Category Archives for "Relational Marketing"

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.

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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?

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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.

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Four Modes of Business Communication

When business-owners think about how to improve their marketing, they usually focus on products or services.  Marketing is more complex, covering many aspects of business and its context.  Here are four modes of communication to consider:

How do You Get the Word Out?

Imagine a graph with two axes.  They cross and so form four quadrants.  Each quadrant covers one of four different modes of communication.

The first axis – fixed versus variable costs

A fixed cost is not related to the number of people who use or encounter your offer.  So, if you write a book, the costs are the same (time and money) whether it is remaindered or a best seller!

Variable costs relate to the number of people who use them, an example would be pay-per-click ads.  Variable costs include things you must pay every time someone makes a purchase or shows interest.  So, if you hold an enrolment meeting and buy the coffees, that’s a variable cost.

The second axis – media versus user experience

This axis is about what you invest your costs in.  You can choose to invest in media; the businesses you pay to help you get your message out.  These include not only investments such as a photographer, website designer or video producer but support such as your ISP, website host, a conference venue, etc.

User experience is when you invest directly in the people in your market.  It is the money and time you invest in building your tribe and the quality of the service you deliver.

Using The Four Quadrants

Sketch the two axes on a sheet of paper and consider your recent marketing activity.  (Some activities inhabit more than one quadrant.  The aim is to help you think critically about your marketing, not to put everything into tidy categories.)

1. When you consider your recent marketing activities, do they fall mainly into one quadrant or are they distributed between all four? Or somewhere in-between?  What do you conclude about your marketing?
2. Consider what you know about your competitors’ marketing. Where do they fall on the four quadrants?  Are you using similar or different approaches to your competitors?
3. Taking all this into consideration, what new things might you try?

What are the Four Quadrants?

Media with Fixed Payments

These are products produced by professional media people.  The focus here is on publicity, how you get the message out using some medium, eg a video, website, advert, book.  The real challenge is content, if you are to invest in high fixed costs, it is essential to know you have good content.

User Experience with Fixed Payments

This focus is on your story, values and relationship with your customers.  This is something you prepare.  To build a tribe, you must offer something they value.  You may invest a lot of time listening before you act on what you hear.  The important dimension is your marketing design, so you know the message to get across in every situation.

Media with Variable Payments

This covers approaches such as pay-per-click ads.  Any activity where you target a particular group according to their demographics and psychographics.

User Experience with Variable Payments

The emphasis here is quality of service.  It is what you invest to make the user experience as positive as possible, so the message gets around by word of mouth.

You may find as your business grows you are active in all four quadrants because all deliver value for money.

Following this thirteenth 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.

The Reasons People do not Choose You

This is the point.  Your marketing is effective when you take on board the reasons people do not choose you.

You’re in a Market Too!

It is easy to forget that as an entrepreneur, you are in a market too.  There will be marketers only too keen to sell you their method or approach to marketing.  Let’s assume they sell tried and tested techniques.  Why don’t they work?

I’ve said this time and again and it is bad news for any entrepreneur.  Most things don’t work.  Why?  Because most things solve the wrong problem.

Choose the wrong technique, implement it efficiently and you are motoring away from the solution you seek.  Several months later, you have spent time and money on an approach that doesn’t work, you have to recover lost ground and then find the right method.  You must understand the problem you face, to find the right solution.  There’s no point in putting yourself in front of people, if your problem is they don’t trust you.

Just as you seek to solve your market’s problem, you need to name your own problem, to find the best way to promote your business.  Your market is as aware of the risks of investing in the wrong message as you are.  Think of your own experiences and ask how you can reassure your market that you can meet their needs.

What’s Your Problem?

1. Does your market know you exist?
2. How do you know you really understand their problem?
3. How can you know your market trusts you?

Most Things Don’t Work

It is important to understand your problem not only because it is difficult or impossible to sell while you have your problem:

Most business-owners are aware they have issues they need to consider, even though they may not know what they are or be mistaken about them.  It is essential you take time to name your problem and find the help you need to solve it.

Following this twelfth 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.

The Social Dimension to Your Market

People with shared worldviews tend to cluster together and become sensitive to what is new in the group.

The Social Dimension

Let’s think about your market and how they relate to each other.  Are there places where they meet?  The aim is not so much to go there yourself, although it may be a good place to develop business relationships.  The aim is to work out how the group develops and maintains its worldview.

They police new ideas, behaviours or products.  If you offer a solution to a problem they share, they must find your solution acceptable.  Some groups may be open to change and so to give something new a try.  Others may resist change, preferring old views to changes that might threaten their interests.

Groups willing to try your approach may move quickly to decide it is not for them.  Others reluctant to try at first, may find it is for them and adopt it wholeheartedly.  You can’t control what happens but you can be aware of what is happening.

 Defining People Like Us

1. Where do your market meet? Socially or for business?  Online or in-person?
2. What do they need, fear or desire?
3. Are they likely to try new things or resist change? How likely are they to stick together when welcoming or resisting change?

Cultural Change

How do you, as an entrepreneur affect cultural change?  You may wish to look back to your promise.  You aim to bring change to your market and this means changing the groups within which your market associates.

It is tempting to think groups never change.  But isn’t it likely they have never encountered an opportunity to change?

Is it possible you are not courageous enough to offer them what they really need?  One day, someone will have the insight and courage to do just that.  Could you be that person?

So, review your offers and ask yourself whether you have an offer that fully addresses the needs of your target market.  Are you playing safe or offering a genuine radical alternative?

Following this eleventh 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.