‘How to Build your Successful Business into a Successful Brand’- part two from  chapter 5 of Dee’s best seller The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Book’

Consistency

Most of us are creatures of habit. There are reasons why we buy our clothes from the same outlets and why we prefer to meet friends at our favourite coffee bar. We feel comforted and secure in the knowledge that by repeating our actions, we’re going to enjoy the same experience every time. We like our loyalty to be rewarded with good feelings and great experiences. Businesses that become successful brands understand the importance of delivering a consistent and positive customer experience. These businesses make it their mission to ensure that each customer has an enjoyable experience regardless of when, how or where they come into contact with the company brand.

So your favourite coffee shop is likely to offer more than simply selling good coffee. The atmosphere is likely to be warm and convivial, and the staff welcoming and friendly. Perhaps they will have made the effort to learn your name and know your preferred coffee choice. And should you ever spill your coffee, they replace it without question or charge. They will have recognised that the taste of their coffee alone is not enough to turn you into a regular customer.

There are, of course, always exceptions to this example of a customer-driven business. Those brands that concentrate on delivering their services or products at the lowest possible price often forego the niceties that result in an improved experience. In those cases, customers are largely willing to lower their expectations in exchange for a very low price. But most of the time, customers want it all – value, first-class service and a consistently great experience.

Building Consistency into your Business.

Identify the interactions that a customer has with your business at each stage of their relationship with you. These are known as your customer touch points. Review how your business performs at each of these touch points. Many businesses tend to focus on delivering positive experiences in two key areas – recruiting new customers, and delivery.

Other areas, such as after-care and building the relationship after the sale can be neglected to some extent. Consequently, inconsistencies can creep in and sabotage what has been a positive experience to that point. You may find that this exercise reveals that your business is one of those that is over-delivering in some areas, and under-delivering in others. Could this be a good time to revisit Chapter 4 and whip your survey into shape?

Once you have identified the touch points, group them into the following categories:

•  The prospecting stage.
•  The sign up stage.
•  The delivery stage.
•  The immediate post-delivery stage.
•  Ongoing relationship building.

Having done this, identify within each category how many times a customer interacts with your business. Can you see any inconsistencies in the quality of the service they are receiving? Does the speed and courtesy of your response to e-mails and phone calls vary depending on how busy you are?

Customers will ultimately become disenchanted with your business if they can’t be sure what to expect from you each time. This will also make them reluctant to recommend you. Similarly, your business will experience fluctuating degrees of success with new prospects if you are quick to respond on some occasions but are impossible to get hold of at other times. If you employ people, check that there are no inconsistencies of service delivery within your team.

Put your customer touch points under the microscope and evaluate whether each one delivers a consistently good experience.

If you have any questions about branding don’t hesitate to post them below or email dee@themarketinggym.org

Being brilliant at the basics – something I covered in my previous blog encompasses taking simple but crucial steps towards building your business into a brand. Many small businesses fail to understand what branding really means and how they can benefit from having a brand; not just a business. Let’s start at the beginning…

‘Brand building starts with understanding the key attributes of your products and services as well as understanding and anticipating the needs of your customers.’ Philip Kotler

Branding is a subject that regularly confuses small business owners. They are either unsure about the meaning of a ‘brand’, or don’t believe that branding is relevant to small businesses. If there’s one myth that I would like to bust in this chapter, it’s that branding is only for blue-chip businesses. I hope to persuade you that branding is relevant to your business too and will show you the simple steps that can be taken towards building your small business into a brand. I will also underpin these steps with case study examples of small businesses that are successfully developing brand awareness of their company.

Firstly, it is important that you are customer-focused and open to change. You need to recognise the importance of customer care and understand that there will be times when you need the support of other professionals, including designers, web developers and perhaps copywriters.

What Does the Word ‘Brand’ Actually Mean?

Occasionally I will hear a business owner saying ‘I’ve got my brand sorted out.’ What they are usually referring to is the design of their logo and business name. These details are only two of the many aspects that contribute towards defining a brand. Branding was encountered as far back as Anglo Saxon times, originating from the word ‘brandr’ meaning ‘to burn’. The Anglo Saxon farmer used branding as a means of stamping his ownership on his livestock.

Those farmers that enjoyed an excellent reputation would find that their brand was in demand, whereas the farmers with poorer quality livestock would struggle to sell their cattle to trade buyers.

And it’s not that different today. Businesses that enjoy an excellent reputation are the ones we gravitate towards when we have available funds. By contrast, the businesses

that make the headlines for their poor customer service or inferior products are invariably ignored. Many go out of business or spend a considerable period of time and money on re-building a positive reputation.

Philip Kotler is one of the world’s most highly regarded marketing practitioners, and he offers the following definition of a brand:

‘A brand is a promise to your customers, the totality of perceptions about a product, service or business, the relationship customers have with it based on past experiences, present associations and future expectations…brand reality is always defined by the customer’s view.’

Kotler’s description suggests that at the heart of a successful brand is the delivery of a fantastic customer experience every time. This is because the power of your brand ultimately comes down to what your customers think about it.

Perhaps one of the best examples to illustrate the impact your brand can have upon your business is that of the Ratners Group. Ratner jewellery had always been extremely popular with the public until Chief Executive Gerald Ratner made his infamous speech about the jewellery on offer in his chain of shops being cheap and of poor quality. The perception of the Ratner brand plummeted overnight and this nearly resulted in the firm’s collapse. And yet nothing had materially changed to the jewellery on sale in the High Street in those few hours. What had changed, however, was the perception of the Ratner brand on the High Street. It was now regarded as a firm selling cheap and nasty jewellery and making fools of their customers. Consequently, customers no longer wanted to be associated with it.

This example shows the power that customers wield in building or breaking a brand and how important it is for an ambassador of the business to recognise this fact.

More on branding to follow in two weeks!

By Dee Blick

I have just returned from speaking at a conference in Shropshire… an animated and lively event comprising of 50 publishers keen to find out more about marketing on a shoestring and the importance of being brilliant at the basics. 

This is something I touch upon frequently.
 
Often a business owner is so intent on finding the marketing miracle at the end of the rainbow that they overlook the fact that accomplishing simple but powerful marketing activities with charm, flair and relevance is what’s really needed to notch up those sales. In recent months I have witnessed all manner of “experts” promising to transform the fortunes of any business if said business owner can part with plenty of cash to subscribe to the system on offer.
 
Before you are tempted by these overtures consider instead whether you can achieve your goals by being brilliant at the basics.

1. Ensure that every single one of your communications, online and off-line represents all that is good and great about your business down to the very last detail. Having a website that bears no relation to your logo and livery because it was created many years ago will only serve to act as a disincentive to potential customers. Those cheap flyers that you had printed on a wing and a prayer using blurred images and copy that falls woefully short of promoting your business are most definitely a false economy too.

Once they have been given a rapid and critical appraisal they will be on their way to the landfill site without a backward glance. Look upon your marketing communications as a pivotal extension of you, your brand, what you offer and what you stand for. You can’t be in front of every potential customer; you need a decent marketing toolkit to nudge the door open to a potential sale or even keep the home fires burning after those meetings have taken place.

2. Invest in a decent designer. Something that I have touched upon in previous columns is that good design should be an investment and not an expense. It’s unlikely that you would attend a black-tie event in your jeans because obviously such attire would be spectacularly inappropriate. Why present literature to the people that you are hoping will buy from you when it has clearly been designed by a person with a conspicuous absence of design skills?

You may have saved a few pounds but the cost to your reputation will cost you so much more than this. 

3. If you are not a wordsmith and the thought of writing your sales letters, brochures and flyers fills you with dread or copywriting is just not your thing, don’t despair.

Focus instead on creating a thorough and accurate brief for a copywriter to work from. Inspire them with a rich description of your target audiences, the benefits you offer, your experience and expertise, how you overcome the barriers to a sale and what you are hoping to achieve from each communication.

Being brilliant at the basics entails delivering a charming message that is relevant and appropriate to the audiences you are looking to communicate with. The days of simply firing off a generic and bland list of your offering to anyone within earshot are well and truly over. Customers know they are in demand. You need to court them; show them respect.

I’ll be back in a few weeks time with more tips on how you can be brilliant at the basics. In the meantime, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to pop a message below or contact me by my website www.themarketinggym.org 

You can also look inside my current No 1 bestseller The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Book on Amazon and read the 24 out of 24 5 star reviews.

Don’t write your sales letter in isolation concerning yourself only with presenting an attractive and well laid out document.  It must contain substance and be relevant to the readers. Spend time identifying and understanding your audience and    supplement this with some competitor research. Although we have covered the importance of competitor research in the previous chapter I would like to reinforce some of those points again relating them specifically to your sales letter.

1. Identify your audience. Before you can write your sales letter, you need to identify the groups of people that you want to communicate with.  As discussed in Chapter 1 this can be a broad or narrow spectrum that includes:

• cold prospects – people yet to do business with you
•  warm prospects – people interested in what you offer but yet to buy
•  lapsed clients – people that have bought from you in the past but not recently
•  existing clients – you may want to segment  existing clients depending on what they buy from you, when they buy and their value 
•  Influencers – people who can recommend you to potential new customers…trade associations, buying groups, membership organisations etc.

 You must be clear about who is going to receive your sales letters because you’re not going to write the same letter to each group.  The message may be the same, but each letter should be tweaked to reflect the differing needs of each target audience.

1. Once you are clear about your target audiences stand in their shoes and appraise your business through their eyes. If you are not writing from your customer’s point of view, your sales letter will fall at the first hurdle.  People are not interested in what you want they want solutions to their needs. Find out what your prospects or customers already know about your products or services.  If you’re not sure, pick up the phone and speak to a handful. Explain that you want to find out more about their needs and what influences them to buy the products or services that you supply.  If you don’t have accurate answers to these questions, your sales letter may offer too much or too little information and be focused in the wrong direction. 

1. Find out what’s happening in the market place in which your prospects and customers operate.  People are influenced in their purchasing decisions by their own prosperity and the underlying trends within their marketplace. You may need to focus on showing  how you deliver value for money. 

1. Carry out some competitor research.  This is not as onerous as it may initially appear.  In all likelihood, the people that you are targeting will also have some knowledge of what your competitors offer, even if it’s a bit sketchy.    However, as covered in Chapter 2, shy away from using the word unique.  Your letter will not be lacking if you don’t pepper it with unsubstantiated superlatives. Instead, acquaint yourself with a handful of competitors before writing your letter. Visit their websites; engage in a spot of mystery shopping and compare your respective offerings.   Are your products cheaper, faster, and easier?  Are they more reliable?  Are they the best performing, recommended by experts?  Do they offer the best value?  Have you won awards or been accredited for your services?  Do you offer unconditional guarantees?  Do you hold the highest possible qualifications in your sector? Have you amassed experience that’s hard to find elsewhere?  If the only tangible outcome of this exercise is to make you realise that you are offering an excellent product or service, it will have been a success.

1. Evaluate your most popular benefits.  If you can focus on three key benefits that is usually more than enough to write a great sales letter.

1.  Will an offer trigger activity?   An offer is something extra, something over and above the product or service that you’re promoting in your sales letter.  It’s designed to prompt the reader to act immediately before they forget or are distracted by another business.  It must be appropriate and appealing to the recipients. They will be unimpressed by a cheap gimmick.  However, don’t believe that every letter sales you send must include an offer. In some cases an offer may not be appropriate or financially possible. 

If you have any questions about writing sales letters for your business, don’t hesitate to ask!

By Dee Blick

In his rather fabulous book, How to Write Sales Letters That Sell, Drayton Bird says: ‘The truth is not that people receive too many sales letters, but that they receive too many irrelevant ones. When people say they hate junk mail, this is what they really mean. They don’t like receiving things that don’t interest them. On the other hand there is ample evidence that the reverse is true. Any letter which talks to the right person about the right subject at the right time, and appeals to that person’s self-interest will succeed.’

That’s good to read if you’re interested in writing sales letters but have a niggling doubt in your mind that this sort of correspondence comes under the banner of junk mail especially in a world in which everything seems to be happening online. In my experience, working with hundreds of businesses and writing thousands of sales letters, I can say that sales letters work without exception, regardless of what business you are in. Whether you manufacture widgets, make exquisite fruitcakes, build websites or coach executives – you can successfully promote your business with a sales letter. And if you run an online business, don’t think that the only way to communicate with your audience is online. Some of the biggest online businesses including eBay and Amazon target prospects and customers with paper and print-based marketing. Adopt a wider view of your business and how you market it to prospects and customers.

What’s so special about a sales letter?

It’s an intimate communication. The recipient holds your letter, hopefully reads it from beginning to end and thinks about your message as they do so. Research has uncovered the positive but hardly startling fact that physical material is more real to the brain. It has a meaning and place. It’s better connected to memory than digital communication. A well-written and engaging sales letter can have a positive emotional impact on the recipient, one that is often far more enduring than a digital communication.

Your sales letter can have a real impact when accompanied by a natty free gift or a sample of your products or services. In an era when we are so reliant upon e-mail, your sales letter provides an opportunity to engage and inspire your audience and encourage them to find out more about you. Online sales messages often struggle to be anything other than impersonal with many being automatically routed to spam folders to save the recipient from even opening them. A sales letter will always be picked up from the doormat, will always be opened if correctly targeted, and, if well written and relevant has a very high chance of being read.

The challenge

When targeting cold prospects with a sales letter you are writing to someone that doesn’t know you from Adam. Whereas you have many reasons for wanting to convert them into customers, they, on the other hand are unlikely to share your enthusiasm for this to happen. Their lives are not incomplete because they have yet to come across your products or services. So you face the difficult, but not impossible challenge of inspiring them through the content of your sales letter to find out more about you. You face a lesser challenge when communicating with your existing customers but still need to motivate them sufficiently to buy from you.

In the next excerpt from The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Book I’m going to share with you six incredibly powerful  tips to help you create a sales letter for your business that really sells! In the meantime if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

>> If it’s specifically Tips for your Business you’re after, click here.

Writing killer copy! Understanding the barriers to a sale

To write copy that sells you must address the barriers that stop a person buying from you.  You can shout from the rooftops about your fantastic business, but if you’re not removing barriers you won’t make the sale. 

It’s important to identify the barriers for each of the groups that you are targeting, i.e. cold prospects, lapsed clients, VIP clients, and so on.  Go further still – if you are grouping your cold prospects by sector, identify whether each sector has specific barriers.  In my experience, the barriers to a sale will vary from group to group; sector to sector.   

For example, a few years ago I worked with a franchisor who wanted to introduce business coaching to his franchisees.  The biggest barrier to the sale was that the franchisees did not understand how their business would benefit from this coaching.  They were labouring under the misconception that business coaching was only applicable for senior executives in big corporations. 

Our initial marketing messages focused on communicating the tangible benefits that business coaching could offer a small business owner.  We explained what business coaching entailed, providing a list of small businesses benefiting from it.  We encouraged the franchisees to talk to some of these businesses to help them to better understand the advantages of business coaching.

Recognising the barriers enabled us to focus our communications specifically to address those concerns uppermost in the minds of the franchisees. By doing so we were able to move beyond any initial scepticism. 

For another client, the higher than average price for his service was the potential barrier.  He was in competition with businesses that offered an inferior service at a much cheaper price. The marketing messages needed to drive home the quality of the service being provided compared to that on offer from the competitors and importantly, just how this superior service significantly benefited the clients.   We needed to tackle the potential barrier of the higher price head-on.   Ignoring something does not mean it will go away!

How can you identify the barriers to a sale? 

• Spend a little time on the Internet researching the groups you aim to target.  This will enable you to understand more about the marketplace in which your target audiences operate, and so help unearth barriers as well as opportunities. 
• Pick up the phone – ask the people that you are looking to target to articulate their reservations or objections when it comes to buying your products or services. What would it take for them to switch from their current supplier?  You don’t need to be specific and relate the conversation back to you personally.  I find that this is a great way of better understanding just what is important to the people I want to communicate with.  Not only will you be helped in identifying those barriers to a sale, you may also obtain information to help you formulate a winning sales message.  
• Again, stand in the shoes of the people that you’re looking to target.  Using your business acumen, commonsense and knowledge of the sector imagine what they are likely to see as the main sales barriers.  Consider actually meeting up with some of your target audience. One of my clients was targeting local architects and was keen to know their thoughts on his product. We therefore organised a couple of informal lunches to which we invited many representatives of this sector. This provided the architects with an opportunity to network with their peers over something to eat, while at the same time enabling my client and I to speak directly with the exact people that we were trying to sell to. The information provided at those lunches was invaluable when it came to writing our sales literature.

You should find this an illuminating exercise. Document your findings and the information that you gather should help you in creating your all-important sales messages. 

Next column?  How to write sensational  sentences that sell and powerful words that evoke the right emotions…

>> Dee Blick is an-award winning Chartered Marketer and author of the Number 1 Amazon UK reader review rated book, Powerful Marketing on a Shoestring Budget. Dee’s second book, The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Book has just launhed and you can look at it here.