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Tag: Consuming

  • What Marketing Strategy Is the Best for You?

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    If you pick the right marketing strategy, you’ll be like that little guy in the middle of my diagram above. Yes! Winning! Fist pumps!

    The problem with marketing today is that there are way too many options and it’s much too confusing. It makes me dizzy just thinking about this stuff and I’ve been immersed in it for 35 years.

    Well, I lay down on my bed last week with a notepad and started to map out my “Unified Theory of Marketing Strategies” with an emphasis on online marketing.

    And I actually came up with something that’s not totally confusing, and might even be helpful to a few people.

    Here goes…

    It’s yet another four-quadrant grid where the vertical axis is a scale from easy to hard and the horizontal axis is a scale from passive to proactive.

    I emerged with these four snappy quadrants:

    Hard and Passive = Multimedia

    Easy and Passive = Publishing

    Hard and Proactive = Presentations

    Easy and Proactive = Email

    Now, all of these strategies can be effective. But, yes some are easier than others. And the passive ones tend to take a lot longer than the proactive ones.

    Hard and Passive = Multimedia (Videos)

    Everyone is crazy about video these days. It’s a challenging, yet passive strategy. You put a lot work into creating a video and then post it on YouTube hoping people see it.

    It’s difficult to do well. It’s time-consuming and it can be expensive. And most videos are pure crap. If you want to do it well, it takes a chunk of change and a lot of time.

    Throwing up a lot of little videos on your website can be a nice touch, but they usually don’t get people to call you in droves.

    So, as you can see, I’m not crazy about a video strategy for self-employed professionals. I’m not saying they can’t work, but it’s a whole lot of work to do right.

    Best example: A non-duality teacher named Rupert Spira (non-duality.rupertspira.com/home). He does live workshops and films everything. Then his staff chops them up into questions and answer segments and posts them on YouTube. They’re five to fifteen minutes long. And what you see is what you get. No pitch, no hype. It’s his teaching unadulterated.

    He has hundreds of videos on YouTube with hundreds of thousands of views. Does it work? Well, his workshops are always full and all he does is a low-key email announcement to his list every month or two.

    I like this approach a lot. Got a lot of good content? Look good on video (unlike yours truly)? Then you may want to emulate Rupert.

    Easy and Passive = Publishing

    I happen to like this strategy a lot as it, ahem, built my “Empire.” It’s relatively easy: Write a how-to article on your subject matter once a week, send it out to those on your e-list and publish on your blog. Fame ensues.

    But online publishing can be a lot more than that. You can take those same articles and publish them on Medium, LinkedIn, and Ezine Articles. And then you can announce them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Sometimes you can get big exposure when writing an article for a major online publication. Web traffic multiplies.

    The cost is zero; an article takes from two to five hours to write (unless it takes you several days). And your ideas are online for eternity to be discovered by those looking for practical ideas. Some will opt-in to your e-list and perpetuate this virtuous marketing circle.

    The downside, of course, is that, according to my extensive research, (a 10 second Google search), there are 2 million articles published online every day. The mind reels. So your stuff will be out there, but somewhat lost in a very big haystack.

    I’m still a big advocate of online publishing, but the mountain is getting steeper and steeper. Just writing an article or two here and there won’t help you much.

    Best Example: Well, other than mine, of course, check out Henneke of Enchanted Marketing. She has a wonderful, readable, fun blog on business writing and blogging. And she walks her talk. It’s all about well-written, relevant content. If you don’t have that as a foundation, it’s a total waste of time.

    Hard and Proactive = Presentations

    I built my business on presentations in front of live audiences at professional associations and chambers of commerce. It got me attention, added people to my mailing list and generated warm leads for marketing coaching.

    And I still do presentations today in the form of webinars. I just filled my recent group program with the help of a couple webinars (also called video conferences). They most certainly do work.

    But I put presentations in the hard category, not because they are all that hard to give, but can take a long time to prepare. The last one I did took me two full days. There were about 200 slides (whew).

    Yes, that’s not the only way to do a webinar. You can just go live on Zoom Video, and that can work as well. You ultimately have to find your style and test what works.

    Presentations are proactive in that at the end you can ask for the business. And, of course, you can turn the recording of the webinar into a video in a snap and send it out to those on your list. Watch it here.

    So presentations will always play a big part in my marketing toolkit.

    One other thing though – If you don’t have a LOT of people on your email list, good luck in getting much of an attendance. Yes, you can do guest presentations hosted by others, but you don’t have the same control and ability to pitch your professional services.

    Best example: John Nemo of LinkedIn Riches (linkedinriches.com). His webinar is a blast. There are a lot of them out there in the online marketing world. And many, Like John, have set them up as evergreen webinars that are scheduled to play automatically several times a day. These are kind of a hybrid between publishing and presentations.

    Easy and Proactive = Email

    In my opinion, email is the most powerful overall marketing tool. And it gets the least respect. But I can’t imagine even being in business without email marketing.

    Social media gets all the PR and all the attention, but email gets the business. A recent study showed that email generated 40 times the business results of Facebook and Twitter combined.

    Email is the online tool that’s been around the longest, and I think it’s taken for granted. Promotional emails have expanded exponentially over the years, but most of it isn’t very good.

    We wade through our email boxes like we sort our mail over the trashcan. Delete, delete, delete. Why? Because it’s either not relevant or it’s boring. Usually both.

    I feel that email has the greatest potential of all the online marketing strategies because it’s both relatively easy and the most proactive marketing medium of all. Your message goes right into the mailbox of your potential client. Nothing else can do that.

    Marketing email holds great opportunities for improvement in several areas:

    1. How to incorporate humor as the most powerful attention-getting device in existence (that almost nobody is using).

    2. How to telegraph your value proposition straight to the minds and hearts of your prospect.

    3. How to make your emails clear, focused, and easy-to-read.

    4. How to craft a compelling call-to-action that is hard to resist.

    5. How to get emails to thousands of your prospects without looking like spam.

    If you’re not working on ALL of these, your emails will not get the attention and response you want.

    Best Example: Therapy Practice Accelerator. Visit this site and get on the list just to see the brilliance of the email marketing. It’s all about demonstrating results.

    What marketing strategies will you choose?

    Take the four marketing quadrants into consideration. The easier a marketing activity, the more likely you’ll actually do it. And the more proactive a marketing activity, the faster the response you’ll get.

    Cheers, Robert

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    Source by Robert Middleton

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  • Questions Are the Key to Success in Business and Life

    Questions Are the Key to Success in Business and Life

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    It was Kipling who gave us what was perhaps the greatest advice for business success and, in fact, success in life that has ever been given. He told us the key to success in all areas when he said “I had six honest serving men. They taught me all I knew. Their names were: where and what and when and why and how and who.”

    The late great Earl Nightingale suggested we add two more friends to this group. They are, which and if.

    Whether you are seeking to find ways to increase sales or control and reduce costs, questions are the key. Whether you are striving to improve your customer service or the quality of your product, or your life, questions are the key.

    Asking the questions and developing the answers are the keys to any and all success you will have in business and in fact life.

    Questions like:

    If we do this, what happens?

    Why do we do it this way?

    Why don’t we do it this way?

    Who else can we sell to?

    Where else can we get this?

    What can we do to reduce costs?

    What can we do to improve productivity?

    What can we do to improve quality?

    What can we do to improve our service?

    How else can that be done?

    How can we do it better, faster, cheaper?

    How can we improve quality, service, and profits?

    How can we cut costs?

    If we do this, will we improve quality?

    If we do this, will it improve service?

    If we do this, will it increase profits?

    Which provides us with better quality?

    Which is best for our customer?

    What do we get in return for this cost?

    Who else can provide what we need?

    Why are we paying that much?

    Why do we not deal with another company?

    Why are we dealing with them?

    How many other bids have we gotten?

    What if?

    How can we replace that with equal or better quality for less?

    What are other companies charging for that product or service?

    What are other companies paying for that product or service?

    Will this process or step add value to our product or service or does it produce added profit?

    When would this investment pay off?

    You see my point I am sure. You must ask questions and seek out the answers. You must also justify the answers.

    You must never stop asking. If you are not continuously asking the questions and reacting to the answers, you are either assuming or stagnating. Either one can be deadly to your business.

    You must review every phase of your business. You may be very surprised when you see how little effort it will take to find huge savings and to make major improvements in how you conduct business.

    You can always improve how you do things. You must find ways to conduct business more efficiently, eliminate needless steps, improve quality, increase productivity, reduce errors, increase sales, ways to increase profit in a business, reduce expenses, and control costs.

    Let me give you one small example of how an assumption proved to be very costly at one company. One of the many products this company offered was a holiday label strip. This was simply a strip of peel off labels to affix to holiday presents showing “to” and “from”. Banks around the country would buy them and give them out one strip at a time to their customers around the holidays.

    For years this company shrink wrapped these in packages of 250 and sold them in a minimum quantity of 1,000. The shrink wrapping was time consuming and costly. I asked them why. Why did they need to be shrink wrapped? How did they know if this was important to the customer? What, if any, difference did packaging make to their customers?

    They asked the questions and found the answers. The answer in this case was that the customer either couldn’t have cared less about the packaging or did not like the shrink wrap as it simply meant more work for them to unwrap. After years of doing it the way they always did and assuming that was what the end user wanted, they found out differently. They now bulk package. They save between $20,000 and $30,000 per year and their customers are either happier or neutral about this change.

    Did this company sacrifice quality in any way to save money? No, they improved productivity, improved customer satisfaction, and, by doing so, improved profitability.

    Ask the questions. They are the key to the door of improvement.

    You should constantly be reviewing every area of your operation to seek ways in which you can improve. Use common sense. From office expenses to customer service, from distribution and production to quality control and shipping, you will be shocked at how little effort it will take to improve your operations, reduce waste and redundancy, and realize huge savings.

    From the way you sell things to the way you buy things, it is up to you to improve things. Improvement is always possible in everything we do.

    You possess the greatest power ever created and it sits right between your two ears. You own it, free and clear. All you need to do is put it to work.

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    Source by Derrick Welch

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  • Customer Satisfaction Management

    Customer Satisfaction Management

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    General understanding of consumer satisfaction or dissatisfaction is the result of differences between consumer expectations and performance perceived by consumers. From the various definitions of consumer satisfaction that have been researched and defined by marketing experts, it can be concluded that customer satisfaction is a behavior response consumer in the form of after-purchase evaluation of an item or service that they feel (product performance) compared to consumer expectations.Consumer satisfaction is very dependent on the perceptions and expectations of consumers themselves. Factors that influence consumers’ perceptions and expectations when making purchases of goods or services are needs and desires felt by consumers when making purchases of goods or services, past experiences when consuming these goods or services and experiences of friends who have consume these goods or services and advertising.In a competitive environment, an indicator that can show customer satisfaction is whether the consumer will buy back and use the product in the future.

    Customer needs are fulfilled is one of the factors forming Customer Satisfaction (Customer Satisfaction), in addition to other factors related to Customer Service. And this customer satisfaction is what we need to ensure the continuity of our business. Aspects that can affect customer satisfaction effectively [13], namely:

    1. Warranty costs. Several companies deal with the warranty costs of their products / services through a percentage of sales. The company’s failure to give satisfaction to customers is usually because the company does not provide guarantees for the products they sell to customers.

    2. Handling of complaints from customers. Statistically this is important to note, but it is often too late for companies to realize it. If complaints / claims from customers are not immediately resolved, customer defections cannot be prevented.

    3. Market Share. It is a matter that must be measured and related to company performance. If the market share is measured, then the quantity is measured, not the quality of the company’s service.

    4. Costs of poor quality. This can be of satisfactory value if costs for customer defect can be estimated.

    5. Industry reports. There are many types and industry reports, as stated by J.D Power in Bhote, which is the report that is the fairest, most accurate, and most eagerly made by the company.Guiltinan [14] argues that one of the benefits of customer satisfaction is that it can increase customer loyalty, as shown in the figure below

    Customer satisfaction is an emotional response to the evaluation of the consumption experience of a product or service. Kotler defines customer satisfaction as the level of one’s feelings after comparing the performance (or results) that he feels compared to his expectations (Kotler, Philip, and Garry Armstrong, 2005). Basically, customer satisfaction includes the difference between expectations and performance or the results obtained.

    According to Kotler [1], satisfaction is feeling happy or disappointed someone who appears after comparing between perceptions or impressions of the performance or results of a product and expectations. So, satisfaction is a function of perception or impression of performance and hope. If the performance is below expectations, the customer is not satisfied. If the performance meets expectations, the customer will be satisfied. If the performance exceeds expectations, the customer will be very satisfied or happy. The key to generating customer loyalty is to provide high customer value.The relationship between customer satisfaction and loyal customers is disproportionate [2], for example, customer satisfaction is ranked on a 1-5 scale, namely:

    1. Customer satisfaction at a very low level (level 1), most likely customers will move away from the company and speak ill of it.

    2. Customer satisfaction at level 2 to level 4, customers feel somewhat satisfied, but it is still possible to move when a better offer appears.

    3. Customer satisfaction at level 5, customers are very likely to buy back and even disseminate good news about the company.

    High satisfaction or satisfaction creates an emotional bond with the brand or company and is not only fixated on reasonable choices.While satisfaction according to Kotler and Armstrong (2001: 9): Consumer satisfaction is the extent to which the assumption of product performance meets the expectations of buyers. If the product’s performance is lower than the customer’s expectations, the buyer is satisfied or very happy. According to Zeithaml and Bitner (2000: 75) the definition of satisfaction is: Consumer response or response regarding fulfillment of needs. Satisfaction is an assessment of the features or features of a product or service, or the product itself, which provides the level of consumer pleasure related to meeting consumer consumption needs. Consumer satisfaction can be created through quality, service and value.

    Customer expectations are believed to have a large role in evaluating product quality (goods and services) and customer satisfaction. Customer expectations basically have a close relationship between determining quality and customer satisfaction. Customer expectation always exists because of four things (Kertajaya, 2004):

    1. Individual Need or individual needs

    If your customer already has high demands, then his expectations are definitely high too.

    1. Word of Mouth

    Customers can have certain expectations because of other people’s stories. Other people’s stories are often seen as references.

    1. Past experience or past experience

    People who already have good experience in the past will be able to receive services at least the same as they used to be. If not, he will be disappointed.

    1. External communication or external communication

    It is an attempt by the company to promise something to customers in order to attract customers.

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    Source by Yufi Priyo

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