Can you believe we are in the final quarter of this financial year already? With 3 down and 1 to go, I'd love to share a few pointers to help you maximise the final quarter of 2018:
I love a great planning session! I have developed a tool to help you map out your plans for 2018. It's simple, it's old school, it's ... a wall planner! And here's yours to download for free. You can print this on paper if you have a jumbo printer, or better still, send the file to your local signwriter and have it made into a whiteboard. Here is what you will need to tell your signwriter: When promoting our business, it can be easy to get caught up in trying to impress the wrong crowd. Most often, I find that crowd is our competition. It's natural to want to impress our peers, we invest a lot to ensure we are leaders within our industry. But when creating communication for our business, this is definitely not who we should be thinking about.
Most business owners I speak with all mention that word of mouth is one of their most impressive sources of business however, most don’t resource customers with anything to make their job easier.
When happy customers want to tell their family, friends and colleagues about you and your business, giving them a helping hand can increase the effectiveness of the recommendation. Hard selling can be difficult and yucky. Persuading someone to buy something they don’t need is just icky – whichever way I look at it. When Dr Flint McGlaughlin, an American academic and business leader used the phrase ‘clarity trumps persuasion’ it certainly resonated with me.
As contemporary business owners, I believe we need to understand that our audience is quite educated. They have a plethora of choice and the internet searching device they are holding in their hands is giving them all the tools they need to carry out extensive searches in a matter of seconds. In response to this, I believe we need to consider moving out of persuading mode and into clarity mode – if we’re not already there. Content marketing has become such a big trend in business promotion. Successful businesses have become publishing houses. As a business owner, how do you take advantage of effective content marketing without having to do it all yourself?
Content marketing is the process of creating and curating high-quality, valuable and relevant content, that aims to engage, inform and attract a targeted audience. In other words, you are educating people about your industry, business, brand, team, product or service, so that they can get to know you, begin to like you and then actually trust you enough to decide to do business with you.
Great content marketing can be a wonderful referral tool. Every business I have ever worked with over the last 20+ years has always cited word of mouth as one of the ways they get new business. Content is a great tool for your happy customers to refer others. In today’s digital world everything changes minute-by-minute, which can make it hard to decipher what’s worth the investment and what is not when it comes to your marketing. Buyers are consuming new information every single day, so how exactly do we capture and keep a buyer’s attention?
A plan without action is just a dream – Cielito Bello.
This is so true. Of course it's great to dream. I encourage you to dream big. But don't get your head stuck in the clouds, or in paperwork. The power is in the action. You've spent time creating a vision and you have identified your goals. That’s GREAT, but it's what you do next that is most important. START is the key word here. Don’t over complicate things, try and achieve one goal at a time before moving onto the next, it’s better to complete one, than start thirty-three and not complete any. Are you customers reading about you or your competitors?
As average Australians, we are spending more and more time each day on-line. We can't get enough of our smartphones! So when your customers (or prospective) customers are hanging out online, are they hanging out with you? |
AuthorRoxanne Grey |