Get this right and the results will be staggering – as this three minute video interview with one of my clients explains…

The back-story is that Ben had been trying for over two years with telemarketing to reach some key people in large corporates, but found they would simply never take his calls.

The great thing about corporate customers is that they have plenty of money and large volumes of work available.  But everybody wants a piece of the action, so the people you want to speak with are being bombarded all day long with marketing materials and sales calls.

Because of this pressure, they can come across as unfriendly or overly busy.  In reality, they don't have the time to look at all of the offers that come their way, so they tend to ignore everything unless it really catches their attention.

That's precisely what I helped Ben to achieve.  I showed him an idea for a series of direct mail letters, supported by extra materials that were specifically chosen to be relevent to his customers.

When the first letter was sent out, with a Where's Wally? book (as seen in the video!), Ben received an email within 24 hours from a manager who would simply never take his calls, asking for an appointment.

As we continued with the marketing campaign, we made sure his prospects would pay a great deal of attention by being creative and standing out from the crowd.  Within weeks, they were picking up the phone and ringing Ben for more information.

In 2011 too many businesses have struggled to win new customers.  Instead they have battened down the hatches to try and just stay solvent.

Meanwhile I've personally helped a small group of clients to swim against the tide, achieving strong growth in trading conditions that are leaving their competitors gasping for survival.

If you are ambitious and like to stretch the boundaries of what's possible, we should talk.  Fill out the contact form and let's find out how fast and how far your business can go.

If you run your own small business, you want something simple and practical that you know will work.

Which is precisely why I created the One Page Core Marketing Plan Template you can download from this page.  It will give you a simple series of steps to help you produce incredible results.

Marketing has been too complicated for too long.  In the past month, one of my clients, a small removals business, increased their sales by 60% in one month by taking massive action using the first three steps of the plan.

Meanwhile a £1M turnover company that sells business to business, wanted a marketing plan to capture utility companies as customers.  In this case the first 4 steps have been completed and the results are staggering.

With my help in the execution, they have captured 8 utility companies as clients in less than 6 months.  These new sales alone should be enough over the next two years to double their turnover.

When looking through the marketing plan template, you'll see that things like market research and SWOT analysis have been left out.  These can be really helpful to prepare your thinking for putting your marketing into action, but for most small businesses the key to success is in the five steps presented.

Download it and let me know how you get on.

If you think this will be useful to you, please tell your friends about it.

And remember to sign up for my mailing list to get lots of great ideas to grow your business.

Most business owner/managers want it to be easy.  They expect to get results from every single advert they place, from every leaflet drop they do, from simply putting a website up.

Marketing gets easier the more you learn & practice

They are surface-skimming the topic, hoping to find a fast solution to a problem that plagues all their competitors too.

If you do a search in the books section of Amazon for the word "marketing", you'll find around 145,000 results.  How many have you read?  How much time have you given to the study of getting new business?

It took me over five years of study and practice to identify the essential factors of a great marketing plan.  Not the marketing plan you'll find online that's taken from academic courses, but a practical plan for every owner/managed business that won't cost the earth.

Yet many owner/managers are not prepared to hear the truth – marketing is hard – it takes effort and determination to get it right.  You can only take so many short-cuts.

Take a decision today to take the road less travelled.  Avoid the easy road of complaint and bitterness, and switch to the trickier but more rewarding path of sustained growth.

You may go down a few blind alleys along the way, but keep learning and apply what you learn to drive your business towards a brighter future.

Marketing is hard, but it's not impossible…

A few weeks ago I was out in the car when I came up behind a bus with an advert on the back of it.

What surprised me was that the advert was for a forklift truck – (I grabbed a quick photo with my phone to look at when I got back.)

I took this picture and blew it up to see the ad properly

So why is this a bad choice for selling forklift trucks?

One key element to all of your marketing is the target market, or niche. This is the group of people you're trying to sell to.

Imagine for a moment that you are the forklift truck company. Exactly who are the people that are likely to buy forklift trucks? And where will you find them?

Not the best place to sell forklifts

I would imagine it's anybody with a warehouse – so the materials or warehouse managers in bigger businesses, farmers for their barn management, smaller businesses in industrial units, any business that uses vans or trucks, and so on.

Once you understand your target market, you can pick the best places to reach them in a concentrated way. This bus advert, unless it gets lucky, is never going to do that.

It's a waste of maybe £500 that could have paid for a telemarketing campaign to exactly the people they want to sell to.

The next time somebody calls you up and asks you to advertise with them, consider whether enough of your best customers would even see the advert. The back of buses is a place to reach the general consumer, not your specialist niche markets.

And, if you know the guys responsible for marketing at Genesis Forklifts, help them out by getting them to give me a call.

This is part of the Core Marketing approach to building your business and is an important part of the Double Your Business Coaching System. Finding the right channels to market your business can dramatically increase the volume of leads you can generate.

Download Core Marketing – 133 Marketing Channels by right-clicking on the link and choosing "Save As…" from the menu, or click on the link normally to open it in a new window.

Let me know what you think in the comments fields below. And more importantly, let me know which marketing channels work best for you!

The Power of Lee's Loop Marketing!

Hi Lee

I thought you would like this!

39 emails sent on Friday morning to previous enquiry database (none of these have purchased before).

As of Monday morning I have had 3 email enquiries, which once converted should equate to around 2k in business.

And there's plenty more time yet!!!

Now what's really special about this is the email took him just 5 minutes to write and send.  So that's potentially £2K business from just 5 minutes work.

How many thousands are sitting in your database, waiting for your email?

Do you even keep a database of past enquiries?

Use many channels to get the most "bites"

In the first two articles about writing a simple one page marketing plan for small business, we compared marketing to fishing and covered the need to choose the kind of "fish" you want to catch, plus putting some strong "bait" on your hook.

Now in part 3 of 5 we're going to make sure that we give you the strongest chance possible of catching some fish.  That means using lots of fishing lines so that more fish come across your lines.

Plus each fish may pass your "bait" on several different hooks, giving them more familiarity with your message and more chances to buy.

In Core Marketing, you'll have several Marketing Channels running in parallel, so that your message is in separate places and getting in front of lots of people with your juicy offer.

Most people try out one or two ways of marketing over time and eventually give up because "it doesn't work for my business".

That's a bit like dangling your worm in a big puddle and then going home after half an hour and saying that fishing doesn't work.  It's not the fishing, it's the fisherman!

Your goal is to discover between 5 and 10 strategies that each produce good leads and sales for your business.  In this way you'll prevent yourself from being vulnerable if one channel should fail.

And you do need to protect yourself from failure.  One of my clients is a travel agent/tour operator who generated a huge proportion of their leads via Teletext ads.

As the switchover to digital TV happened, the volume of leads fell away completely, leaving a big hole in their business that we had to quickly fill with other lead sources.

So how do you pick the right channels for your business?  That's where experience and practice come in to a large degree.

In the Core Marketing System there are 132 different channels, including 99 offline and 33 online methods of winning more business.

Let's take a look at some of them here…

1.  Networking Meetings – wonderful because you get to meet people and build relationships with them.  Over time this turns into business.  A couple of great ones are BNI and 4Networking.

2.  Direct Mail Letters – when you've got a clear niche and strong bait, direct mail is incredibly powerful.  For lead generation, my clients often get a response well over 10% from a cold list of names.

3.  Signage – turn your van or shop front from being a name plaque on the wall into a powerful magnet for new business.  State your "bait" on signs and see the leads come in.

4.  Website – most small business websites are just like a brochure – they don't make a strong offer at all.  Turn your website into a powerful lead generator with well written sales copy.

5.  Competitions – run a free draw or a competition of some sort.  Give away a decent prize and let the papers, local radio and tv know about it.  Do everything possible to get wide publicity to generate more interest.

6.  Google Adwords – tried by many, understood by few.  Google's pay per click advertising is incredibly effective and cheap to do when you're doing it right.  The return on investment can be measured accurately.  It's easy to get wrong, though, so make sure you're getting advice from somebody who really knows what he's doing.

7.  Blogging – write about topics that are relevent to your customers.   Let them comment back and get the word out via Twitter or Facebook.  Join in the social chatter and generate a buzz about your business.

Of course, once you've put a channel into action you need to make sure it's working for you by measuring results.   There's no point continually going to the same pool or using the same bait if you never catch fish, is there?

In the next installment, you can read about the next step of Core Marketing – something I call the Marketing Loop.   In that post you'll learn how to stock your own pool with fish, so that you can fish there with confidence that you'll land a whopper every time.

A juicy worm to tempt the "fish" you want to catch

In the first article about writing your marketing plan for small business, you were introduced to the idea of marketing being like fishing.  That first step was all about choosing the kind of customers (fish) you want to land.

In Step 2, we're going to make sure you offer them the tastiest bait in the water, so they can't resist your advertising.

Remember, we want outstanding results, not just average, if we're going to double your business…

We'll start by looking at some reasons for the poor response to adverts.  Why don't people respond by the thousand to your advertising?  There are a bunch of common sense reasons…

1. We live in a time of information overload.  We don't even notice 90% of the adverts we see – we simply don't register that we've seen them.  Wherever you look, watch or listen (newspapers, TV, Internet, commercial radio, cinemas, magazines), you are overwhelmed by information and adverts for every product imaginable.
2. Your customers are so busy just living their lives and trying to keep up, that reading and responding to your advert will fail unless it's obvious, really obvious, that it will make their life better in some way.  Does your advertising do that, honestly?
3. People think you're lying.  We've all been conned by promises of amazing deals that crumbled into dust in our hands, making you a bit cynical about ads.  Nobody trusts the snake-oil salesmen in the adverts any more.  And if you're in business, that means they don't trust you!
4. Your advert is all about the wrong people – it's about you.  If you stand at a party and talk all about yourself, giving it the "me, me, me", you'll end up with a clear gap around you and people desperate to get away from you!  You're the only person who's got a real interest in hearing about you, you, you all the time.  So why does 99% of adverting do this?
5. You're following the wrong rules for advertising – Coca Cola don't need to increase sales, but they sure as hell want to protect their brand because they own 50% of Cola drink sales.  Yet 99.9% of all adverts follow Coca Cola's lead – if your ads have your business name or logo at the top in big letters, then it's an ad for people who already know you, not for a new customer.  In your business you need to get people to respond for the first time, to make contact with you.  You need to employ direct response marketing.

Imagine a fish swimming in the see with hundreds and hundreds of fishing lines dangling in front of them.  They're going to take a bite eventually, but with so much choice, how do you think they'll choose?

That's right – they'll go for the tastiest looking worm of the lot – and ignore all the rest completely.

So you need to be a little cunning, like the smart fisherman who's invented his own secret sauce to pour on his worms into before putting them on his hook.  A secret sauce that makes the fish hunt down his hook and tell their friends about it.

What you need is a big, fat, juicy worm of an offer to dangle on your hook, liberally soaked in your own secret sauce.   And to keep customers, you'll need to make sure that your business satisfies your customers, too, so they'll come back for more.

So, let's build part 2 of your marketing plan – your differentiator – this is what makes your business, products and service simply the best for the customers you want to catch.

Core Marketing Plan Part 2 – Tasty Bait

So marketing is like a big fishing competition with lots of people all dangling their bait into the water and hoping to get the most bites.  We need to figure out, based on what your "fish" are hungry to eat, two key ingredients that together will make your marketing irresistable to the customers you want…

1 – Your Tasty Worm – Your Differentiator

Your business is the "main meal" and it needs to be something that makes it stand out, in some good way, from your competition.  To do this, your business can be one of three things – the cheapest, the best, or somehow different from your competition.

Forget being cheapest or best, because you can always be beaten on them by the big companies with money behind them.  Focus on being different (in a good way!).

If you offer the same products and don't do anything different, your business will struggle to stand out in any way.  So you need to find some way of being different and standing out, so that you have something unique and worthwhile to offer.  This is often called the Unique Selling Proposition, but this is complicated marketing jargon for being a great company for your customers.

So, putting the customer to the front of our minds, what are the things that they would really value from you?  Don't get caught up by saying "good service", because that's a cop-out.  Think through what an exceptional service experience would be and then figure out how much you can do to bring this to life.

Beyond this, you've also got the secrets of developing a brand identity.  This is a whole load cheaper and easier to do than you can imagine – in fact, I strongly recommend you don't spend anything just to "get your name out there" or to "build the brand".  People don't buy from small businesses just by the name alone (not without a recommendation, anyway).

However, over time, if you've got advertising that's bringing in customers, it should also be creating a sense of identity for your brand.  That's why it's really important to consciously create a Brand Essence.  You'll use this to help put muscles on your marketing and make it perform even better over time.

The other thing you've got to think about is overcoming the fear of being ripped off.  This is what stops most people from buying from you – the fear that you're a dodgy firm that'll take their money and run.   How do you get past that?  Offer a guarantee – the best kind are 100% money back guarantees.  This puts all the risk on you, the firm, rather than the customer.  Fill your heart with dread?  Get over it!  People are generally honest and decent – only a tiny minority will claim their money back if you give the service you promise – perhaps 1-3% in total.

So, a quick recap – three things we need to work on for the "tasty worm" part of your marketing plan…

1. Be different and special for your customers
2. Identify your Brand Essence and cleverly garnish all of your marketing with it
3. Offer a strong guarantee to take away their fear of buying from you

With these in place, we just need to liberally pour over your secret sauce in any adverts you do…

2 – Your Secret Sauce – A Powerful Offer

The thing with adverts is making them catch the attention of your customers.  You've got to give them what THEY want, not talk about yourself.  Why do you think that DFS, the furniture people, keep advertising with 50% off sales?  It's because it's so powerful as an offer that people can't resist it.

Your marketing pieces need to have a drop of secret sauce – a powerful, compelling offer that you can imagine the Godfather saying, "I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse".  Make it so exciting and easy for them to say "yes", that they'd be mad not to take you up on it.

Here's a few kinds of offers you can make that are exciting and compelling…

Free Gifts – my young daughter can't resist the comic with the best gifts on front, even if she knows the only one that she wants to read is Hannah Montana…

Coupons – used extensively in the food industry, I know that we'll always buy Dominoes pizza when their coupons come through the door with 2 for 1 offers and all sorts of other giveaways…

Free Information – used a lot on the Internet, you can produce a free guide to something that matters to your ideal customers, in exchange for their email addresses.  This way you can keep in touch with them (but more on this in step 4 of how to write your marketing plan).

In the next installment, we're going to move into the next stage – 132 ways to get in front of the customers you want.  That's what we call your Marketing Channels, and it's part 3 of how to writing a marketing plan for small business.

The trouble is, it's easy for you to get stuck on the idea that "there's nothing I can do that's different to my competitors".  So in this blog post, you'll discover how a true commodity business – the dairy industry – has lots of differentiation.

The idea here isn't to turn you into a cheesemaker (even though "blessed are the cheesemakers!" according to Monty Python),  but to inspire you to stand out from the crowd in your line of business.

There can be few more challenging businesses to be in than milk production.  The supermarkets have you by the throat and buy from you at pretty much cost price.  You only make something because of the huge volumes you sell.  What to do?

Well, some diaries came up with the idea of flavoured milks and shakes many years ago.  But far more interesting is the brilliant mainstream milk company Cravendale.  They've innovated to make a better milk, rather than going after a tiny niche.

So now you can drink normal milk, or Cravendale's pure filtered milk that lasts longer.

I don't know about you, but if I can get "pure", that suggests that what I was drinking before wasn't pure.  Seeps into my brain after enough repetition and gradually starts to become the normal milk you buy.

The real crunch though, is that your price is no longer directly compared to ordinary milk, the commodity stuff.  You've carved out a whole new niche within the vast milk market of pure milk.

In the Cravendale ad they make the point about their differentiation – on the fridge door they tell you it's filtered so it lasts longer.  And they're all fighting for the last glass.  How many times do we throw away the last glass of milk because it's going off?

Clever, witty, engaging.  Perhaps a little irritating.  But they're selling a lot of filtered milk now, to an audience that had never seen it just a couple or so years ago.

Now take a look across the rest of the dairy industry and you'll find lots of similar examples.  Anchor Butter have differentiated themselves by claiming the free-range credentials.

Who ever heard of free range cows?  I haven't – never thought of cows being anything but free range, wandering in the fields eating grass.  But Anchor have brilliantly captured the eco-mood and transferred the free-range idea from chickens…

Interestingly, a search on Google for other butter advertising shows that Country Life gave a money-back guarantee that their butter tastes best a few years ago.

Can't find a video on it, but apparently they printed 5 million packs with the offer on it.  The idea being that you'll try the butter out because if you don't like it, you can get your money back. What's the chance of you not liking a quality pat of butter?  Pretty low risk strategy, it seems to me.

Going back to the blessed cheesemakers, how do you make an ordinary cheese into something special?  Packaging does it very nicely for Mini Babybel, who put a twist in their adverts by showing tiny cheesemakers putting it together…

As you start to get into the differentiation groove, you'll find lots of interesting options – Cheestrings are the modern replacement for Dairylee cheese triangles, it seems to me, becoming one of the defacto kids' choices for their lunchbox.

You may be wondering just how you can use these cheesy examples in your own business…

Bottom line is you've got to come up with some great ways to differentiate your business, products or services from your competitors.  So many people in small business tell me they can't.  You can, once you decide to give it the attention it deserves.

There are a host of ways you can be different in business – including changing your…

• Product (filtering the milk)
• Packaging (little wax jackets on your cheese)
• Positioning ("The Free-Range Butter Company")
• Guarantees (Best tasting butter or your money back)
• Service (the good ol' milkman)

If you'd like more inspiration on ways to differentiate your products and services, I can highly recommend both Purple Cow by Seth Godin and Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles.  Both are available from Amazon for around £5 each and are inspirational.

Differentiation is one of 5 parts of my Core Marketing approach to developing an effective marketing plan for your small business.   Over the next few articles  I'll be posting about the remaining 4 main concepts behind Core Marketing to help you put them into place in your business.  Next up will be choosing a nice niche…

In truth, I'm not happy with it as I was so tense I think it sounded like I'd just run a marathon!  I'm always comfortable talking to an audience and so this came as a bit of a surprise to me, even though I'd done a few dry runs!

Talking into a phone that says nothing back is a very strange experience.  While I often mutter to myself, talking to a phone for an hour is a bit tougher!

However, that's the truth of doing something new for all of us.  The first time is tough and we have to feel the fear and do it anyway.  If we didn't face up to fears and discomfort, we'd never do anything new or different.

In this teleconference, I introduced my key Core Marketing concepts.  Your small business marketing plan needs to address 5 areas to maximise the return on your marketing investment…

Differentiation – Standing Out From Your Competition

It's not enough to just advertise, you have to demonstrate how you are different to your competition.  Think of it as the bait on your fishing hook

Niche – Who Will You Sell To?

Just dangling a hook with a worm over the side of your boat does not target any customers at all – you've got to decide what kind of "fish" you want to catch.

Product Ladder – A Range Of Products To Buy

Your customers need to get to know you steadily and slowly, not all at once.  Offer them a range of products, starting with a free giveaway or information pack in exchange for their name and email, so you can open up a…

Communications Loop – Keeping In Touch

People buy when they are ready, and most are not ready when they first come across your business.  Nurture a relationship slowly with them by keeping in touch regularly with newsletters etc until they are ready to buy.

Marketing Channels – The Campaigns & Strategies

Have a range of different sources for attracting leads and enquiries.  Don't depend on just one strong source, but build a range of different marketing campaigns that each bring in a dependable volume of leads for you.

If you were on the call, I hope you got something new out of it and are now going to take action.  Next time I'll be a bit more relaxed I hope!