Is your marketing message a hot date?

Like to know what’s stopping your marketing turning into sales?
Justin Cunningham offers some helpful strategies for attracting and converting more customers.

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does!”
– Stuart Henderson Britt

As business owners, leaders and decision makers we all want to improve our results. We analyse the results, we identify weakness, we apply training to the weak spots but we often fail to realise one fatal flaw – does the system we use actually work?
Without analysis of our systems we persist like a desperate teenager looking for a date. You may get one, but you are going to go through a lot of work, rejection and heartache.
As an experienced sales trainer across New Zealand I have often seen that the leadership of the people being trained for greater results had missed this vital key to their success.
The emotional obstacle for leaders is that it can require management and leadership to expose their own personal strengths and weaknesses and, as a result, it’s not always high on their agendas to expose their own inadequacies to the world.  
However, it’s vital to long-term success, especially in a fast-changing market where product and category borders are blurred, and international competition is encroaching upon local markets.
There is a good reason for this type of neglect. It’s in the way we see the world.
Through studying human behaviour I’ve discovered humans see the world in two ways:
• We are happening to the world, or,
• The world is happening to us.
It is easy to believe that markets are dictating results, forces beyond our control are impacting our performance, and we just need to keep our head above water.
Whilst this may seem real, it does not serve any purpose other than to avoid responsibility.
If we are to improve results attracting and converting more customers to business we must adopt the mindset of ‘I must make a measurable impact in the world’.
In marketing, as in sales, that behavioural apathy is also very prevalent.
When I have spoken at decision-maker events, and I have asked the business leaders attending, “How many people know their marketing ROI?” – two percent of people put their hands up!
In fact, upon digging deeper, I found business leaders at these events were spending more than $200,000 on Yellow listings/services without knowing what impact that was having.
I found this very disturbing.
I wanted to know why this was happening. And what could be done about it?
What I discovered was business owners needed to embrace the bottom-line driving nature of direct response marketing.
The method that quantifiably impacts sales results.
This method is the fastest-growing way of creating sales success for small and large businesses for a good reason.
It gives you proof.
I can take an action, implement a system to measure response and calculate income generated. This technology has been available for the last seven to eight years, yet it is still misunderstood or under-utilised. Again, why is that?

The problem we face

With information overload from the Internet and the ever-increasing demands of customer service it can be easy to suffer from time poverty.
With most businesses we have the intention of working ‘on’ our business and we understand this is vital for future success. However, doing customer sales now seems urgent and emotionally intoxicating with the immediacy of the reward and the instant gratification from serving customers.
However, are we serving our business best?
The only way to know is to try something new and measure.
That measurement requires a platform that can capture specific qualitative and quantitative data.
If it’s a website, you may create a landing page from your promotional activity that educates, supports, inspires and nurtures your sales prospect to contact you, buy from you or leave their contact details for a free premium offer.
On this page you can ask people to leave invaluable demographic and behavioural information. This can then validate what you spend on marketing, whom you target, and where you spend it.
The main obstacle to using this fantastic technology is understanding its value and direct impact, and the time it takes to learn how to use it effectively.
However letting ignorance stop you from earning more from your marketing, spending less on wasteful promotion, and converting more suspects to prospects, and indeed customers, is a cardinal sin we must overcome.

Riding the wave to victory

There are three vital keys to revenue growth, as we all know.
• Acquire more customers.
• Increase the average sale.
• Increase the frequency of sale.

What if you could automate these three keys and have your customers feel like you overdelivered and took more time to understand them? It can be done.
In order to achieve this we need to excel in three vital steps:
• Discover and understand more about our customers’ pains and aspirations through research and powerful questioning techniques to expose opportunities for supplying value.
• Attract and convert more customers with an enjoyable experience when exposed to our message, our product, our people, our expertise, and our service.
• Nurture and develop our current value offering to our client base so we become trusted advisors and business partners, and the by-product is our clients become raving fanatics eagerly referring us to anyone in need.

These three steps support the growth keys to improving your revenue.
To some readers this will not be new news.
The truth is that to action these steps has never been easier and to truly achieve growth can now be tracked, proven and delivered with any sized business. If you know this and results have still not changed it’s because it wasn’t actioned. Perhaps it’s time to do something different.
To support you to do these very things The Auckland Chamber of Commerce and JustinCunninghamOnline.com are producing ‘Attract and Convert’ on Wednesday March the 12th – a groundbreaking business leader event with multiple speakers who can show you exactly how you can achieve exceptional results through using these techniques.
If you would like to learn how to increase your sales figures, decrease any wasteful expenditure, improve the efficiency of how you achieve sales success, deliver and connect with your marketing message, and learn how to ‘wow’ your established customers even more – then this is the right event for you. I hope to see you there.
To learn more about this event go to www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/attract-and-convert-more-customers-multi-speaker-event-tickets-10268257635  

Justin Cunningham is an experienced sales trainer and marketer specialising in helping businesses in competitive industries stand out to succeed with creative strategies and platforms. www.JustinCunninghamOnline.com