The learning center

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.

Tell Me More

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:

‍

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:

‍

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.

Tell Me More

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.

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.

Einstein’s famous definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” is well known but rarely acted upon.

At the start of every new year, people talk about “resolutions” with the hope that as the last digit of the date increments that things will magically become better.

When they hit week two or week three of the new year, their “resolutions” become a distant memory as they return to routine and the daily grind.

Resolutions are a close cousin of wishes – basically nothing more than goals which have no plan or action behind them.

Chances are if nothing changes in your regular routine, nothing will change in your business or personal life.

I elaborate more on this concept here.

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

Become A Prolific Marketer

One of the commonalities amongst high growth businesses I’ve observed and personally experienced is that they focus heavily on marketing and make a lot of offers.

Some of these offers end up being misses and some end up being hits. The exciting part is that you don’t need many hits to offset your misses, especially if you place “small bets” by first testing with a small sample of your list.

By making many offers, you start to get a very good sense of what works and what doesn’t. When you become a prolific marketer it’s much easier to spot trends and scientifically measure response by split testing.

They’re also not timid with their offers. They take risks, use compelling copy and make outrageous guarantees. The short answer is yes. The fundamentals never change. Sure there are now more channels through which you can make offers, new  to help you track return on investment and split test, but the fundamentals never change.

Could it really be that simple? Making more offers, more often?

The short answer is yes. The fundamentals never change. Sure there are now more channels through which you can make offers, new marketing technology to help you track return on investment and split test, but the fundamentals never change.

More offers, more often = rapid business growth.

Being more prolific with your marketing will create a buzz in your business. Your clients and prospects will start to notice you more and you’ll start to cut through the clutter and fill up your sales funnel.

If You Change, Everything Will Change For You

Any change that becomes part of your routine, whether positive or negative, will have a profound impact over time.

If you make the crafting and sending offers to your list of clients and prospects part of your weekly routine, within a year’s time you’ll have a dramatically different business.

You’ll have made the exciting shift from business owner to marketer who owns a business.

Making regular offers will make you a better marketer. Getting good at the science of marketing is the key to rapid business growth.

And when you get better, everything will get better for you.

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

With all the hype that surrounds “social media marketing,” you’d imagine it was a marketing cure-all. But is social media an asset you should be building?

Many self-proclaimed social media “gurus” would have you believe that social media is the future of all marketing. If you’re not dedicating all or most of your marketing resources to social media, you’re made to feel like a luddite who’ll soon be out of business.

Of course, like most hype, there’s a need to keep a level head in order to separate fact from fiction.

Before I’m labeled as being against social media, let me set the record straight. I’ve used social media in multiple businesses and continue to use it on a regular basis.

However, because there’s so much hype that surrounds social media, I want to put it in perspective for you and help you see where it fits into an overall marketing strategy.

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

It’s A Media

A successful marketing campaign has to get three vital elements right:

• Message – The marketing message or offer you send
• Market – The target market you send your message to
• Media – The media you use to send your message to your target market e.g. radio, direct mail, telemarketing, TV, etc.

You need to hit all three of these to have a successful campaign. You need to send the right message to the right target market, through the right media channel.

Failing at any one of these three elements will likely cause your marketing campaign to fail.

Understanding this framework helps put things in context. Social media, by definition is a media – it’s not a strategy.

The time-tested fundamentals of marketing don’t suddenly change just because a new media comes along.

Is It The Right Media For Your Business?

Remember, of the three things we need to get right for a successful campaign, media is one of them.

Every type of media has its idiosyncrasies and social media is no exception. Here are some of the things you need to be aware of when it comes to social media.

1. Social Media Isn't the ideal selling environment.

I like to think of social media as a social gathering or party.

We’ve all been to gatherings where someone, perhaps a family member or friend has been bitten by the multi-level marketing bug. You know where they start spruiking the health benefits of the latest pills or potions and try to sell or recruit others to sell.

It makes everyone uncomfortable because it feels pushy. It's an inappropriate time to be making or receiving a sales pitch.

Social media is exactly the same. Overt selling and constant pitching of offers is generally considered poor behavior on social networks. You'll only repel people from your business rather than attracting them.

2. Social Media Is A Great Place To Build Relationships.

Just like a real-life social gathering, social media's a great place to create and extend relationships which can later turn into something commercial if there’s a good fit.

One of the most valuable things I see in social media is being able to gauge customer emotions toward your business. You can also engage with vocal customers who offer either praise or complaints in a public forum.

3. A side benefit of Social Media Is Social Proof.

Being accessible, responding to criticism or praise and engaging with your customers builds social proof.

It makes prospects and customers feel like they are dealing with humans rather than a faceless corporation. Remember people buy from people.

But let's take social proof a step further. If you wanted to add PR to your media strategy, social proof is crucial in getting journalists to give you the time of day. So you can use it to your benefit when pitching your new story to the press.

Two Social Media Traps To Beware Of

There are two potential traps with social media.

Firstly, it can be a time suck.

Feeling like you have to respond to every inane comment can be draining and it can suck time away from marketing tasks that can give you a far better return on time and money invested.

It’s important to be disciplined with your use of social media. Just like you wouldn’t let your employees stand around and chit chat all day, you can’t let yourself or them get carried away with the online equivalent.

Secondly, there’s the question of ownership.

Your social media page and profile is actually the property of the social network. So spending huge amounts of time and money building up a profile and audience on these networks ends up building up their assets rather than your own.

My preference as much as possible is to build and own my own marketing assets such as websites, blogs, email lists, etc. I then use social media simply as a way to drive traffic to these marketing assets.

This way, my time and effort go into renovating my own “house” rather than that of a landlord who can kick me out at any time.

You might want to check out my article on How To Build A Marketing Infrastructure.

Example Of Why You Don't Want To Rely On Social Media

A classic example of why you want to do this is Facebook’s change of policy on business pages.

Previously if people “Liked” your business’s Facebook page you could freely reach this entire audience for free. So businesses spent a lot of time, money, and effort getting people to “Like” them on their Facebook page.

Now Facebook requires you to pay them each time you want to send a message to your entire audience. If you don't, it only allows you to reach a small percentage.

For those who spent huge resources on building up a Facebook audience only to have the rug pulled out from under them, this came as a huge blow.

This is one of the reasons why personally I’d prefer to have 1,000 people on my own email list than 10,000 people who “Like” my Facebook page.

Do Your Homework First

As always with any marketing strategy, it’s vitally important to find out where your prospects “hangout.” Then use the appropriate media to get your message through to them.

Social media may or may not be one of those places they hang out.

Make sure you've got your marketing plan in place before implementing.

How are you using or how do you plan to use social media in your marketing?

I’ve had “the naming discussion” with entrepreneurs many times. It usually goes like this – I’ll be asked for my opinion on a new name or several variations thereof for a new product, service or business venture. Then often follows an explanation of the name or names which are being considered.

Title Should Equal Content

Here’s my take on naming – if you need to explain the name, to me that’s an automatic fail. Title should equal content. In other words, if the name doesn’t make it automatically obvious what the product, service or business is, then you’re starting from behind.

When I give people this advice some shake their heads in disbelief. What about great brands with unusual names like Nike, Apple, Skype, Amazon etc? Surely I must be missing something by giving such simplistic advice?

Here’s the thing. All of the big brands spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to educate people who they are and what they do. How much are you willing to spend to do the same?

Here we’re not even talking about advertising that sells or generates leads. We’re talking about advertising that merely tells people what you do. I can’t think of a bigger waste of money.

By using a non-obvious name, you start from behind and then have to make up for by spending a lot of money on advertising to rectify the situation.

All you had to do to avoid this colossal waste of money was call your business “Fast Plumbing Repairs,” which immediately explains what you do and what you stand for, rather than “Aqua Solutions,” where you then have to explain that Aqua is the Latin for water and that you provide “complete plumbing solutions” (whatever that means), hence the name “Aqua Solutions.”

If You Confuse Them, You Lose Them

So many times I’ve seen business or product names whose meaning is unclear. Sometimes it’s a corny play on words, other times it’s an obscure literary reference and still other times it’s some made-up word, the meaning of which is only apparent to the creator.

The reality is no matter how clever your name is, very few people will go to the trouble of trying to decipher its meaning or origin. These things may be important to you because it’s your baby, but rarely does a customer or prospect give it even a split second of thought.

What’s even worse is that being “clever” often creates confusion and works against you. One of the core principals of marketing is that confusion leads to no sales. If you confuse them, you lose them. It’s that simple. Always choose clarity over cleverness.

It’s hard enough to get a message read, understood then acted upon at the best of times. But intentionally adding confusion into the mix when you’re a small business with a modest marketing budget is madness.

Lastly, please don’t ask friends and family for their opinion on your clever new name. They’ll, of course, praise your idea and compliment you, which feels nice, but it’s unlikely to be truly helpful.

By all means test and get opinions but do so from objective people who are part of your target market – not from those who already know what you’re about.

Naming can work for you or against you and is expensive and difficult to change down the track, so give it thought, effort and above all else focus on clarity.

With so many people and so many things competing for our attention, just keeping up with all that’s coming in can feel overwhelming.

We may feel the need to keep up with it all to be properly informed and up-to-date.

Certainly, there’s a satisfaction in feeling like you’re across everything. Yet enormous chunks of time are taken up by consuming content from various sources including books, blogs, videos, email lists, magazines, news outlets, etc.

Information triage has become a vital skill. The late great Jim Rohn said it well:

Don’t spend most of your time on the voices that don’t count. Tune out the shallow voices so that you will have more time to tune in the valuable ones.

Lately, I’ve been doing just that. Reducing the number of “voices” I listen to so that I can spend more time going deeper with the voices that count the most. But more importantly, I’ve been working on BECOMING a voice of value.

What sets Apart Successful Entrepreneurs from The Wannabees?

One of the major distinctions between successful entrepreneurs and “wantrepreneurs” is that successful entrepreneurs are predominantly content creators whereas wantrepreneurs are predominantly content consumers. Even more than just content creators, successful entrepreneurs are often prolific content creators.

Finding Inspiration

To become a voice of value, you need to have valuable ideas and rarely do valuable ideas come from nowhere and interrupt you. By seeking out voices of value – thought leaders in and out of your industry, mentors, coaches and successful peers, you lay the foundation for building your own valuable ideas.

This type of self-education is the most valuable type of education I know of. Yet it’s important not to let too many voices in, however tempting that may be a few voices who speak from experience and first-hand knowledge are infinitely more valuable than a multitude of voices that speak from theory and opinion.

While neither theory or opinion are bad in themselves, rarely do I find voices of value from sources that haven’t been where I want to be.

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

Becoming a Voice Of Value in Your Market

The days of high-pressure selling tactics are fast coming to an end, if they haven’t already. In an age where everyone is connected and everyone has access to almost all the available information, the most valuable commodity is reputation.

The reputation economy requires that you transform your marketing from just information and high-pressure sales tactics to education-based marketing. The point of education marketing is twofold.

Firstly, it’s about positioning yourself as an authority in your target market. Everyone wants to hear from an authoritative source. By being a content creator, you position yourself as an authority and expert in your niche.

Secondly, it’s about building relationships – becoming the trusted advisor to your target market rather than just a salesperson. By regularly releasing valuable, educational content to your target market, you lay the foundation for a relationship – and after all who would you prefer to buy from, a trusted source who has been giving you a lot of value or a stranger who wants to make a quick sale?

It's Time To Develop Your Voice Of Value

Becoming a voice of value is hard work and it takes time, but the time invested will pay dividends. In the reputation economy you can’t afford to be a commodity or another “me too” type of business.

What can you do to start being a voice of value in your market? Could you start a blog? A mailing list? A monthly newsletter? Regular YouTube videos?

Any one of these things could be the start of you becoming a voice of value to your marketplace. Certainly doing so will set you far apart from your competitors who are still stuck on the selling tactics that are no longer working.

I spend a lot of time each week looking through various local and national newspapers – not for articles but for advertisements.

Having done this for several years, with very few exceptions, I’m absolutely amazed at how boring, similar, and useless most advertising is.

The waste going on is staggering. Wasted money and wasted opportunity.‍

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

Marketing By Accident

You could summarize the structure of most ads from small businesses as follows:

• Company name
• Company logo
• A laundry list of services offered
• Claims of best quality, best service or best prices
• Offer of a “free quote”
• Contact details

Then they hope and pray that on the very day they run their ad, a prospect in immediate need of their product or service stumbles across it and takes action.

This is what I call marketing by accident.

A qualified prospect happening upon the right ad at the right time sometimes results in the happy accident of a sale taking place.

If these “accidents” never happened then no one would ever advertise. But as it happens the occasional random sale or lead will come from this type of advertising. It tortures business owners to death because while the ad generally loses them money, they fear not running it because some dribs and drabs of new business have come out of it – and who knows next week it may bring in that big sale they’ve been hoping for.

It’s like these businesses are visiting a slot machine in a casino. They put their money in, pull the handle and hope for a jackpot – but most of the time the house just takes their money. Occasionally they’ll get a few cents in the dollar back which raises their hopes and emboldens them to continue.

It’s time to start marketing on purpose – treating advertising like a vending machine where the results and value generated are predictable, rather than like a slot machine where the results are random and the odds are stacked against you.

To start marketing on purpose we need to look at two vital elements.

What Is The Purpose Of Your Ad?

When I ask business owners what the purpose of their ad is, I usually get a list like:

• Branding
• Getting my name out there
• Letting people know about my products and services
• Making sales
• Getting people to call in for a quote

These are all very different and you cannot possibly do all of these with one ad. In typical small business style they’re trying to get maximum bang for their buck.

But by trying to do too much, they end up achieving none of their objectives.

My rule of thumb is one ad, one objective. If something in the ad isn’t helping you achieve that objective then it’s detracting from it and you should get rid of it.

That includes sacred cows like your company name and company logo. Advertising space is valuable and these things taking up prime real estate in your ad space often detract from your message rather than enhance it.

Rather than trying to sell directly from an ad, my preferred objective by far is simply to have prospects put their hand up to indicate interest. This lowers resistance and helps you  – one of the most valuable assets a business could have build a marketing database – one of the most valuable assets a business could have.

Here are 10 other business assets you need.

Once your objective is clear, you need to communicate it to your reader. What exactly do you want them to do next? Do they call your toll free number to order? Do they call you or visit your website to request a free sample? Do they request a free report?

You need a very clear call to action – not something wimpy and vague like “don’t hesitate to call us.”

You need to be clear on what they should do next and what they will get in return.

Also, give them multiple ways to take that action. For example, if the call to action is to order your product, give them the ability to do it online, over the phone or even via a mail-in coupon.

Different people have different preferences when it comes to modality of communication. Give them multiple means of response so they can choose the one they are most comfortable with.

What Does Your Ad Focus On?

Have you ever been to a party or gathering and been seated next to someone who just spends the whole night talking about themselves? It gets old pretty fast. You keep giving half-hearted smiles and polite nods but your mind is elsewhere and that exit sign is calling your name.

Similarly, most advertising by small businesses is inwardly focused. Instead of speaking to the needs and problems of the prospect, it is focused on self-aggrandizement.

The prominent logo and company name, the laundry list of services, the claims of being the leading provider of that product or service— all of these things are shouting, “Look at me!”

Unfortunately, you’re in a crowded market, and with everyone shouting “Look at me!” at the same time, it just becomes background noise.

By contrast, direct response marketing focuses heavily on the needs, thoughts, and emotions of the target market.

By doing this, you enter the conversation already going on in the mind of your ideal prospect.

You will resonate at a deeper level with your prospect and your ad will stand out from 99% of other ads that are just shouting and talking about themselves.

Don’t be the advertising equivalent of that guy at the party obliviously talking about himself the whole night while his uninterested audience looks for the exit.

Also don’t leave anything to chance. Know exactly what you want your ad to achieve and the exact action you want your prospect to take.