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Five Secrets To Writing Great Copy

There are 5 major components to good advertising copy and the order of these is essential to success!

You must:
• Command Attention
• Showcase the benefits of your Products or Services
• Prove the Benefits
• Persuade People to Embrace the Benefits
• And finally, use a Call to Action – ask the customer to DO something right then!

Advertising is sales in print. So, you need to think about the unique benefits your products or services offer and showcase that in a persuasive way. You need to emphasize results, not features.

Let’s take a minute to talk about each of these components:

1. The first thing you must do is get the Attention of you customer! This is usually accomplished with the headline. You need an attention-getting headline that makes people want to know more about your product or service. The best headlines give you the benefits or show how a problem can be avoided by using your products or services. The headline is the advertisement for the advertisement.

2. You MUST showcase Benefits: You have to showcase the benefits of your products and services and, more importantly, show how they will solve or prevent a problem. It needs to answer the customer’s question: “What’s in it for me?” Be sure to include useful, factual and clear information to show precisely what the benefits are and how they are going to help the customer.

3. Next you need to offer proof. You must establish that you’ll deliver on your promises. The proof you use should establish credibility and show your past accomplishments.

4. Once that is all done you need to persuade your potential customers. You’ll need to add compelling reasons for your potential customers to purchase your products or services. At this point, I suggest using a hard sell approach and creating scarcity. This will make your potential customers feel like they have to act now, which leads into the last component.

5. The last component is a Call to Action. You need to compel your potential customers to DO something. You need to tell them what to DO. It may be that you want them to check out your site, sign up for your newsletter, purchase your products, contact you about services…something. Offer them a freebie – a free report, a sample, a product, a bonus, a demo, a consult, limited time pricing…the list goes on. There are lots of ways to get potential customers excited about ordering and help them feel like they are getting an amazing deal.

Good advertisements include all of these components and are not complete without any of them. You can sit down and think through any one of these components, then figure out how to put them together for the most effective response. We can help you with this, too. Try our FREE test drive to learn how to put together great ads. For more information and your free test drive, go to www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com!

Direct Response Marketing Is The ONLY Way To Go!

Direct response marketing is marketing that is measurable, trackable, and demands a direct response from your potential customers. This type of marketing is used to answer questions, present your products, and to introduce the reason you do what you do. Customers love this, as they are offered the opportunity to respond, whether that be in the way of signing up for a newsletter, posting a comment on your site or blog, participating in a survey or purchasing a product from you.

So, what does direct response marketing look like? Well, it comes in many forms, including direct mail, print ads, radio and TV ads, coupons or other incentives…even telemarketing!

The biggest reason to use direct response marketing is because it offers measurable results so you know exactly what IS and what IS NOT working as compared to traditional advertising, where it’s all about building your “brand.” If you are a small company, you must be able to track your marketing dollars back to what works.

Some other advantages of direct response marketing are that it’s a productive way to communicate with your customers and gives you the opportunity to create more relationships. It’s a great way to up-sell and cross-sell to current customers. Direct response can be used as leverage to turn small sales into large sales. Direct response is a cost-effective way to reach specific target markets and it helps you reach outside your local area for new business. Lastly, direct response increases the effectiveness of your sales force.

These are all the great things that can come together when you put a direct response marketing plan in place and execute on it.

Jay Abraham says, “I honestly don’t think you’ll ever find a safer, lower-risk, higher-profit method of increasing your business or profession than direct-response marketing.”

Direct response marketing is one of the best ways to launch your business on a large scale and reach out to everyone in your target market whether they are in your local area or not. Our FREE test drive can help you put together a great direct response marketing plan and get you on your way to success. For more information and your free test drive, go to www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com!

The Three Essential Start Up Marketing Tools to Keep Your Customers For Life

Let’s talk about the three most important start up marketing tools you need to get and keep new customers, and how to implement them.

The three most important tools you can use are:

1. Go meet your customers in person! It’s essential for you to meet with your customers or clients in person whenever possible. This shows you respect them and that you will take the time to work with your clients to give personal attention to each of them.
2. After your meeting, always take a moment to send a follow up letter about what you talked about, new agreements or partnerships made and to thank them for taking the time to meet with you. Likewise, you should always send thank you letters or small gifts to partners you find success with.
3. Use a phone call to follow up with your customer to talk further about the matters you covered in your meeting and offer any assistance you can to help their business run smoothly and more successfully.

In our high tech society where everyone emails and texts, it’s these personal touches that will begin to make you stand out from your competition.

And remember…none of these will work if you don’t have a quality product or service to back you up!

Here are the five key steps for putting together your start-up marketing tools:

1. Research potential customers, buyers, competitors and their preferred methods of distribution.
2. Talk to potential customers. Take a hard look at your product from a customer’s perspective and see what it needs to be successful.
3. Follow up with your 3-step process from above.
4. Develop systems for contact follow through, quality control standards and customer service.
5. Lastly, develop a post-sale follow up system to keep the lines of communication open to customers and build on your current relationship which will increase future purchases.

Peter Drucker, a management consultant says, “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs” – and it is so, so true.

Here’s another one I love from an icon:

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” That’s a quote from Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company.

I hope you take this lesson and assemble the tools you need to put together a start-up marketing plan that can be used over and over again to help your customer base and business grow in a manageable way.

The tools offered in our FREE test drive offer these very same things. For more information and your free test drive, go to www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com!  Let us show you how to put together the resources and tools you need to keep your customers coming back for life!

Keep Your Customers For Life

Keep your customers for life? It sounds like a great dream…but how? Well, consider this: most businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you must spend time retaining current and former customers. These are people who have already bought from you!

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and spend less time trying to sell old products to new customers. When you do, you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

Here are a couple of keys to retaining your current customers.

Stay in contact: You can do this by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person…or how about this?  Send a handwritten thank you note!  When was the last time you got a handwritten thank you note from a business or salesperson that you did business with?

You need to follow up with your customers. Your customer needs to feel like they are being supported after their purchase. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt like you were completely abandoned? This happens to me all the time – especially when I buy software!  You think the software will solve some big problem and then you get home and remember,  “Oh yeah, I have to actually LEARN how to use the software first!”  Something as simple as a thank you email to your customer introducing your customer service center can go a long way in retaining a great customer.

Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business!  One of my biggest pet peeves is when businesses offer specials to entice new customers to come in but do little or nothing in the way of discounts or deals to KEEP me as a customer – it really drives me nuts when I’ve been a long standing customer and get no ‘reward’ or discount to show me they appreciate me!  They are so busy trying to get new customers that they don’t spend enough time or money on keeping their current customers. Don’t let this happen to you and your business. One of the best ways to thank your current customers is to start a loyalty club specifically to reward longtime customers. Another option for this would be to offer preferred pricing to loyal customers.

Lastly, have some integrity!  Implementing good business practices and simply having integrity, dignity and honesty goes a long way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of deceit and deception out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they’ll trust you – and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business.  The first is to offer a quality product or service. The next is to offer useful products or services that solve a problem for, or enhance the life of, a customer. And lastly, offer subjects that your customer finds interesting.

By using the approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight, you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new getting prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!

As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and divert some of your resources into reselling, upselling, & cross-selling to those same customers. Stay in touch with those customers every way possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers –  and get them used to buying from you.”

So, there it is! Remember, our FREE test drive can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. We can help you create customers for life and when you do, you can watch your profits multiply! Visit us at www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com today!

Lessons I Learned from Paris Hilton

Today we’ll talk about shameless self-promotion. That’s right, I said it! Shameless! After all, we are learning from Paris Hilton here.

It’s all about self-promotion! Self-promotion comes in many forms and you can use different tactics to get your name out there. Look at politicians! Talk about self-promotion and in some not so discreet ways, at that. But, seriously, consider some of the major superstars we all know. Madonna, Donald Trump, Howard Stern and Bill Clinton, just to name a few.

We all self promote. Did you raise your hand in class to show the teacher you knew the answer? Of course! That’s self-promotion. This is the kind of self-promotion we are talking about. With dignity, class and the knowledge to back it up. If you self-promote only to prove you don’t really know what you’re talking about, you’re going to lose business.

Natural self-promoters are the former and I want to tell you about the three major traits they have and use to build themselves and their businesses.

1. The first is position. You need to position yourself around people who can make a difference in your life. You need to do this frequently. You need to wake up every morning and ask yourself “Who can I meet today who will make a difference in my success?” In fact, go a step further, write it in big, bold letters and tape it on your bathroom mirror.

Also consider:

Who can help me meet my goals?

Is it a prospective customer/client? A colleague with contacts? An association with key members who may become prospects?

Don’t settle into interacting with the people who are the easiest to access. You need to reach outside your comfort zone and there you will find a wealth of new connections that will bring you great success.

1. Now, let’s talk about Style. No, this doesn’t mean you need an Armani suit to bring in more business (though, let’s be honest-it wouldn’t hurt) J What this really means is how are you different from your competitors and others in your industry. What makes you memorable with customers?

If you are meeting a lot of people and they don’t remember you once you leave the room, you have a serious problem! This means you have an opportunity to present yourself in a more memorable way.

There are lots of little subtle changes you can make. Reassess your:

• Business cards
• Company message
• Your picture
• Your wording

Maybe even, your hairstyle (of course, now we’re back to the expensive suit, but it really works!)

You get the idea. There are lots of little ways you can work on making your image and business more successful. Also, consider how you sound on the phone and how you great people at meetings or other events. Think about your 30-sec elevator speech.

1. The third trait of natural promoters is repetition. You can’t say it once and leave it at that. Successful self-promoters say it as many times as they need until they get a response. Would you remember a commercial for Coca-Cola if you only saw it once, no! You see it over and over and eventually you head out to the store.

You, also, have to make multiple impressions on those you are networking with in order to build brand awareness. Repetition is in direct connection with positioning. Once you find people to network with, reach out and find hundreds more who can help in your success as well.