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5 P’s of Business Success

Your definition of success is different than mine. Is the wino who scores a cheap bottle every day less successful than the sales representative whose achieves the goal of 10 sales in a week? It comes down to how you define success.

Success Key When it comes to owning and operating a business, defining success is still a personal choice, although there are certain keys that can clarify the definition. Here are five “P”s:

Passion. One of the first elements Brand Irons considers when taking on a new client is how passionate you are about your business. The passion gets you up in the morning with eager anticipation for what you can accomplish during the day. It motivates you to bring enthusiasm to every decision you make about the business. It energizes your employees and that passion for your vision goes right through to your customers. That passion for your enterprise sends you home at night encouraged by the results and excited about bringing it back tomorrow.
Plan. Various research projects have illustrated that people, especially business owners, who set goals and write down their plans are far more likely to succeed than those who feel goals and plans have little value. Take some time to think for a few minutes: Are you working in your business or are you taking the time to work on your business? Working on your business means you do some research, study your competition, talk to your customers and personnel, and develop strategies to enhance your bottom line. Try a different tactic and measure the results of how it worked. Consult with professionals and others in your field who have been successful in their endeavors. Think about things.
Perform. Your passion conveys a sense of urgency that follows the path you’ve laid out in your plan. Another critical element is to execute the strategy, which means you and your people have to perform. Your customers have expectations. They believe in and trust you. They know what to expect from your products and/or services. It’s up to you and your team to make it happen and fulfill those customer expectations. That’s why it is essential you stay in touch with your customers. Get to know them and their needs. What are they looking for, and is your company meeting those needs? How can you enhance service? Are there other products you could provide to help them solve their problems? Do what is expected of you … and then do a little more than that.
People. Whatever your business, whatever you market, and whether you have employees or it’s only you, everything you do involves people. Your customers are people; human beings with needs, wants, and wishes. Your employees are people with a need to feel appreciated, who want to have value and make a contribution, and wish to be treatly fairly and honestly. Your success in business is therefore wrapped up with people. That means you need to establish and sustain relationships with these people, especially your customers. Always remember that without customers – who are people – you have no business.
Place. The adage that it’s all about location is true, to a degree. If you operate a restaurant or a retail establishment, your place in the community can be a critical element in your long-term success. The same holds true if the primary place where your business is located is on the Internet. If your web presence is old, stagnant, and hard to find, even the most elaborate website is a poor location. Keep your place looking sharp. Your parking lot should be as safe, clean, and comfortable as your place of business. Your website should be up-to-date and your social media current and professional. Remember, marketing is about perception. If your customers think your place looks sloppy, that perception could reflect on your products and services as clearly as crystal.

Missing: Call to Action!

Far too often, advertisers neglect to include a call to action in their advertisements. What is the purpose of an ad? To get customers or prospective customers to buy your product and/or service! Pure and simple.

Be specific.
.

Author Paul G. Thomas shared a powerful message about the importance of a call to action in his book, Psychofeedback. Here’s an example he shared: Hold a pen or pencil with two fingers and tell yourself “I can drop this pen” repeatedly until you drop the pen.

Why does the pen stay in your fingers?

The message, like the call to action in your advertising, needs to be more specific. Try this phrase, “Drop it!”

Another friend, author Bob Nicoll – http://www.remembertheice.com/, shares a story that is specific to advertising. A convenience store near where he lived had a sign that encouraged patrons to “Don’t forget the ice.” Bob asked the owner how his sales of ice were. “Abysmal” or something similar was the response. When you tell people not to forget something, what do they do? Forget.

Bob asked for a marker and some paper to make new signs. His signs read, “Remember the Ice!” when he gave them to the owner. When he returned, he asked the owner how his ice sales were, and the owner replied he was having a hard time keeping it in stock.

The lesson in these stories: 1) Tell your customers and prospects what you want them to do.

Be specific. Think about the end result you want from any advertising you spend hard-earned money to put out there. Why would you spend good money and forget to ask for the sale? There are three basic actions to call your audience to do:

Come in;
Visit your website; or
Call you.

Many advertisers use the attraction of a sale to draw potential customers in to their store. Pick up a Sunday newspaper and browse through the ads to get a better idea of what I mean. “Special 2-day sale now going on” or “50-60% off all men’s shoes” or “This week’s specials” are fairly common lures to draw customers in, and the more successful ones are the ads that send a message to act now. “Buy a new Mercedes this Saturday and receive a FREE 60″ wide-screen TV,” is an example.

Ever wonder why retail stores include so many different products in their ad flyers or TV commercials? They want to attract you to come in but they’re unsure of what you really want or need or might be thinking about buying. That’s why they lump a bunch of products together to pull you in.

If you study those ads, though, the direct call to action may be too subliminal.

The call to action where an advertiser sends the consumer to the company’s website can be especially effective with the under 45 demographic. It can work for any age group, but can also be extremely narrowly targeted as well.

Success with this call to action requires that the website have the information the users are looking for in an easy-to-find location. Internet users have little patience. Remember instant gratification? If you’ve sent them to the web for a special offer, that coupon or banner must jump out at them once they land on the site you’ve given them. If not, you’ve probably lost them for good.

The intent is to get them to your site and pique their curiosity enough to get them to do some browsing on your site and learn more about your company and its products and services. The nice thing about this call to action as well is that it is easy to track the volume of traffic being generated by the site and correlate it to the placement of the message. Tracking is beneficial.

The third call to action is to generate a phone call. A professional hair salon or massage therapist, for example, may prefer that clients or potential customers call to schedule an appointment instead of walking in. Some professionals may encourage walk-in traffic, but doctors, dentists, optometrists and other medical professionals, as well as lawyers, accountants, and marketing consultants prefer a scheduled appointment to allocate sufficient time for the customer.

As you craft your advertising messages, think about the desired outcome. If you want the phone to ring, ask for it in a bold headline. If you want people checking out your website, use social media with links and make sure the address is easy to find once they’re online. If you want customers in the store, make sure they know how to find it and tell them to stop in.

Call Brand Irons at (920) 366-6334 for an appointment to clarify the call to action for your business and build your brand.

Budgets & Bullet Points

2013 Budget graphic When you are sitting down to develop an annual advertising budget, think about where you’re going to spend your hard-earned dollars. Will each dollar generate a return? How much will it cost you to acquire a new client, or to keep your existing customers?

You must measure these metrics to know if your strategies are working. If you plan on spending $20,000 on television advertising as part of your budget, you should also know what the value of a prospective client is to your business. Why? If your business is building websites and each prospect potentially represents $5,000 in business when they become a new client, that TV campaign would need to result in four new clients to cover the cost of advertising. More than four and you’ve generated a positive return on your investment (ROI).

Is it a negative ROI if you fail to land any new clients? From the bottom line perspective, probably so. From the viewpoint of the exposure you’ve generated for your business with TV spots, hardly. The bullet point becomes how effective was the message in your commercial.

And that is another bullet point. If your advertising fails to generate a positive impact on your bottom line, that should not result in the wide-ranging opinion and a deep-seated conviction that “advertising doesn’t work.” It only means it was somehow flawed.

More bullet points that impact your marketing budget when it comes to advertising:

Make sure you know your target audience for any advertising;
Verify that the delivery vehicle (TV, radio, newspaper, Internet) is effective in reaching that target market;
Find the market research that gives you reasonable assurance the audience will respond favorably to that message delivery vehicle;
Know what you’re offering but, more importantly, what the consumer is buying;
Craft a message that focuses on what’s in it for the consumer, not you;
Deliver the message by getting the audience’s attention first; and,
Finish with a strong call to action so the consumer has little doubt.

Back to my point about the effectiveness of your commercial. If you threw out a campaign or message that was missing some of the bulleted items above, chances are your results were less than what you anticipated. Add in that the commercial may have run at the wrong time for your audience or been buried on a seldom seen page of the magazine, and your results deteriorate.

We once worked with a jeweler who insisted on having the largest ad in the phone directory. We roughed out the concept and had the directory’s graphics department design an effective and attractive ad. We were good to go. When the directory hit the streets, we opened a copy to the “Jewelers” spread of pages and the ad wasn’t there! Phone directories place ads alphabetically. Our client’s ad was there, but it was on the page before the spread with all the other jewelers in town. Good effort wasted and beyond our control. Subsequent ads were mere bold-faced listings under Jewelers.

Rather than succumb to a sales representative suggesting your business belongs in their publication or on their station, take the time to think things through. Can they answer the bullet points you’ve established for your products and services to your satisfaction? If not, simply let them know that what they’re offering fails to meet the demographic profile of your target audience. They’ll understand, but not give up easily.

Another option is to use the professional consulting services of a business such as Brand Irons to help you come up with a solid profile for your customers and help you make those marketing decisions so they have a positive impact on your bottom line.

What is a Brand?

A brand is an illusion; a perception in the mind of a consumer.

Every consumer is different, so a brand can mean one thing to one person and something totally different to another.

Consider some examples:

If you drink red wine, and maybe have a glass every day, do you buy the same brand every time or do you try different reds? Do you drink a red because you heard it was good for you? Some of you may enjoy how you feel after a glass or two. All red wines are perceived to – in a branding sense – have medicinal purposes or go good with certain foods. If you, as the consumer, lock in and buy cases from a certain winery, you have bought the illusion it’s the best red wine … in your mind.

What convinced you it’s the brand to buy? Was it a commercial or advertising message? Was it an influential bartender? A good friend who also loves it? The perception that you should at least try the brand, followed by a bottle you really enjoyed, are the steps that would have created your brand loyalty.

My grandfather drove a Ford automobile. My uncle managed a fleet of vehicles for a multi-national company; all Fords. My dad drove Fords, although he was the trading sort and brought home a variety of makes and models over the years. This family history created the impression with me that Ford was the vehicle to own, so I’ve been loyal to the brand because of that perception. Three of the vehicles I’ve purchased new have been Mercury products; a former, now defunct, division of the Ford Motor Company. The kicker is that the illusion has stuck, largely because of history.

Yes, a brand is an association with a corporate product or service. Business owners will pay exorbitant fees to a big name accounting firm because of a perception, which might be that “they must be good because they charge so much.” In reality, accounting is about debits and credits so any certified public accountant (CPA) should be able to service your account as well, if not better, than the higher priced firm.

Is one brand of milk any better than the next one in the cooler? Only in perception … and probably price. Think about it. Where does the milk come from? A cow. What the cow eats may change the content of the milk, but it comes out the same way and is processed and bottled according to federal standards. And here’s a secret that applies to other products as well: Some milk processing plants bottle milk for a private label as well as for their own label.

From a business marketing perspective, the more people you can convince that your illusion – your brand – is what they should believe in, purchase, and remain loyal to as long at they need or want it, the greater will be the profits on your bottom line.

Illusions can work like magic if you create the right ones. That’s where professional help such as Brand Irons comes in, to strategize and help you create the most effective marketing for your product and services.

The Consumer Mindset

This is a topic that has always been fascinating to me as a professional business and marketing consultant. Marketing is about perception, so the mindset of consumers begs a whole series of questions.

What do consumers buy?
Why do they buy?
Why should they buy from a certain seller vs. a different one?
How do you reach the consumer when they’re ready to buy?
How do you convince or encourage them to buy when you want them to?

These questions seem simple, but the answers are rather complicated. Keep in mind that the average consumer wants to avoid being sold; they prefer to make purchases on their own terms. My hair stylist told me she finished her Christmas shopping early in 2012; she bought everything online. Her terms.

There are several factors that influence the consumer’s mindset, such as the budget (is the product or service affordable), the level of need (is it a necessity or a luxury purchase), and the deal (is it a bargain at the price offered or is it better to wait), among other variables.

Let’s start with the level of need. Remember the heirarchy of needs? It starts with basic necessities such as food, water, and shelter. If your business offers products to meet these necessities, the theory holds that your business should survive and succeed. The consumer, in most cases, wants toilet paper so you should have little competition … except there are different levels of softness, sheets per roll, and other variables. What determines the consumer’s decision to buy in this scenario?

Here’s where other factors come in. Is the consumer looking to stock up because the supply is running low? Is there a good price on their favorite brand? Are they totally out and need whatever they can find at whatever the price?

With other necessities, such as electrical power and a water supply, the consumer has little choice since the market is dominated by monopolies. Utilities provide cost savings through the control of grid systems which enable individual users to share the cost of a major development. Going “off the grid” for your energy needs is an expensive project for the same reason it is costly to develop your own water capture and filtration system.

Another aspect of the level of need is whether the purchase is vital or merely a luxury.

This can be where the budget factors come in. If a woman needs a pair of pants for work and the same slacks are available at a discount store for 30% less than at a name brand department store, where does she buy the pants? She may buy them at the department store for the “prestige factor” or save the money buying them at the discount store and saying she bought them at the other place.

As the retailer, your advertising is going to depend on which store you own or represent. The discount outlet can be effective marketing the pants as “department store quality at 1/3rd the cost” whereas the department store is likely to focus on the quality of the name brand with a message along the lines of “available exclusively at.”

Another influencers in the consumer’s mind is brand loyalty. If the woman needing pants has always purchased her work slacks at the discount store, she will most likely purchase the next pair from that store. And if she’s loyal to the department store, she will buy there despite the price difference. The deal is less a factor when the power of the brand trumps the perceived value.

So what have we learned about the consumer’s mindset?

While advertising tends to lump consumers together, the individual makes his or her own buying decisions based on their psyche, budget, personal preferences, and perceived value. As a business owner, it is essential to understand your customers as much as you possibly can so that you and your products or services, remain relevant to them and their desires.

If you’d like some assistance with some market research on your consumer’s mindsets, please contact Brand Irons.

Instant Gratification – Pros and Cons

If you’re “in to” instant gratification, you’ll need to scan down to get the pros and cons. If you’re a bit more patient, read the whole piece.

Business owners, especially those with significant advertising budgets, are scratching their heads in frustration over the generations that seem so intent on instant gratification. How do you reach someone who wants information, answers, and product “NOW”?

We’ll get to the answer, but let’s look at the pros and cons of this instant gratification mindset. It’s certainly a concept spawned by technology, so any answer has to incorporate a technological aspect. We live in an age where a person with a smart phone can look up a business online, get a phone number, and call that number right from their phone in a matter of seconds.

During the Christmas holidays, we were away from home and wanted to have dinner at a chain restaurant. I looked up the chain online, entered the city, and up popped the restaurant’s phone number. I tapped on it, called it, and learned they were not accepting reservations, which was fine. I had relatively quickly ascertained what we wanted to know. Instant gratification. I had an answer in less time than it would have taken to look up the restaurant in a phone directory.

Two points here: One is that phone directories have a limited life span due to these advances in technology, and the other is that if you have a service business such as a restaurant, it is critical that your business be smart-phone enabled, especially if you are on your own and operating independently.

Instant gratification pros:

Quicker decisions can be made;
Choices are focused on using the right key words;
Speed is easily rationalized by fast results;
Demonstrated skill in using electronics and technology; and,
Masses of information digested rapidly.

Instant gratification cons:

Quick decisions can often be rash choices;
Wrong use of key words can cause longer delays in searches;
Deliberation of potential consequences is given short shrift;
Loss of important, personal human communication skills; and,
Too much information can trivialize all of it.

Now let’s look at instant gratification from the perspective of business.

While there are still companies that make calculators, they must realize their future is finite. Smart phones have calculator applications and so do laptops and other computers. The stand-alone calculator has become a nuisance because it takes up space somewhere and you have to find it to use it when there’s one on your phone.

In order to reach the consumer market dominated by the need and desire for instant gratification, business advertising must have a technological base including a web site that has relevant content. It should also be smart phone enabled and embrace any new, emerging techology within a reasonable time frame.

Using social media effectively should also be given serious consideration. Users may search for your social media sites before deciding to use your services. Keep in mind that Facebook is less about selling your products than it is about showing your business has a social conscience. LinkedIn is more business oriented but still has social aspects that involve reciprocity. If a user endorses you, consider returning the endorsement. With Google’s other search engine, YouTube, being #2 behind Google, put some videos on a YouTube channel, including testimonials and endorsements. You also need to use Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines optimally. Klout, Hulu, and a myriad of other social outlets come online regularly, so you need to be aware of social options and determine their viability for your business.

Understand that one of the most relevant methods to reach those infatuated with instant gratification remains to be word-of-mouth marketing. Flash mobs are a good example of how a message can go viral quickly. Word-of-mouth can help you reach a global market for your business, provided you’re ready to handle the potential rapid growth.

It comes back to having strategies for reaching your target audience effectively, so if you need help thinking this through and developing strategies, Brand Irons has people and resources to help.