Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Reputation Marketing For Okanagan Businesses
4 Proven Marketing Systems Every Business Must Optimize to Maximize Revenue Growth
SLIDE 1
Hi everyone and welcome to my presentation today of the 4 Proven Marketing Systems Every
Business Must Optimize to Maximize Revenue Growth. If that's what you were looking for,
you're in the right place. We'll get started here in just a few minutes.
Now is a great time if you'd like to get a drink of water or finish up that last second
email, run to the restroom. Any of that type of stuff, please go ahead and do it now and
we'll get started here in just a few minutes. Thank you.
Hi everyone and welcome again. We'll get going here in just another couple of minutes. We
still have a lot of people logging on to the presentation, so we'll give everyone just
a minute to get settled in and then we'll get rolling. Thank you.
Okay, everybody, let's go ahead and get going. Again, the presentation today is the 4 Proven
Marketing Systems Every Business Must Optimize to Maximize Revenue Growth. I have a lot of
information for you here today, so we're going to hustle through this presentation and I'm
going to do my best to keep it to an hour as promised. Just a few logistics here before
we get going.
One, if you have any questions please type them in to the question box below this presentation.
I will receive those and I will do my best to answer as many of them as I can at the
end of this presentation. Those that I don't get the opportunity to answer we will respond
to you within 24 hours, either myself or someone on my team, to make sure that we get back
to you. I will also be recording this presentation, so no need to be furiously scribbling notes.
I'll get you a recording and can watch it as many times as you'd like.
Finally, if you hover over the image of the presentation here using your computer mouse,
you will see on the lower right-hand side of the image of the presentation a little
box. You can click on that and it will expand this presentation into full-screen mode on
your computer screen, if that makes it easier for you to view. At any time you can just
hit Escape and go back to the normal view where you can access that question box if
you'd like to. Okay, let's go ahead and get going.
In the next hour here I'm going to teach you how you can dominate your market and take
your income to entirely new levels. I work almost entirely with small businesses and
I work with them to leverage marketing and technology to achieve maximum results. All
small businesses are resource constrained, time, money, manpower, we're all hustling
to do more with less and I've found that it's critical in order to get that maximum growth
out of your business that you can, you have to take advantage of the marketing systems
and technology that are out there that can allow you to leverage those resources that
you have to their fullest extent.
SLIDE 4
Now, unfortunately, I found that 95% of small businesses across just about any vertical
industry are missing at least two out of the four marketing systems we're going to cover
today that are critical to achieve maximum growth. My bet is that amongst the folks who
are on this presentation today we have a lot of room for improvement.
SLIDE 5
Now, why is that?
SLIDE 6
Well, the competitive landscape for business has changed dramatically. Particularly over
the last 10 years we've seen dramatic changes in the way that we do business due to technology,
the Internet and software.
SLIDE 7
The landscape has changed and so has the way your customers find and shop for your services
or products.
SLIDE 8
Unfortunately, businesses, small businesses in particular, have been slow to adapt to
these changes, so that's what we're going to do today. We're going to cover what those
major changes are and we're going to talk about the important systems you need to make
sure that you have in place to capitalize on these changes. So, what are the three big
drivers of change that I mentioned?
SLIDE 9
Well, they are—
1 Search, 2 Social, and
3 Mobile
I'm sure these are all terms that you're familiar with; however, you may not be exactly familiar
with how these things are impacting your business, your consumers' desire to do business with
you and the decisions you need to make at your business to make sure that you're capitalizing
on these changes. So, let's go ahead and jump into them.
SLIDE 10
Search -- Search engines didn't even exist 15 years ago, now they are just a part of
the way that we operate every single day. It's easier than ever to find information
about products, services, companies, people, places or whatever it is that you're looking
for. Search engines now are accessible from multiple devices. We can access search from
our computers, iPads or tablets and, of course, from our smartphones now when we're walking
or driving around. So, information really has become incredibly accessible and the search
engines have become the predominant way that people now find information about those products
and business.
SLIDE 11
It's no longer the yellow pages it's search engines. In fact, 92% of consumers have more
confidence in the information found online than they do in anything from a sales clerk
or other source. In other words, what this is saying is not only are we finding our information
online, but we actually trust it more than the information we get directly from businesses
and that makes sense. When information is coming from a business directly we feel like
they're selling us or advertising to us, so we have more faith in the information that
we find with search engines than we do from information directly from businesses.
SLIDE 12
Now, social is the second major factor and if search engines have grown fast, well then
social media sites are just absolutely on fire. It's unbelievable the growth in social.
Connecting and sharing with others, sharing our opinions with others, has never been so
easy and those opinions are highly visible. People spend a lot of time in the search engines
each day, so what's being shared with them is very, very visible and now very much a
part of people's everyday lives.
Because of that the search engines are also paying attention, so Google, Bing, the MSN
search engine and Yahoo are all trying to find ways to capture the information that's
being created and shared within the social media sites to make sure that it's also being
incorporated in the data you get from the search engines. The important thing you need
to know about this is that it's easier than ever for people to create and share information
about how they feel about your business, products and services.
The content about your business that's out there on the Web is largely not being created
by you anymore. It's the consumers that are the publishers of that information and that's
a major, major impact on how we do business.
SLIDE 13
In fact, look at this statistic. Seventy percent of consumers consult reviews or ratings online
before purchasing. That comes from a document called Zero Moment of Truth that was published
by Google in 2011. So, social is having a huge impact on how people make buying decisions.
SLIDE 14
The third major factor is mobile and this may be the biggest game changer of all. Why
is that? Well, it was one thing when we had access to all of this great information on
our computers, but the reality is that most people are not sitting at their computers
24 hours a day. They're up and about, traveling around town, going to meetings or whatever
it is they're doing, shopping. Now they have access to all of this information in the palm
of their hands no matter where they're at and they're using it.
Mobile search gives that immediate gratification people are looking for, so if you're not present
on mobile and if you don't understand how mobile is changing people's buying behavior,
your competitors will eat your lunch.
SLIDE 15
In fact, look at the statistics. Mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year according
to Google. One in seven searches are now mobile. So, you add all of this up and it's easier
than ever for consumer to quickly research and compare various products and services.
SLIDE 16
This is a screen shot from a site called Trip Advisor that I'm sure many of you have been
to. Trip Advisor has become incredibly powerful in the hospitality industry because of all
of the reviews and feedback that are posted on its site about the various hotels, restaurants
and places to visit around the world that are out there. I know for me, personally,
when we travel and plan a vacation Trip Advisor is the place I spend a lot of time doing my
research and it really, really has an impact on the decisions I make about the places I
want to stay. So, the hospitality industry has been dramatically impacted by Trip Advisor
and some similar sites, but it's not just the hospitality industry it's all industries.
SLIDE 17
The companies that get it, the companies that understand this and know how to optimize the
way they work with these three factors are crushing the companies that don't.
SLIDE 18
So, the big question for you is how do you strategically work with these three big drivers
of change to make sure you come out on top in your industry?
SLIDE 19
It means that now more than ever you need to have a marketing plan that works.
SLIDE 20
When I talk to small business they say man, there's so much going on. There's so much
technology out there. There's so much change happening so fast. It's not like I have the
time to sit around and study this stuff and work on this stuff all day every day. How
do I keep up? How do I make decisions about what I should be doing at my business?
SLIDE 21
Well, my approach is to simplify the challenges these businesses face and clarify the approach
for success and I do that by suggesting there are just these four key marketing systems
that you must maximize at your business.
SLIDE 22
I refer to this as the R-4 Marketing Framework and you can see it here. It's just a very
simple triangle. You can see what it's called the R-4 Marketing Framework. Each of those
words there begins with the letter 'R' and it starts at the bottom with Reputation and
then there's Reach, Resell and Referral. You'll notice that arrow looping back around to the
bottom pointing back to Reputation and that's an important arrow.
SLIDE 23
The idea behind this triangle is that at the base of it is Reputation. Reputation is what
people think about us and about our businesses, products and services. Now, we all know that
reputation has always been important in business, but it's now more important than ever. We'll
explain why, but the big reason why is because it's never been easier for people to share
what they feel about your business online. That information about your reputation, those
feelings about your reputation and how you deliver your products and services can now
spread like wildfire.
SLIDE 24
Next is Reach. Reach is making sure that you're getting in touch with more of your qualified
prospects every single day. It's pretty obvious that if you want to grow your business you
need to get more of your targeted prospects to know who you are. If they don't know who
you are they can't buy from you, so Reach is the process and the systems we use to get
in touch with more prospects and let them know about our business.
SLIDE 25
Then there is Resell. Resell is making sure that we maximize the lifetime value of every
customer we get by continuing to resell them our products and services, to up-sell them
to more expensive products and services and to cross-sell them to other complimentary
products and services. So resell, up-sell and cross-sell to maximize the lifetime value
of a client or customer.
SLIDE 26
Then, finally, there is Referral and we all know how valuable referrals are. If we could
just grow our business through referrals, through all the positive word of mouth we're
getting out there in the marketplace that would be the easiest and best way to grow
our business. Unfortunately, that's typically not enough, but there are often times so much
more we can be doing to generate referrals at our business if we're proactive and thoughtful
about our approach.
SLIDE 27
Those are the four R's of this R-4 Marketing Framework. The idea behind it, again, is keeping
it simple, keeping it focused. If you focus on enhancing your reputation at your business,
reaching out to new prospects every day, reselling, up-selling and cross-selling those customers
that you do get and then delivering a fantastic customer experience so that you get more referrals,
well those referrals are essentially people saying positive things about you, which is
enhancing your reputation and making this whole process easier to move up the pyramid.
SLIDE 28
So by focusing on these four R's, we can achieve maximum growth at our business. In fact, what
I have found is that any of these four R's can lead to 25% annual growth on their own
at just about any business—
SLIDE 29
—but maximizing and optimizing all four of them is where you can get to 100% growth
or more. There is really is a compounding affect.
This is where you see those businesses in any industry that seem to just be growing
so much faster than the rest of the industry and they seem to be doing everything right.
Well, those businesses are maximizing these four R's. Whether they're conscious of it
or not, they've hit the nail on the head. They're maximizing maybe not all of those
four R's, maybe three out of four, and that's allowing them to grow much faster than the
rest of their industry. Like I said, you can see that in any industry out there. So, let's
go ahead and dive into each of these and talk about specific strategies and tactics to make
sure that you are maximizing each of these four R's, starting with Reputation.
SLIDE 30
There's a reason that Reputation is at the base of that pyramid. I really do believe
that it is the foundation of marketing going forward. Why is that?
SLIDE 31
Well, it's easier than ever for consumers to find the feedback of other consumers to
help them make a decision about who to buy from and you'll see all kinds of sites out
there that rate businesses. There are the Yelps of the world. Google actually has ratings
built into its search engine. I showed you Trip Advisor earlier. There are all kinds
of ways for people to review businesses and review products and services and find out
what other people think.
SLIDE 32
In fact, 70% of consumers say that the feedback they find online is the number two factor
in making a decision about who to work with, visit, or buy from.
SLIDE 33
Seven out of 10 who read reviews share them with friends, family and colleagues.
SLIDE 34
So, these reviews are getting passed around now that we have this social world that we
live in and 74% of U.S. consumers say they choose to do business based on online feedback.
SLIDE 35
The reality is that everyone is out there talking. The question is who's talking about
you and what are they saying? Make no mistake, they are talking.
SLIDE 36
I like the title of this book from Pete Blackshaw Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry
Customers Tell 3,000. You may have heard something along the lines before that an angry or dissatisfied
customer would tell 10 people for every one person that a satisfied customer would tell.
Well, now because of social media those reviews and negative feelings are so easy to pass
around that the unhappy customer will get online, get on the social media sites and
tell thousands of their closest strangers on the Internet.
SLIDE 37
So, people are talking about you and they're talking about your business. Who? Customers,
prospects, competitors, disgruntled employees, ex-spouses, former business partners and investors
and then what we call the trolls, which are just the permanent aggrieved. These are the
people that just love to get online and beat up businesses it seems for no good reason.
This gentleman is a perfect example of the way people are out there talking about businesses
and sharing their feelings about businesses.
You can see this gentleman has a video camera attached to the dashboard of his car. He's
driving away from a restaurant that he's just eaten at and he's leaving a restaurant review
while he's driving away from it. You think well, big deal. Let this guy say whatever
he wants. Who's going to pay attention to that? Well, you may be able to see here down
below 35,000 people have viewed this video.
SLIDE 38
So, people are really paying attention to this kind of information and you can't just
ignore it. In fact, reviews are now at the center of search.
This is a copy of a TechCrunch article saying 'Google acquires Zagat to flush out local
reviews.' I'm sure you're all familiar with the Zagat guys, the books that were published
to review bars, restaurants and hotels all around the world. For people traveling to
a new city these guys were indispensable for a long time. Well, the value they had was
all of these other people's ratings, consumers and reviews captured in this book so that
if you were traveling to a new city for the first time you could find the places you thought
would be best to go visit and kind of lower your risk of getting lost in this new city
and ending up in the wrong places.
Well, Google realized that that was the most important information they could present to
searchers to help them make their buying decisions. It was the opinions of other people and there's
good reason for that.
SLIDE 39
The data shows 90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know, which
makes sense. We all trust those recommendations we get from friends and family, but look at
this. Seventy percent of online consumers trust unknown users, people we don't even
know, while only 14% of online consumers trust advertising, so there's a huge gap between
the advertising we're doing to get customers and how people trust that vs. the reviews
of other people. That's why Google bought Zagat and is now incorporating reviews at
the center of their search engines.
SLIDE 40
This is a screen shot that I did. I just typed 'Denver plumbers' into the search engine in
Google just to see what comes up. Well, what comes up are the Google local listings. As
you know, if you do a search for any business in Google now or any category of business
like Denver plumbers, Denver pizza restaurants or anything like that, you'll see these local
reviews. The local reviews will have the local businesses there in that category. They'll
have the addresses and phone numbers. There'll be an image of a map to show you where they're
located, but what's most important is this. Everything I've circled in red there is a
review score of these businesses based on the reviews of past customers of that business.
SLIDE 41
Now, what's really, really frightening and this is an interesting case study here is
the second plumbing company, Applewood Plumbing, Heating & Electric. They spend an awful lot
of money on marketing in the Denver area. You can see by all the ads they run and things
like that, so they're spending a lot of money. However, look at the review score that Applewood
has from previous customers. They have a three out of 30 on 52 reviews. That, by any measure,
is a failing grade, three out of 30.
So, they're spending all of that money on marketing to drive people largely to the search
engines, because people search in the search engines before they make a decision to buy,
and what do they see? They see that the far majority of Applewood's past customers that
have gone on here and left a review are completely dissatisfied with the service they received
from Applewood. I think you can see now why I say that reputation is the foundation of
marketing going forward.
It doesn't matter what Applewood Plumbing does with their marketing at this point, all
they're doing is driving people to see the negative reviews about their business. How
would you feel if you went and searched about this business and here were the reviews that
you found, poor to fair, poor to fair, poor to fair? If you read the details of the reviews
they're largely just beating up Applewood Plumbing for poor service. Poor Applewood
Plumbing, no matter what it does with the rest of its marketing, no matter how well
it does with those other three R's is going to run head on into a serious problem growing
their business because of their poor reputation.
SLIDE 42
Your goal is to make sure that you have a five-star reputation at your business. That
should be your first goal is to make sure that you have a five-star reputation at your
business. Now, how do you do that?
SLIDE 43 Well, I think the most important and controllable
thing you can do besides, of course, making sure that you deliver great products and services
which you absolutely should be focused on, the next step is to contribute, contribute
to the conversation about your business in a meaningful way.
SLIDE 44
What do I mean by that? I mean that you can't control what people are saying about your
company, that's largely up to the individual. No matter how good of a job you do with your
products and services some people are going to say negative things. It's just a fact of
life of being in business, but you can make sure that you're adding enough good content
to the conversation that is taking place online to insure that the ratio of positive content
out there vs. negative content out there is in your favor.
SLIDE 45
What I mean by that is you should strategically make sure that you are getting content online
that is supportive of your brand and positive about your brand so that when a consumer does
do a search they find good things about your company and not just a bunch of bad reviews.
The first step to doing this is to take ownership of the profiles in all of your key directories
and networks. What I mean by directories and networks, I'm talking about sites like Yelp,
as I mentioned before, LinkedIn, the Google Plus local listings I just showed you a minute
ago are absolutely most important since those are a part of the Google search engine, but
depending on what business you're in maybe a site like Trip Advisor, certainly Facebook,
Twitter, things like that.
You want to make sure that you have a company presence where you need to have it, that you
have taken control of that presence and that you are making sure the information that's
in these listings and directory sites is complete and accurate. You may not even realize it,
but you have a company listing in just about all of these sites already and many more.
The Superpages, the Yellow Pages sites online, they've all created listings about just about
every business out there, but if you have not taken control of it that means the information
on there may be wrong and maybe incomplete.
SLIDE 46
You may be getting bad reviews from customers up there and not even having a chance to respond
to them, so you have to take ownership of these profiles to make sure that you can control
the message that's on there and that's exactly what you want to do. You want to publish your
own story about your business. You want to make your own news. You want to post on good,
positive, helpful subjects that will help your clients, customers and prospects and
you want to add social media sharing buttons to all of that content to make sure that people
can spread the good word about your business. How can you do that? Well, some examples here.
SLIDE 47
Make education videos and post them to YouTube. Video is incredibly powerful. Video is continuing
to grow at just an absolutely amazing rate. Look at this statistic. Any given video stands
about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results in the search
engines than any given text page. Why is that? That's because the search engines are smart.
They've studied the data and seen that searchers who find a video are generally much more engaged
with that content than they are with text.
People like to watch videos more than they like to read, so the search engines are showing
more and more videos in the search engines to be relevant to what people are looking
for. If you can create content about your business, which I'm telling you any business
can create good video content to share with their customers, creating video content will
give you a real leg up in the search engines and is a great way to connect with your prospects
and customers.
SLIDE 48
Next, you should build a review collection system for your business. You don't want to
just leave it to chance that people are going to give positive reviews about your business.
You want to be absolutely proactive and methodical about getting positive reviews and referrals
at your business and make sure those things are getting published online.
There's a fascinating stat here. Reviews on a site can boost conversion by 20%, which
just means if people go to your site and they find a positive review they are 20% more likely
to purchase something or contact you when they see that positive review. So, you want
to make sure that you are proactive in capturing the feelings of positive satisfied customers
and making sure that those feelings get shared online.
SLIDE 49
The big takeaway here regarding reputation, reputation is now the foundation of effective
marketing. It's no longer enough to do good work and it's no longer enough to have good
products and services. Those things, of course, are important, but you must proactively develop
and market your reputation online. You have to make sure that those good feelings about
your products and services and business end up online so that other people can find them.
So, that's Reputation. Let's talk about Reach next.
SLIDE 50
Now, as I said, when you have that positive reputation, you want to make sure that you're
reaching out to as many prospects as you possibly can to let them know the good word about your
products and services. If you're not reaching out to more prospects every day then the chances
of you growing your business long term are pretty slim to none. So, let's talk about
reach via social media. There are obviously all kinds of ways to reach your target prospects
and customers. I mean there's direct mail, doing radio advertising, TV advertising, sponsoring
local events. There are tons of ways, but we're going to dive in to a couple here starting
with social media.
SLIDE 51
Social Media -- It's just incredible the growth it has experienced, 712% since 2005. That's
probably just about the timeframe, maybe a year after Facebook was kind of coming onto
the scene. Since then the growth has just been ridiculously fast.
SLIDE 52
Sixty-six percent of adult Internet users access social media and in 2005 this was true
of only eight percent.
SLIDE 53
There are now 155 million plus Facebook users in the U.S. and over 1 billion throughout
the world. Facebook is now one of the largest countries in the world—
SLIDE 54
—so chances are no matter who your target audience is you can reach them on Facebook.
SLIDE 55
I know a lot of you probably don't think that Facebook is a viable advertising opportunity
for you, but I hope to challenge you on that because I've seen Facebook work in just about
every industry out there now. So, let's talk about six reasons to advertise on Facebook.
SLIDE 56
1. Reach
As I said, just a massive number of people are on social media sites, particularly Facebook.
You can reach huge numbers of every group of consumer out there, every type of person
out there, and Facebook and social media give you multiple ways to engage with them. So,
again, whatever industry you're in, whatever group you're going after, I'm positive you
can reach them on Facebook. Next is—
SLIDE 57
2. Precision Targeting
Facebook's advertising interface is absolutely amazing. If you've never run ads in there
you really should jump in there just to see. You can target people by location, including
zip codes and area codes, by age, birthday, education, and not just education like they
were a college graduate. You can target specific classes at specific universities. You can
target them based on the connection they have, based on their demographic information, based
on their interests and psychographic information, even on things like their relationship status.
You can get really, really precise in the way that you target people in Facebook.
SLIDE 58
3. Cost Control
Cost control is super important, particularly for small businesses. You can advertise on
Facebook for as little as $20-$25 a day. So, you can control how much you spend for each
campaign. The budgets can be very low, as I said, and because of that better targeting
you're getting less wasted spend because you're really doing a rifle precision shot at the
people you're trying to reach vs. just kind of doing a shotgun blast to everybody that
you typically do in more of a mass media advertising forum. That's space two, number four here—
SLIDE 59
4. Cost Efficiency
So, you have that precision targeting, you also have an incredible level of measurability.
Everything you're doing in online advertising can be measured, which means that it can be
optimized. So, dollar for dollar there's really no better way to get the word out than through
these advertising platforms.
SLIDE 60
5. Simplicity
Facebook, in particular, is very simple to use. It has a great user interface that makes
it just a real breeze to set up and get going. If you've used Google Adwords in the past
it's much, much easier than that, so a very simple and nice advertising platform. Then
one of the most powerful things, maybe the most powerful thing about advertising on Facebook,
is this idea of—
SLIDE 61
6. Interest Targeting
Typically, in advertising what you can do is to target people by demographic information,
where they live, how old they are, how much income they make, things like that, but advertising
starts to become so much more powerful when you can reach people based on their interests.
So, that's the power of Facebook. I mean everybody that's in Facebook posts everything about
their life in there, the things they like, the things they don't like, the places they
like to go visit. All that good stuff gets posted in Facebook, so now you can customize
your advertising to really target that information, which just makes it really, really powerful.
SLIDE 62
Let me share with you one of the most powerful ways to advertise on Facebook that every business
should be taking advantage of and these are called Sponsored Story Ads.
SLIDE 63
Sponsored Story Ads essentially convert a user's activity into ads and display the ads
to friends of that user. That's a mouthful, so let me explain what I mean. If you hop
on your Facebook account you will more than likely find one of the Sponsored Stories in
your feed within a minute or two. You can see here in this case, Jessica Gronski was
at Starbucks and liked Starbucks. Well, Starbucks paid Facebook to turn that into an ad to show
all of Jessica's friends that she liked Starbucks.
Any time you like something on Facebook that can be turned into an ad and shown to your
network of friends on Facebook. Now, why would Starbucks want to do that? Well, because Starbucks
knows that Jessica and her friends have things in common. Starbucks knows that they should
show that Jessica liked Starbucks to all her friend and family and most likely they're
going to get other people to like Starbucks as well.
SLIDE 64
These Sponsored Story Ads typically are geared to increase the likes for your business, so
if you have a Facebook profile for your business there then you can get likes from more people.
It's a really nice advertising vehicle because it tightly fits in to how people use Facebook.
It doesn't really show up as this big ad, it just kind of fits in to the rest of the
things that are displayed in your stream.
Most importantly, you're now targeting people based on psychographics vs. just demographics,
as we talked about before. Jessica and her friends will tend to have interests in common,
that's what friends do, so you're now getting the benefit of targeting, specifically, other
people that have similar psychographic profiles as the person who just liked your page. This
is incredibly powerful.
SLIDE 65
In fact, Facebook Sponsored Stories have an 18% lower cost per fan than direct ads—
SLIDE 66
—and they have a 53% higher click-through rate than direct ads. So, it's a really powerful
form of advertising and it's powerful, like I said, based on this idea that you're sharing
somebody's specific experience with your brand with other people who are much more likely
to like your brand as well than just the general population that you would be advertising to,
so the ads end up being much, much more effective. This is a super powerful and very, very simple
form of advertising that you can take advantage of on Facebook.
SLIDE 67
The big takeaway here is your audience really is socially active online no matter who you're
targeting. If you're not reaching them via social media I'm telling you that your competitors
are. This is a simple form of advertising. It's very accessible, very easy to do, doesn't
take a lot of money and is not very time consuming, so all of you should be taking advantage of
it.
SLIDE 68
Next, let's talk about reach via mobile. As I said before, mobile may be the biggest game
changer of the three big factors, Search, Social and Mobile. Let's talk about why that
is. Well, mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year according to Google.
SLIDE 69
One in seven searches is now mobile and the average user spends an average of two hours
a day on their mobile phone. That number seems light to me and it's probably because I'm
one of these people here.
SLIDE 70
They refer to people as having nomophobia, which is the fear of being out of mobile phone
contact.
Almost 66% of smartphone subscribers admit to sleeping with their phones and I have to
admit I'm one of these people. I have my phone with me at all times and I'm checking it at
all times. Mobile phones and smartphones really have become something that people just have
attached to the hip, so reaching people via mobile is incredibly important, particularly
if you're running a business that's local in nature.
SLIDE 71
One in three mobile searches are local in nature, which just means that they're looking
for the local restaurant or the pizza shop and trying to find driving directions or the
phone number.
SLIDE 72
After looking up a business via mobile, 61% result in a phone call and 59% result in a
visit, so people really are taking immediate action when they search for a business on
their mobile devices.
SLIDE 73
Six in 10 prospects have said that they will leave your site if it's not mobile friendly
and—
SLIDE 74
—52% of users say a bad mobile experience makes them much less likely to engage with
a business, so your goal is to have a mobile friendly website that can easily be found
and the information on it be easily accessed.
SLIDE 75
This is a good example of a mobile site that is not easy. If you're looking at this on
your mobile phone look at all that text. It's not easy to read, it's not easy to navigate
and, unfortunately, this actually comes from a website designer, which isn't a good sign.
SLIDE 76
Here are a couple good examples of how you can make a mobile site much more easy to use
and accessible.
You can see on the left-hand side, again, here's this site called Howdah Designs. This
was their before picture. You can see lots of small text there and just cluttered and
very hard to navigate through and really understand what you're looking at vs. on the right is
their redesign where they're taking advantage of these big buttons and clear images and
very, very limited text to make it very easy for someone to navigate through their site.
You want to do the same for your business. You want to make sure that you are easily
found on mobile devices because, again, so many searches are now taking place on mobile
devices. You have to make sure that your website is ready to be viewed by those mobile searchers
or you are missing out on a ton of consumer visibility.
SLIDE 77
So, the big takeaway here, consumers don't want to be disconnected from their phones.
This addiction gives you a chance to stay connected to consumers wherever they go. You
have the opportunity to reach your audience without making them step out of their daily
routines. If they can just pick up their phone, pick up their mobile device and find your
business easily and connect by making a phone call or getting directions to your business
then they are much more likely to work with you.
SLIDE 78
All right, the third R is Resell. Again, that actually encompasses reselling, up-selling
and cross-selling, anything you're doing there to make sure that once you get a customer
you're maximizing the lifetime value of that customer.
SLIDE 79
So, let's talk about resell via mobile again real quick.
Mobile, as I said, may be the biggest factor of the three that we need to be paying attention
to. Eighty-seven percent of Americans have mobile phones. Seventy-three percent say it's
their number one most used technology device. Twenty-five percent of all U.S. households
have ditched their landlines, their hone phone lines all together. I know I did several years
ago. Mobile has just become a part of our culture.
SLIDE 80
Now, how do you resell via mobile? Well, I think SMS text messaging is one of the most
powerful ways that I've seen to date and can be used by so many businesses. SMS messages
are just those text messages that you send and receive on your phone. Well, there were
6.1 trillion text messages sent and received in 2010 and that number is growing pretty
dramatically. SMS text messages are capable of reaching 91% of the U.S. population because
that is a capability that is built in to almost every single mobile phone that's made.
SLIDE 81
Why use SMS? Well, instant deliverability. Those messages will instantly arrive. It's
a very flexible, easy-to-use platform. Your consumers have very easy ways to opt-in and
opt-out. They can get off your list if they really don't want it, so make sure you're
playing by the rules. There are very high open and conversion rates. Meaning, just about
everybody opens their SMS messages and they take action on what they find. SMS messages
are very, very low effort to create and send. It is super simple, just a little bit of text.
SLIDE 82
The reality is, those reasons to use SMS that I just mentioned, the results are super powerful.
I mean 97% of all SMS marketing texts are opened, 95% to 98% of text messages are read
within minutes of receipt. Compare that to email. We should all know the power of email
marketing. If you don't, email marketing is just a massive, massive business generator,
but 33% of email addresses change on a yearly basis, which makes it difficult to keep in
touch with people via email.
If you look at the open rates for email, the average open rates for email are down now
around five percent. Only five percent of emails actually get opened compared to 97%
of all SMS marketing texts getting opened. So, it's easier to reach them, it's a more
effective way to reach them. People are keeping their cell phone numbers for life so you have
a list that lasts for a long, long time, so SMS is incredibly powerful.
SLIDE 83
Let's talk about a few specific ways that businesses can use SMS. One is appointment
reminders. So, if you have any type of business where you are reliant upon appointments, a
dental office, a chiropractic office, a massage therapist, things like that where people set
an appointment to come to your business, well, as you know, no-shows are a huge killer of
profitability at your business. If people don't show up for their appointment that's
just an hour you've wasted where you could have taken care of another paying customer.
SMS reminders sent to their cell phones prior to their appointment are shown to reduce no-shows
by 50% or more, which means that you can save a ton of money and put it back in your business
or into your pocket. So, SMS reminders delivered right to those phones are a great way to get
people to show up for their appointments.
SLIDE 84
Mobile coupons are another very powerful form of marketing that most businesses can take
advantage of. Mobile coupons are 10 times more likely to be redeemed than traditional
coupons, so you're getting people to take much more action with mobile coupons than
traditional print coupons and then geotargeting.
SLIDE 85
Geotargeting means that you can automatically send text coupons to people when they're within
the vicinity of a certain geographic location. How powerful is that?
If somebody is within five miles of your pizza shop, let's say, you can send them a message
saying hey, you're close. Keep on coming. Come on in and pick up your nice hot pizza.
So, how powerful is this? I mean it really is just amazing that you can literally target
people based on where they're at. It doesn't have to be just your business. What if they're
within five miles of a competitor? Maybe that's when you want to send them your coupon or
your ad to get them to pay attention to you instead of the competitor that they were getting
close to.
SLIDE 86
So, text messaging is super, super powerful. It is the most popular form of communication
among consumers on electronic devices and your audience is almost guaranteed to get
and to read your SMS text message. Every business should begin building their text list today
so they can explore the marketing opportunities that are out there via SMS text.
SLIDE 87
All right, the fourth R is Referral. Again, referral is getting those happy customers
to say good things about you and share the good word about your products, service and
your business to other prospects in the marketplace. This is the easiest way to get new customers,
when you get good hot referrals and you get those people to come in that are already presold.
We'd all take as many of these as we can possibly get.
SLIDE 88
In fact, the New York Times says 65% of new business comes from referrals and—
SLIDE 89
—41% of businesses count on referrals for over 80% of their sales. So, referrals are
incredibly important.
SLIDE 90
The question is how can you proactively drive referrals instead of just hoping they come
to you?
SLIDE 91
One of my favorite sayings in business is that hope is not a strategy. We want to have
a proactive method to drive more referrals instead of just hoping we'll get more. To
do that you need to understand that good customer service doesn't always equate to referrals.
SLIDE 92
Eighty-three percent of satisfied customers are willing to refer products and services,
but only 29% actually do. Why is that? Well, it doesn't really matter the reason why.
SLIDE 93
What matters is that you must leverage a proactive referral system if you're going to get more
of those referrals. You obviously can't just leave it up to the consumers because even
though 83% say they would, only 29% actually do.
SLIDE 94
Word of mouth is based off of chance vs. a referral system which is something that's
predictable, consistent and repeatable that you control.
SLIDE 95
A referral system is a methodical process that captures qualified prospects through
your association with people. So, how do you generate referrals and a repeatable system?
SLIDE 96
The simple answer is that you ask for them.
SLIDE 97
Ninety-one percent of clients would give a referral, but have never been asked. Most
of us just do not take the time to actually ask for people to share their feelings with
their friends and family about their experience with your business and your products or services.
SLIDE 98
It's really pretty straightforward. You have to incorporate the message about your referral
opportunities into referral cards, postcards, social media, your website and make sure your
happy customers see them and see the opportunities to refer your business because, again, if
it's difficult at all or if they just feel like they haven't been asked then they will
not leave a referral, but it's been proven that if you just give people a simple opportunity
to share their good feelings about your business then a much higher percentage of people will.
So, let me share with you a couple of examples.
SLIDE 99
Here's a direct mail piece. It says 'Hey, turkey, give thanks to yourself with some
free months.' This just says 'Refer some friends to the Dollar Shave Club and you'll get a
free month of Dollar Shave Club razors for every friend that you sign up.' Any business
can take advantage of this, super simple. This just comes in their package when they
razors come to your house.
SLIDE 100
You can also do this online. Incorporate referral requests into contests, coupons and other
viral promotions on your website and on social media pages such as this one from REI on Facebook
so that the good things that people say about you can virally be spread to other people.
SLIDE 101
All right, the big takeaway. Referrals are great, but are hard to depend on if you can't
make them predictable, so it's your job to design a repeatable system that captures the
referrals when your customers are thrilled. When they're happy you want to take advantage
of that by giving them a simple vehicle to share those positive feelings with others,
so you just have to make it as easy as possible and you just have to ask.
SLIDE 102
So, those are the four levels of the R-4 Marketing Framework—
1 Reputation 2 Reach
3 Resell, and 4 Referral
I hope you can see that by just focusing on these four areas, maximizing and optimizing
these four areas, we can take our business to dramatically higher levels of growth.
SLIDE 103
So, are you doing everything you can to grow your business?
SLIDE 104
Well, the far majority of times when I ask that question the answer is no. Why is that?
Well, again, we're small businesses, we're resource constrained. Many times it's just
lack of awareness of the options that are available to you or it's a lack of time or
budget or just manpower and expertise there at your company. You're busy creating whatever
product or service it is that you do for a living and you don't have time to think about
or implement all of these new marketing strategies and systems at your business.
SLIDE 105
Well, what's the problem with that?
SLIDE 106
The problem is the gap between those that really get it and are taking advantage of
the online marketing strategies, the technology, taking advantage of the search, social and
the mobile that we discussed, well the gap between those that get that and those that
don't is widening. The companies that are taking advantage of those three factors with
proven marketing systems are crushing their competition.
SLIDE 107
When I speak to small businesses out there about this topic and those that have gone
through this presentation or something similar to it, I find that 90% realize that they aren't
growing like they should.
SLIDE 108
Just about every small business owner out there that I speak to says yeah, man, we should
be doing more. We're not growing as fast as we'd like. It's been tough years. It's been
a tough economy. I'm not making the money that I need to. That's a common theme amongst
almost every business owner that I speak with, but only 50% of those people realize that
they need to make a change.
What I mean by that is so many small business owners think oh, it's the economy or somebody
else has some product or service that gives them a real advantage and that's why they're
not growing. Well, in most cases it's not the economy. It's not the products or services
you're competing against. Every small business out there that I see has the opportunity to
grow much faster than they are regardless of economic conditions or competitive forces.
The challenge is that it's you that has to make that change. You can't wait around for
the economy to get better. You have to look at your business and say am I taking full
advantage of these marketing systems or not and, if not, what could I be doing better
and how do I get started today? That's the issue. Only 20% realize that being strategic
about their marketing is the difference.
As I said, it's not the products and services. Most of you have great products and services.
It's not the economy. In every industry right now there is a business that's growing like
wildfire in spite of a bad economy or tough economic conditions. It's not the economy.
It's taking advantage of all of the marketing systems and capabilities that are out there
for your business to optimize to fuel your growth.
SLIDE 110
So, if you are part of the 20% ....
SLIDE 111
The 20% that is absolutely committed to creating maximum growth at your business and recognizes
that yeah, the economy may be tough, yeah, there may be tough competition out there,
but really there are a lot of things that I can control and that I should be doing better
...
SLIDE 112
... if you're one of those people I'd love to get to know you and your business better.
This is not a hard sales pitch. In fact, this is not even an invitation to work together.
I'm very, very selective about who I work with and there are all kinds of factors that
go into making a decision about who I work with. Regardless, if you are of the mindset
of being a really growth-oriented business owner and a growth-oriented entrepreneur and
you are committed to finding that growth no matter what it takes then we're similar people
and I'd love to get to know you because that community of people is a lot of fun, very
energetic and is doing really positive things in our economy, in our communities and for
our individual businesses.
That is what I'm passionate about and I'd love to connect with you on this subject.
So, again, if you're one of those 20% I'd love to connect. I've made it easy for you.
You'll see a little button below this presentation and that will take you to an opportunity to
connect with me so that we can get to know each other a little better.
SLIDE 113
All right, I see that we are coming up very, very closely on an hour here and I appreciate
your time and attention. There are a number of questions that have come in and I'm going
to try and get to a few of them here in the next few minutes to see what we can answer.
The first one comes from Julie. Julie says—
We have a restaurant. What do you think about using deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial?
Julie, I have very mixed feelings about those types of deal sites. Here's the reason why.
The deal sites themselves are not bad. They're incredibly powerful and you can get a flood
of customers coming your way. The problem is that most small businesses have completely
failed to capitalize on that flood of new business that's coming. So, now you're getting
a whole bunch of new customers, but they're paying you much less money and you're giving
away a lot of that money to a Groupon or a LivingSocial. You don't have the right follow-up
systems to do effective reselling, cross-selling or up-selling. You're not capturing the reviews
of those happy customers when they're in your business.
If you're doing all those deals correctly then these deal sites can be fantastic. The
problem is that most businesses I meet with are not doing those things effectively and
then those deal sites can be a real challenge for your business because you just drive a
flood of cheaper customers to your business, so you have to be careful. I do say, though,
there are sites out there other than Groupon or LivingSocial that give you much more control
over this whole deals process that allow you to keep higher margins and allow you to limit
the number of people who get these coupons to a certain number. If you do that and put
all of the four R's in place that we discussed then these can be very powerful for you.
All right, the second question is from Jim. Jim says—
Which of the four R's do you think is most important to focus on?
Jim, maybe you zoned out during part of the presentation focused on reputation. I do really
believe that reputation is the foundation of marketing today. So, generally speaking,
I would say that reputation is the most important thing to focus on. That being said, every
business is different. I meet with lots of businesses every day that have fantastic reputations,
but their businesses are not growing because they're not implementing any of the other
R's. So, if your business has a fantastic reputation but you're not growing then I would
look at the other R's to see what we can do. I hope that makes sense for you, Jim.
Sarah says—
We have some of the best products in our industry. Customers rave about them, but we aren't growing
as fast as we want to. What gives?
Okay, Sarah, this is exactly what I was just mentioning from Jim's question. If you have
a great reputation, if people are saying great things about your products and services but
you're not growing as fast as you should, the reason why is you're not optimizing those
other R's. Now that you have a fantastic reputation you should be finding new ways to reach out
to new prospects every day to share that reputation and with the customers you're getting you
should be doing everything you can to maximize their lifetime value through effective up-sells,
cross-sells and reselling.
Again, it sounds like you have great products and services. That's fantastic, but we need
to look at the other R's. It's not enough just to have one system working for you. We
need to look at the other R's and think about how we can maximize the results that you're
getting from all of those R's.
Well, look, great questions, but I see here we are right on an hour. I want to stay true
to my commitment to be respectful of your time here, so we're going to go ahead and
wrap this up. I will get out to all of you who have unanswered questions and make sure
that we follow up directly within 24 hours of this presentation. Somebody on my team
will get in touch with you or I will personally.
Again, if you are focused on growth, if you can recognize these challenges at your businesses
and say I'm not growing as much as I'd like to be, as much as I feel I should be and you'd
like to talk to me or somebody on my team about how we can potentially address that
at your company, I'd love to hear from you and love to just have a conversation to see
if there's some sort of fit.
Thank you so much for taking your time to attend our presentation and we'll look forward
to speaking with all of you soon.