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NetFaqs in This Article
• Tighten Your Focus
• Optimize Prices
• What's Selling Best?
• Sharpen Marketing Materials
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Expand
Your Promotions
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Get Set and Go!
IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T
SUCCEED
Five Ways to Fix Slow Business
and
Give Yourself a BIG Second Chance.
...and
re-fire your sales on your site from
TheWebsiteDistrict!
by Dr. Kevin Nunley
This would normally be a
busy time of year for Margaret, but business is slower
than usual. She worries things will get ever slower
in the months ahead. Greg came up with a terrific idea
for building a second income from the Internet. Months
later, his web site and advertising have only brought
in a few sales. He is afraid all his time, money, and
enthusiasm were wasted.
I hear similar experiences
fromdozens of people each week. Some are start-ups,
others are mature businesses. Most business ideas flop
on the first try. The key to success is knowing how
to give yourself a BIG second chance. Sometimes you
will need to try a third or fourth time before your
new product or service brings home the bacon.
Here are five simple ways
to give your business new life.
1. Give your business a tighter
focus. Many businesses are too broad, trying to interest
too many different kinds of prospects. Being too general
will leave you lost in a crowd. America has more stores
than at any time in history. Retailers are finding their
markets split into tiny fragments as shoppers have a
bewildering choice of places to spend their money. Meanwhile,
the Internet is exploding. Christmas spending in 1998
is 2.3 Billion dollars, twice what it was in 1997. All
that money is divided among some 300 million web sites.
How do you compete when there
are so many others? Tighten your business focus to include
a narrow, very well defined audience. The man who sells
John Denver memorabilia from the 1970s has a very specific,
almost peculiar business. But he is selling his product
like crazy on the Internet. He is filling a niche that
deeply interests a particular group of people.
2. Make your prices more
competitive. For the past few years consumers have told
us they want quality and service with price being much
less important. The tightening of the economy has changed
that. Now consumers are ranking price as one of the
most important reasons they buy from one business and
not from another.
Think of ways you can tighten
your belt or redefine your product or service to offer
it at a lower cost. Maybe you can limit your service
to fewer, but still important features. Perhaps your
prices are already lower than competitors. You
just need to emphasize your lower prices more in your
marketing. Lower prices are suddenly an important way
to get people to buy.
3. Choose the product or
service that sells best for you, then expand it. Go
wide and deep. Offer more versions of the same product
or service. If the green one is selling well, come out
with a red one and a blue one to offer along side your
start performer. Look for more related products or services
you can offer. I write press releases for people. I
have also found those same people want me to write articles
for them. That is a related service I can offer along
with the popular press release service.
4. Sharpen your marketing
materials. With all that competition in the business
world, you profit when your marketing and advertising
stands out and hits home with consumers. Give all your
marketing pieces a headline. Busy prospects need a way
to quickly find out "what's in this for me" before they
will take the time to read your sales letter, brochure,
classified ad, or web site.
Relate the features of your
product or service to the benefits the buyer will get.
Your "Widget 900" has a clever lever. Tell prospects
how that lever will save them time, money, and make
their day more enjoyable. It is the benefits that your
buyers really care about.
Take a closer look at where
you are putting your advertising dollars. It is tempting
to place all your cash into big media that reach a lot
of people, but are all those people your best prospects?
Marketing is generally more
effective when it can be closely targeted to a well
defined audience. If your audience is made up of lots
of your best customers, you get sales. Consider advertising
in trade publications, email newsletters, and neighborhood
papers. Postcards are cheap and prospects read them
without having to open an envelope.
5. Expand your promotional
effort. It takes a LOT of advertising, marketing, and
promotion to get into the heads of your busy prospects.
People are constantly bombarded with ads and commercials.
You need to hit your best prospects over and over again
before your message sinks in.
Look for several ways you
can CONSISTENTLY market your business. Find affordable
methods that reach your best customers and use those
methods over and over again. When marketing doesn't
work, it is almost always because the business ran out
of money and gave up too soon.
Give your business a big
second chance. The children's story of the "little engine
that could" might as well be a $1,000 business seminar.
The best way to clobber competition and build your business
into a cash cow is to give your business a tight focus,
make prices more competitive, expand what works, improve
marketing materials, and promote big and consistently.
Kevin Nunley provides marketing
advice and copy writing for businesses and organizations.
He can be reached at www.DrNunley.com. Click
here to promote your business to thousands of Media!
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