It is important to understand the process your prospective customers go through before they are ready to buy from you. If you understand that process, you are better equipped to put in place marketing activities that support it, and help lead people through it and towards buying from you. The first step is for people to know you exist, so awareness is the first thing. I don’t just mean people seeing you once or twice, but actually noticing you. Actually registering that you exist. It’s pretty hard to get people to buy from you if you don’t exist, right? ;) But even if they … [Read more...]
Marketing is branding
One of the reasons I fell in love with the subject of marketing was that when I did my MBA I quickly realised that marketing is the very heart of every business. Without marketing there can be no business. Non-marketing people often hate it when us marketing nerds harp on about how “business = marketing”. The thing is though, it’s true. I cannot stress this enough, so I figured it would be good to enlist the help of two of my favourite business gurus in management and marketing in the last century: Peter Drucker and Al Ries, to drive home the message of just how important marketing … [Read more...]
Use Content Marketing To Make Your Life Easier
- by educating your customers Content marketing is one of my favourite aspects of marketing for many reasons. One of the somewhat hidden benefits of content marketing is how it can improve your relationship with your customers through their learning. Most of us have experienced bad customers, whether they were difficult to sell to to begin with or whether they are difficult to work with once business is underway. There are many reasons for them being this way (some people are just like that ;) but in many cases these difficulties can be reduced through content marketing. By informing and … [Read more...]
Customer Relationship Nurturing With Online Groups
We have all heard that it is easier to keep your current customers than to get new ones. And this is very true. However, we tend to forget this and neglect the customers we already have, whilst we offer the world to new customers and give them all our attention. For a while now I have been thinking how best to remedy this in my business and find ways to better maintain my relationship with my "older" customers. So I want to share with you what I am getting up to, and perhaps this is something that you could use in your business. I buy a lot of online courses. I have bought courses on … [Read more...]
You Need to Communicate
If I had a dollar, pound or euro for each time I hear people complain about a customer, how they just don't understand this or that, I could probably have at least one free meal a week (even if it is only a sandwich). I recently came across this quote: “If you've told a child a thousand times and he still does not understand, then it is not the child who is the slow learner.” (Walter Barbee). It might as well say: “If you've told a prospective customer a thousand times and he still does not understand, then it is not the customer who is the slow learner.” It is not the customer's … [Read more...]