Category Archives for "Marketing"

Understanding Story Telling

Story-telling is a recurring theme in this blog (search for “story”). Twice a month I run a story-telling session for business owners.  However, I still find understanding story-telling in marketing challenging.  The challenge is to tell a story that connects you and your prospects.

From Me to You

Mostly, stories used in marketing are personal.  Why?  Well, they are easier to tell!  You know what happened, how you felt, what you did and the outcome.  The problem with many such stories is they do not reach out to your prospects.

Some people argue you need a story that shows you understand your prospects’ problem.  There is a lot of truth in this.  The challenge is to make your prospects feel the connection.  I may have experienced the problem first hand but can I show I know how my prospects feel?

The key is to tell their story too.  Show you have empathy and really understand what they are going through.

Your Business Story

1. How do you think your prospects perceive your story?
2. What difference does your story make to theirs?  Do you know and tell their story?
3. What changes when your stories interact?

Stories that Transform

If your story makes an impact and brings about the transformation you seek, there are some  things to remember.

Consider who is the star of your story.  If it is a personal story, can you make your prospects centre stage?  There is tension here.  Your story is unique, while a story about prospects in general will be less personal.  Even if you find a story about a particular prospect, why should that story be any more effective than yours?

Help your prospects understand and avoid their problem.  Start focused on them and then show you understand the problem too because of your experience.  Later you can offer more examples, to show how the problem manifests.

Then show how your story leads to solutions to their problem.  Show them how to achieve what they want, make the connections they want and ultimately realise their dreams.

A Journey

Take the listener on a journey.  Show how you thought and experienced the world in a particular way.  Then show how something happened, a turning point led to seeing the world in a different way, to new experiences, new skills and success in some field.

There are other story structures but the main point is to tell a story listeners apply to their situation.  It is about how you faced the problem they faced, what you tried and results that resonate with what they want.

Following this twenty-second post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Sometimes you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

How to Understand Reciprocity

Reciprocity underlies any transaction in the marketplace.  It helps us understand the basics of what it is that makes an exchange fair.

The Exchange

Let’s start by thinking about an exchange.  Let’s say I have £100.  I will generally be willing to exchange the £100 for something that is worth more than £100 to me.  If you have the thing I want, we will have a deal so long as the thing is worth less to you than £100.

If that happens, both parties benefit from the exchange.  Buyer’s remorse is where the customer has regrets because they are not convinced of the value of their purchase.  The vendor can do a lot to counter remorse but that’s another story.

Note though, fair exchange is something we can do a lot to realise.   But let’s focus on what upsets the balance, eg someone who gives so much the recipient gives up trying to reciprocate.  As a vendor you should aim to deliver what is possible for you given the price you’re charging.

Alternatively, you may find customers who spoil the balance by making unreasonable demands.

So, it is important to describe your offer in writing so you can agree what is in it and what is not available or available at a higher price.

How do You Serve Others?

1. Have you designed packages for different prices? How do you present them to prospects?
2. What do you do to reassure your clients so they do not suffer buyer’s remorse?
3. In what ways do your packages enhance the status of those who buy them?

Reciprocity and Status Roles

The issue at stake is: who is in charge?  There are three options: you are as the vendor, your customer is or else the deal is mutual.  A lot of this is about how it feels but there are things you can do arrive at the deal you want.

Usually, we want a mutual relationship.  To get there you need to remember personal status and ask whether this deal will enhance or maintain it.  You can ask similar questions of your prospect.  Both of you benefit mutually if you see your status enhanced.  Obviously this is a delicate matter for the British (and maybe everyone).  To mention status is likely to stop a deal.  But it is possible to convey status advantages without being blatant.

The big advantage in a mutual relationship, where client and coach enhance each other’s status, is trust grows between them and possibly leads to several exchanges.

Following this twenty-first post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Using Testimonials: Getting Others to Communicate Your Value

There are several ways to approach getting support from other people.   Far and away the most common is using testimonials.

Using Testimonials and Other Ways to Win Support

One reason testimonials are common is they are easiest to find.  They are supportive words from people the reader has not heard of.   They are an opportunity for people who have used your service and benefited from it to share their experience with your next generation of clients.

Other forms of support are celebrity focused.  You ask someone with an established reputation to risk it to support you.  Normally, you would seek this support for a substantial piece of work, eg a book.

Blurbs are the celebrity quotes you see on the back or inside front cover from.  They are like testimonials because celebrities give them voluntarily on request.  Also, like testimonials, few people actually read them.  The names are what counts.

You pay for endorsements and so their impact can be reduced, although they may have a greater impact subconsciously.  A further approach is a license, where you use your contact’s brand to aid your sales, possibly with a return based on revenue for the external brand.

These three are specialist and for many businesses rarely encountered.  It is worth bearing them in mind should you be in a position to benefit from them.  They need to be approached in a different way to testimonials.

Questions to Ask Yourself

1. Is your offer worth a testimonial? What do you need to change to make it worthy?
2. What would your ideal testimonials say? This may vary if you have several offers.
3. How do you use testimonials to help tell your story?

Questions to Ask Others

Broadly two types of testimonial work.  Remember your client may have difficulty knowing what to say or write and so may appreciate guidelines.

The first type is to describe a change.  Before I did this I was … and now I am able to …

The second type provides detail of what the client has learned from your business.

You are the curator of your testimonials.  Make sure they are helpful and work out how to make them available in a way that helps your business.

Following this twentieth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

How to Use Pricing to Market Your Business

Marketing Through Pricing

Prices are integral to marketing because they represent the value you attach to your offers.  If you under-price your offers, what does that say to your market?  Even you don’t rate your own offer.

Having said that, there are many reasons people do not buy.  They may genuinely not have the money or they don’t trust you or your offer.

For these reasons, it is worth having a range of offers so that people can try you at a lower price first.  If you offer two high-end options and they decline them both, you can try one of your low-end offers.

Or you can market your low-end offers and then offer an upgrade.

What About Your Prices?

1. What do your prices say about how much you rate your own offers?
2. Do you have a range of high-end and low-end offers?
3. How do you manage your selling, so that you get a sale as often as possible?

Pricing Your Market

Never cut prices.  Take every opportunity to increase prices.  If you sell at higher prices, you need fewer customers and so you have more time to deliver better service.

You get feedback from marketing that helps you decide when it is a good time to increase prices.  Increasing demand is one good indicator.  Increase prices and some prospects fall away, leaving you with those who can afford it and believe your prices are worth it.

But don’t forget prices show the degree to which you value your own offer.  Is it possible, your low prices are deterring new customers?  It’s counter-intuitive but a possibility.

Following this nineteenth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

How to Build a Better Marketing Plan

The reason business plans don’t work is they are self-centred.  They attempt to persuade others of the effectiveness of your idea and so depend upon defending your idea.  This post shows you how to think of planning in a different way to build a better marketing plan.

Three Principles

Understand three principles to underpin your approach to marketing.

The first is empathy.  We’ve covered why your business thrives on empathy in earlier posts.  You must see the world through your market’s eyes.  They need to know you understand not only the problem but also them.

Then a second principle is humility.  This implies a collaborative approach to marketing, where you work with others.  This is not about forcing your way into your market’s lives.  It is about an invitation to explore together.

Finally, your plan needs a healthy dose of effectiveness.  You must show you deliver on your promises; your approach works for your market.

Five Point Plan

1. What do you know to be true about your market?  What is impossible to argue against because reliable informationit backs it up?
2. The assumptions you make. These play the role of hypotheses in science and must be testable.  “I can’t say for certain this is true but I know how to test it.”
3. What are you going to do should your current assumptions prove to be false?
4. Who is on your team and what skills and insights do they bring to your business?
5. How much will it cost in time and money?

Making it Real

The biggest challenge any marketer has is to take their idea into the world.  The problem is subconscious resistance to selling and marketing in general; fear of asking for money.

If I hesitate and don’t put my idea out there, should I fail it will be a private failure and I won’t lose face.  If I don’t put my idea out there I will certainly fail.  And I will fail and look foolish if I do put my idea out there.  I may have to look foolish several times before something works and so vindicates my efforts.

Not prepared?  So, why are you in business?

Your marketing plan is a foundation.  It offers a solid reason why you are in the market and some fall-back positions for when your first efforts fail.  You may need to revise it several times but more wisdom informs each revision.

One last thing.  You can waste a lot of time tinkering with your offer.  Focus on your marketing and get some customers.  You will meet the promises you make for them even if your offer is not ready.  Keeping promises is always easier than making them.

Following this eighteenth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Do You Market Needs or Dreams?

Have you ever been locked out of your house?  You need help?  Did you pay to meet needs or dreams?

Needs or Dreams?

If you are a coach, which are you most likely to supply – solutions to needs or to dreams?

Needs are well-defined issues, where we know exactly what we want.  Sometimes we think about needs and wants.  However, this is not exactly the distinction I want to make here.  The thing that discriminates between needs and dreams is that needs are precise.  The prospect has a very good idea of what they want.  They may be unclear about details but these are likely to be non-essential.

Dreams are more diffuse.  The prospect may have a general idea life could be better with some change but they are not entirely clear exactly what they want.  They need help to define the problem and sometimes this may be all they need.  Think about how difficult it is to remember a dream on waking; our need for coaching may be just as hard to pin down.

Which Do You Market?

1. Does your business meet clearly defined needs or do your prospects need help to understand their problem?
2. Recall a time when you needed help to define a problem. How did you know you needed help?  Consider how the help you received increased your understanding of the problem.
3. How do you help clients understand their problems?

Features and Desires

Where someone’s need is urgent, they are usually very clear.  So, if they seek a hotel and there are two to choose from, they take interest in their features.  When the lights go out at 10pm, I seek an electrician who comes out at night (and I pay more for this feature).

If you offer solutions to dreams, you work more in the realm of feelings and images.  You help people understand what they want and offer them solutions to whatever stands in their way.

You need to decide which business you are in.  There is nothing more frustrating than arguing on the doorstep with a locksmith who wants to be sure you really want to get into your house!

Following this seventeenth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Using Leverage to Change What Your Prospect Wants

This post considers a very basic change.  Do you want to change how your clients get what they want or do you want to change what they want?  You need greater leverage to achieve the latter.

How or What?

Let’s take an artisan baker as an example.  In terms of marketing, are they changing how you get bread or what you buy as a staple?

There are far fewer outlets that sell artisan bread than outlets that sell bread.  Unless you live close by you have to go out of your way to buy the bread you want.  If you really like artisan bread and perhaps the increased status it implies, you may be willing to go out of your way to buy it.  But in general it is harder to persuade many people to change how they get their bread.

But maybe you can persuade people artisan bread is a different product that is desirable.  It tastes better, it is healthier, better for the environment and so on.

For the coach or consultant, the question is: are seeking to change people so they use you for their services, eg as a website designer you do the work for your customers?  Or are you seeking to change your customer in some way?

You can immediately see both approaches have pros and cons.  The former offers little distance from your competitors.  It may work well if you have some speciality.  Otherwise people will use whoever is most convenient to them.  The latter is harder than the former but if you can do it, people are likely to seek you out.  The more difficult the task, the better the tools you need to do it.

What do You Change?

1. So, which do you do? Change the way people get something or change what they want?
2. What would persuade you to take up an offer that would change what you want?
3. How do you market something that changes the way people think?

Leverage

One important thing to consider is, if you aim to make difficult changes to what your clients want, do you have the time and the resources you need to do this?  What about experience?  What do you need to be successful in what you aim to do?

Changing what your potential clients want is more difficult than changing how they get it and more rewarding.  So, on reflection which of the following works for you?  (Fill in the blanks!)

Following this sixteenth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Marketing Through Status Roles

Here is something you rarely hear about from marketers!  Sales associate strongly with status roles.  This may not be immediately obvious but once you spot it, it is hard to see it any other way.

Class and Status

You may have heard the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”.  It is worth considering for a moment.  It is an old phrase, from well before the Internet.

Marketers have been aware status roles are important from the earliest times.  It is something we are reluctant to own up to, especially in Britain where we have a lot of anxiety around class.

Class is important, however much we may deny it.  In the UK, we are subjects of a monarch, not citizens.  We still have gentry as well as new gentry, funding their way through investments and accumulation of wealth.

UK people are conscious of gradations of class and even if we don’t care to admit it, most of us are acutely attuned to signals that mark class.

The connections between class and status are complex.  A trade union leader for example may have high status and low-class.

What is important to marketing is our perception of our own status and how it can be enhanced.  I feel it myself, in my desire to do training and read books.

How Does Your Offer Address Status?

1. Can you think of times when you have made purchases to enhance your status, at least in your own eyes?
2. How are your offers likely to influence the status of your clients? Is this explicit or implicit?  To what extent might clients consider status when buying from you?
3. How could you change your offers to appeal to status change?

Status Roles and Ethics

That people consider status when making purchases is outside of your control.  We all do it (except perhaps a few saints, who being saints already have high status!)

Look, I want to be better than anyone else at what I do.  I want to be respected for my contribution.  When I am respected, I enhance my status.  I doubt there is anyone reading this post who can honestly say they don’t experience similar desires.  Some argue these are entirely legitimate aspirations.

Given status is important, how should a marketer react?  They need to be aware of status.  For some, a ruthless appeal to enhanced status increases sales and that’s that.  Coaches perhaps take a little more care.  Someone who hires a coach solely for reasons of status may not use the resulting opportunities in the most constructive way.  You see why the third question is important?  What are the implications of appealing solely to status and are you aware of the extent to which you do so?

Following this fifteenth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Marketing Through Trust and Tension

We’ve all experienced marketing campaigns that aim to instil fear.  They communicate fear because the marketers are fearful themselves.  Panic selling creates panic buying, in the unlikely event it achieves anything.  Without fear the marketer introduces their market to trust and tension.

Trust, Tension and Action

To sell you need to build two things: trust and tension.  No-one buys from you if they do not trust you.  But equally they won’t buy if they do not experience some tension, something they need and feel they lack.

Ideally, you build tension as you build trust.  The tension part is an obligation on your part, if you offer something of real value.  If you know people benefit from your offer.

How do you build trust?  You cannot take action and build tension without trust.  Usually trust grows as you take action.  As you build tension in your audience, you build trust because you take action.

To build trust you take action

To take action you create tension

Taking Action

1. Think of a positive experience of marketing (it could be yours or anyone’s). How did they build tension between “That’s what I want” and “I don’t have it yet”?
2. How do you take action to create tension?
3. Why should people trust you?

Your Marketing Design

The tension between “That’s what I want” and “I don’t have it yet” is old-school marketing.  Our challenge is to build trust and tension but there is more to it.  You must design your marketing strategy to take into account things like:

Your aim is to change your market’s story.  You want people to view the status quo in a different way; to see your offer as an alternative to standard offers.  You seek to bring change.  Change requires action on your part and that action creates tension and builds trust.

Following this fourteenth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and notice of events relating to story-led maketing.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can improve your marketing through storytelling.