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If you want to get more out of your marketing but don’t know where to start, then the Small Business Marketing Huddle podcast will empower you to take action.
Each short, waffle free episode breaks down an important marketing concept in clear and simple terms, giving you practical actions to apply in your business right away.
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011: Where to start, when starting up? Part 6: Practical steps to a winning distribution strategy.
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
Welcome to another episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle, where we provide you with actionable tips and insights to take control of your marketing journey. I’m Lily Richmond, your host, and in this episode, we’re diving into part six of our series on where to start with your marketing as a startup business. In this episode you are going to learn all about distribution strategies and how important they are in ensuring your product or service ends up in the hands of your ideal consumer.
You can have the best product or service in the world, but it’s a wasted effort if you don’t get your distribution strategy right. Join me, Lily Richmond, in the latest Small Business Marketing Huddle episode to learn how to effectively distribute your product or service and reach your customers.
We’ll discuss the pros and cons of direct versus indirect distribution channels, supply chain management, and how to maintain your brand’s essence at every touchpoint. No guests, just practical steps and five easy-to-implement actions to get your distribution strategy right and your product or service in the hands of your customers.
By the end of this episode, you will have the knowledge to determine what distribution strategy is best for you and what distribution sources you need to have in place to perfect it.
Get this episode’s FREE workbook to create your distribution strategy and devise the actions you need to take to make it a reality. Distribution Strategy that gets you to market.
Interested in learning more about buyer roles and how to reach the key influencers who aren’t necessarily your end customer? Listen to Episode 4 below.
Missed any of the other workbooks in the series? Grab them here.
- Workbook 1: How to make your product or service irresistible
- Workbook 2: Uncover your target market and ideal customer
- Workbook 3: Be customer centric from day one
- Workbook 4: Pricing strategies for long term success
- Workbook 5: Your Brand Essence Workbook
Make sure you subscribe via your favourite podcast player because next time in the final instalment of this series, we will are going to put everything you have learnt together in your communications. That’s right, we’ll be covering the topics of marketing calendars, channel selection and more. I can’t wait to finish the series strong as we get you to launch!
Got a topic you want me to cover? I’d love to hear your ideas!
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 011: Where to start, when starting up? Part 6: Practical steps to a winning distribution strategy.
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Lily
Host
00:30
Hey, this is Lily. Thank you for being here today. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you very much. I do really appreciate you being here and I’m really stoked that you are taking some proactive steps to take control of your marketing. Now, if this is your first time here, don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your favourite podcast player because today, as in every episode, I’m going to cover a marketing topic that I think you’ve really got to learn if you want to master your marketing. And make sure you listen until the end, because I’m going to share the key actions that you can take to get your distribution strategy sorted and, of course, get your product or service to market, which is what we’re all here to do. So let’s get into the episode.
01:18
So today is part six of seven in my series on where to start with your marketing when you are just starting up in business. We are getting close to the end. It has been a bit of a marathon, but, yeah, we’ve covered some great topics. So let me quickly recap what we’ve covered so far. In part one, we covered how to make your product or service totally irresistible to your consumer. In part one, we covered how to make your product or service totally irresistible to your consumer. In part two, we uncovered who your target market was and your ideal customer. Then, in part three, we crafted a single-minded statement on how you make your customer’s life better. In part four, we demystified how to set pricing so that you can win business and make a profit. And part five, I talked all about brand strategy and how you can distil down your brand essence into three words. And then today, as I’ve already alluded to at this top of the episode, we are going to talk about a really exciting aspect of marketing. Well, I think it’s exciting, and that’s distribution strategy. Or, put really simply, it’s how you get your product or service to market. So by the end of today’s episode, you are going to have nailed down what your distribution strategy is going to be and then the actions that you’re going to need to go away and take in order to make that happen. So let’s get cracking, because there’s a bit of terminology and quite a lot to cover.
02:51
So, if distribution is how you get your product or service to market, what are the different types of distribution strategies and how should you distribute your offering to maximize your sales and, ultimately, your profitability? And what is it that you need to watch out for? Well, these are all of the things that we’re going to cover today. So distribution, firstly, should be thought of as all the activities that support you getting your product or service into your ideal customer’s hot little hands. And what could some examples of these activities be? Well, there is your supply chain, right, so that is how your product or service that has been produced gets delivered to where it is going to be sold. So who is physically going to sell your product or service? Is it you or is it a retailer, for example? And then, another thing that you need to consider is what is needed at the point of sale when you are selling that product or service. Maybe it’s a display stand, or you maybe need a delivery policy, or, if you’re, say, an electrician, for example, it could be the van that’s sign written that you turn up to a job to. That’s the way you are distributing your service. Now, your distribution strategy is going to be closely linked to your ideal customer, who they are, where they buy, what their expectations are of when they go through that purchase process and the nature of the product or service that you are actually selling, your pricing strategy and the brand experience you want to create. So can you see how all of these various facets of marketing that we’ve been talking about in this series are all really linked together. So everything links and everything influences each other, and if you change one part of your strategy around some of this, you might have to go back and revisit some of the other aspects that we’ve covered. So when we talk about distribution today, it is going to become clearer as we work through Now there are some differences between services and products when it comes to distribution strategy.
05:02
First up, and typically products have a longer distribution model or strategy with more people involved. Let’s think about it using, let’s use the idea of a writer’s journal or a notebook. Let’s imagine you’re a brand that sells notebooks. There is the person who makes the notebook, and this is called the manufacturer. That’s pretty simple. Then there might be a distributor or a wholesaler and an end retailer. Now a distributor is normally a company that you would engage to sell your manufactured notebooks in bulk, and they would then essentially take control of all of the on-selling of those notebooks to wholesalers and possibly direct to retailers as well, depending on the market, and they would then essentially take control of all of the on-selling of those notebooks to wholesalers, and possibly direct to retailers as well, depending on the market. So ordinarily, a distributor already has a large database of wholesalers and retailers that they can just tap into straight away, quickly and easily, and then, when a wholesaler or a retailer wants to reorder, they just go straight back to the distributor, not to your company or the company that’s had the notebooks made for you if it wasn’t you. So you then get removed from that whole process. Once it goes to the distributor, they take it from there. Now the next role is a wholesaler. Now they might buy direct from the manufacturer or they buy from a distributor, and their goal is to sell to retailers. And then finally, there is the retailer. So they are the ones that sell the notebook to me, the consumer, either via a bricks and mortar store or through an online channel.
06:36
So does the difference between a wholesaler and a distributor seem confusing to you? Why are both of these types of parties in a distribution chain? Why are they even needed? Well, distributors normally deal in very large volumes, and they often will deal with manufacturers who only want to sell really large quantities of product. They often have exclusive supply agreements in place as well. So a manufacturer will only sell to one distributor in a particular market, and so using a distributor is very common. If you’re trying to get your product into an international market, they have the relationships, the contacts and the market context for that particular market that ultimately could take you as a business owner years and years for you to get a handle on if you were going to do it yourself. And often some retailers, wholesalers they will only deal with a distributor as well. So if you’re trying to get into a particular market, you might find that it’s really difficult for you to actually get straight to a wholesaler, for example. So distributors can be quite big gatekeepers. Now a wholesaler might also go direct to the manufacturer Okay, so if that manufacturer is maybe smaller and is not selling huge volumes so let’s use this notebook example again.
07:56
Say you were physically going to manufacture your own notebooks at your small local factory that you have you might not be able to or want to supply volumes that are large enough to work with a distributor. So in that case you would work with wholesalers. Or, to confuse things more, you might decide that you want to sell direct to retailers yourself and you’re effectively the manufacturer and the wholesaler at the same time and you’re selling direct to retailers or differently. Again, you might decide that you want to sell direct to the consumer, and there are pros and cons of each of these different strategies and we will cover that off. So sit tight. Okay, so market context also plays a really big role here as to how your product is going to get to market. Typically, the bigger the market and the volume that you want to sell will dictate whether you use a distributor, wholesaler, or go direct to the retailer or sell directly yourself.
08:53
Okay, so me explaining manufacturer, distributor, wholesaler and retailer is all well and good, but the world has changed dramatically for many industries. So think about, you know, globalization and the internet. They’ve created what we call, in the biz, disintermediation. So I told you that we marketers, we love some complicated jargon. Basically, all this means is that globalization and the internet have cut out the middleman in a lot of cases.
09:23
So let’s use our notebook example again. You could still manufacture your notebooks at your local factory, but you might become an Amazon seller. So you’re the manufacturer working directly with one of the biggest online retail brands to get your product straight to market. Of course, this isn’t free, but you’ve cut out all those middlemen along the way that clip the ticket, so to speak. Or you might set up a Shopify website and sell direct to your consumers, and that might be the only way that you plan to sell your products. And we’ll cover that a little bit more when we get into the strategies.
09:54
So you can see that these old models, they’re getting turned on their heads. It is so much easier now to find manufacturers who will work with small minimum quantities. You can work direct with distributors offshore to import products. You can drop ship. You know, this is where you never even see the end product that you’re selling. The consumer orders it from your website and your supplier sends that product direct to your consumers. Now you might be feeling a bit confused. You know what way should you go. Well, I’ll share some insights on this shortly, but for now let’s move on to the distribution of services.
10:26
So, as I’ve mentioned, services work a little bit differently. So let’s use the electrician example again from earlier in the episode. So you deliver your service direct to your consumer. In this case, what would your distribution channels actually be? And this could include what I would call your owned distribution. So think your website, telephone, your customer service email address, and then there’s the physical service that is delivered from your van, where you rock up to rewire someone’s house. Now you might have some other methods, though, of distributing your electrical services, and I like to call this third party channels. So this is where your service is distributed via a third party that you have a relationship with. So, for example, you might be a preferred provider for a home insurance brand, or you might have set up your own referral partnerships with local home renovation companies or builders. You might have contractual partnerships with large construction firms. So all of these examples are third parties who essentially get your service to the market and in front of the end customer. So in this case, your focus isn’t so much in selling direct to the consumer that needs the electrician. It’s selling your business and your capability to that third party who are then going to have the end customer who needs the electrical services supplied.
11:55
Now, episode four of the podcast on buyer roles is a really great one to listen to if you want to understand more about who you really need to be influencing and marketing to, especially when it isn’t direct to the end consumer, like the examples that I’ve just talked through. So that’s a rundown on services very quickly, and now let’s move on to some of the different strategies and the things that you need to consider. So now you know the basics of how products and services get distributed. What type of distribution strategy should you be employing? Now? I want to keep this really simple. I’m going to talk about two direct and indirect. Okay, so let’s cover direct first. This is where you are distributing the product or service direct to your consumer. There is nobody in the middle. So this is our notebook manufacturer who is selling directly to the end consumer, say, on their website. Okay, so you’ve got a website set up. Or this is the electrician who books electrical maintenance jobs direct with consumers who inquire on their website. Those are both examples of direct distribution strategy.
13:00
Now what are the pros and cons of this? The pros are you have complete control over the customer experience. You get direct feedback from the customer about what works and what doesn’t, and you get to build the relationship direct with that consumer. The cons of a direct distribution strategy is that you have to manage everything and this can require a lot of resources and time on things like let’s think about it customer servicing, complaints, product returns, chasing, invoice payments, having to develop skills and expertise in your business that you might not have, like marketing communications, setting up digital marketing campaigns, website management, inventory management. I think you get the picture. Direct can be quite a lot of work. Now, financially, with this distribution strategy, you get to keep all of the margin because there are no middlemen who want a slice of that margin. Okay, but conversely, you will have more costs in your business. Someone has to answer the phones, carry out training, post-purchase servicing, all of those sorts of things. So the upshot is a direct distribution strategy is perfect when you want or you need to have tighter control over the sales, customer or brand experience.
14:18
Moving on to the second strategy, this is called indirect. This is where you sell your products and services via a third party, like a distributor, a wholesaler or a retailer, or maybe it’s a franchise partner, you know. For services it might be a preferred or a contractual partner that you sell through. Now, the pros of this approach you are not responsible for the end customer relationship. You don’t have to worry about selling or marketing your product to get the sales Although, it’s important to note, you might have to invest in growing your brand so that there is awareness of it in the marketplace. You might still have to do that, but there is no dealing with returns, customer inquiries, that sort of thing. That’s taken care of by the other parties in your distribution relationship.
15:06
Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? You don’t have to have any of the control at all, but that is where some of the cons come in. When you use an indirect distribution strategy, you do lose some control because someone else is taking care of getting your product into the consumer’s hands. So you get removed from your customer and that can be quite hard for you to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t, and you might only hear that third hand through the retailer or the wholesaler. And if you want to create a particular customer and brand experience, it can be really hard to do when you are not in control of that selling process. To that end consumer Okay.
15:37
So financially, with an indirect distribution strategy, you do make less margin per unit you sell, and that’s because you have to share that margin with, potentially, the wholesaler and the retailer right or the distributor. So the upshot is is that when you sell indirectly, you have to sell more units to hit the same revenue target, but you have to offset the fact that you’re also avoiding costs and resource commitments by not having to do all the marketing to get the sales to answer phone calls or provide that after sales support. That’s why you have to share the margin, because someone else is taking on some of the operations and the cost for you. So indirect distribution strategies are great when you don’t want to be doing all the heavy lifting, selling and servicing or you want to access the relationships of, say, a distributor or a contractual partner. Think of that electrician who works under contract for a commercial construction company. This frees up your business to focus on what it’s good at and it doesn’t have to get spread too thin trying to develop a sales channel and a sales pipeline because that commercial partner is doing that for you. So that’s the two core strategies explained.
16:46
But there’s an important aside here if you’re a product-based business and you choose an indirect distribution strategy, it’s really key to consider how exclusive or mass you want to go with distributing your product. Again, let’s think about those notebooks. Is your goal to have mass appeal and be in every bookstore across your country, or is it to be more selective than that? You only want it to be stocked in, say, high-end homeware boutiques because it’s a premium product with a high retail price? Or would it be something only you would stock exclusively with one retailer? The point here is that your choice to be mass, selective or exclusive directly correlates to your pricing, your branding and your positioning that you want to achieve. That’s where it’s key for you to maybe go back through the earlier episodes and the work that you’ve done on those to think about well, what’s my pricing strategy going to be? What kind of brand do I want to be? What sort of brand experience am I wanting to create? That might dictate the type of approach you take. If you’re doing indirect distribution, you know, do you want to be in every supermarket or do you want to be in high-end stores? That’s quite a key decision for you to make, because that’s going to influence how your brand actually appears in the marketplace.
17:58
Okay, so after the break, I’m going to share a series of actions with you that you can take right away that are going to help you come up with the distribution strategy that is right for your business so you can get to market. Okay, so let’s get you to market Now. As I work through these actions, you might find it easier to work along with a workbook, so I’m going to drop a link in the show notes for you to access distribution strategy that gets you to market. That’s the workbook. Or you can head to my website can grab it there. The URL is https://marketingondemandco/startup6.
18:42
Action number one I want you to list out all the ideas you have around where your customer would be able to purchase your product or service in an ideal world. So just do a bit of freeform brainstorming there. Action number two I would then want you to map out the chain of events, right from how the product or service is made, who it passes through and how it gets to the places that customer is going to buy from, and I want you to highlight which ones of these are your owned channels versus third-party channels, and there’s kind of a sub-action within here. If you have some owned channels in that list, I need you to make a note of these to ensure that you’ve got those set up for when your business launches. You know I’m thinking things like your website, your retail store. Maybe it’s your online customer booking engine or a phone hotline. It really does depend on your individual business, but if you’ve got those owned channels, make sure that they are set up and ready to go when your business is ready to go live.
19:39
If you have some third-party channels, I want you to go away and do some research on how you would get access to these. For example, if you want to sell to wholesalers, well, who are those key wholesalers in your market that you need to approach? If you’ve got a particular retailer in mind, for example, it might pay to find out how they purchase the products that you might want to have stocked in their store. You know you might have to go through a distributor. You might have to go through a wholesaler. You might realize that you’re going to have to start producing in a certain amount of volume to be able to get into that distributor or wholesaler, to get to that end retailer that you want to. So you need to do some research here to understand what is actually required.
20:19
Action number three Once you’ve done that research, I want you to narrow down which distribution channels are going to be your priority and if it was me and my business, I would be focusing on those where the most sales are going to come from, as a starting point, and you can build out other channels at a later date. But when you’re just getting started out, you need to get as many sales in as possible. So it’s a good idea to start with where the bulk of your sales might come from, and a good hint of where this might be is really the primary place that your consumer would expect to go and buy your product or service. Now action number four. This is where I want you to make a pretty honest assessment of the channels that you’ve selected here.
21:00
Realistically, what parts of the distribution chain do you want to be doing? You know, and what do you have the capabilities to do so? For example, you might like the idea of taking the full margin for a product you sell by creating a website and selling your products direct to the consumer. Awesome. But do you really want to be a retailer? Do you want to be dealing with order fulfilment, inquiries, returns, complaints, keeping a website updated? You know you get the picture. You know you can outsource this. You can also hire staff to do it, of course, but it’s a strategic decision for you to be in retail and as a business.
21:35
Is that what you want to be?
21:38
Do you want to be a retailer?
21:39
Do you want to be a wholesaler? Do you want to just be the person who manufactures the product. If you’re a service based business, you know if you have to get out there and do loads of business development to sell your services and you hate it, then maybe you need to get into some partnerships with other people who could do that heavy lifting for you, who could refer you to other people, or you have a contractual arrangement with them. You have to be really honest about what you are capable of doing and what you want to be doing as part of your overall business strategy, because distribution is key and if you’re not committed to it or you don’t have the right resources in place, that’s where it can fall over.
22:14
And finally, action number five I want you to write out what your distribution strategy is going to be. You know that my service-based business is going to use an indirect distribution strategy. This is how I’m going to do it. These are the key players and this is how the service will get to my end consumer. And it’s the same for product right. I’m going to use an indirect distribution strategy. I’m going to use an indirect distribution strategy. I’m going to sell into those wholesalers and they are going to sell to my end consumer. So I want you to be able to just map that out and write that out what is your final distribution strategy going to be? And then you can create an action list of everything that you need to tackle and do to be able to turn that distribution strategy into a reality and something that’s operational in your business from day one.
Well, ultimately you need to have it ready before day one.
23:06
So get cracking on that. It’s a really important part of your business and distribution often gets overlooked. I’ve got to say A lot of people don’t really think about how they’re going to get their product to market and it all falls over if distribution doesn’t work properly or that experience is really clunky for the consumer. So take the time. It’s a really important part of marketing and I think it’s one of the exciting ones because it’s actually it’s. You know, it’s where the rubber hits the road. And a great campaign, a great looking brand, you know it’s an amazing thing, but it’s only amazing if it’s backed up with that experience of when someone goes to buy the product or service. They have a great experience, it’s what they expect and it works how they expect it to. So keep that in mind. Okay, so that is everything for the huddle today. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you enjoyed this episode and you are a little bit wiser and you’ve got some clearer ideas on how you are going to tackle distribution strategy for your new business and your startup phase.
24:09
And next time on the Small Business Marketing Huddle and I have to say for the last episode, it’s going to be a cracker of an episode because we’re going to talk about how you put it all together with your communications, how you actually get out there and tell the story about your business. So we’re going to talk about marketing calendars. We’re going to talk about initiative plans. What sorts of communication channels should you be using? It’s going to be action packed.
24:36
So make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and then you won’t miss that episode. Now, remember there is a workbook from today’s episode and you can grab that in the show notes. I will drop a link there or you can head to my website and you can grab it. The URL is https://marketingondemandco/startup6. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll catch you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
010: Where to start, when starting up? Part 5: Brand strategy for small business.
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
Welcome to another episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle, where we provide you with actionable tips and insights to take control of your marketing journey. I’m Lily Richmond, your host, and in this episode, we’re diving into part five of our series on where to start with your marketing as a startup business. In this episode I’m going to show you how to create a brand strategy for small business. I’ll teach you the branding basics you need to know to develop a clear, concise and consistent brand experience.
- We’ll explore the essence of your business identity beyond aesthetics and how you can create a brand experience that keeps customers coming back to your business.
- We also discuss consistency and how critical it is to build trust with your audience. Developing and managing your brand consistently is inexpensive and easy, so make sure you tap into the power of consistency in your branding.
- We’ll work through an exercise designed to help you identify your brand’s core attributes—your brand essence. You’ll also have access to a workbook to help you brainstorm and then weave your brand’s essence into your business operations. You are going to learn how to come up with the soul of your brand in just three words.
By the end of our conversation, you’ll have the tools and insight necessary to create a distinctive space for your brand in your competitive market.
Get this episode’s FREE workbook to follow along. Your Brand Essence Workbook
Read Seth Godin’s blog post defining branding as mentioned in the episode.
Missed any of the other workbooks in the series? Grab them here.
- Workbook 1: How to make your product or service irresistible
- Workbook 2: Uncover your target market and ideal customer
- Workbook 3: Be customer centric from day one
- Workbook 4: Pricing strategies for long term success
Make sure you subscribe via your favourite podcast player because next time in part six of our series, we will tackle distribution – how you are going to get your product or service to market. This is where the rubber hits the road as you get ready to launch.
Got a topic you want me to cover? I’d love to hear your ideas!
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 010: Where to start, when starting up? Part 5: Branding strategy for small business.
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Lily Richmond
Host
00:31
Hey, this is Lily. Thank you for being here today. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. I do really appreciate you being here and you know I am really stoked that you are taking some proactive steps to take control of your marketing. Now, if this is your first time here, don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your favourites podcast player, because today, like in every episode, I’m going to cover a marketing topic that I really think you have to master if you want to improve your marketing. That I really think you have to master if you want to improve your marketing. And make sure you listen in right until the end, because, as always, I’m going to share with you a really simple exercise and a link to a workbook that is going to help you improve your branding and, specifically, how to narrow down what your small brand stands for. Okay, so let’s get right into the episode.
01:25
Today is part five of seven in my series on where to start with your marketing when you are just starting up in business, and let’s do a really super quick recap on what we have covered so far. In part one, we talked all about how to make your product or service irresistible, and in part two, we uncovered your target market and your ideal customer. Then, in part three, we crafted a single-minded statement on how you make your customer’s life better. And in part four, we demystified how to set pricing and win business so that you can make a profit. And today I’m going to boil down branding to a really, really simple concept and that is brand essence and I’m going to teach you how to come up with yours and I’m going to share some ideas on how you can use that to create, I guess, a really engaging and a consistent brand experience for your target market.
02:25
So, before we go anywhere, what is a brand? I know this seems like I don’t know a really simple question, but we need to start with what a brand is, and I want you to take a really broad view of what a brand is. It is more than a logo. It is much more than a colour scheme or a fancy looking website, and I really love the definition that one of the most famous marketing speakers in the world, Seth Godin, uses to define a brand, and I’ll drop a link to a really good blog article of his where he talks about the definition of brand. I’ll pop that in the show notes. But he says that a brand is the set of expectations, the memories, the stories and the relationships that, when you put all of those together, that accounts for the consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. Now, what I love about this definition is that it not only explains what a brand is, but it also puts it in the context of the consumer and their decision to buy.
03:29
Because ultimately, we create brands because we want a consumer to resonate with us. We want them to buy something, or we might want them to join up to a community group, or we might want them to support our charity. You know, we need a brand to be able to do that and we need to create a set of expectations and a relationship with that consumer so that they can choose which brand they’re going to choose over another. Ultimately, how you feel about a brand in that case that’s going to dictate whether it resonates with you or not and whether you support that brand and how you feel about that brand is going to be made out of the expectations you have, those memories that are stored of your experiences with it and the relationship that you build with that brand, and that’s why I’m choosing in this episode for us to focus on what your brand essence is, and your brand essence really is kind of the spirit of your brand and how it makes people feel, and we’re going to do a really simple exercise to help you come up with that brand essence.
04:33
Now, at this point I want to make a disclaimer. This short podcast episode is not going to cover the nitty gritty and all elements of brand strategy. You know that could be a whole series in itself. In fact, that could be a whole other podcast, and I’m sure there are plenty of podcasts out there that talk just about branding if you really want to go deep into this topic. What I’m really conscious of in teaching this episode today is that there is a huge amount of jargon, there are a lot of concepts around branding and there are many theories about branding and I don’t want you to get overwhelmed because you just have to do a Google search and start trawling the internet for information on how to do branding and there is so much out there, and so when you are just starting out in business and you’ve maybe never had a business before, the whole concept of this could be just too much and you give up and you don’t even focus on it, but branding is a core pillar of your business when you first start out. So I did think about this episode long and hard. And how do I explain branding in a really simple way that is accessible for you and is easy for you to implement? And that’s why we’re going to focus on the essence of your brand. You know this is not the only way to do it, but I find that when I’ve worked with clients, it helps them narrow in and focus on what is most important.
05:50
So what are some of the important watchouts when thinking about branding? Firstly, to create a brand that people understand and resonate with, I think you’ve really got to be consistent. And why is that? Well, being consistent with your branding builds trust, and as consumers, we do start to expect a certain experience when we interact with brands, and we don’t really like it when that familiarity is challenged. So think of some of the world’s most recognizable brands. You know they don’t change. Think Coca-Cola or Nike or Amazon. They are reassuringly consistent, and that builds trust and therefore a stronger bond.
06:34
And one of the things that I see with small businesses and their brands quite often is that they are inconsistent. Often is that they are inconsistent. So you’re always changing things up, always changing the colours or fiddling around with the logo or changing the website all the time. You know your email campaigns look totally different to what’s on your website. The look and feel there is totally different. Or you say that you know you’ve got great customer service, but you never pick up the phone. All of these things are about building consistency in your branding. So what I want you to think about more than anything is how do I just be consistent? How do I always deliver the same brand experience each time? That’s what the first thing that I think you have to watch out with branding.
07:19
The second thing that I wanted to raise is that branding is much more than your logo, it’s much more than your website and it is so much more than brand colours. You’ve got to think of branding, I think, as every experience that your consumer has with you and I’ve already touched on it in point one, but every phone call, every email, every social media post, every purchase and even when someone might see your sign written business vehicle out on the road these are all brand experiences. These are all opportunities for your target market to have an interaction with you, whether you’re proactively doing that or not, and what does that mean? That means it’s an opportunity for that consumer to ultimately form a perception of what your brand and your business is about. So it’s really important. Think of every single touch point that a consumer might have with you. That’s a brand experience, and we’ll cover that off when we go through the exercise in the next section of the episode.
08:15
Thirdly and lastly, I wanted to raise a question that you might be having right now listening to this episode, which is as a small business owner, do I even need to bother focusing on branding? Isn’t this a big business thing where you have big budgets and deep pockets? And I would argue that having a clear and consistent brand that resonates or creates an emotional response with your target market is very important. When you’re a small business and you don’t need to be spending a lot of money on developing branding and expensive branding to be able to do a good job of it, you’ve really just got to be able to distil down and narrow down what it is you want to be known for, and a really cost-effective way for you to build relationships with your customers is to develop a brand identity or an essence of your brand and it’s a way for you to set yourself apart from your competition. You know, if you remember, in the last episode if you’ve listened to it where we covered pricing with Alana Swain, there was a really great example about a white shirt, and lots of brands sell white shirts and each one of those brands creates a very different brand experience. So it is also a way for consumers to identify with something, that a brand that resonates with them, and be able to choose between different alternatives that are out there.
09:31
So if you’re a small business owner, don’t you want people to choose your brand? So it’s about identifying what your brand essence is and being able to deliver that consistently across all touch points. So I think that about covers everything that I wanted to really cover off with you before we move on to the next section and the exercise. So stay tuned because after the break, we are going to delve into how you define your brand essence and then how you can implement that across your marketing. Okay, so are you ready to define your brand essence? Now?
10:10
To recap, your brand essence is like the spirit of your brand. It’s essentially how your brand makes people feel when they experience it and, for another quote. There is a very famous one from Jeff Bezos, the founder of the retail giant Amazon, who I’m sure many of you know and love Now. He said that your brand is what people say about you when you aren’t in the room, and I just think that is really true. As a business, you know you can create the branding that you want to project right. You can create that experience as best you can, but ultimately the consumer is going to decide how they think and feel about it, and that is why I think it is so important for you to be clear, concise and consistent with what you want your brand to stand for, because if you can do that, you have a much greater chance of your consumer actually having that same experience and having them feel that way about your brand. Now, to do this exercise, I’ve created another easy-to-follow workbook, which I will drop a link to in the show notes, or you can grab it on my website, and the URL to go to is https://marketingondemand.co/startup5 .
11:31
Okay, to uncover your brand essence, here is what I want you to do. I want you to put yourself in the seat of your ideal customer, which you would have defined. As a side note in part two of the series. Now, if you’re the sort of person that has a hard time visualizing or imagining what life might be like for your ideal customer, I want you to go and observe them, if you can, of course, okay. So if your ideal customer, for example, is a busy parent who has to juggle a lot of priorities, well, a good way to see them might be to head down to your local sports field after school and observe parents with their kids heading to sports practice. Now, this could help you put yourself in their shoes, by observing them, because you’ve got to remember that we aren’t always in the target market for the products and services that we sell, right, so we need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes. Okay, so let’s visualize, right, you are your ideal customer.
12:27
Now I want you to ask yourself this question how do I want my ideal customer to think and feel about my brand? And here I want you to do a brainstorm. Use the workbook or grab a piece of paper and get as many words out onto paper as possible. Just free flow. Write, for I don’t know, say five minutes all the ways that you want your consumer to think and feel about your brand. So that’s part one of the exercise.
12:58
Now part two. I want you to look at those words. Are there any patterns? Could you group some of those words together into kind of categories that might go together so you can kind of summarize some of that data? That’s part two. Now part three. I want you to take that brainstorm and I want you to come up with just three words that you would want the consumer to use to describe your brand. So if you overheard them in a cafe talking about your brand, what three words would you want them to be using to describe you? So, for example, my brand Marketing On Demand. My three words are supported, relaxed and helpful. So those are the three things that I try to embody in any of the branding that I do. Okay, great stuff. You’ve now nailed down how you want your ideal customer to think and feel about your brand. Now the final piece is putting it into practice. Now, if you’re just starting out and you haven’t developed any branding yet, I want you to use these three words to inform your decisions about how you want your brand to visually appear and how all aspects of your business will work towards making the consumer feel that way. Now, if you’re going to engage someone to help you do your branding, these three words are really helpful. Hey, even share with them the brainstorming that you did, because that might help them spur their thinking as well.
14:23
Now, in this exercise, I want you to list out all of the ways a potential customer could interact with or see your brand. You know, so I’ll give you some ideas. These are obviously all your marketing activities that you might do. It would be your social media content, it could be the way you answer the phones, it could be any of your customer servicing, how you deliver your products and services, your office space, what that looks like, your email signature. You know the signage on the outside of your building. You know even people who aren’t in your target market are going to see that signage. So there could be ways that your consumer is interacting with your brand, which is not them directly interacting with you but observing and seeing it in the marketplace. So I do want you to list out all of the ways a potential customer could interact with or see your brand, and I want you to use your three words to guide how you are going to create and manage those experiences. So write those down and then that’s going to give you a really good action list of the things that you need to do to create those brand experiences that you want. So that is it. That’s a wrap. You have now come up with your brand essence and how you can turn that into a reality across all of the ways the consumer could interact with your brand.
15:39
Thank you so much for being part of the huddle today. I hope you enjoyed the episode and I hope you’re feeling a little bit fired up and inspired really to get creative and develop your branding. Now don’t forget to hit subscribe, because next time, in part six of the series on where to start with your marketing when you’re just starting out in business, we’re going to talk about distribution and that is how you are going to get your product or service to market. This is a really exciting episode because this is where our attention in this series now starts to turn from the why behind why you are doing your marketing all of the why, the strategic pieces into the how are you going to execute it. So you don’t want to miss this episode. It is vital.
16:22
As you get ready to launch and as a quick reminder, don’t forget to visit the episode show notes to get access to today’s workbook to help you define your brand essence and a plan for implementing it in your business. Or you can head to my website and you can grab the download there. You can find it at https://marketingondemand.co/startup5 . Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
009: Where to start, when starting up? Part 4: Pricing strategies for long term success.
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
Welcome to another episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle, where we provide you with actionable tips and insights to take control of your marketing journey. This episode is all about pricing. What are pricing strategies that set your small business up for long term success? In this episode, your host, Lily Richmond, delves into the critical topic of pricing strategies to consider when you are just starting out in business. I share insights on how to set pricing to win more business and make a profit. Joining me is special guest Alana Swain, co-founder of Your Success Team, who provides valuable advice on pricing from a financial, operational, and mindset standpoint.
You will learn about the five main areas that influence pricing, including:
- What consumers are willing to pay
- Competitor pricing
- Positioning in the marketplace
- Costs
- Profit margins
For each of the five areas, I share actions you can take right away to put this learning into action. Download the workbook and follow along.
Want access to Alana’s pricing calculator? You can sign up here.
This episode is part four of a seven-part series on where to start with your marketing when first starting up a business. Need access to the other workbooks in the series? No problem. You can grab then here.
- Workbook 1: How to make your product or service irresistible
- Workbook 2: Uncover your target market and ideal customer
- Workbook 3: Be customer centric from day one
Make sure you subscribe via your favourite podcast player because next time in part five of our series, we will tackle branding, and how to create a consistent and engaging brand experience for your customers at every touchpoint. I’m going to walk you through an easy to implement approach to finding your brand essence.
Got a topic you want me to cover? I’d love to hear your ideas!
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 009: Where to start, when starting up? Part 4: Pricing strategies for long term success.
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
00:30
Lily Richmond
Host
Hey, this is Lily. Thank you for being here today. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. I really appreciate you and I am really delighted that you’re taking some proactive steps to take control of your marketing. And if this is your first time here, don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your favourite podcast player because today, like in every episode, I’m going to cover a marketing topic I think you’ve really got to learn if you want to master your marketing. And, as always, make sure you listen until the end, because I’m going to give you the low down and a handy worksheet on how to set pricing so you can win more business and make a profit.
So let’s get straight into the episode, because today is going to be a cracker. It is part four of seven in my series on where to start when you are first starting up in business. And, just to recap, in part one, I gave you some practical steps on how to make your product or service totally irresistible to your target market. Then we delved into uncovering who your target market and ideal customer actually are, and then, in part three, we came up with a single minded statement on how you make your customers life better.
Now, today is actually a really special episode for a couple of reasons. Number one we’re going to firstly demystify how to set pricing so that you definitely win business, that you definitely make profits. It’s critical because business is all about the dollars and cents, and all of your hard work and your risk taking to set up a business has to be rewarded, so it’s critical that we cover pricing at some point. And the second reason is that today I’ve got a special guest joining me who’s going to give you some pretty darn important insight into pricing and what to watch out for.
Alana Swain is a corporate escapee and entrepreneur and she’s the co-founder of a company called your Success Team, and it’s a business that gives small business owners the business smarts that they need to feel supported, clear and confident and in control again, because business can be overwhelming. Being in business for yourself is amazing, but it is a roller coaster, and your success team has a range of different support plans and coaching services to help you thrive in business. Now I’m going to drop a link to her business in the show notes if you want to find out more. So I was really excited when Alana agreed to step up today and chat about how to set pricing for your small business, because she has seen the pitfalls and she knows absolutely what you need to watch out for. So I’m hoping that this is going to be a really insightful episode for you.
But firstly, this is how the episode is going to run. I’m going to chat about pricing strategies, looking at it from a marketing and a positioning perspective, and then Alana is going to join me and we’ll chat about pricing more from a financial, operational and a mindset standpoint, because they are just as important. That way, you’re going to get all of the smarts that you need and you’re going to be able to think about your pricing from a number of angles, and that’s just one of the key things that I want you to take away from today. Pricing is multifaceted. It has so many different perspectives and angles and things to consider, so I’m going to hopefully share some of that with you today and you can get that insight that you need. So let’s get straight into the episode.
So what is pricing strategy At its simplest level? It is just the method by which you determine what prices you’re going to charge, and there are a number of factors that are going to influence how you set them.
The five main areas that are going to have an influence over your pricing are number one, what your consumers are willing to pay. Number two, what your competitors charge. Number three, how you want to be positioned in the marketplace. For example, are you going to be a premium brand or will you price match your competitors? Number four, the costs of creating the product or service, running your business and the marketing of your business as well. And then number five is what profit margin you want to make.
Now, alana and I are going to talk more about understanding your costs and profit margins and mindset later, so I’m going to tackle the part about consumers, competitors and positioning first.
So, first up, you need to understand your customers’ expectations and their willingness to pay, and I want to get something out on the table right away. Customers don’t always want to pay the lowest price possible. Why is it? For example, even within product categories that you might consider as commodities, there are variations in pricing. Take a humble bottle of cow’s milk. You might think that everybody wants to pay the lowest price, but that’s not necessarily true. Check it out in the supermarket aisle next time you’re there and it might surprise you. There are premium brands, there are budget brands, there’s generic milk, there’s organic milk, there’s milk fortified with extra vitamins, there’s the A2 protein milk. The list goes on. So consumers are willing to pay a price that they perceive as giving them value for money, and that’s a key point that I really want you to take away here. They will pay for the features and benefits that are important to them, and value for money does not necessarily mean it’s the cheapest.
How would something like a Louis Vuitton handbag be value for money, for example? If you ask someone who owns one, they might say it’s handmade, it essentially has a serial number, it uses the finest materials, it’s iconic and recognisable around the world as a symbol of luxury, it makes me feel better about myself and it infers a level of status in society, so for that person, it definitely has value for money.
So when you consider this for your business, think about what is important to your consumer and what your value story is, and this tightly ties into parts one and two of the series, where you need to understand what it is you’re offering and who your audience is. And when we think about the last episode, where we talked about how you make your customers life better, that also feeds into pricing as well.
So the second area is the competitive landscape. To set robust pricing for your new business, it is important that you understand what your competitors are charging, and my tip here is to use this to inform and sense check what you’re going to charge, but not define it. You have to make a decision. Are you going to match your competitors, and that’s called, in the industry, parity pricing, or are you going to undercut your competitors, and that’s called penetration pricing? Or are you going to charge more than your competitors, and that’s called premium pricing? And why might you opt for one of these pricing programs over the other?
Let’s talk about matching first. Here you’re going to want to price match if your consumer is sensitive to the price or has a really set expectation of the price, or the market for what you’re selling is a really competitive place. If you sell identical products and services to another organization, you might have to price match. If you have to price match, then you’ve really got to focus on managing your costs, because the profits you make will be dictated more by your costs than the price you charge. Remember that the profit margin if you aren’t aware of what this term is is the difference between the price and what your costs are. I mean, that’s at a really, really simplified level. Now, even if you are selling an identical product, you don’t have to match what your competitors charge, right, because maybe your offering is different, maybe you give more value via things like better customer service or free delivery and returns, or your brand and the experience that you give your customers is going to be totally different to what your competitors do. That’s why I say let your competition inform your pricing, not determine your pricing. You have to look within and understand those key things that are going to make your business stand out. Be a bit different, offer more value, and that’s how you can overcome the situations where you have to look at parity pricing.
Now, what about penetration pricing, which is where you essentially undercut your competitors when you might want to do this when you first launch, for example, to get people to try your business out. Now, as a small business, I do want you to be careful here. If you’re considering the strategy, if you’re competing against big corporations, comparing yourself to a large big box retailer in your country, whether that’s Walmart, kmart, carrefour in Europe, they’ve got really deep pockets and they can outcompete you on many fronts, and primarily. One of those is scale. They can just produce a whole load more product much more cheaply and sell it in much greater volumes than you can if you’re a small business or you’re just starting out. So you’ve really got to think about if you’re going to use penetration pricing, which is where you undercut your competitors. You really have to think about is how long you could sustain that for now.
Another way that you can look at penetration pricing is actually to treat it like an introductory offer, so it gives people an opportunity to try your business out and it can encourage them to take the plunge and it creates a bit of urgency. However, I am going to say I don’t think that being a loss leader is a good strategy for a small business. Over the long term, we want your pricing to be sustainable and for your business to be successful, so undercutting from day one is not a great place to start.
Finally, the third pricing program is premium pricing, and this is my favorite. This is where you are going to charge more than the majority of your competitors because you are going to offer some form of value that makes you better and, as a small business, this is where you can play really effectively. Just remember you have to unlock what value your consumers are looking for. So make sure you do your research on that first. What do they value? And if you can offer that, premium pricing is definitely the way to go.
And this then neatly leads me on to the third factor of pricing, which is positioning. And what’s positioning? Well, it’s how you influence your consumers’ perception of your business, brand or product offering versus your competitors. If you want to be a budget conscious business that offers a no-frills service, then you’re going to price yourself at the lower end of your competitive set. But if you want to be seen as a premium offering with high quality products, then you will want to be charging more. And this is something that I do see quite a bit with small businesses. They want to be a premium brand or a premium business, but they’re price matching or undercutting their competitors, or their brand experience isn’t premium enough. They’re using really cheap packaging or their branding just does not appear premium. So there’s a mismatch and consumers pick that up. And pricing in particular is a really big signal to the consumer. So make sure that you’ve got your positioning and your pricing lined up.
Okay. So we are on to factors four and five, which are understanding your costs and profit margins. And it’s at this point that I’m going to bring Alana into the conversation and we’re going to have a pretty free flowing but kind of a question and answer session around profit margins, around costs, what to watch out for, and she’s going to give some great insights on some mindset pieces and what to consider.
Okay, well, I would now like to introduce you to Alana Swain, who is joining me today on the Small Business Marketing Huddle, and Alana is going to share some really great insights and ideas and tips around pricing and some things to look out for, and we’re going to talk all about the differences between pricing and profitability, understanding your financial dynamics, charging what you’re worth, all of those good things. So, without further ado, I am going to welcome Alana to the podcast. Welcome hi, Alana. How are you today?
Alana Swain: 13:43
Oh, I’m so good. Thank you so much for having me here, lillian. I’m really excited to talk about this stuff because it’s one of the things that we don’t share enough. You know the money side of business, which then makes all that hard work that you’ve done with marketing and getting people to know about you. It makes the business busy Totally and actually profitable, which is the difference. I always like to joke between having a subsidized hobby for an expensive hobby and a business.
Lily Richmond: 14:07
Yeah, yeah, and I guess this is and that’s so spot on, given that we’re talking about the idea of when you’re just starting out in business. So you know, getting people set up with those good foundational principles and concepts early on is so key, because if you start really well, then you’ve got a greater chance of your business succeeding over the long term. So, yeah, absolutely Perfect, perfect. So, before we delve into the topics of understanding your costs and the financial dynamics and how they influence your pricing, I’d really love to hear from you about some of the most common challenges or mistakes that people make when it comes to setting pricing for their products or their services. And feel free to tackle products separately to services, because there are some different dynamics there or together. So yeah, what are your perspectives on that? So I think yeah you’re quite right.
Alana Swain: 15:00
I think pricing, products and services are quite different because obviously if you’re running a product-based business, your overhead and your business model is just totally different than a service model. Typically, and I think one of the biggest traps that I see people fall into for both, if I start with the general is not pricing for growth, so just as you just said, when you’re starting out you’re thinking here and now. but some of the biggest challenges come when you need to do those step changes in business and if you’ve not got your pricing with enough fat in the tank, you can stimmy your own ability to grow and you get those wobbles because you’ve sort of priced a business that doesn’t have, say, for example, the appetite to pay someone to help you with your marketing. Or let’s say, all of a sudden you need to level up and get new premises. If you haven’t built some room for growth into your pricing, it can become really hard to then increase your pricing without re-looking at your entire proposition. Who are my customers? Are they still willing to pay if I need to increase my prices by 20% because I need to meet these new costs of delivering with this growth? You know you sort of that’s where we see a lot of speed wobbles. So that’s one of the universal things that I see.
And then I think the other thing is people not necessarily understanding the cost of running their business and pricing with that awareness, if that makes sense. So let’s say for example I think this is quite common follow your passion, we hear. Follow your passion. And so someone really loves photography, say, and they’re like, I’m going to be photographer and they’re working a job and they say getting paid $30 an hour currently. So they’re like well, I know that I can take I don’t know 15 photos and get that to someone in the half hour window and I’m going to charge $75 for that. And look, I’ve increased, I’ve more than doubled, my hourly rate. Yay, I’ve more than money. I’m going to be up in the grand business owner before I know it. And they haven’t realized that actually, that doing the work part of their business is just one component of running a business, and they haven’t priced for the fact that they may need to be spending five hours a week doing some of the administrative tasks, or a certain number of hours a month attending networking meetings or working on website updates or planning their marketing efforts to get that person in front of their camera to do that work. And so they’re going for this really direct transfer of salary or hourly rates to charge rates, without understanding their other stuff. And I think that’s a particularly service based example, but it’s true for product as well.
Lily Richmond: 17:33
Yeah, yeah, and I think you’ve just raised such a really valuable point about pricing with the future in mind, regardless of whether it is service or a product, because, yes, when you first start out, your overheads are really low, potentially, if you like, you say you’re a solopreneur, you’re a one person band, but that moment that you need to scale that business in any shape or form, there are expenses that are going to come out of nowhere that you hadn’t planned for and, yes, your cost dynamics and your pricing completely changes. And I think that’s really that is such a valuable insight to give people that, yes, you’ve got to think about what it might look like in two, three years time if you’ve doubled or tripled it in size, and what would the operation look like and the costs that are associated with that. So, are there any on top of those points? Is there anything that business owners that are just starting out should watch out for?
Alana Swain: 18:32
I think both keep this in mind and it’ll come over the fence and bite you is. Everyone’s got an opinion about pricing and we sent out a sort of a bit of an email tip last year talking about, example, of a white shirt, because everyone’s got an opinion about pricing, right. So we use the example of white shirt. So whether or not you buy a $5 shirt from some mainstream household brandish retailer or you’re off to buy a $500 completely tailored, heavily labelled item, someone’s going to have an opinion about where your shop is on the end of the spectrum, right there, or fancy pants or a cheapskate, right? So you have to acknowledge that your price is not going to be for everybody. That you know, regardless of where you choose to place yourself on that spectrum. So we can’t all. We sort of have a joke if you can’t compete with the likes of, like, a Walmart business model or a Kmart business model because you’re just not delivering at million scale items. So try the heaven’s sake to stay out of that chase to the bottom the mindset that sits behind that, to have faith that you’ve done your homework, you’ve thought through your pricing process, you know your business goals and we do want to set to know that your pricing is right for you.
Lily Richmond: 19:53
Yeah, and I think that is so valuable when I think back to earlier part of today’s episode where I talk about positioning. So, like you said, with that white shirt example, you could be at the cheaper end of the market or you could be at the premium end of the market and for you and your business, you have to work out what’s your sweet spot, isn’t it? It’s that Goldilocks formula between your cost base, what profit margin you want to make, which will come on to, and also where you want to be positioned in the marketplace. So you’ve raised some really interesting concepts there as well around value. So it’s you can charge whatever you want for whatever you offer. It’s just whether you have got a market that is willing to pay that price because they see the value in what it is that you’re offering. So, yeah, and I think that’s where that’s where small business owners get a little bit caught up as well. So that’s where it’s all about. Well, I have to charge what my competitors are charging, because no one’s going to pay anything else. Well, with your white shirt example, look at the spectrum of prices out there in your own marketplace. The variation is huge and there is enough room in many, many markets for people to be able to compete Absolutely.
Alana Swain: 21:08
Yeah, and it does become really hard, and this is why I think one of the hardest adjustments to being a business owner is to understand. It’s not linear, that there’s one decision to make. You have to go oh so how does that sit against this? And then come back. So you might have thought you know where you wanted to position yourself. Then you do your numbers and go oh crumbs, I can’t make profit on that. So then you have to come back and reevaluate, or what does that mean for where I thought that customer, that client, that group of people I’ve been talking to, did they still sit there at that price?
Lily Richmond: 21:42
point. Totally, totally agree. Oh no, that’s super, super valuable and I think it would be really great if you could talk about that relationship that exists between your pricing and profitability. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Alana Swain: 22:00
Yeah, absolutely, pricing sort of sits at the visible end of business, right, and so what you get is you get a lot of people talking about your top end number, so like six bigger, this and 10 came out there and seven figures. But none of that matters if you don’t have a profitable bottom line, and so pricing is above the line thing that everyone can see. If you sort of use an iceberg example, your pricing is the bit that everyone can see at the top. How you run your business is all of the bottom things, and then at the bottom of that is, and so therefore, have you got profit once you account for all of those things? And so typically I would say you need to have an understanding of whether it’s product or service. How much does it cost you to just deliver that widget? So, for example, you’re going to start selling whiteboards. How much does it cost you to buy the whiteboard? How much does it cost you to package the whiteboard? How much does it cost you to dispatch that? Right, that’s your above the line cost that you can see. And so that is directly linked to how many of those things you’re going to sell on a month, right, so that’s your gross profitability. That amount can shift depending on how many you’re selling. Then you’ve got your open. The business costs and I think sometimes people forget about those costs and those are the ones that can trip you up as you go and grow, because it costs you more to open your business the bigger you are, and so that’s why when you’re starting out, just you and your computer and your app home and you know, and then a little overhead creeps in because you need a subscription for that, oh, and then you might need that, and all of a sudden you need liability insurance here and you need this, and then, oh, now I’m going to choose to spend some money on, say, google or all of those things stack up. Those are your overhead. They typically don’t change as much depending on how many units. That’s just how much it costs you to open your business, and I think it’s there that can get really murky and people don’t necessarily like to share that. They just wait for their financials at the end of the year from the accountant to go did I make a profit or not?
Lily Richmond: 24:03
Right, totally with you there. And what are some of those? For someone who’s not really that familiar with the concept of the overheads, can you run through a little bit of a list of what would those big ticket items be that people need to make sure that they are definitely budgeting for, and those overheads with their startup?
Alana Swain: 24:23
costs. Yeah, so I think it’s quite easy to capture. What does it cost me to provide my product or service? Right, but then below that I’d say so you’ve gone to at some point want me accountant To help you. Probably you may have insurance needs, whether that’s liability or premises. You may want to have a premises in the future. You have costs in terms of your ongoing subscriptions to the things like Zoom, and everything’s priced at enough of an amount that you probably don’t. Oh, that’s right, that’s $30. I don’t need to worry about it. All of a sudden you’ve got 10 of them. That’s $300 a month. That could significantly impact you when you’re starting out in terms of profitability. And then I think, as you perhaps tip toe out of startup and into that, I want to run more stuff through the business mode. That’s where overheads set your home office expenses, your vehicle expenses, those sorts of things, and so on the one hand, you may have an inclination to want to put as much through the business as possible, because that’s old school business advice Run it all through the business. You might just say, hey, it’ll be great for you, tax deductible and all of that. But same thing, that impacts on your profitability.
Lily Richmond: 25:43
Yeah, and ultimately if you’re running as a consultant or that type of a service-based business, then from a profitability standpoint you can only pay yourself out of your profits. Really, If you’re going to take it in New Zealand anyway, if you’re going to take a shareholder salary as opposed to paying yourself wages, so that profit number then becomes really important.
Alana Swain: 26:04
if you’re going to be a one-man-man consultant, for example, absolutely, and I think and this is where pricing is really important to think what’s my long term? So if you’re a consultant, typically you don’t have a business to on sale. Therefore, you need to make as much profit as possible for the lifespan of your desire to run that business. If you have a different business model, for example, a product business or a business where you have a team, you may want to sell that business. Therefore, it’s important to be profitable. So someone wants to buy your business, yeah, and so that’s why profitability is so important, regardless of whether that’s product or service. It’s really important to understand what is this business a vehicle for?
Lily Richmond: 26:52
and profit is important and, from a financial perspective, what would you say a business owner needs to consider when actually coming up with their price? What are the things that they need to consider and keeping the back of their mind or watch out for what are the key dynamics?
Alana Swain: 27:06
So I think we’ve still spoken about that room to grow. I think you need to have an understanding of your supply chain costs, like, are you in a part of the market? You saw a lot of people get really hurt, particularly in the New Zealand market, if they were at the mercy of a supply chain when the Sways Canal sort of crisis hit which came off the back of lockdown. So we sort of got this perfect storm for some people in that they had these incredible like quadruple shipping cost changes but they couldn’t quadruple their charge to the end consumer because the market demand just wasn’t there. If you didn’t have room and you’re large in for that, you’ve not got profit, and we saw a lot of businesses sort of going to negative profitability. So that’s why I think one of the things businesses in linear, but I do think it’s really important when you’re sense testing, before you go live, do a little bit of a SWAT analysis, which is what are those threats out there in the marketplace that you do need to be aware for and just put some of that thinking into your pricing. And you know that is where quite often it’s really helpful to work with someone with your pricing, and obviously I’m totally biased there because I’ve got a business that helps people do that. But sometimes you can’t see what you can’t see because you’re so invested in your idea becoming a business that you don’t want to validate that and have someone shoot you down yeah.
Lily Richmond: 28:30
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it’s also that perspective of when you run the numbers, of thinking, well, how am I ever going to make any money doing this and actually is my idea viable? And you know, that’s pretty disheartening for somebody when they follow the enthusiasm they’ve got these great ideas and then they think how am I going to make a living out of this? But it’s so important to get that sorted right from the outset. Like you say, and working with someone like you or another consultant that does that type of work, the reality is that having that person to sense check with you might need to give you a reality check or say it might come out that, okay, the way that you’re planning to do it isn’t going to work. It might work a different way. You might have to change the business model or the product or the way you’re going to run the business slightly so that you can Turn it into a going concern. So, and that’s that insight that I think, like you say, people don’t. People don’t have a sense of that.
Alana Swain: 29:29
Do that yeah because, I mean, none of us know what we don’t know, and that’s the part, part of the part, and that’s why it is like I think it’s. I do think it’s particularly New Zealand trait to not want to ask for help and that is damaging to our success as a nation of small business owners. If we ask for help sooner, we may not have these growing pains or growth wobbles and we might find more success. Because if someone was able to just point out a couple of things, you don’t know it yet because how it is for you meant to know it, you can’t know until you’ve been through it. That’s not you being stupid, that’s just you not having had the bruises yeah, someone else’s bruises. Be the lesson you know oh, totally, totally.
Lily Richmond: 30:14
And I think you know you’re absolutely right about New Zealand businesses. Yeah, we’re afraid to ask for help. We don’t want to. You know, maybe there’s a bit of pride there as well. We don’t want to admit that. Maybe we don’t know what we’re doing. There’s so many shortcuts that you could take by actually saying, well, yeah, I can, if I could Invest, not think about paying, but if I could invest in some proper advice, then it would save me thousands and thousands of dollars and hours of and heartache as well. Can you talk a little bit about profit margin in relation to your pricing and your? You know your cost of delivery of that product or service and why it’s important for small business owners to actually Understand what profit margin actually is and how you set what your, you know your margin or your markup is going to be and all of those sorts of things. Can you give us some insight into that?
Alana Swain: 31:12
You know, look, I could, we might need to record like. So I think one of the things is, if you want to take yourself seriously as it is and slightly, you need to take profit Seriously. I think typically you need to, depending on what your so, let’s say, for the likes of our Consultants starting out. If I sort of was to use that, you want your gross profit. So that is your gross profit. Actually, if you’re a consultant could be as high as 80 to 90%, because your costs of delivering are really low, versus if you say, for example, the whiteboard example. If you’re selling whiteboards, there’s lots more. Yeah, but I think, regardless of your business, you want to be sitting with your gross profitability at 40%, because that is going to give you that room for growth, right as you so 60% or above, and then, as you’re sort of running your overheads, your net profit. So that’s when you take out all the other costs of opening the door, what’s your net profit? You want that to sit between 20 to 60%, depending on your business. Now, some businesses that is really hard. Hospitality has to run so much tighter than that. But if you’re trying to start a product-based business, if you want room to grow, you need that bigger buffer Because you yes the likes of, like a Walmart or Kmart or one of those big box retailers. They can run on a tiny, tiny profit margin, but that is because they are pumping such volume through that it doesn’t matter if they’re running at 4% net profit. No one’s going to buy a business for 4% net profit.
Lily Richmond: 32:49
Yeah, and their game is a numbers game, and that’s where it’s really dangerous to compare yourself, isn’t it? So it’s the thing you immediately want to do and I talked about hey, you need to go out and look at what your competitors are doing. Yes, look at what they’re doing, but you know your immediate competitors. Are you really competing with Walmart? Are you truly? Because you’re not in that same space. So someone who’s maybe Going online looking for something that’s slightly different it’s not that mass produced product than they’re not a, then Walmart’s not a direct competitor for that anyway, and so it can be really dangerous, can’t it? The the curse of comparison?
Alana Swain: 33:27
ultimately, comparison is the thief of joy in life, but so true in business it’s the. I think Comparison is the thief of confidence in business.
Lily Richmond: 33:36
Yeah, yeah. What are some of the implications if you, if either you don’t see your margin properly Well, not properly, but at the right level for you or you don’t capture some of those expenses and costs of doing business, what are the real ramifications if you don’t, if you don’t do that from the outset?
Alana Swain: 33:53
So I think one that immediately springs to mind is you just can’t play the long game. You just can’t. You’ll just for a variety of reasons, but you’ll pretty quickly hit negative profitability. But if you come back to that consults example, you find that you have to work all the hours under the sun to come anywhere close to. If I use a corporate escape example, because you and I both coming off corporate escapee bandwagon there was at least a parameter there for a salaried life Expectations to match that. If you haven’t priced it right, you will quickly find that you just bought yourself a job when actually you do need to work 60 hours a week in order to be able to bank the same amount you were banking as a salaried employee and that’s kind of probably what drove you to start your business. So you need to price it right now and for all the time and all the other things you’re gonna need, so that what hits you because what hits your bank account is the reason you’re running that business. Yeah, yeah.
Lily Richmond: 34:52
Yeah, yeah, you’re spot on there and I think that’s where service, service-based businesses, where people are selling Ultimately themselves or time there can be a real psychological aspect to pricing there and some, I guess, some issues around self-worth and doubt and things like that. So could you maybe this is going a little bit off topic for talking about pricing generally, but I think it’s quite an important one if there are people out there listening who are thinking about starting a service-based business when they selling themselves ultimately.
Alana Swain: 35:29
Yeah, it’s so interesting because it’s a little bit off topic, but it’s also part of it. So I I kind of go charge the impact but also charges a business owner and just be commercially astute with that, because if you can stop apologizing to the mean Person in your brain picking holes and it, yeah, you’ll go out and go.
Lily Richmond: 35:48
This is the price perfect, okay, so there’s gonna be some more general Sort of ideas that I’d love to to pick your brains on now before we wrap up. But what’s your number? One piece of advice on how to set prices.
Alana Swain: 36:06
I would say, put on the spot.
Lily Richmond: 36:09
My number one piece of advice would be to, to as much as possible, divorce your emotions From the price and think commercially, and that will help set you up for success so much as you said before, yeah, we do all struggle with it, and I think because when you start a small business or any kind of business, really it’s usually come out of some kind of idea or passion, something that you’re really invested in personally, and so it can be really hard to divorce that and yourself from the commercial aspect of running a business, and that, yeah, you actually have to be a little bit hard-nosed and say, well, I’m in business, yes, this is this might be my passion, this might be something that I just love to pieces and I’m totally invested in, but ultimately it’s a business. Ok, alana, and I guess my final question for you is as for a business owner who is struggling to set their prices high enough, what advice would you give them?
Alana Swain: 37:16
I think, the biggest thing. For me. It comes back to you have to. It sounds like really like woken buzzwordy but you have to be really committed to your vision, your passion, your why, whichever word sort of lights you up, go with that word and then try and keep that light in front of you. If you have to have it written on the screen in front of you, but just keep bringing it back to why are you doing this business thing in the first place? Because it has challenges. And so if you keep bringing it back to your why, then hopefully that will help you get over your nursing yourself, your doubt, your worries, all of those sorts of things. And to hopefully also, if the reason that you’re struggling with your pricing being high enough is that you’re scared to look at your numbers, then hopefully that commitment to your why would drive you through that.
Lily Richmond: 38:11
Yeah, oh no, that’s a perfect piece of advice. Yeah, no, that’s really really great, thank you. Thank you so much, alana. We’re going to have to leave it there. I could talk pricing and business profitability with you all day and, yeah, such a great topic that you’re clearly passionate about, and even for me, as a marketer, you’ve got to know your numbers and you’ve got to make sure that you can be in business to make a profit. So it’s not all advertising and fancy social media. So, yes, this has been a really meaty topic and I really do appreciate you joining me today and giving me your time and sharing your wisdom and your insights with the audience. So, thank you so much and hopefully we’ll be able to get you back on the podcast another time to talk about a different topic.
Alana Swain: 38:59
So yeah, yeah, I’d be delighted. It’s truly been a pleasure and I just think if it could, if it helps one or several or many people, then that is absolutely time I’ll spend in the work that you’re doing here with the podcast. It’s incredible. Hopefully people can take something from here, go away and do something with it, and it makes an impact for many businesses Wonderful.
Lily Richmond: 39:21
Okay, thanks, alana, you’re welcome. Take care.
Well, I hope you found that interview with Alana helpful in understanding your costs and profit margins when it comes to setting prices. So let’s recap what we’ve covered.
There are five different perspectives to consider when you set your pricing. There’s the customer competition positioning, your costs and your profit margins, and after the break, I’m going to take you through each of those five perspectives and share some actions that you can take to make sure that you’ve incorporated these into your pricing strategy.
Alrighty, let’s get into the nitty gritty of things that you can do to set yourself up for success with your pricing. So I’ve, as usual, created a short guide that can help you get some of your ideas down on paper, really when it comes to pricing and the considerations that you need to make. So I’ve included a link in the show notes or you can grab it at https://marketingondemand.co/startup4 , and I just find these workbooks tend to be helpful for you to get your ideas down on paper, and I appreciate that when you’re listening to the podcast, you might be doing something where you can’t really take the time to think things through, and so that’s why I recommend download the little guide and you can work through and refollow the episode as well.
Ok, so remember there’s the five different perspectives when thinking about your pricing strategy.
Let’s tackle number one, the customer. And actually that you can take here is to do some desk research, and I want you to note down what the range of prices are for the product or service that you offer. What’s out there in terms of pricing? What do you think consumers are willing to pay? The second piece that you can consider here is actually listing out the value that you offer your customer that could help you command a higher price, a premium price. What’s that extra value add that you are going to bring to the table that is going to encourage that customer to be willing to pay a higher price for it? Remember, consumers will pay when they get value for money. Everything has a value equation and you’ve just got to work out what that is for your individual product or service.
The second area to consider is your competition, and again I want you to go away and do a little bit of desk research here. Who are your main competitors and what is it that they’re charging? Now, if you have been following along in this series, in episode one there was a workbook that came along with that, and actually you will have included three competitors there. So that’s a really great place to start. Go back, check out those competitors and look at what their prices are. And the second part of looking at your competitors is not just their prices. I want you to look at what value they offer as well. Right, so this could be things like free returns, after sales care, maybe it’s a free website audit if they’re a web designer. These are all the sorts of things that businesses do to offer value for money. Do they offer any promotional pricing? Note that down as well. They might offer some introductory offers, but their underlying price might be higher. And remember my word of advice from earlier in the episode Use your competitors pricing as a guide, not as the justification for exactly what you should charge. You’ve got to believe in what it is that you are selling and the value that it brings.
Number three positioning. So, based on the three pricing programs that we talked about earlier, are you going to parity or match price? Are you going to go for penetration pricing that’s where you undercut your competitors in the marketplace or are you going to premium price? That’s where you price above the bulk of your competition? What makes sense, where do you want to be positioned in the market? Do you want to be the budget option? Do you want to be the premium option, or do you kind of want to be middle of the road? It’s really important for you to think about that, because that’s actually going to link into the next episode where we talk about branding.
Number four understanding your cost base. Now I’ve got to make a big caveat here. I’m making an assumption that you’ve already completed a basic business plan with financial projections to work out the revenue and the cost dynamics for your new business. The goal here in this episode, by understanding your costs, is not to do a full financial analysis this isn’t an accounting podcast but it is a good idea to sense, check and make sure that you haven’t missed anything in your cost base. So here are some actions that you can take around that.
So, following on from the interview with Alana, she talked a lot about making sure that you account for all of the costs of making your product or service and your overheads. So this is what I’d like you to do Get out that pen and paper and list out all the costs associated with making your product or service, and then I want you to list out all of your overheads. Now, like I said, you might have already done a lot of this analysis, so maybe pull that out, pull out your business plan and your financial projections and have another hard look at those overheads. And remember that overheads are your costs of opening your business up every day. They’re things like rent for premises, insurance, marketing costs, employee costs. You might have training and development costs. You might have licensing costs. You might have to belong to a professional association, for example. You might have freight costs. These are all of the overheads that form part of your day to day running of your business. And there was a really powerful thing that Alana talked about, which I really do recommend you do so.
This is the third action for you under understanding your cost base, think about where you want to be in two years’ time. Do you need to start accounting for now those higher or new costs that you will have in two years time, when your business has grown significantly, but you don’t have them today? You need to be able to factor those things in from day one so that you’re not having to have an awkward conversation about putting prices up and we’re on the home straight now.
Number five. Let’s talk profit margins. Now. Make sure that when you set your price, that you’ve taken into account your costs to run your business and what level of profit you want to make. This has got to be factored into setting your price. So the question is what is the target profit margin that you want to make per sale? Write that down. And, as a final side note, if you’ve got a price at a similar level to your competition, then you’re going to need to play around with the percentage profit margin and your costs to make those dynamics work. These are the only two things that you’re really going to be able to influence if you have to price match in your industry. I always think the simplest way to think about profit is that if you minus all of your expenses from the price of your product or service, what is left over is your profit. So there’s three things that ultimately, you can play around with influence to get that mix right. You can play around with your price. You can influence your costs to produce your product or your service. So how do you keep those costs down? How do you manage your overheads? So how do you keep those costs of running your business down and your profit margin. Those are essentially the things that you can change and that you can pull the levers of to make sure that you get that right mix to get the profit that you want to achieve.
Now, if the thought of costs, margins, profits, overheads is making your palms sweat and your head spin and you’re pretty overwhelmed, then I strongly recommend that you do seek some professional advice to help you work through your financials so you can set great pricing for your business. It will be money really well spent in the long run.
Now, finally, Alana has a great pricing calculator tool in Excel that you can access if you join up to her business club. I will share the link to that in the show notes too. It is another great resource to help you set your pricing so you can have a sustainable business that will last over the long run. But, of course, it’s not the only pricing calculator tool out there. There are loads of them across the internet and there’s plenty of free options out there. Wow. Well, that is the end of, I must say, a bit of a monster episode the longest one so far, and interviews are going to be a bit like that. So I really hope you enjoyed the huddle today and I really hope you got some great value out of it and enjoyed it. Now don’t forget to hit subscribe, because next time, in part five on the series of where to start with your marketing when you’re just starting out in business, we’re going to cover branding and a really simple yet super effective exercise that is going to help you come up with your brand essence so that you can create a consistent and engaging brand experience for your customers. And, as a quick reminder, visit the episode description to get access to today’s show notes and workbook and any other links that I’ve talked about. When you can download the workbook directly on my website, you can grab it at https://marketingondemand.co/startup4 . Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you at the next episode of the small business marketing huddle.
Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
008: Where to start, when starting up? Part 3: Be customer centric from day one.
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
Welcome to another episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle, where we provide you with actionable tips and insights to take control of your marketing journey. I’m Lily Richmond, your host, and in this episode, we’re diving into part three of our series on where to start with your marketing as a startup business. In this episode I share a powerful question that will help you be customer centric in all marketing you do.
In the previous episodes, we covered how to make your product or service irresistible to your target market and how to define your ideal customer. Now, in part three of seven it’s time to distill all that information into a single sentence that explains how your business makes your customers’ lives better. This is the key to effective marketing without sounding too salesy and a surefire way to be customer centric.
Join me as we explore why focusing on your customers’ needs and aspirations is crucial and how to craft that one powerful sentence that will make your business compelling. We’ll walk through a simple exercise that will help you identify your customers’ goals and problems, and how your product or service solves them.
Remember, this episode is part of a series, so make sure you’ve completed the previous worksheets (Episodes 6 and 7) before diving into this exercise. Taking the time to reflect on your offering and truly understanding your customer’s motivations is essential for this exercise. Get the workbooks here:
- Workbook 1: How to make your product or service irresistible
- Workbook 2: Uncover your target market and ideal customer
To make the most of this episode, find a quiet place to focus without distractions. Don’t forget to download the accompanying worksheet to jot down your thoughts and ideas as we go through the exercise.
Get this episode’s workbook here.
Once you’ve crafted your one sentence on how you make your customers’ lives better, you’ll be amazed at how it can shape your messaging and marketing strategies. Engaging headlines, impactful social media videos, and compelling call-to-action statements are just a few examples of leveraging this statement to connect with your target audience.
So get ready to unlock the true value of your business by putting your customers first. Remember, they are at the centre of everything you do. By the end of this episode, you’ll be equipped with a powerful message that will set you apart from your competitors and resonate with your target market.
Make sure you subscribe via your favourite podcast player because next time in part four of our series, we will tackle pricing strategies for winning business and increasing profitability. I’ve invited a special guest to discuss common concerns and questions surrounding pricing as a startup. You won’t want to miss it!
Got a topic you want me to cover? I’d love to hear your ideas!
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 008: Where to start, when starting up? Part 3: Be customer centric from day one.
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
00:30
Lily Richmond
Host
Hey, this is Lily. Thanks for being here today. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. I do really appreciate you and I am really delighted that you are taking some proactive steps to take control of your marketing. If this is your first time here, don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your favourite podcast player because today, like in every episode, I’m going to share a marketing topic that I think you’ve really got to learn if you want to master your marketing. And make sure you listen in until the end because we’re going to work together today to come up with a single sentence that states how you make your customer’s life better. And, like in all episodes, there’s going to be a worksheet available for you to download, to work along with me as well. So let’s get started.
01:16
Okay, so today is part three of seven and my series on where to start with your marketing when you are just starting up in business. Just a quick recap In part one, I gave you some practical steps on how to make your product or service totally irresistible to your target market. In part two, you got the lowdown on how to define your target market and hone right in on who your ideal customer is, and today we are going to distill part one and two down into a single sentence that explains how you make your customers life better. And why are we doing this? Well, the reason that I wanted to focus on it is because it puts you in the mindset of thinking about your product, your service or your business in relation to how and I mean really how it makes your customers life better, and this is really important. As a marketer, this is one of the key things that you always have to think about when you’re marketing your business. If you look at your business from the perspective of how it helps your customer live a better life, then it becomes so much easier to market your business and sell without well, let’s just say being too salesy. Yep, we want sleaze free marketing all the way. So let’s dive straight in Now.
02:41
In your business travels and research into marketing, you might have heard terms like unique selling point, single minded message, unique value proposition, and these are all fine. In fact, you know they are really robust marketing concepts and they have been around since the dinosaurs roamed the earth, but I think they don’t work that well for a small business owner. So why is that? Well, the focus tends to be more on your business than on the customer and again, these are often really off-putting, jargon filled ideas that can cause more confusion than anything.
03:16
And if you haven’t worked it out already by listening to other episodes in this podcast, I’m a really big advocate for you putting the customer first. You know they’ve got to be just the center of everything that you do. Without the customer, your business is nothing. And if you’re just starting out in business, I want to really encourage you to get into a customer first mindset from the get go, and that is why we’re asking such a powerful question how do you make your customers life better? It really is a question of how, not what, you do. You know it’s not what the features of your product are. It’s about trying to get to that essential nugget of how you help.
04:00
And you know you’re probably listening, thinking well, this is really simple and it might seem too simple, and I’m not much of a gambling woman, but I would take aback that many of your competitors out there, they’re not thinking like this. They’re thinking about themselves and they’re thinking about their product or service and how they can sell more, and undoubtedly we all want to sell more. Of course we do. That’s why we’re in business. But this is really good for you that your competitors are probably not thinking about their customer first, because if you can unlock how you make their life better, then they’re going to sit up and they’re going to listen to what you have to say. You know why would I engage with a brand that is all about you? That’s not helping me achieve the change that I want to experience or the transformation that I want to see, and it’s certainly not helping me solve my problem. So, before we move on and work through an exercise, it’s going to help you come up with that single sentence of how you make your customers life better. You really need to have completed the work from part one, which is episode six, and part two, which is episode seven.
05:06
First, Because we’re gonna use this work that you did there to distill down what your one sentence is and basically to answer this question really well. You’ve got to understand what it is you are offering to the world and you’ve got to understand who your customer is and what they’re trying to achieve. When we do this exercise, you might take some time to come up with that one sentence or something that you feel is compelling enough, and that is totally fine. I do exercises like this all the time and I leave them for a day or two and I come back to it. You know, the subconscious mind is a really powerful powerful thing. It is gonna be working away In the background and you don’t even know you’re thinking about it. And so I find that by leaving something for a couple of days, I come back and I either build on it and make it better, I change it, or I go hey, it was perfect first time. But often you get some additional insights if you sort of let it sit for a little while. So are you ready to craft your one sentence on how to make your customers life better? Listen in after the break and I will take you through the exercise that you need to distill your thoughts down to a statement that’s gonna make your business really compelling. Okay, here we go.
06:25
First things first. I want you to book a time slot in your diary to do this, and I want it to be at a time of day that you are most energetic and productive and when you’re less likely to be interrupted. If you do get interrupted a lot in your work day, give yourself some permission to take that time out. Go to a quiet cafe, wherever you need to go, to get that headspace that you need. It might even be going and sitting in your local part. Next, I want you to download the latest workbook. I’ll drop a link in the show notes along with the links to the workbooks from episode six and seven of the podcast and, I’ve got to reiterate again, if you haven’t done this work yet, from episode six and seven, and they’re accompanying workbooks. I strongly recommend that you listen to those episodes first, do their work related to those, finish off and come back.
07:14
So we’re going to tackle this exercise in three parts. First, I want you to reflect on those deeper reasons why your ideal customer would use your product or service, and you would have covered this in workbook too. So take another look at that first. See what you came up with and revisit it. Just reflect on it. What was their main motivation? Jot that one down. Then I’m going to get you to brainstorm what your ideal customer’s goal is. What are they trying to achieve? So they’ve got an underlying motivation there and they’re going to want to achieve something. What is that? And here I want you to settle on what you think their primary or main goal is. Okay, that’s step one. Completed Step two.
07:59
I now want you to think about the problem that stands between your ideal customer and that goal that you came up with in the last exercise. Nine times out of 10, consumers purchase because they want to achieve something, but there usually is a problem that’s sitting in their way, and whatever it is they’re buying is helping them to alleviate that. So it’s really important to try and start thinking about your products or services in that way. They are a way to help a consumer to remove roadblocks and get things done, achieve higher goals, tap into deeper motivations and purposes. So in this part of the exercise, I want you to jot down your ideas on what that problem could be. There could be more than one, and I would recommend in that case, that you select the one that is most pressing, the primary problem. Now this is where your business comes in. How does your product or service or your business, help the consumer to solve that problem that they’ve identified? Look back at the workbook, workbook one. It is where you came up with those buying priorities and the product benefits for your individual business. These should really give you the clues you need to help you identify how you solve that problem for the customer.
09:17
And now we’re onto the home straight, part three. It is time for us to put it all together. Are you ready? I’m gonna run through some statements and I want you to fill in the blanks. And this is where the workbook does come in handy, because you can fill it out as you go. Okay, so, to kick off, my ideal customer wants to blank, and in there I want you to state their goal. Okay, so my ideal customer wants to achieve a particular goal in order to blank, and in here I want you to summarize their deeper motivation. Okay, so my ideal customer wants to achieve this particular goal in order to tap into a deeper motivation. Why are they doing it? That’s the deeper motivation piece. What’s the underlying reason for why they want to achieve this goal?
10:04
The next part of the statement is the main problem they are trying to solve is blank, and I want you to put the problem in there. And my product or service helps solve it by blank. I want you to put in the main way that you help them solve that problem. Now that you’ve completed that whole phrase, I want you to look at it and I want you to think about a one sentence statement that starts with I make my customers life better by and remember, this is the how. How are you doing it? And that earlier piece of work that you’ve just done about filling in those blanks that’s going to give you some really, really good insight into how you’re going to make your consumers life better. Okay, that’s it, you’ve nailed it.
10:50
Now you might be thinking this is all great. How am I going to use all of this? Well, there are plenty of ways that this can influence how you market your business. Getting your messaging right is key for you to be able to connect with your customer, so you could use this in a variety of ways to help you develop more impactful messaging. So what are some examples? You could use it to create really engaging and impactful headlines for brushes or website pages, for example. Or maybe you could show the consumer how you help them solve their problem with a series of short form videos for social media.
11:28
Or it could be as simple as creating a really compelling call to action statement across your marketing, instead of the boring old get in touch, contact us. You could opt for ready to blank, where you insert the customer goal into your call to action. One of the calls to action that I use is really to take control of your marketing question mark. It’s actually empowering the consumer. So that’s how you can use a much more active, engaging and empowering call to action rather than the boring old contact us for details, get a quote, for example. So these are just a few of the ways that you can use your single sentence of how you make your customers life better to do better marketing. But above all, I want you to keep this statement in the back of your mind at all times when you think about your marketing, and then you will be off to such a great start in business.
12:25
Thank you so much for being part of the huddle today. I hope you enjoyed yet another episode. Don’t forget to hit subscribe because next time, in part four of the series on where to start with your marketing when you’re just starting out in business, we are going to work out how to set pricing to win business and make profits, and I’ve got a special guest joining me to talk all things pricing, what to watch out for, what are some of the common questions and concerns for business owners when they first start out. So I’m really excited about this episode. Pricing is so critical to your business. This is key for when you’re starting up in business.
13:04
And as a quick reminder, visit the episode description to get access to today’s show notes and it’ll have links there to all of the workbooks and you can access it there. Or, if you prefer to get today’s workbook, you can head to my website and download it directly and that’s at https://marketingondemand.co/startup3 and that’s number three. Thank you so much for listening in today and I will catch you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
007: Where to start, when starting up? Part 2: Uncovering your target market and ideal customer.
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
All good marketing starts with the customer. So it’s critical that you have a clear picture of your target market and ideal customer. Join me, Lily Richmond, as we embark on part two in a seven-part series to empower you to start your marketing on the right track when you’re just starting out in business. In this episode, we will uncover how to nail down a specific target market, customer segments and ideal customer. If you’re ready to make your product or service hit home with the people that matter, this is an episode you can’t afford to miss.
I will explain the nuances of marketing with precision – it’s not just about casting a wide net, but fishing in the right pond. We’ll tackle the sweet spot between a tightly focused target market and maintaining financial viability. Learn how to weave demographics, geographic locations, and lifestyle factors into a vibrant picture that depicts your ideal customer.
Whether you’re a startup or an existing business re-evaluating your approach, this seven part series will help you get your marketing approach right first time.
Grab the downloadable workbook and get your pen ready. It’s time to market with purpose and power.
There are three exercises in this brainstorm:
- Defining your target market.
- Do you need to segment your target market?
- Create an ideal customer profile
Listen to the episode to hear me explain these fundamental building blocks of defining your target market and ideal customer so you create marketing that connects with the right people.
Need to grab the workbook from Part 1. Get it here.
Want to know more about target markets, segments, and ideal customer profiles? Read the blog post.
Got a topic you want me to cover? I’d love to hear your ideas!
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 007: Where to start, when starting up? Part 2: Uncovering your target market and ideal customer.
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Lily Richmond
Host
00:31
Hey, this is Lily. Thank you for being here today. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. I do really appreciate you being here and I’m also really stoked that you are taking some proactive steps to take control of your marketing. Now, this is your first time here. Don’t forget, hit the follow or subscribe button in your favourite podcast player, because today, like in every episode, I’m going to cover a marketing topic that I think you really have to learn if you want to master your marketing. And make sure you listen until the end, because I’m going to give you some practical steps and details of how to get a handy workbook to come up with your target market segments and ideal customer for your individual business.
01:17
Today is part two of seven in my series on where to start with your marketing when you’re just starting up in business. Now, in part one, I gave you some practical steps on how to make your product or service totally irresistible to your target market, and you’ll be able to find that in episode six if you haven’t listened to it already. But today, in part two, I’m going to give you the lowdown on how to define your target market and hone right in on who your ideal customer is Because, ultimately, your success is going to hinge on knowing exactly who your customers are and what makes them tick. Here’s one I’ve worked with small business owners. They’ve got a pretty broad idea of who their target market is, but that’s just it really. It’s really broad and often it’s too broad to be of any real value when it comes to being effective. Think of it this way your goal is to make your product or service seem like it was made just for your customer, and your marketing communications speak directly to them as an individual, and you can only achieve that with a clearly defined target market and ideal customer. So let’s get into the terminology so you can understand these concepts better, and I thought it would be helpful if I used an example so you can visualize them in action.
02:43
Let’s consider an imaginary person called Joe, and they have celiac disease, which is an intolerance to gluten, and they decided to start a bakery that sells only gluten free products. So let’s tackle what a target market is first, and we’ll use Joe’s bakery as an example. So your target market is the group of people who have a want or need for whatever it is you offer. This is the total opportunity that your business has to convert people into customers. So, in Joe’s case, to keep it simple for now, their target market is broadly anyone with a gluten intolerance in their town.
03:24
And I’ve started with a quite a broad definition of target market for this exercise today, because if you’re just starting out in your business, it’s important for you to be able to identify what your total market opportunity is. And why is that? Well, we want to know if there really is a viable market for the product or service that you’re going to develop. We need to make sure that you have a market of a size that’s going to enable you to make money from your new venture. So that’s target market. I’ve kept it really broad. I would say, however, that when you are defining your target market, you do narrow it down, and when we go through the exercise later, you’ll see I’m going to give you questions which are more specific and will allow you to have a much tighter defined target market. So next, we want to understand what market segments are.
04:16
Now, these are distinct groups within your target market that either have specific needs or different uses for whatever it is you sell, and they might have a totally different motivation for buying. Now, how would this apply to Joe’s Bakery, as an example? Well, they might have identified three clear segments within their target market, which is everybody with a gluten intolerance in their town. They’ve identified segment number one is people with celiac disease. It’s a life threatening allergy to gluten, and so they definitely need gluten free products. But Joe also knows that there are going to be people in their town that do not eat gluten because they feel better when they avoid it, but they don’t have celiac disease. So Joe defines this as segment number two. And then the third segment that Joe has identified is local cafes and restaurants who want to offer gluten free bread and other baked goods on their menus. Ok, so that’s a business to business segment within Joe’s overall target market. So can you see from that those people? They’re buying the same product, but they have different motivations and different needs, so there might be some different treatment that we need to think about in terms of marketing to those three groups. Now I want to point out here with segments, your customers within your target market might not be diverse enough for you to even warrant using segments. So you’ve got to use your judgment on that. A lot of marketing is really super practical. So just take a look at this when you’re doing the exercise and think do segments actually apply to me? Now some people might say, oh, you know, for a small business, you know it’s overkill to have segments as well as a target market and an ideal customer. Well, I think it’s important for you to just consider it Not necessarily use it, but consider it and I want you to understand the concept so you know what people are talking about when they say segments. So the third definition that we need to understand is an ideal customer, and this is a really crystal clear description of the person who it is that is most likely to buy from you. This is the person that you want to target with your marketing activity and who you want to have in mind whenever you are doing marketing, communications or social media, digital marketing. Here you want to be able to describe that person and you want to be able to build a really clear picture of them. Now, there are lots of names that get used for the term ideal customer. Things you might have seen are avatar, a customer persona, customer portrait or profile, buyer profiles there are lots of different terms for the same thing. So in Joe’s business example it might be busy working mothers who have a child with celiac disease. Okay, I’m keeping it really simple. Right now we won’t go into all of the detail of that person because I want to cover this in more detail in the exercise that we’re gonna do in the next part of the episode. So that’s target market, segments and ideal customer described, and have you noticed it gets more narrow as we go. So it’s a little bit like an inverted triangle where you start really broad with your target market at the top, you then have segments and then you have your ideal customer in the point at the bottom of that inverted triangle. So that is targeting done and dusted. Now what are the important things that you need to know or to watch out for when doing this exercise?
07:41
Firstly, I want to talk about niches. Where do they come into it? Everybody talks about finding your niche and I haven’t even mentioned it. Well, a niche is just a very narrowly defined audience that you are going to serve, where there is generally very little competition. You could argue that in our example of Joe’s bakery, that their target market is already a niche People who want gluten free baked goods within their town. That’s actually quite a small segment of the overall market for baked goods in that particular town, right, so that is actually a niche.
08:13
The idea really with targeting is that you want to be as narrow as possible but as commercially and financially viable as possible. Yes, there might not be any competition there, but there might not be enough business for you to make a viable return and keep your business afloat. Niche’s do need to be lucrative and actually, if you think about your ideal customer, that’s kind of a description of a niche in a lot of ways. Where Niche’s work really really well is where you have an online first or digital only business, where you’ve got very little overhead and you can be highly targeted with the marketing tools that you’ve got available to you to reach those people. If you’re a bakery or a plumber or a physiotherapist, a hyper focus niche could be a really challenging way for you to make a viable business. So I guess there’s a wider lesson here that one size does not fit all when it comes to marketing. There is no silver bullet or one way to do things, but if you understand these principles. You can apply them and you can flex it to fit your own situation. You don’t have to follow everything religiously into the letter.
09:19
Okay, so next up, I’m gonna give you some actions that you can take away to define your target market segments if you have them and your ideal customer. But firstly, I wanna highlight as well that you want to do this exercise, and then you might go back and re-look at your target market and narrow it down further, or you might make it broader. You might realize you’ve been too narrow to start with, and my tip for you is to get to your ideal customer. You need to know who they are and you need to be able to describe them to a friend so they could actually picture them, because that’s how you understand them in enough detail to be able to develop some great, effective marketing. So I’ve explained target market segments and ideal customer. How are you going to put this into practice? Well, after the break, I’m going to give you some practical steps so you can make it happen, and how to grab the workbook that gives you the space to get those ideas down on paper. Ok, first of all, I’ve created a workbook to go along with this episode, because I totally appreciate that you might be driving or you’re unable to drop everything and follow these steps and write your outputs down, so I’ve added a link in the show notes or you can grab it on my website at https://marketingondemand.co/startup2. And that’s number two.
10:38
So let’s start with your target market first. For the product or service that you’ve defined, we want to know who your target market is, and there are some questions that you need to ask yourself to be able to help you define it. So, number one I’d ask myself who has a need or desire for my product or service, and I’d want to describe who that person is. And how would you describe them? Firstly, the easiest way, and the one that springs to mind, is demographics. So their age, their gender, their sexual orientation, marital status, do they have children or do they only have pets? Where do they live? All of those sorts of things. It does help you build up a good picture, but you don’t have to follow this to the letter.
11:22
Another question I’d be asking myself is well, what geographical territory am I going to serve? Where is this target market physically located? I’d also, then, want to pick up some key points about their lifestyle. Maybe they’re massively into fitness, maybe they love classic cars. What is it about that person? Maybe they love travel. What are some of the key aspects of their lifestyle? And then I think about the motivations of that target market. What are the reasons why they’re buying that product? What’s that deeper reason as to why they’re buying? Now, a last question that I’d be asking myself is if I was selling business to business rather than business to consumer. What type of business are they? What size is their business? Why are they using this product and service and how are they using it?
12:09
Now, as another side note, if you are selling to other businesses, you will absolutely love episode four of the podcast, which talks all about buyer roles. So buyer roles are really valuable to understand if you are selling business to business. So have a listen to that one too. I’ll drop the details of that in the show notes as well. So that’s how you define your target market.
12:32
Second is do you have segments? So take a look at your target market that you’ve described. That’s the next thing I want you to do. Are there groups of people here that have distinctly different needs or problems that they’re trying to solve with your product or service? Are they buying it for completely different reasons. If the answer to that is no, then don’t worry, skip past segments. You don’t need it. But if you think that there are some real clear distinctions and types of groups of people that are gonna buy from you, then I would recommend that you do just jot them down for now and you can decide to use them or narrow down within those segments and only target certain ones, but just get it down on paper for now. So now you’ve done two things You’ve pulled together a really good description of your target market and now you’ve identified, if you have segments and you’ve given a bit of description around those two.
13:23
The third thing I want you to describe is your ideal customer, and this is where you get to be really creative. What do they look like? What sort of job do they do? What do they do on their weekends? Do they have a family? What sort of car would they drive? What media do they consume? What TV shows do they watch? What kind of social media do they use? You get the idea. I want you to describe a real person in a way that you can actually make this even more realistic is to grab a magazine or do a Google search and find a picture of someone who looks how you imagine your ideal customer to. You want to bring them to life as if they were a real person, and that can be a really handy little tip for you to be able to do that once you’ve pulled together that description.
14:09
Okay, so you are done. You’ve defined your ideal customer, as well as your target market and your segments. So now you know exactly who you’re going to target with your product, which you’ve already designed, which is totally irresistible to that audience. Now you might remember, in the last episode, episode six, I said you might need to go back to your product or service and refine it once you’ve identified your ideal customer. So I do highly recommend that you dust off your outputs from last week’s workbook and just sense check it. Has anything come out of today’s episode where you’ve defined your target market and ideal customer that changes what you came up with as your product? Are there some tweaks you need to make? So this ensures that what you plan to sell resonates with your ideal customer and that your ideal customer resonates with what you’re planning to sell. And another reminder if you haven’t listened to part one, head over to episode six, I’ll put a link in the show notes as well, and there’s a workbook for that episode as well, if you haven’t managed to do that yet. So that’s it. You now have an irresistible product and a really defined target market. You are well on your way to getting your marketing sorted when you’re just starting out.
15:26
Hey, thank you for being part of the huddle today. I really hope you enjoyed the episode and got some value out of it. I appreciate, yet again, it was another meaty topic. Now don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, because next time, in part three of the series on where to start with your marketing when just starting out, we’re going to come up with how you make your customers life better, and we’re going to do that in one sentence. So we’re going to put everything together that you’ve done in part one and part two. So make sure you download those workbooks and complete the tasks that I’ve shared.
16:04
This is going to be a great episode to give you a really single minded focus and the clarity you need to market your business effectively. And, as a quick reminder, visit the episode description to get access to today’s workbook to help you define your target market segments and your ideal customer profile. Or you can head over to my website and grab the download there. https://marketingondemand.co/startup2 and that’s number two. Thanks for listening and I will catch you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
006: Where to start, when starting up? Part 1: Make your product or service irresistible.
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
Make sure you create a product or service your consumer needs, and you are on the path to success in small business. Believe me, it will save you a lot of heartache and frustration in the long run.
This is the opener of a seven part series to help you lay the groundwork for you to start your marketing on the right track. This is perfect for you if you are starting out in business and aren’t sure where to start with your marketing.
This episode is all about why creating a compelling product or service offering is so critical to your success. I share a powerful brainstorming exercise to help you stand out in a crowded marketplace and build a product that consumers actually want. I’ve even developed an easy-to-follow worksheet to help you nail down your unique product or service offering.
There are five exercises in this brainstorm:
- What are you bringing to the world?
- Doing your competitor research
- What is important to consumers who buy your product or service?
- Standing out in your marketplace
- Putting it all together.
Listen to the episode to hear me explain these fundamental building blocks of creating a product or service your consumer actually wants to buy.
Got a topic you want me to cover? I’d love to hear your ideas!
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 006: Where to start, when starting up? Part 1: Make your product or service irresistible.
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Lily Richmond
Host
00:31
Hey, this is Lily. Thank you so much for joining me in this episode today. Now, if you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. You definitely make this huddle an awesome place to learn about all things marketing. And if this is your first time here, don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your favourite podcast player, because today, like in every episode, I’m going to cover a marketing topic you’ve really got to learn if you want to master your marketing. And, as always, make sure you listen until the very end, because I’m going to give you the inside track and an easy to follow worksheet on how to create a compelling product or service that people actually want to buy. So let’s get started Now.
01:14
Today’s episode is a little bit different because it’s going to kick off a series on where to start when you’re just starting out, and this idea actually came from a listener who asked me will you be doing an episode targeted to those who are just starting their marketing journey, when it’s a brand new business and they literally don’t know where to start? And I thought, hey, that is an awesome series of episodes that I could do, and particularly at the start of the year, when there might be a few of you out there who are brimming with a new business idea and you don’t know where to start. So you asked and I’m going to deliver. And on that note, actually, if you do have a marketing topic that you would find helpful for me to cover, definitely get in touch. You can find out how to do that in the episode show notes, so definitely check that out once you’ve finished listening. Now I put a lot of thought into what marketing tasks are absolutely critical when you want to start strong with a new business, and I wanted to distill this down so you can focus your energy on the most important things. And I know from my own experience that starting a business is really exciting, but it’s pretty scary too and at times it is really overwhelming. You know you go from having the nugget of an idea to having to work out your I don’t know your legal structure, how you’re going to develop a product, what roles you need to hire, opening bank accounts the list just goes on and on and on. And I totally appreciate that you might be in a space where you’re doing this for the very first time. You’ve never had a business before.
02:57
Going into business for the first time is, it is a full on thing, and feeling a bit all over the place is totally, totally natural, but together we’re going to make sure that, when it comes to the marketing aspects of your new small business, you know exactly what you need to do, and we’re going to filter out all of that stuff that just doesn’t matter at this point so you can focus. So there are going to be seven different topics that I’m going to cover over the next seven episodes, and today we’re kicking off with how to create a compelling offer that people just cannot resist. And why are we choosing that first as a topic? Well, I really think that you need to be able to spell out what it is your business brings to the world. And, second, you need to make sure that the world actually needs and wants what it is that you’re going to offer. Otherwise, being brutal, you’re actually wasting your time and money if you develop a business around a product or service offering that people just aren’t interested in buying. So we need to make sure that you get that right and, to be fair, this is one of the foundation or bedrock pieces of your marketing, whether you’ve started a new business or whether you’ve been in business for a while. So, without further ado, let’s get into it.
04:20
So what does it mean to create a compelling offer, and why is this an important first step for you? Well, I like to think about it this way A compelling product or service makes your ideal customer go oh, I’ve got to have that. This is just what I’ve been looking for, right? It solves a problem. It meets your customer where they are and it says this is how I’m going to make your life better. That’s a compelling product or service offering. Now you might fire back at me and say that’s all well and good, but there is huge competition out there in the space that I want to operate, and there are plenty of people doing what I’m about to start doing. How on earth am I going to break through? And this is the way you do it.
05:07
You be compelling in what your offer is. You’ve got to create that offer that gives your ideal customer a reason, a really good reason, to choose you over your competitors. And this is a key thing. It’s a key question that I ask consulting clients. So what? Why is your ideal customer going to choose your business over your competitors? And you can probably detect I get pretty passionate about this particular topic because it’s really simple but so often overlooked. So we are going to sort that out today.
05:44
Now you don’t have to be inventing something new with your business right. You don’t have to be zany and out there. You don’t have to be inventing something. You’ve just got to create a product or service with solid reasons, you know and I mean solid, right Things that you can prove and you can hang your hat on on why someone would choose you to help them solve their problem. And this is why I’m starting with your product or service offering. First, you’ve got to understand what you bring to the marketplace. Now I’ve got to caveat all of this that your first entry point into your marketing might not start here, with your product or service offering.
06:22
You might not have come up with your product or service idea first. You might have actually identified a target market that you want to go after and you’ve really got to come up with a product or service that meets something that that market needs. It’s totally cool to start with the customer first, before the product, but what I’ve tended to find in my experience is that most business owners have an idea of what it is they want to offer first, and then the market gets defined and refined after that, but that might not be the case for you. So if you want to start with the customer first, then you’ll want to listen to the next episode that comes out and that might make that first step more clear and easy for you, and then you come on to product. There’s no single way to do this. You can listen to the episodes in whichever way you want to. They all work perfectly fine together and you’ll probably need to come back to them. There’s no one single way to do any of this marketing like, but I’m just going to give you those key tools so you can actually work it out for yourself. Now, getting a really clear picture of your target market and your ideal customer are really important and they are very much linked to creating that compelling product or service offering. So once you’ve defined your target market and your ideal customer, in the next episode you might need to come back to this episode or the tasks from this episode to refine your compelling offer, because once you really get into the nitty gritty of who your audience is, you might need to refine your product further. But let’s not focus on that today. That’s what we’re going to cover in the next episode and really what you offer and to who they are intimately linked. But I really need to break this down and make it simple and digestible for you. And another aspect of developing your product or service for market is your pricing, and pricing is a big old, meaty topic that we’re not going to cover today here either. That’s going to be in a later episode in the series too. So park pricing for now.
08:25
I always think you need to have a market with something compelling to sell and then you can work out how you need to price it. Now, what are some of the benefits that you would get by focusing some of your time and energy now on developing a compelling product or service offering? I think there’s three key things. Firstly, your ideal customer is going to connect with it. The second is, you are much more likely to win customers, sell more products and get repeat business. And the third thing is it helps you be super clear and really intentional about what it is that you are really offering. Yep, it helps you just focus on those basics of what your business is here to do.
09:10
Now, okay, you understand why it’s important to have a compelling product or service offering. How on earth are you going to come up with it? If you listen in, after the break, I’m going to give you five actionable steps that you can take to make sure that you’re creating a product or service or business idea that people actually want to buy. Okay, it is time to grab some space your favorite refreshment and take some action Now. I’ve created a worksheet for this exercise because, yet again, like some of the others, you don’t want to have to write all these tasks down while I’m talking, and it can be a little bit overwhelming and you need time to think. So pop into the episode show notes, where I’ve dropped a link to grab it.
10:00
Okay, first up, number one you need to take the nugget of your product or service idea and get your head around what it does, who would use it and why and just freeform brainstorm this right out as many points that are coming to you as possible what it does, who would use it and why. Second, you need to look at what else is out there in your marketplace where you want to serve. Who else is doing this? How are they doing it? What do they do well? What do they not do quite so well? Where are the gaps? What are some opportunities that are maybe being missed in your marketplace? This is your market research, and a really good way to do it, I find, is put yourself in your customers shoes. Pretend that you are them shopping for what it is that you are going to offer.
10:52
Okay, task number three I want you to have a good think about the things that are important to your consumer, the things that they consider when they’re buying your product or service. What’s on their list of priority features and benefits? Now, don’t worry that you don’t know exactly, maybe, who that ideal customer is. Yet we’re going to get to that. Keep it broad for now. Anyone who’s in the market to buy your product, what’s important to them? Put yourself in their shoes, like you did in the market research section and list out the things what’s important to them when buying this product or service. The fourth task I want you to do is to have a think about how you’re going to stand out against that competition that you have assessed in action.
11:35
Number two what is it that you could do differently? And it doesn’t necessarily have to be that you do anything different. It could be that you’re doing something better, but this one I always think it’s easy if we consider an example. So think about our pizza takeout example that I’ve used in a previous episode. In your town there are probably plenty of pizza joints and they all make a living. There’s plenty of space in that market. You just have to identify what that unmet need is and go for it. So maybe your pizza takeout service let’s put yourself in the pizza takeout owner’s shoes Maybe you’re going to source all of your toppings locally and they’re going to change seasonally so that you’re reducing food miles and supporting other local producers in your town. Now that is a totally different concept to a big global chain like a, let’s just say, a pizza hut, for example. So you just need to think about how you are going to stand out. That’s number four.
12:36
Number five. I want you to now look at those outputs from the four tasks that I’ve just explained and I want you to summarize it by filling in the blanks of the sentence, and it goes a little something like this my product or service is, explain what it is in the blank, and then consumers will choose my product service, business over my competitors because blank. Now give yourself permission to take the time to sit and work through these tasks, and then you’ve completed item one of how to get your marketing started when you’re just starting out in business. That wasn’t so hard, was it? You’ve got this on to the next stage.
13:25
Thanks for being part of the huddle today. I hope you enjoyed the episode and you got some value out of it. Now don’t forget hit subscribe, because next time we’re going to delve into the second topic on where to start with your marketing when launching a new business, and that’s by defining your target market and your ideal customer. This is a biggie of a topic and it’s actually super, super helpful to revisit, even if you’ve been in business a while. And, as a quick reminder, visit the episode description to get access to my worksheet that’s going to help you complete the five tasks that I’ve talked about today, or you can head directly over to my website and grab it there. That’s at https://marketingondemand.co/startup1. Thanks for listening and I will catch you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle.
Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
005: How to Create a Clear, Actionable Purpose for Your Small Business.
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
If you thought defining a purpose for your business was just an exercise for big corporates, I am here to change your mind!
Unlock the power of purpose to be more efficient, effective and engaging with your small business marketing. Drawing inspiration from Simon Sinek’s insights, I’ll guide you through the significance of the ‘why’ in your small business, ensuring that your marketing efforts resonate with your target market.
A good purpose statement isn’t necessarily about saving the world; it’s about distilling your driving force into a clear, actionable purpose that informs every decision you make, especially in marketing! Get ready because, by the end of this episode, you’ll have a practical exercise and a handy worksheet to crystallise your business’s purpose and tips on applying your business purpose to your marketing.
This is a meaty episode with some brainstorming tasks. I recommend you have a think, and come back to it. Defining your purpose can take a bit of brain power. Grab a copy of the Create an Actionable Purpose Worksheet, and follow along. It also includes tips for applying your purpose to your marketing. Get it here.
Want to find out more about Simon Sinek’s inspirational thoughts on defining purpose? Check out the TEDX Talk he gave.
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 005: How to create a clear, actionable purpose for your small business.
Introduction
Announcement
Speaker 1: 0:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Speaker 2: 0:31
Hey, this is Lily. Thank you so much for being here today. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. You definitely make the Huddle an awesome space to be, and if this is your first time here, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, because today, like in every episode, I’m going to cover a marketing topic that I really think you have to learn if you want to master your marketing. Now, make sure you listen until the end, because I’m also going to share a brainstorming exercise and worksheet that is going to help you define your business purpose and three immediate actions you can take to use that purpose in your marketing activities. So let’s get straight into it.
In today’s episode, I am going to talk all about purpose, and there are three reasons I want to teach you about purpose in this episode. Firstly, it’s the new year, right, it is a great time to really refocus on why you’re in business and really what you need to do to achieve your vision of success over the long term. It’s always a great time to reflect and plan ahead. Second, you might be thinking about a new business idea and you’re going to take the plunge and you’re going to get started on that, and that is super exciting, but there is no better place to start than by defining your purpose first. And the third reason I’m going to talk about purpose today is that it really does touch all parts of your business, including your marketing. That is the one surefire way to be clear and consistent in your marketing so that you can connect with your target market and you deliver on what you promise. So today I’m going to teach you some simple ways to focus on your why, because for your marketing to be successful, your why needs to come before the what the doing aspect of your business.
So what does it mean to have a purpose for your business? To my mind, no one describes purpose better than Simon Sinek, if you’ve not come across him. He’s an author, an inspirational speaker and generally a bit of a guru on business leadership, and Sinek says that people don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it, and to me, this really is the perfect definition of what purpose is, and there is a great video it’s a TEDx talk explaining this in more detail, if this is really piqued your interest, and I have dropped a link to that video in the show notes, so be sure to check that out if you’re interested in finding out more. So purpose requires you to think about why your business exists. And if you think it exists to give yourself a paycheck or make you loads of money, then you definitely need to think more about your purpose, because those results that you achieve, the money that you make and the success that you achieve, is an outcome of delivering a business which has a purpose. Okay, so that’s kind of an outcome or a result of doing a great job running a business and ultimately, you’re going to be more successful and you’re going to make more money if you’re clear on what your purpose is, because it makes your business more compelling and more trustworthy to your consumers.
Now you might be thinking, boy oh boy, this is all corporate theory, I don’t need that, I’m a solopreneur, or my business is really small. Well, I’m here to change your perspective and challenge your thinking on that. I would say it is just as important for a small business to be clear on its purpose. And why is that? Well, I think of it in terms of three E’s It’ll make you more efficient, it’ll make you more engaging and it is definitely going to make you more effective. And that’s not just for your marketing, that’s going to be across your whole business. And how will it do that? Well, let’s start with how it makes your business more efficient. If you know what your purpose is, then you know exactly what you and your team if you have one should be doing every single day. You’re going to save a load of time. You’re going to save a load of money and resources Because you’re going to start weeding out activities that are not helping you drive towards what that purpose is. You’ll be focused, focused, focused, and this definitely applies across all of your marketing activities. Now, if you can describe and believe deeply in your purpose, it makes you more engaging. Your customer can understand your business really clearly and they get the underlying reason why you exist beyond making money, and they’ll connect with that. It makes you immediately more trustworthy if you’re doing something for a greater purpose than just a means to an end making money. Having a clear purpose also means that the marketing you do is going to be way more engaging, because every piece that you put out into the world will and should link back to that purpose and it will be consistent. Now you don’t have to say in your marketing what your purpose is, but you need to make sure that your marketing helps you achieve that purpose. And finally, having a clear purpose makes your business more effective Because you’re more likely to achieve the results you want by being efficient and engaging right. The results of your marketing efforts are going to be better Because you’ll prioritize and spend wisely, you’ll focus on the right activities for your business, and the activities you do will, in themselves, be immediately more engaging and enable you to connect with your target market.
Now, before I share a way to come up with your purpose, I want to put out there that your business does not have to save the world. There is a lot of chatter, and there has been a lot of chatter in the business world about being a purpose led business and that you have to have a purpose that connects to a greater good in society and that you’ll hear, to help save the world, and that’s very noble. And there are plenty of businesses out there that, just by their very nature of what they do, they can do that and that’s great, but it isn’t for every business. You know it goes without saying that we have to all be good citizens and we have to do our bit for our communities and our environment, but it doesn’t mean that your purpose has to be driven in that particular direction. More than anything, your purpose has got to be believable and it’s really got to be authentic and it’s got to fit your business and what you offer. You have to believe it, first and foremost because if you don’t, well then it’s not right. But also, consumers are savvy, they’re pretty smart and they will see right through it. So be honest and be authentic.
So let’s use some examples. Right, if you’re a dry cleaning business, your purpose might be enabling my community to look their best every day. Or if you run something like a pizza takeout service, it might be delivering the hottest, freshest pizza seven days a week. See how it has to fit your business and what you do. And it’s got to be inspiring right. That’s the idea of purpose. And even if I share what my purpose is for my business, if marketing on demand, my purpose is to help small business owners make better marketing decisions. That’s what gets me up in the morning and everything I do is geared around how I help small business owners make those better marketing decisions. So how are you going to come up with a purpose that is just right for your business? After the break, I’ll give you some specific questions and tasks for you to bring that purpose to life.
Okay, so are you ready to devise a meaningful purpose to guide your business? I’ve created a handy workbook for this exercise because I appreciate you might want to think more deeply about these questions and take your time, and you might not be in a place or a space where you can write down the questions that I’m going to ask you, so you can get the workbook at marketingondemand.co/purpose.
So what I want you to do is brainstorm the answers to these five questions. Number one why are you running your business and go deeper than to make money? What’s the greater, deeper meaning for running your business? Why did you start in the first place? Number two what are you and your team, if you have one, passionate about? What are the passions that your team and you have about running that business? What do you care about? Number three what does your community or the wider world in which you operate need? Now, that’s in relation to what your business offers. And number four what is your business good at? What are you known for? And number five how do you create value for your customers Meanwhile making profitability for your business? So those are the five questions. Once you’ve brainstormed those you know, take some time over them you might want to jot down a lot of ideas and you might want to come back to it, but now that you’ve answered these five questions, you can use the outputs to create a one sentence purpose statement that inspires your community and taps into your passion and strengths and value creation at the same time. Now, a good way to come up with the sentence is to start it with I get out of bed every day and make a difference by if you’re a solopreneur, for example, or self-employed, or if you have a team you could start it with we come to work every day to make a difference by filling the blank. Okay, so that gives you an idea about how you can structure the sentence. Keep it really short. Super, super short is better. So those are the five questions and how you can create your purpose statement.
Now, finally, how does this apply to your marketing? You’re thinking. Here are three things that I know that you can do to embed purpose into your marketing right away, as soon as you’ve defined it. Number one what elements of your customer experience do you need to change to live up to your purpose? Using our pizza takeout company example, are you really using the freshest ingredients? How easy is it for a customer to order? How do you make sure your pizzas stay hot? If this is what your purpose is, could your packaging be improved to retain the heat? See how purpose touches all aspects of your business, and that includes your marketing the way you answer the phones, your email campaigns, how they’re structured, what information you share. If you write blog posts, for example, how does that connect back to the purpose? Are you blogging about topics that relate back to that, or are you going totally off-piste and talking about something totally unrelated to your business? Bring it back to purpose. So that’s how purpose can help you really improve your customer experience. Number two identify all of the marketing touchpoints that you have and where you can start to include some of that purpose messaging into it. Think about things like your social media bios, your website, email footers, brochures. These are just some of the examples. Now, I said earlier that you don’t actually have to include your actual purpose statement in your messaging. That’s not required, but you need to get the intent behind that purpose into your messaging. It’s the how. So how do you bring that purpose to life? Number three and finally review the next. I would suggest 60 days at least of your marketing activity. If you’ve got that much planned in advance, is it aligned to your purpose? What do you need to change in order for you to bring that purpose to life in your marketing campaigns that you’re running? Is there messaging that needs to change? Are there activities that you’re doing right now that no longer fit because you’ve come up with something and you think actually my purpose doesn’t really align with what my marketing activity is? Is there something missing? Are there new ideas and opportunities that you’ve actually thought of as a result of that brainstorming that you could put into your plan? So those are three quick and easy things that you can go away and do to start implementing purpose into your marketing as well.
Wowwee, there is really a lot for you to take away and digest from this episode. I appreciate that, and don’t forget to make this really super easy for yourself. Pop over to my website and grab a copy of the workbook so you can work through the brainstorming and the actions I’ve just shared, and you can get that at marketingondemand.co/purpose.
Thank you so much for being part of the huddle today. I really do hope you got some value out of this episode and it’s motivated you to go and think more about the purpose of your business and how important it is, and making sure that you connect with your customers and you’re consistent all the time.
Now don’t forget to hit subscribe, because next time I’m actually going to kick off a series of episodes that are all designed to tackle where to start with your marketing. It’s quite possible that you’re about to, or have just started, a new business, and I thought this would be a perfect way to support you in the new year, since you might be brimming with new business ideas, especially if you’ve set some resolutions of things that you are going to do this year. So you don’t want to miss that next episode and that’s first one is going to drop on the week commencing the 15th of January. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll catch you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle.
Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
004: Are you Marketing to the Right Person? Navigating Buyer Roles.
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
Unlock the secrets of the buying process to market your business better. Join me, Lily Richmond, as I teach you about buyer roles and how they impact the decision to purchase your product or service. From the office manager who sparks an idea to the receptionist who could make or break your pitch, we dissect the roles of initiator, influencer, gatekeeper, decider, purchaser, and user; you’ll understand why selling is never just about the final handshake. With anecdotes from my days marketing credit card brands, this episode promises to equip you with the savvy needed to engage effectively with every player in the decision to buy from you.
Prepare to broaden your perspective on who you need to consider in your marketing. I share three key actions to help you improve your marketing by using buyer roles.
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 004: Are you Marketing to the Right Person? Navigating Buyer Roles.
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Lily Richmond
Host
00:40
In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about decision making and how more than one person could actually be involved in the decision to purchase your product or service, and why it’s really important for you to understand that. In marketing land, we like to use a lot of jargon, and buy a rolls is no exception, and it’s a term that gets bandied around quite a bit If you sell products or services to other businesses, for example, but it is equally important to understand if you sell to consumers as well. So today we’re going to unpick what buyer rolls are, why you need to understand them and how you can really use this information to tailor your marketing approach so that you can get more sales, because if your marketing is talking to the wrong person or ignoring an important influencer, then you are really leaving sales on the table that somebody else will very happily hoover up Now. I don’t want you to be that person, so let’s get straight into the topic of buyer rolls. Essentially, they are the various people who play a role in the decision to purchase a product or service from you, and there are six different buyer rolls. They are the initiator, an influencer, a gatekeeper, a decider, a purchaser and a user. Now, don’t worry, I’m going to explain all of these, so don’t get too worried if you haven’t memorized already what they all are. Now, depending on what your business sells, some of these rolls might be performed by the same person, but it’s handy for you to just think about these six rolls to work out which ones are relevant to your specific business situation. And we’re going to use a really super simple example to illustrate the point. So let’s pretend that your business hires out and maintains indoor plants for businesses in your town.
03:12
Let’s start with the person who is the initiator. So this is the person who comes up with the idea that something needs to be purchased. So in our example, the office manager in a local business might raise in a I don’t know a team meeting that it would be nice if the office was more visually appealing and healthy and that having some plants could help do that. So in that case, they have initiated the idea for the purchase in their team meeting. They are the initiator. Now, of course, this only applies if there is an initiator. Sometimes there isn’t, because someone isn’t shopping for whatever it is that you sell in your business. So, for your role as a business owner often is about generating demand for a product or service, so there might not be an initiator at all.
04:02
The next role is the influencer, and there could be more than one of these. An influencer is someone whose perspective or opinion is important or valued in the decision-making for your product. They influence the decision. So, using our example of the local business looking for plants for its office, other people in the team who are based in that office regularly, they might be influencers about whether they think it’s a good idea that they have plants there. Or maybe a connection within the office manager’s business network and coffee group has hired a company in the past for indoor plant maintenance and their opinion and experiences are valued to the office manager, making them an influencer. So influencers can come in all shapes and sizes, and this is a broader term than the idea that you might think of when you think of influencers and influencer marketing, because those are personalities who promote products and services specifically, but we all have influences in our lives.
05:09
The third role is the gatekeeper, and a gatekeeper is someone or something that controls the flow of information or access to the decision-makers and influencers. So how would this work in our plant hire example? Well, if you think about it, google could be a gatekeeper, because they hold and they display review information about your plant business. But it could actually be a person. So a gatekeeper could be the office receptionist. Who’s that first point of contact? Typically, a gatekeeper is someone that sits between you and your business and the influencer or the decision-maker. Let’s take our plant business example and imagine that you were proactively contacting businesses locally, trying to convince them to add plants to their office. Now, oftentimes you would be stopped at the receptionist or the office administrator. But actually you know that you need to get to that office manager or the business owner, as they have the influence and or the power to make the decision to buy. So your email that you’ve sent is getting stuck at the office receptionist and it’s likely to get buried. They often do, Because that receptionist either plays an active role in shielding the decision-makers from cold calls or they might just sit on that information and they might delete your email. So that’s what a gatekeeper is, and it is really key to understand if you have gatekeepers in your purchasing decision process, because they can really make or break whether you get sales through the door or not.
06:48
Now onto the fourth role. This is the decider. This one’s pretty simple it’s the person who makes that final decision to purchase. So let’s use our example again. Let’s say it’s the business owner who makes the final decision about whether the office is going to pay to have a plant, a higher-age and maintenance company work with them. So the office manager has presented the idea, they’ve gone and looked at some preferred companies and the costs for each of the businesses that are around locally and it’s that business owner who’s gonna make that final decision to give the sign-off for that spend.
07:21
Now the fifth role is the purchaser. This is the person who is going to make contact with your indoor plant hire and maintenance business and purchase from you and in this instance, let’s say it’s the administration assistant in the company. It’s not the owner of the company that’s actually purchasing, putting the card details in or making the call, getting a quote. It’s the office administrator. And then the final role is the user, and this is the person who benefits from the product or service, but they might not have actually played a role in influencing, deciding or purchasing. In this case the users are people who work in the office, but it could also be clients who come to visit and use your meeting rooms or sit in a reception area waiting for their appointment. They’re users too, so the user doesn’t always have to be the person who buys the product. So I’ve rattled through those six roles. Let’s just quickly go over them again. They’re the initiator, the influencer, gatekeeper, decider, purchaser and user.
08:23
So why is it valuable for you to understand these roles? Well, it helps you be more targeted and more effective in your marketing, and if you’ve listened to any of my earlier episodes already, you’ll realize that I am super hot on targeted and effective marketing, right? So how does it help you? There’s three key things, really, that can impact your marketing approach how decision gets made to purchase your product or service, who’s involved in that decision to purchase and at what stages, because your marketing might need to engage more than one user or more than the purchaser. There might be an influencer or a decision maker that you aren’t even taking into account today. It also helps you identify where those barriers might be, or information sources that you need to be part of because they are the gatekeepers, like, for example, an accredited industry database. If your business has some form of accreditation, then you might want to be on that accredited industry database as an example. So it’s a really good way for you to understand what those information sources are that you need to be part of and where potential barriers are in the buying process for your product or service. So let me give you a real life experience from my career that shows how important it is for you to understand buyer roles and how it influences the marketing that you do.
09:47
So I used to market credit card brands for a number of years and back in the day when sending direct mail was a thing yes, it wasn’t actually that long ago that direct mail was still being sent out but we used to send out promotional campaigns for double reward points or something like that, if you spent over the weekend on your credit card and we used to use clear plastic sleeves so that the person who picked the mail up through the letterbox could actually see what the offer was. Now, in this day and age, we probably wouldn’t send out plastic sleeves, but that’s another topic for another day. So why would we send out those clear plastic mailers? So you could see what the promotion was. Well, quite often the person who had the credit card account had a supplementary card holder, and often that would be a husband and wife or partners, so one of them would be the main card holder and then there’d be a supplementary card holder. Of course, the account holder would have to be sent that mailing. It would be addressed to them, but ultimately we knew that there’d be a big influence on purchasing decisions was actually the other party in the relationship, and so it was a really good way for us to be able to communicate out to some influences about promotions that were happening, even though we weren’t writing to them directly. So that shows you how you can tailor your marketing if you really understand who the various people are in the decision to purchase your product.
11:19
Okay, and next up, I’m gonna talk about how you can apply this concept in your business and the actions that you can take. Right, so now we understand the different buyer roles, but I wanna point out here that it’s really important that you keep it simple and remember that you really need to adapt these ideas to your business. You might not have all of these roles involved in the buying process. It might be just one person who initiates, decides, purchases and uses right, so don’t over complicate it if your product or service is really simple, but it’s a really good exercise if you go through and say, right, well, does that role exist in the decision to purchase my product or service? You know, what I’m trying to teach you here is how you apply these concepts in your business. It’s not just a one size fits all formula. And another thing to consider is whether you sell business to business or whether you’re selling business to consumer. Okay, business to business organizations when they are selling, often there are more people involved in the decision making process. That’s why I use the example of a plant high-region maintenance company selling to another business. So if you’re a business to consumer and it’s just one person or two people that are involved, that’s all cool, okay.
12:47
So what are the actions that you can take right now to implement this in your business? Okay, down to the actions. Here are three things that you can take away to gain clarity on who the real decision makers are for your product or service and really supercharge the effectiveness of your marketing. So, number one what I want you to do is get a piece of paper and write out each role, and I’ve actually created a worksheet for this, which I’ll talk about at the end. But if you’re not gonna download my worksheet, get a piece of paper and write out each role. And just a reminder number one is the initiator, number two is the influencer, number three is the gatekeeper, number four is the decider, number five is the purchaser and number six is the user.
13:36
The second action is I want you to walk through each of those roles for your business and jot down next to them, if there is someone in that role, who they might be, what they might look like, what are they interested in. Build up a bit of a picture about those people and what’s important to them. Once you’ve done that number three, there are three questions that I want you to answer. The first is who do I need to consider in my marketing? So once you’ve brainstormed each of those six roles and whether they apply to your business, now you know who you need to consider, so write that down.
14:12
The second question is how do I reach these people? What are they interested in? Where do they hang out? What sort of media do they consume? Who are their influencers? Build up a bit of a picture of them. So think about how you’re going to reach them.
14:26
And then the third question is what messages resonate with those people, what’s important to them, what’s their problem that they’re trying to solve or what’s the objection that they might have to your product or service. And if you’ve listened to episode one, you already know how to create engaging messages based on understanding your customer’s problem or need. Now, if you haven’t listened to episode one, have a listen after this episode and you’ll get a great set of actions and tips on how you can message more effectively based on your customer’s problem. Now you can go away and you can tailor your marketing and make sure you’re engaging the right people in it. And, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve actually created a worksheet for this, because I appreciate that it’s a bit jargon filled and there’s a few steps to this process. So either visit the episode description for the link or head to my website at marketingondemandco, and then it’s slash buyer rolls B-U-Y-E-R-R-O-L-E-S buyer roles or one word. So that’s it. You should have everything you need now to define your buyer roles and make sure that you are targeting the right people with your marketing.
15:44
Okay, that’s the end of the episode. Thank you so much for being part of the huddle today. I really hope you enjoyed it. Now don’t forget to hit subscribe, because next time we’re going to talk all about purpose and how getting clear on what yours is will make your marketing less icky and salesy and much more meaningful and engaging. And this is going to be a cracker of an episode to start the new year, so you don’t want to miss it. And as a quick reminder, visit the episode description to get access to my worksheet to help you work out your buyer roles and how to market to those people. Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you in the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
003: How to Boost Sales With Existing Customers on a Shoestring Budget
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
Are your existing customers the untapped goldmine for your small business? Join me, Lily Richmond, as we uncover this treasure trove, revealing the incredible potential for growth that’s right under your nose. This episode explores the importance of your existing customers in driving sales, and we’ll dive into fascinating statistics that prove it. New customer acquisition often gets the most focus, and while it is crucial for growth, small businesses often overlook a valuable resource that they already have – their existing customers!
I share share seven easy and nifty tips to elevate your sales – without burning a hole in your pocket! If you’re eager to sharpen your marketing skills and tap into the value of your existing customers then this is the episode for you.
Read more about how to boost your sales on a shoestring.
Ready to get your marketing sorted? Grab a copy of my FREE Marketing for Growth Guide.
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 003: How to Boost Sales With Existing Customers on a Shoestring Budget
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Lily
Host
00:31
Hey, this is Lily. Thank you for being here today for episode number three. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. You do make the huddle awesome, and if this is your first time here, don’t forget to subscribe, because today, like in every episode, I’m going to break down a marketing topic that I really believe you’ve got to learn to master your marketing. And make sure you listen until the very end, because I’m going to give you seven quick and easy ways to grow your sales without blowing the bank. So today we’re going to talk about how you can grow your sales quickly, cheaply and, hopefully, effectively, and the reason why I wanted to teach you about this topic.
01:18
It isn’t driven, really, by the fact that many small businesses have a small budget. To be honest, in my 22 plus years of working in marketing, I’ve never worked with an inexhaustible budget, and there is always a never enough for the wish list conversation. That happens in a business and budgets are managed tightly, and that holds true whether the budget for your business is $1,000 a year or half a million dollars a year. So my goal of discussing how to grow your sales on a shoestring is really to help you uncover the opportunities that are sitting right under your nose. So let’s get straight into it. When we work on our marketing, it’s really easy to get caught up in the chase for new customers. Now, don’t get me wrong A steady stream of new customers. It’s really critical to keep your business growing. I know that for certain, but what I do see time and time again is a lack of focus on existing customers. All those people that have purchased from you or worked with you before that have been left sitting in a database or on a spreadsheet or languishing in an email marketing list somewhere untapped and unloved, and they are a wealth sparing of opportunity for you and your business if you pay attention to them Now.
02:36
Throughout my career, I’ve done a number of roles managing existing customer marketing and, okay, it isn’t as sexy as going out there with a flashy new customer acquisition campaign I get it, but it is really critical and a valuable and often really overlooked stream of marketing that you, as a small business owner, should really prioritize. And why is that? Well, let me just give you some statistics that might blow your mind a little bit and get you focus. It costs about five times more to get more customers than to keep existing ones, and if that isn’t a juicy enough statistic for you, your probability of selling one of your products or services to an existing customer is upwards of 60%, but for a new customer it’s anywhere between five and 20.
03:28
Now, existing customers because they know who you are, they’re also much more likely to purchase a new product from you. So if they purchased a particular product or service that you offer and you’ve got a whole range of products and services that you could offer them, they’re 50% more likely to come and purchase a new product from you. They also spend, on average, upwards of 30% more than a new customer. So not only are they more likely to purchase from you, when they do, they’re going to spend more than a new customer. And that makes sense, right? If you think about your own behavior. When you go shopping for something or you use a particular service, if it’s a business that you’ve purchased from before and you trust them and you like them and you know them, then you are more likely to spend with them. I certainly know that. I do that myself as a consumer.
04:21
Existing customers are also great because they are more likely to recommend you to others, and this is free advertising and we all know the power of influences in this day and age, and it doesn’t have to be an influencer that’s on social media. It could be one of your friends, it could be someone at work, it could be a family member and they recommend a business to you, then you’re likely to trust that recommendation, and that applies to your small business too. So once existing customers have had a great experience with you, they are much more likely to recommend you. Free advertising Awesome, okay. So I hope these stats have made you sit up and take notice of your existing customers. They are a really, really valuable source of revenue to your business over the long term. And, as I’ve said in previous episodes, chances are your competitors aren’t focusing here either, and that makes it a great opportunity, because if you’ve got an existing database of customers and you give them the love, then you’re more likely to get more sales and win in a competitive environment.
05:28
Now we’ll talk in future episodes about how to build customer loyalty, because that’s a whole big topic that we can unpick in a number of episodes, but for today, I’m just going to share some easy, quick fireways for you to grow your sales from your existing customers. Are you ready? Let’s go All righty. Well, first things first.
05:53
Okay, I have to point out they’re really obvious but ignored task that many business owners really do neglect, and that is capturing your customer information. And you need to do that in some kind of a database. Now, it doesn’t need to be flashy, it doesn’t need to be a bells and whistles CRM system, but they are great. And if you want to use one, that’s awesome. It could be your email marketing software, but it could even be a spreadsheet that’s capturing the key metrics about your customers, the key contact details, what they’ve purchased from you before, maybe how often they’ve purchased, so those sorts of things you can be capturing. It doesn’t have to be fancy, so don’t let that stop you from getting started. Okay, now an important note as an aside on capturing and using customer data you’ve really got to make sure that you comply with the marketing and privacy requirements of your country first. So if you are not familiar with the regulations in your country and your jurisdiction, then please make sure you go and research that first. Please do swap up on those, because you don’t want a full foul of any regulations in your country and, of course, I can’t give you any advice on that.
06:59
Okay, so you are capturing your customer data. Now what? How do you go about growing those sales? Here are seven ways that you can grow your sales from your existing customers on a shoestring budget. So let’s get through them super fast.
07:15
Number one use your customer data to tailor your offerings. You know a monthly generic email out to your entire database is not enough, as I mentioned earlier, for your marketing to your existing customers to be powerful. It needs to be tailored. You do know information about them. You probably know some demographic information, but also you are going to know they’re purchasing history with you. What products and services have they bought from you before? How often have they purchased? How much do they spend every time they purchase with you? This information is really, really powerful because it allows you to send those customers tailored marketing offers for the things that they’re interested in and you can anticipate when they’re ready to buy next. So that’s the first thing using your customer data intelligently. If you’re not capturing that sort of customer information, I think a key action for you is to go away and think about how you might be able to capture that information to use in your marketing going forward.
08:12
Number two is regular customer communications. You know whether this is sending out an email or it might be communicating, engaging with your community on social media. Keep in touch. If you stay what we like to call in the business top of mind, then you really increase your chances of getting the sale. You know, think about yourself. If you’re a consumer and you’re thinking about buying a particular product or service and you see a brand that you’ve shopped with before keeping in touch with you, maybe sharing useful content on social media, that brand is front and centre and that could be just the push that you need to buy.
08:49
Number three remind your customers about your products and services. Don’t fall into the trap and make the assumption that your customer knows all about all of the products and services that you sell. To be honest, they’re not thinking about your business. They don’t care about it like you do. So you’ve really got to remind them of the value that you can bring to their lives with what you offer. So don’t feel shy about reminding your customers about the products and services that you offer.
09:17
Okay, number four is the upsell. So, depending on your business and the nature of what you’re offering is, you might be able to upsell a customer to a different or higher price point product or service, and this can be hugely profitable Because, as we’ve already talked about, this customer has purchased from you already. They trust you, they know you and hopefully they like you because you’ve delivered a great customer experience for them. So they are much more willing to give you that chance and buy a higher price product or a related item maybe to what they’ve purchased in the past. And if you don’t have a product or service that could be used as an upsell, then have a think about developing one. There could be opportunities here for you that you are leaving on the table if you don’t have an upsell strategy for your existing customer base.
10:07
Number five is a goodie which I love, and it’s called Surprise and Delight. Yeah, give your existing customers some love. You know it could be a customer or subscriber only discount. It could be a free resource or a tool that you only make available to them, or maybe it’s advanced access to any sales or new products that you’re launching. If you make your existing customer feel valued, then they’re more likely to shop with you again.
10:36
Number six is a bit of a bugbear of mine. This one just drives me mad. You know, if you’re a business that needs to generate quotes to create your sales. So you know, a consumer calls you up, requests a quote for you to come out and do some work for them, then the aim of the game here is just to be the most responsive. So that’s a really easy way and it doesn’t cost you a thing. With your existing customers, if they are requesting another quote from you, prioritize it.
11:05
And finally, number seven is all about asking for referrals, and you know I’m guilty of this and it’s something that we often forget to do when we are head down and so busy in our businesses. Right, whether it’s a structured program with an incentive, like a refer a friend program, you know where you both get a discount if you refer your friend to a business. Or it could be something more informal. You know, if you’re a service-based business and you’ve just finished a client engagement, ask them for a referral. Say to them do you know anyone else who would benefit from my service? You know, could you connect me to them? You would be so surprised at how willing other people are to refer you when they have a great experience with your business specifically. So don’t forget to ask for those referrals. It’s kind of that whole thing if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Okay, so those are my seven quick tips on how you can boost your sales on a shoestring Really quickly. I’m gonna go over them again.
12:06
Number one make sure you use your customer data to tailor your offerings and your communications to your customers. Number two communicate regularly. Keep in contact. When was the last time you went out to your customer base? These are really simple things to do. Number three remind your customers of your products and services. Your customer doesn’t think about your business like you do, so it’s important that you keep that top of mind with them.
12:32
Number four is upselling Really valuable, because we know that existing customers are more likely to purchase and they’re more likely to spend more. So make sure you’ve got a product or service offering that you can upsell. Number five surprise and delight. You know, throw something into a package where the customer order that goes out. Offer a subscriber only discount. There are lots of really cost-effective ways that you can reward your existing customers and generate that loyalty. Number six be responsive to quotes the supplies to you and your business. That’s a key one, really easy to fix but really important. And finally, number seven don’t forget to ask for those referrals. Okay, so that is the end of the episode. Thank you so much for joining me in the huddle today. I do hope you enjoyed the episode and got some great tips that you can apply in your business. Now don’t forget to hit subscribe, because next week I’m gonna explain why it’s so important for you to understand who the real decision maker is when someone buys from you.
13:35
And sometimes it’s not the actual person that pays the bill. This can really supercharge the effectiveness of your marketing, so I don’t want you to miss it, so make sure you subscribe. And finally, one last thing that I would love you to do once you’ve listened to this episode, is head over to my website and grab yourself a copy of my free marketing for revenue growth guide, and that’s gonna help you prioritize your marketing to the stuff that actually grows your revenue. You can get it at marketingondemand.co/growthguide and growth guide is all one word. Thank you so much for listening to this episode and I will catch you next time in the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
00:40 / 14:43
002: What is Your Biggest Marketing Growth Challenge and Why it Matters
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
What if you could conquer your biggest marketing growth challenge with a new, refreshing approach? Here’s the deal: this Small Business Marketing Huddle episode is about doing fewer things exceptionally well, rather than spreading yourself too thin. So how do you achieve this? In this episode, I share an easy approach to focus clearly and make real progress by nailing down your biggest marketing growth challenge to maximise your budget’s potential.
As we edge closer to the new year, it is time to start thinking about what you want to achieve, and how your marketing can support your business goals. I know you’re keen to make 2024 your best year yet, and I’m here to help you do just that.
When you look at your business now and what you might want to achieve for the next year, what should your marketing focus on to help you get there? Here are some examples. Maybe you want to:
- Build your brand awareness
- Enter into a new marketplace
- Reposition your business into a different lucrative niche that you’ve uncovered in the last year
- Deepen relationships with your existing customers
- Set your business apart from your competitors with a new service offering that you’ve come up with
These are big, meaty marketing challenges to overcome in a year. Could you imagine doing all four of those at once in a year? It’s going to be really hard when you’re a small business and you don’t have a big marketing team or a big marketing budget to play with. Prioritising and being super focused and intentional is key. I share five reasons why identifying what your overall marketing challenge can help you market your small business better.
Ready to get your marketing sorted? Grab a copy of my FREE Marketing for Growth Guide.
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Episode 002: What is Your Biggest Marketing Growth Challenge, and Why it Matters.
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Lily Richmond: 0:31
Hey, this is Lily. Thank you so much for being here today. If you are already subscribed to the show, thank you so much. You guys make the huddle an awesome place to be, and if it’s your first time here, don’t forget to subscribe, because today, like in every episode, I’m going to cover a marketing topic that I think you’ve really got to learn if you want to nail your marketing for your small business. And make sure you listen until the end, because I’m going to share a technique that’s going to help you filter out all of that noise and distraction and focus on the marketing that really matters most for your individual business.
So today’s episode is all about a concept that I like to call your biggest marketing growth challenge, and the reason I wanted to teach you about this upfront early on in the podcast is that I use this with most of my clients, and it is a really helpful way to think about the big picture, really when it comes to marketing your individual business and making sure that you do a small number of things really well, rather than doing lots of things and maybe not doing them quite so well because your focus is spread so thin, and you know what. This is super timely, given that we are rounding out 2023. My goodness me, how did that happen? And 2024 is going to be here before we know it, and it’s a really good idea to start thinking about what you want to achieve next year now. So let’s get straight into it.
Firstly, I feel like I kind of need to set the scene a bit first. So if we think about next year 2024, you might say, have five goals or business priorities for the year that you want to focus on and look back at the end of the year and go, yeah, cool, I achieved that. Chances are that probably equates to I don’t know 20, 25 different marketing activities that you might have to do throughout the year to help you achieve those goals. And the problem really arises that when you’ve got so much to do, your focus gets split. It’s like I guess the only way that I can think about describing it is like having 25 tabs open in your internet browser at once. It gets a little bit overwhelming and you’re not quite sure where to start, where to go next and what to finish off, and it actually splits your budget and your resources, which I think can be pretty problematic if you’re a small business and you’ve actually got a small marketing budget to play with in the first place. You know it can often be better at times to spend a larger chunk on a few activities and do them really, really well, rather than spending really small amounts on many things, because sometimes you’ll struggle to get that cut through that you need, especially with things like digital advertising. That’s a really good example of there are really minimum budgets that you need to be using to play with to actually get cut through, get some good results. Otherwise, you can be wasting your money a little bit sometimes in those areas. Now it’s not to say that small you know really small budgets don’t work but it’s more that if you can concentrate and focus that money and effort and time into a small number of activities, you’ve got a greater chance of those succeeding.
So the question for you is looking at your business now and what you might want to achieve for the next year. What does your marketing need to focus on to help you get there? Just to give you some examples is it to build your brand awareness? Maybe you want to enter into a new marketplace, or maybe it’s that you want to reposition your business into a different lucrative niche that you’ve uncovered in the last year. Or maybe you want to deepen relationships with your existing customers. You might have quite a large engaged customer base already that you really want to focus on giving the love and delivering more business through. Or maybe it’s to set your business apart from your competitors with a new service offering that you’ve come up with. These are quite big, meaty marketing challenges to overcome in a year. Could you imagine doing all four of those at once in a year? It’s going to be really hard when you’re a small business and you don’t have a big marketing team or a big marketing budget to play with.
So prioritizing and being super, super focused and intentional, I think, is really key. So once you’ve settled on what your biggest marketing growth challenge is, then you can create a marketing plan and a budget and a calendar all around that biggest marketing challenge. So everything that you’re going to do in that particular year is going to feed up into that overall goal, which will ultimately help you achieve your business objectives for 2024. So, if we think about your biggest marketing growth challenge, how does it actually help you market better?
So here are just five ways that I think it’s going to help you, and I’m sure there are many more than five ways, but firstly, it’s going to make you feel less overwhelmed. Second, you’ll have a clearer sense of purpose around your marketing. Thirdly, it becomes easier to prioritize. You will know which activities are important and which ones can be deprioritized, depending on what you’ve got going on. Number four your marketing really has a much greater chance of being consistent and integrated. You’ll be hitting the same messages throughout your marketing activities in the year. Number five back to budget again. It can be used much more effectively. I’ve already mentioned it, but really when you focus on a smaller number of focused activities, you get much more bang for your buck. So how do you come up with your biggest marketing growth challenge?Stay tuned and I’ll give you the easy to action steps to create yours.
So we are down to the business end of the episode. How do we apply this concept in your business? Well, I guess the first thing I want to preface this with is there is no single right answer here. Your business is unique and what you want to achieve from it is individual to you. So don’t get caught up worrying if your goals are the right ones and if your priorities are the right ones, or if your biggest challenge is the right one. There is no right one. There are many, many options in marketing that you can always choose from. So it’s progress over perfection here, and don’t worry about being able to tick a box with the right answer.
So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, what are the actions that you can take right now to implement this? Well, first, up with 2024 coming, I want you to sit down with a coffee and plan out your top business goals first. And if you’re not sure how to do that, or if you haven’t done that before in your business, here are two quick and easy ways to help you brainstorm. Firstly, look at your performance this year and ask yourself how do I want to improve my business on 2023? What could I do to take my business to the next level? And that doesn’t have to be the business getting bigger, it could be the business getting better. And the second tip for brainstorming your business priorities is ask yourself this question when I reach the end of 2024, what will a successful year have looked like in my business? And jot down your ideas around that. That’s a really good way for you to project forward and think about what you want your business to achieve, so that you can work backwards if you want.
So hopefully, those two ideas can help you get your inspiration flowing around your business objectives. Once you’ve done that, the next thing to do is to look at your business goals and brainstorm the different marketing activities that you could action to help you achieve that goal. So, for each of your business goals, write down all of those different marketing activities that you could do throughout the year that are going to help you achieve that. Once you’ve done that, then look at all of those marketing activities that you’ve listed down and have a look. Are there some themes emerging? Is your marketing all about growing awareness? Maybe it’s about growing market share? Maybe all of your marketing is related to launching a new product or service, or could it be fully maximizing your loyal customer base. That you’ve got and you want to be able to really cement your position in your market is the best at what you do. So these are just some examples, and there are plenty more, but it’s a really good way for you to start to tease out and look at those marketing activities that you’ve defined for those business goals and start to say, actually, what’s the common thread here? What’s my overall goal with my marketing. What do I really need to do? What’s going to move the needle more than anything else? And then that’s how you come up with your biggest marketing growth challenge. And again, this is unique to you and your business. There are no right or wrong answers here, and hey, if you’re not happy with it, you can change it Easy peasy.
Okay, so you’ve now landed on your biggest marketing growth challenge. I want you to then write that at the top of your marketing plan or your marketing calendar whatever you use to plan your marketing for the year and you can then start to list out those activities that are going to help you get there. And, hey presto, you’ve done that in the previous exercise. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got your biggest marketing growth challenge front and center, it’s a great time to assess your budget. Is your marketing budget going to be going towards activities that are going to help you meet that challenge and achieve success? And that should be the yardstick with which you determine what activities you’re going to do and which ones you’re going to pass on. So, if we can get a practical level, how does this work? If you wanted to say, cement your market position as one of the best in your industry and your category for what you do and you want to use Facebook to do that, then you might use Facebook to share testimonials, or you might ask customers to share their photos of what they love about your business or your products and services, and this is called user generated content, and we’ll talk about that in a future episode. But that’s how you could use Facebook to really position yourself as a leader in your particular field. Another way might be that you want to create an automated email campaign that goes out to your customers with a satisfaction survey, so you can share how happy your customers are. You can put that on your website. You can also keep potential suppliers updated. There are loads of ways that you can use a customer satisfaction survey to your advantage to help you market. So can you see how this is all super focused and helpful, because it makes you really single-minded in the things that you do, in the effort that you make, so that when the next marketing agency knocks on your door and they’re trying to I don’t know sell you some advertising space, you’ll be primed to ask yourself does this help me achieve my biggest marketing growth challenge? That way, you can make the best possible decision for your business and your individual budget. So there was quite a lot to unpack there. Quite a few actions for you to take as a result to come up with your marketing growth challenge.
So just to recap number one come up with your business goals for 2024. Number two brainstorm all the marketing activities that you could do to help you achieve each of those individual goals. Three look for the themes and patterns. Ask yourself overall, what does my marketing need to achieve for me to hit my business goals? And four write that growth challenge down and put it on the top of your marketing plan or your marketing calendar, and it’s a perfect way for you to filter marketing in and out of your plan based on your priorities.
Thanks for being part of the Huddle Today team. I really do hope you enjoyed this episode. It was a little bit of a meaty one, but I think, such an important way to start thinking about 2024 now. Now don’t forget to hit subscribe, because next week we are going to cover how you can get more sales for your business on a shoestring budget, so you definitely don’t want to miss it. And one other thing I’d love for you to do once you’ve listened to this episode. Head over to my website and you can grab yourself a copy of my free marketing tactics for growth guide, which will help you prioritize your marketing to the stuff that actually grows revenue. You can get it at https://marketingondemand.co/growthguide – all one word. Thanks for listening and I’ll catch up with you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only . We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
001: Master the Art of Marketing Your Small Business
Episode Summary
Transcript
Episode Summary
Are you ready to revolutionise your marketing approach and set your small business apart from the crowd? You’ve come to the right place! I’m your host, Lily Richmond, and I’m excited to kick off our journey together. In the inaugural Small Business Marketing Huddle episode, where I explain why you should listen in, a bit about me and how the huddle will work.
I started the Small Business Marketing Huddle because I know that marketing can be really overwhelming when you’re a small business owner. I get it. You constantly have to pivot from being the CEO to the Head of Finance or, of course, the Head of Marketing. It just doesn’t stop! So I’ve created this podcast to cut through that noise specifically. I’m going to walk you through the marketing concepts you’ve got to crack if you want to succeed over the long term.
So if you’re a small business owner who wants to market your business better, but at the moment you’re finding it’s all a little bit overwhelming, then I’m really, really glad that you are here, because we are going to build your knowledge so that you can market your business confidently.
In this episode, I spill the beans on a game-changing messaging hack that can connect you with your customers like never before. It all starts with understanding what problem your customer is trying to solve, and how you solve it better than anyone else. I share some quick and easy tips to help you uncover your customer’s problem and ways you can use it to improve your messages in your marketing so you engage, connect and convince prospective customers to buy from you. Head over to my blog post for more information.
Ready to get your marketing sorted? Grab a copy of my FREE Marketing for Growth Guide.
Transcript
This transcript was generated via an automated transcription service for your convenience. Please accept my apologies for any errors in the automated translation from voice to text.
Podcast Episode Transcript | 001 – Master the Art of Marketing Your Small Business
Introduction
Announcement
00:05
Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let’s huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.
Lily Richmond
Host
00:30
Hey, this is Lily. Thanks for being here today and welcome to episode one of the Small Business Marketing Huddle podcast. I am so glad that you have found it. Now, if it is your first time here, don’t forget to subscribe, because today, like in every episode, I am going to cover a marketing topic that I really think that you have got to learn if you want to master your marketing. Today’s episode is a short one. I am going to share a little bit about the podcast, what it is about, a bit about me and what you will get out of it by tuning in, and, if you stick around to the end, I will share a tip on how you can beat your competitors with a really, really simple messaging hack.
01:15
So let me tell you a little bit about the podcast. I started it because I know that marketing can be really overwhelming, right when you’re a small business owner, I get it. You’re constantly having to pivot from being the CEO to the head of finance or, of course, even the head of marketing. It just doesn’t stop, and so I’ve created this podcast to specifically cut through that noise. I’m going to walk you through the marketing concepts that I guess. I think you’ve really got to crack if you want to succeed over the long term. So if you’re a small business owner who wants to market your business better, but at the moment you’re finding it’s all a little bit overwhelming maybe you don’t know where to start or maybe you’re actually not sure if what you’re doing is even working then I’m really, really glad that you are here, because we are going to build your knowledge so that you can market your business confidently.
02:13
So a little bit about me. I’m Lily Richmond and for oh, I guess it’s probably more than 22 years now. I’ve had a pretty diverse career in marketing in international markets across Europe and Australasia. You know I’ve driven results for some pretty well-known Fortune 500 brands, but I’ve also consulted and supported small business owners to get more out of their marketing. And hey, I’ve got a small business too, marketing on demand. It’s a consulting and training business specifically for small business owners. So I do get what it’s like to be a small business owner and how to market small business.
02:52
I’m based here in New Zealand and this podcast is brought to you from my home office, which I do share with my two dogs. So that means that from time to time you might hear the odd bark, or you’re more likely to hear gentle dog snores in the background that I just can’t edit out that easily. Now I’ve created this podcast because I live in, breathe marketing and I’m really passionate about sharing what I’ve learned throughout my career along the way with small business owners so they can market better. You know, I’ve seen plenty of business owners in that hamster wheel getting very worn out by their marketing or they haven’t been able to make the best decisions around it because you know they don’t have the knowledge and the confidence that they need. But I also hate seeing a small business owner spend their marketing budget on the wrong things. So we are going to fix that together. So what can you expect when you tune in?
03:50
Each huddle episode is intentionally short, and that’s because I know that. You know you’ve probably got 101 things to do and you really don’t have time for waffle. So the huddle is a place where I’ll break down a marketing concept in really simple terms, with as little jargon as possible, and I’m going to explain how it applies to you as a small business owner and to help you make traction with that marketing. I’m also going to share ideas, tips or some actions that you can take right away to implement that marketing concept in your business. I really want this podcast to be focused on action so you can actually put these things into place. So here’s a teaser of the next episode to get you started
04:45
Looking at your business now and what you might want to achieve for the next year what does your marketing need to focus on to help you get there? Just to give you some examples is it to build your brand awareness? Maybe you want to enter into a new marketplace. Or maybe it’s that you want to reposition your business into a different lucrative niche that you’ve uncovered in the last year. Or maybe you want to deepen relationships with your existing customers. You might have quite a large engaged customer base already that you really want to focus on giving the love and delivering more business through. Or maybe it’s to set your business apart from your competitors with a new service offering that you’ve come up with. You know these are quite big, meaty marketing challenges to overcome in a year. Could you imagine doing all four of those at once in a year? It’s going to be really hard when you’re a small business and you don’t have a big marketing team or a big marketing budget to play with. So prioritizing and being super, super focused and intentional, I think, is really key. So once you’ve settled on what your biggest marketing growth challenge is, then you can create a marketing plan, and a budget and a calendar are all around that biggest marketing challenge. So everything that you’re going to do in that particular year is going to feed up into that overall goal, which will ultimately help you achieve your business objectives for 2024.
06:14
Okay so, at the top of the episode I promised I would share a simple messaging hack to help you connect with your customers better than your competitors. And really it all is pretty simple and it starts by solving your customers’ problems or challenges that they’re having better than anyone else. Successful marketing starts by understanding what your customer’s problem is so you can create a product or service that solves that problem for them. That’s the exchange between consumer and business, ultimately. But how do you work out what challenge your customer is actually trying to solve? Well, it’s time for a bit of desk research and brainstorming, and there are some really easy ways to gather some market intelligence.
07:00
There are a few ways that you can gather information about what customers are asking or what they’re searching for when they’re looking for a product or service like yours. So head over to Google or whichever internet browser you use and put yourself into that customer’s shoes. What would they be typing into Google? What questions would they be asking? And actually, google helps you with that. So you know, when you start typing something into Google, it’s already predicting what you’re wanting to type. Well, that’s a really great tool, because that tells you what people are actually typing in, the sorts of things they are asking. So make some notes around those. Secondly, you might be familiar that when you scroll down the page, there’ll be a section where it has related questions that people have asked. And this is gold, because this will give you the other types of questions that people are asking that relate to your product or service. So jot those down as well.
07:59
A second place that you can go and look for this type of information is community pages on social media that might be related to the product or service that you offer or the problem that you solve. So if you sell gardening products, for example, it might be really good to get onto some gardening related Facebook communities and you can start to see what sorts of things people are asking about. What types of questions are they asking for help on? Where are they getting stuck? That can help you define what those problems are that your consumers are solving. And a third area that you can go and have a look are places like Quora or Reddit. There are other websites where people can go and ask questions and a community of people will answer them for them. You know, I certainly use it in my business to try and understand the sorts of things that small business owners might be asking about marketing. I go onto Quora and Reddit for small business marketing channels and I have a look and see what types of things people are commonly asking about. That helps me tailor what I do.
09:00
Okay, so you’ve gathered that information. How do you now use it? Well, it’s time to look at your marketing communications that you currently have. I want you to look hard at your current marketing and be honest with yourself. Are you talking about how great your product is or what features it has, or are you actually explaining how you’re solving your customer’s problem? It’s fine to talk about the features of your product or service I’m not saying don’t do that but it needs to be within the context of how it helps that consumer solve the problem that they are looking to solve. So you want to make sure that your marketing messages are explaining how you’re going to help that customer solve their problem. You gathered that great intel online to find out what your customer is trying to figure out. So now it’s time for you to answer those questions and whatever marketing that you create Now you can weave your answers to those questions and to say your product descriptions.
09:57
If you have a website, social media posts, email campaigns, and it’s going to give you some great ideas for things like blog posts or a frequently asked questions section on your website, it really demonstrates to your customer that you understand what they’re going through and you actually have a way to help them move forward or go from A to B. So whenever you attempted to explain what your product does, a big piece of advice is flip it. Explain how your product or service that you offer helps, and you’ll go a lot further, and I can guarantee you most of your competitors are probably not doing this, so it gives you a major advantage and a way for you to connect better with your consumer. So that’s just a really simple little messaging hack Just flipping your thinking from talking about what you do and what you offer to how you actually help your consumer solve their problem is a really big way for you to be able to make a bigger impact with the marketing that you do. Thanks so much for being part of the huddle today.
11:08
I really hope you enjoyed the episode and don’t forget to hit subscribe, because next time we will cover how to unleash the power of focused marketing efforts by nailing down what your biggest marketing growth challenge is, and I’ll explain all about it in that next episode. You don’t want to miss it. And one other thing I’d really love for you to do once you’ve listened to this episode head to my website and grab yourself a copy of my free Marketing for Revenue Growth Guide. It’ll help you prioritize your marketing to the stuff that actually will grow your revenue, and sometimes we do all need a reminder of that. So it’s got some really quick and easy tips and well laid out explanation to help you.
11:51
You can get that guide at my website, which is https://www.marketingondemand.co/growthguide. And that’s growth guide. All one word. Thanks for listening and I will catch you at the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.
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