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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!

Your Lifetime Value of a Customer

Today you’re going to learn how to find a target market of potential customers so you aren’t wasting precious resources on “blitz marketing,” or marketing that is all over the place and not focused. So, the two questions you have to ask yourself are:

What do people really want to buy from me? And what related products are they already buying?

Once you figure this out, you will know who is most likely to purchase your products or services. Then, you can find other businesses with the same customer base (that are not in direct competition with you), who you can share your customers with. Then, think of a way to come up with an incentive or arrangement to encourage both of your customer bases to shop at both of your stores.

The basic concept is this:

You want to find an existing business who has the same customer that you are looking for to market your products or services to.

You then develop a relationship with those business owners to work out an incentive for customers to purchase from both businesses.

As a result, you have an audience to market to and the partner business generates added value from their current base.

So, how do you figure this out? The following is a great formula from Jay Abraham you can follow with great success.

LV = (P x F) x N – MC

Here’s what it all means:
• LV is the life time value of a customer
• P is the average profit margin from each sale
• F is the number of times a customer buys each year
• N is the number of years customers stay with you
• MC is the marketing cost per customer (total costs divided by the number of customers)

Once you know how much you need to spend to attract a new customer, you will know how much of an incentive you can offer to a business to help attract new customers.

So, here’s your step-by-step process:

1. Find companies who already have the customer base you are looking for.
2. Negotiate an incentive for them to share that customer base with you.
3. Focus your marketing resources to this group of predisposed customers.

If you need help working through this process, check out our FREE test drive for the most comprehensive system of marketing tools and resources. Visit us at www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com today!

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.