.

At this point you’d be justified in thinking, duh Sherlock, thanks for stating the bleeding obvious. However, few business owners truly understand the financial investment called advertising.

The theory behind branding is that you want to “get your name out there.” So, if you broadcast your message enough times, you’ll by chance get an audience with your prospects and some percentage of them will buy from you.

If that sounds a lot like our disoriented archer, flailing about in the fog, shooting his arrows in random directions and hoping for the best, then you’d be right. You might be thinking – if he just shoots enough arrows in all directions, surely he’s bound to hit his target. Right?

Maybe, but for small to medium-sized businesses at least, that’s the stupid way of marketing because they’ll never have enough arrows (i.e., money) to hit their target enough times to get a good return on their investment.

So to restate the obvious another way: how you invest your advertising dollars affects your profits and business success. If you’ve been trying to do branding with limited success, Uncle Abe would likely tell you your current marketing strategy is not necessarily wrong but that doesn’t mean that it’s right. Let’s take a look at a smarter way of doing it.

The Visible Target Technique Is a Painless Way To Attract High-Quality Prospects

Over the past few years, I’ve built multiple high growth businesses. I’ve also shared my strategies by speaking at conferences, writing in online and print publications and one-on-one with business owners and entrepreneurs.

That’s why you need the Visible Target Technique. It’s a simple but powerful marketing strategy. I’ve personally used it over the years to grow my businesses rapidly. This technique that ensures you’ll never have to waste huge sums of money on advertising without even being able to measure if it’s working or not.

You can kiss goodbye that hopeless old marketing adage: Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted: the trouble is I don't know which half. If you're wondering, “How do I use The Visible Target Technique?” Let me show you.

How to use the visible Target Technique To Get More Customers

Is your goal is to get more customers, more easily than you ever thought possible? Then you need to implement these three simple steps. Here's how the Visible Target Technique works.

• Step 1: Select a narrow target market
• Step 2: Create a lead generating ad
• Step 3: Follow up until they buy or die

Step 1: Select A Narrow Target Market

A 100-watt lightbulb, like the kind of lightbulb we normally have in our homes, lights up a room. By contrast, a 100-watt laser can cut through steel. Same energy, dramatically different result. The difference being how the energy is focused. The same is true of your marketing.

You have a limited amount of money. If you focus too broadly, your message will be too scattered to be relevant to anyone. The goal of your ad is for prospects to say, “Hey, that’s for me.” So you want to find a niche.

Take the example of a photographer. If you look at ads from most photographers you’ll often see a laundry list of services like:

• Portraits
• Weddings
• Family photography
• Commercial photography
• Fashion photography

The technical way photography is done may not change very much from situation to situation, but let me ask you a question. Do you think someone looking for wedding photography would respond to a different ad than someone who’s after commercial photography?

Do you think a bride-to-be looking for a photographer for her wedding might be looking for something radically different than a purchasing manager from a heavy machinery distributor looking to photograph a truck for a product brochure?

Of course! However, if the ad just rolls out a broad laundry list of services, then it’s not speaking to either prospect, therefore it’s not relevant, therefore it will likely be ignored by both market segments. That’s why you need to choose a narrow target market for your ad.

Being all things to all people will lead to marketing failure. This doesn’t mean you can’t offer a broad range of services, but understand that each category of service is a separate campaign. My advice is first dominate one target market, then move onto the next.

Step 2: Create A Lead Generating Ad

Even in a narrow target market, all prospects should not be treated equally. The more money you can spend marketing to high probability prospects, the better your chances are of converting them to a customer.

Just like our proverbial archer, who has a limited number of arrows, you have a limited supply of money for your marketing campaign, so it’s essential you invest it wisely.

‍For example, if you have $1,000 to spend on an ad campaign which reaches 1,000 people, you’re essentially spending $1 per prospect. Now assume that out of the 1,000 people the ad reaches, 100 are potential prospects for your product. By treating them equally, as you would have to do with mass marketing, you’re wasting $900 on uninterested and unmotivated prospects to reach the 100 who are interested.

‍What if instead of treating them all equally you could sift, sort and screen so that you were only dealing with high probability prospects and not wasting valuable time and marketing dollars on uninterested and unmotivated prospects? You could then spend the whole $1,000 on the 100 high probability prospects.

That would allow you to spend $10 on wooing each of them instead of the measly $1 per prospect you’d have if you treated them all equally. With ten times the firepower aimed at the right targets, do you think we’d have a better conversion rate?

Of course. But how do we separate the wheat from the chaff?

How do you get leads to opt-in?

The short answer is we bribe them into telling us!

Don’t worry there’s nothing underhanded here. We offer an “ethical bribe” to get them to identify themselves to us.

For example, our friend the photographer could offer a free DVD telling prospective brides exactly what they should look for in a wedding photographer and showcasing some of his work.

A very simple lead-generating ad could be headlined: “Free DVD Reveals The 7 Costly Mistakes To Avoid When Choosing A Photographer For Your Big Day.”

Anyone requesting this “ethical bribe” would be identifying themselves as a high probability prospect. You now have at least their name and address which would go onto your marketing database.

Remember the goal is simply to generate leads.

Avoid the temptation of trying to sell from your ad. At this early stage, you just want to sift out the uninterested and unmotivated so that you can build your database of high probability prospects.

Why You Want To Avoid Selling From Your Ad

• At any given time, about 3% of your target market is highly motivated and ready to buy immediately. These are the prospects most mass marketing hopes to convert.
• There’s a further 7% who are very open to buying.
• Another 30% who are interested but not right now.
• The next 30% are not interested.
• And finally, the last 30% wouldn’t even take your product if was free.

If you tried selling directly from your ad, you’d be targeting only the 3% who are ready to buy immediately and losing the other 97%.

By creating a lead generating ad, you increase your addressable market to 40%. You do this by capturing the 3% who are immediate buyers but also by capturing the 7% who are open to talking as well as the 30% who are interested but not right now.

By going from a 3% addressable market to 40%, you’re increasing the effectiveness of your advertising by 1,233%.

Step 3: Follow Up Until They Buy or Die

So now that you have your database of high probability prospects, what do you do next? Quite simply you market to them until they buy or die. It may seem like I’m advocating being obnoxious and pestering people to buy until they cave in. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Traditional selling is focused on pressure tactics like “always be closing” and other silly little close techniques which are based on pressure. It makes the seller a pest who the prospect wants to avoid.

Instead of being a pest, I advocate becoming a welcome guest. Send your high probability prospects a continuous stream of value until they’re ready to buy. This could be in the form of tutorials, articles, case studies or even something as simple as a monthly newsletter that’s related to their area of interest. This builds trust, goodwill and positions you as an expert and educator rather than just a salesperson going for the jugular.

Various technology tools make it easy to automate this continuous follow up mechanism, making this a cost-effective and scalable way of building up a huge pipeline of interested and motivated prospects. Some of these prospects will convert into customers immediately, while others will do so weeks, months or even years later.

The point is that by the time they’re ready to buy, you’ve already built a solid relationship with them based on value and trust. This makes you the logical choice when it comes time for them to make a buying decision.

Start Implementing This Technique Now

This is one of the most ethical and painless ways of selling because it’s based completely on trust and an exchange of value.

While your competitors are blindly shooting arrows every which way in the hope of hitting one of the 3% of immediate buyers, with “The Visible Target Technique” you’re focusing all of your firepower on a clear and visible target.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on Marketing Plan 101: What is a Marketing Plan? + 5 Examples. As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to acquire leads for your business and build your authority.

Peter Drucker is famously quoted as saying that the two basic functions of every business are marketing and innovation.

The word innovation often conjures up thoughts of high tech startups in Silicon Valley, biotech companies, or engineering firms.

The question often arises – can an ordinary business, that sells ordinary products be innovative? The answer is, of course, yes.

What is Innovation?

A common misconception that businesses make is that innovation has to be in the actual product or service itself.

If you sell a boring or ordinary product it may seem like innovation may not be relevant to your business or industry, in which case you have no option but to compete solely on price – a situation you want to avoid at all costs.

However, innovation can go far beyond the actual product that’s sold.

Innovation can be applied to how the product is priced, financed, packaged, supported, delivered, managed, marketed, or a myriad of other elements related to any part of the customer experience.

If you’re in an “unsexy” business where your customer’s first question is generally centered around price, you may be a bit skeptical about all this talk of innovation.

After all, how can a disposable razor blade distributor really be innovative? A manufacturer of blenders? Or perhaps a restaurant?

How can these ordinary, boring businesses be innovative? I’m glad you asked. Let me show you how.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

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Disposable Razor Blade Distributor – The Dollar Shave Company

The Dollar Shave Club turned cheap disposable razor blades into a subscription service. How brilliant is that!

Not only have they created enormous value and convenience for their customers, but they now get to charge for their product every month until you say stop.

If you sell consumables, couldn’t you do something similar – turn the consumable product into a subscription service?

Blender Manufacturer – Blendtec

Blendtec is a manufacturer of blenders – ordinary blenders like the type you would use in your kitchen at home.

They’ve created an enormous viral marketing buzz by making a video series called Will It Blend? Here they demonstrate their product blending a variety of objects from iPhones and iPads to golf balls. Check it out here:

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I want to cry after seeing the wanton destruction of my favorite Apple products, however, Blendtec must be pretty happy about the more than 220 million views on their YouTube channel. That kind of publicity compared to the small cost involved in producing these videos is just genius.

Could you demonstrate your ordinary product being used in unusual ways to create publicity?

Local Restaurant

I was in the men’s room at a local restaurant in my area when I noticed this poster on the wall:

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The restaurant offers a pickup and drop off service so customers don’t have to worry about driving under the influence. It creates convenience for the customer and the restaurant ends up selling more of their highest margin product – alcohol. Everyone wins.

These are just three examples of ordinary, otherwise boring businesses that are selling their products in innovative ways.

There are numerous other examples but I think you get the gist.

Now it’s time for you to innovate. You don’t have to invent anything original. Model, borrow, or shamelessly steal innovative ideas from other industries or products.

Do anything other than stay a boring commodity which forces you to compete solely on price.

I’m often asked questions like, “What’s a good response rate for direct mail?” or “What kind of open rate should I expect when doing email marketing?”

The expectation is that I’ll give a numerical answer. Something like, “expect a 2% response rate from direct mail” or “expect a 20% open rate for email.”

Usually, these kinds of questions come from well-meaning business owners who are yet to build their marketing infrastructure.

My answer is always the same – it depends. Sometimes a 50% response rate is a disaster and sometimes a 0.01% response rate is a massive success. Response rates will vary dramatically depending on factors such as how relevant the message is to the target market, how compelling the offer is, and how you came about the list you’re marketing to.

Instead of asking what a good response rate is, which is a nonsense question, they’re really asking, “How do I measure the success of my marketing campaign?”

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

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How to measure marketing success

How do you measure the success of a marketing campaign?

For the impatient here’s the short answer: did the marketing campaign make you more money than it cost you? Another way of putting it is, what was the return on investment (ROI) on the marketing campaign?

If it cost you more than you made (or will ever make) on this campaign then it’s a failure. If it cost you less than the profits you made as result of the campaign then it’s a success.

Of course, some people will argue with me and say that even a campaign that lost money was valuable because it “got your name out there” or was some sort of “branding” exercise.

Unless you’re a megabrand like Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola or similar then it’s likely you can’t afford to burn tens of millions of dollars on fuzzy marketing like “branding” or “getting your name out there.”

If you’re a small or medium-sized business you need to get a return on your marketing spend. Putting your comparatively tiny marketing budget into fuzzy marketing would have the same effect as a kid peeing in the ocean.

The only way to win the game of mass marketing, branding, or 'getting your name out there' type of marketing is with more firepower (i.e., money).

If you’re a small to medium business, that’s not a game you’re equipped to play. You need to be focused on direct response marketing. But I divert. So, we need to look at the numbers carefully.

What is the average direct mail response rate?

According to the DMA (Data and Marketing Association), direct mail is becoming more effective every year. This could very well be down to email fatigue (let's be honest, everyone's doing it).

But if you're looking to launch a direct mail campaign, you need to aim for a 9% response rate.

I like to use direct mail for high-value clients. It's surprising and a great way to open a line of conversation with a prospect.

What is the average response rate for email?

While I'd love to give you a single number to strive for, the truth is that response rates vary according to the industry you're in.

The average response rate across all industries is 2.3%.

I can tell you that since the Mail Privacy Protection act has come into play, click-through rates have dropped.

Why do marketers track email response rates?

Whether you're dealing in direct mail marketing or a digital mail campaign, if you're not tracking responses, you can't know if your marketing is delivering a return on investment. Here's how to measure yours.

Measuring marketing ROI

Let’s run through an example with some numbers to illustrate. I’ll keep the numbers small and round for the sake of clarity.

You do a direct mail campaign and send out one hundred letters.

The cost of printing and mailing the one hundred letters is $300.

Out of one hundred letters, ten people respond (10% response rate).

Out of the ten people who responded, two people end up buying from you (20% closure rate).

From this we can work out one of the most important numbers in marketing – cost of customer acquisition. In this example, you acquired two customers and the campaign cost you a total of $300. So your cost of customer acquisition is $150.

Now if the product or service you sell these customers makes you a profit of only $100 per sale, then this was a losing campaign. You lost $50 for every customer acquired in this campaign (negative ROI).

However, let’s say the product or service you sell makes you a profit of $600 per sale, then this is a winning campaign. You made $450 for every customer acquired (positive ROI).

Now obviously this is a simplistic example but it illustrates how irrelevant statistics like response rates and conversion rates are. Our primary concern is return on investment, which varies based on cost of customer acquisition and how much profit a marketing campaign yields.

What is the Lifetime Value of a Customer?

With the above example, we determined that if we made only $100 of profit per sale then we had a losing campaign. However, in that example we didn’t take into account one of the other very important numbers used in measuring marketing, customer lifetime value.

If for example we make $100 directly as a result of the campaign but then the customer continues to buy from us down the track, that completely changes the economics of the campaign. A campaign that looked like a loser can, in fact, become a winner when we take into account their lifetime value as a customer.

We now need to take into account how much we’ll likely make on a customer over their entire tenure with us. For example, you might sell printers that require refills or a car that requires servicing or some other service that a customer buys repeatedly e.g. haircuts, massage, insurance, internet access, etc.

The money we make upfront on a campaign is known as “the front end.” The money we make on subsequent purchases is known as “the back end.” Together these figures make up the lifetime value of a customer.

Lifetime value and cost of acquisition are the two numbers you need to know to measure marketing effectiveness. The other statistics like response rates and conversion rates in themselves are useless. We just use them to determine these two figures, which give us a true picture of how our marketing is performing.

If you don’t know what these numbers are in your business, then now’s the time to start measuring and making your marketing accountable. Constantly testing, measuring and improving these numbers is how you build a high growth business.

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