Two Owner Characteristics That Hurt A Businesses Growth
I’ve been helping businesses grow and prosper for a lot of years. Throughout the years I’ve had the opportunity to work with all kinds of companies, including companies that have been around for a long time and with new startup companies.
Interestingly enough, I have always found startup companies to be the easiest to work with only because the majority of the owners of these startup companies aren’t brainwashed with two characteristics that will stunt the growth of a business.
Before I get into the two characteristics, let me point something out. Buying habits change and how consumers are making decisions is changing.
Along with this, the internet has greatly affected marketing strategies and how to promote a business. So has smart phones and their explosive sales the past few years.
When you take all of the changes taking place — and I haven’t even mentioned all of them — it’s clear that businesses need to adjust with their market place. However, not all businesses are, or they’re slow as molasses at making critical key changes that will make a lot of difference in the effectiveness of promoting their business.
Let’s take a look at the two characteristics:
1) Being “wedded to tradition” and not adjusting to the market place and changes in consumer buying patterns.
With these types of businesses what I constantly hear is, “But this is how we’ve always done it”. I’m certainly not suggesting offline marketing is dead because it’s not. However, the internet has changed the playing field when it comes to marketing in a very dramatic and significant way.
2) Most business owners have been in their career for a long time, and their expertise creates a form of nearsightedness — or tunnel vision. In other words, almost all businesses in their market place are doing plus or minus 80 percent of the same marketing approaches the same way.
That’s because that’s all they know — the basic approach to business and marketing that people in the industry practice, which they learn from trade magazines, peers and other industry specific sources.
I show businesses how to think “outside the box” and to stand out in a crowded market place. When you’re the first to the market place with an innovative marketing strategy, it captivates consumers and gives you the edge.
Let’s dig into both of these characteristics more …
When Consumer Buying Patterns Change, You MUST Adjust Your Marketing To Them. Or You’ll Get Left In The Dust Of Competing Businesses Who Do!
One of the biggest challenges we have when working with businesses is their being “wedded to tradition”.
What I mean by this is only doing what they’ve always done and not being open to new strategies they may not be familiar with. This creates a kind of near-sightedness that holds the business back from taking advantage of newer, more effective strategies that could make a huge difference in their business.
For example, we all know how valuable a referral is. We all know you absolutely cannot beat a referral. And we all know that if we can get our customers to brag about us and our products to their friends and family, these friends and family will more than likely come to our business if and when they are in need of the products we offer.
We know all of this! You do know this, right?
Then why aren’t more businesses capitalizing on this simple fact?
Let me show you three ways to massively increase your referral business:
Reviews! Yes, online reviews like with Google+ Local, Yelp and the many other review sites.
Reviews are on the internet and are available for anybody to see. So here’s what happens… a consumer goes to a review site or to a search engine like Google and types in plumber denver. Up pops a list of plumbers in the Denver area and under each website listing and each listing under the search engines Local Business section you’ll see the businesses reviews … how many they have, what their reputation score is and you’ll have a link to read them all.
And don’t think for a second consumers won’t read them, because they will!
Those reviews are doing one of two things … 1) Promoting your business as the go-to-place in your market place, or 2) Warning people to avoid you.
If they are promoting you — and you have enough reviews (a minimum of 10) — those reviews are pre-selling you so when that consumer contacts you they’re pre-sold, just like referrals.
You absolutely do not want to blow off the power of online reviews. That’s because they will either drive pre-sold consumers to your business, or they will scare them away (if you have no reviews, that will also scare them away).
Social Media. Just having a Facebook Fanpage isn’t enough. You need to know how to engage with your audience. You also need to know how to get consumers to “like you” and to promote you to other friends and family they’re connected with on Facebook.
Play this out strategically and you’ll have your business being promoted throughout the city. Do it wrong and you’ll be just another Facebook page … no big deal.
Running A Contest. Yes, run a contest where participants get points for doing certain things like Liking You on Facebook, emailing a special URL to people, getting others to promote you to win the contest. Then the person with the most points gets a prize, along with 2nd place and 3rd place.
People LOVE contests and the chance to win something. They win a prize and you get a tremendous amount of publicity, you build a list of names you can market to and you make a bunch of sales. How can you ignore the huge benefits your business gains by just running a simple little ol’ contest?
Another contest idea: You can even run an SMS Text Messaging referral program where people text their friends a special URL for a, i.e., 20% off their next ____, and are also given the opportunity to promote your company, after 10 people have opted in the person gets _____ (you decide).
Not only have you drummed up a lot of business at a very low cost, you just as importantly now have a list of names you can continue sending offers too.
We have 3 different contest programs because contests are so effective.
Any one of these three ideas can send you a bunch of referral business. Do all three and you had better be prepared to hire more people to handle all of the new business you’ll have coming in.
But if you’re stuck in the “old ways of doing things”, these 3 very effective referral generating strategies that take advantage of today’s online services would be so far out of your realms of comprehension you’d likely just kiss them off along with kissing off a whole lot of money you could’ve put into your bank account this year.
And this was just 3 ideas all because of the internet. There are a lot more like a strategy we use for display ads you’d place in newspapers, magazines, billboards and everywhere else. This strategy will capture leads a whole lot faster, promote your product in a very effective way and will massively increase your sales.
My point here is stop being wedded to tradition and start focusing on the buying patterns and decision making process of YOUR customers.
So let’s take a look at the other characteristic, “Doing 80% of the same marketing your competitors are doing”.
Insanity: Doing the same thing and expecting a different results.
How very true. If you’re doing what 80% of the other guys in your industry are doing then you’re likely getting the same mediocre results everyone else is getting.
The problem is, we all have this belief system that the only people who can help you grow your business is people within your industry who know your business.
Well, there’s a belief that will cut you off at the financial knees.
In every industry there are those 10-20% of businesses that stand out from everyone else because they’re out-marketing the heck out of everyone else. They’re growing. And they’re the industry leaders. And they’re the one’s getting the lions share of leads.
Why?
It’s not because they’re doing what the other 80% are doing, that’s for sure!
It’s because they got innovative and started paying attention to key factors around their customers. And then they built their marketing around these key factors.
I bet you’re wondering what these key factors are, aren’t you?
They are different between industries, but for me to explain how to elicit these key factors in your industry would be a complete training course. For the purpose of this article I just want to point out that there are key factors that play a huge role in what type of marketing you should do.
What I have found so interesting is (pay close attention here) I can help a startup company go from zero to industry leader within a few years. Why?
Because they aren’t brainwashed into doing marketing like everyone else and they aren’t wedded to tradition. They just want to grow and be a huge success, and with that goal they take the blinders off and out-market everyone else.
I’m sure you’ve seen it in your own industry where a new guy comes along and all of sudden he becomes a main player in your industry.
Yet, if anyone has the ability to do this it’s a well established company. Well established companies already have customers, cash flow, a staff and other important pieces to grow their business. But what many well established companies don’t have is the drive like a startup company owner has.
This is in part because of being wedded to tradition — “This is how we’ve always done it” — and being brainwashed to the industries way of doing things.
Now, let me give you a little peace of mind here. I’m NOT talking about stopping everything you’re doing. What I’m suggesting you do is do these innovative things in conjunction with what you’re currently doing. Then if the new approach creates greater results at less cost giving you a higher ROI per lead and sale, then you can choose to drop the “old way” of doing things.
Just replace things, or enhance what you’re doing to create better results like with our Display Ad Maximization strategy.
The simple fact is, if you’re an established business you have a much better and higher probability of becoming the next “main player” in your market place if you’ll just take your blinders off.
One more thing I have to warn you about after having shared all of this with you …
Be Careful Of Putting Your Businesses Financial Future In The Hands of a Backyard Marketer!
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to fix things other marketers have put in place for a business. Let me just say, “way too many times”.
Here’s what you need to know, and I’m just going to be blunt here.
There are quite a few online marketing guru’s who are selling courses to other online marketers on how to make a financial killing selling online services to offline businesses. This should scare you. Why?
There are very distinct differences between an online business and an offline business, plus the buying patterns are different and the consumer demographics are different.
In order for a marketer to be effect in helping you to market your business they MUST have an intimate understand and knowledge of offline marketing and offline businesses. Let me give you a couple of examples of what online marketers are doing that’s wrong or isn’t complete:
Putting in place SEO (Search Engine Optimization) prior to a Marketing Driven Website. SEO is one of the most expensive online services you can purchase. The whole objective behind it is to get your website onto the first page of the search engines for your keyword searches (i.e., plumber denver).
What you need to understand about SEO is it’s just a traffic generating strategy. Yes, it will drive more consumers to your website and yes it will increase your leads because of this. But here’s what you need to realize here … While SEO sends a lot more traffic to your website it’s still leaving the heavy lifting with your website to convert that traffic into leads. For most businesses it’s the website that’s dropping the ball.
That’s why you must put in place a Marketing Driven Website first. Then start tracking your conversion rate of visitors to leads and it’ll absolutely blow you away!
For many businesses, by simply updating their website to a Marketing Driven Website they’ll generate more leads than with SEO alone. That’s because in today’s market place just about everything you do sends consumers to your website meaning you’ve already got website traffic. What a Marketing Driven Website will simply do is convert far more of those website visitors into leads.
Then by adding SEO to the mix you’ll watch your leads massively increase.
The second and last example I’m going to give you is this … Online marketers aren’t taking into consideration the demographics of your clients.
For example, let’s say 50% of your customers are over 50 years of age. Did you know that the 50+ age group still predominately uses the phone book (creatures of habit)?
I can’t tell you how many businesses I’ve talked to that market heavily to the over 50 crowd that have been told to dump their yellow page advertisement for some online strategy. Bad, bad, bad move! These same marketers are out there telling businesses that the yellow pages and offline marketing is dead!
Really? No, they are not!
So many of the marketers who are marketing to offline businesses only know what the course they purchased is teaching them, and most of the courses out there are from online marketers who don’t have a clue about offline businesses and offline marketing.
My point here is to just simply be careful. You want to do business with someone who has a track record and who has an intimate understand and knowledge of offline marketing and offline businesses. There are just simply way too many differences between online marketing and offline marketing to not work with someone with offline experience.
.
Article by Mr. Chesnut, Lead Consultant for On-Off 360 Marketing, LLC with 27 years of offline marketing experience. Over the past 27 years Mr. Chesnut has helped hundreds of businesses generate millions of dollars of new business.
One of the key advantages Mr. Chesnut brings to his clients is his extensive experience and intimate knowledge of offline marketing. It’s not just one thing that creates success for a business but a number of things all working together in perfect harmony.
