What exactly is Marketing? Episode 162 of the Marketing for owners podcast with me, Jon. Each weekday, I give you a simple lesson on Marketing.
It is something that will help your business, make you think, and the best part is it’s free, and it’s going to help! It’s what I use to successfully market my businesses without a single salesperson and without even being there half the time. How cool is that?
So Marketing — it’s a word you’ll hear everywhere all the time but many people have different definitions. Mine is very simple; Marketing is everything before and after the process of taking the money from your customer.
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It is everything else so when your customer says, “Yes I’ll have that”, and you say I’ll have your money, and she hands you the money, that’s as much selling as we want. The rest of it is Marketing. It’s everything and every single person that works for you or works with you is/should be Marketing and they should be thinking about it at all times.
For example, if you send goods out or if you deliver goods, when you package the goods, it needs to be packaged correctly so that the goods will get there, but it needs to be packaged in a way that shows you put some effort into the packaging so I would recommend that you do not use second-hand packaging unless it’s giant box is all you’ve got.
But I would recommend that when you package it, you package everything uniformly and you have a standard way to tape up the box. You put inserts within your packaging that have some extras. Now we put a little insert it that says ‘thank you’.
Within it, it has some explanations of the warranty. We’ve got a warranty, why not tell people it exists? We also give a little offer, we will print out their delivery note on neatly headed notepaper, obviously it’s computerized but that still has to be set up and it has to be laid out to look professional and easily readable.
We put those in proper dispatch, with the things on the side. When we put the carrier’s label on, we place it on neatly. It’s not just slapped on. We put certain little stickers on the outside which we have custom printed that will tell people there are additional documents inside.
Now I’ve had things from people, the other way coming in, where they put in a bag of candy or sweets. Little things that cost pennies and we think well that’s nice and all that’s nice adds to the memory bank of ‘that’s a nice company’.
Now that’s packaging. When someone comes to your door, do you have a procedure? For instance, if in ours when you come to the door, you have to ring because we’re in an office in a warehouse so we can’t just let anyone wander around.
So you have to ring a buzzer outside and buzz up. Now anybody can answer that and all of our staff know the procedure of what to do when they go down to meet the person. We don’t just buzz them and say come on up. They go down and come down and see you.
Our staff will buzz them, let them in, go down and see them. Then they know what to say, where to take them, where to park them (depended on what it is) and that’s all members of staff. Don’t forget someone could just be wondering past from your warehouse.
In your accounts department, when someone owes you money and you want to wring their neck, you still have to have your bookkeeper or your accounts department to call them and remind them of their past due bill. That will sound a bit more professional.
It sounds regimented but being consistent in this method is a tested method and you’re going to sound polite. That is marketing. At the other end, you don’t know who you’re speaking to.
It might just be a credit clerk who’s a person who just writes a check out who doesn’t do any buying. But it might be the boss of the company who may have been about to place a large order as soon as they paid this last one.
And you’re thinking I don’t like them, they don’t pay but hey they may have had a one off problem and may have lost the invoice etc. There may be some genuine reason.
No, I don’t ever believe those reasons either but you never know about that big order. Everybody is in marketing and that’s it. And after you’ve got the sale you don’t think ‘yes’ that’s it.
No that’s when the magic starts. That’s where you turn them into a preacher. You contact them a little while afterward and say we just wanted to make sure that you’ve received your goods. Were they what you were expecting? Is there anything I can help with? Did you know about that we also offer….
Yeah, now the marketing doesn’t have to be like that. You can just phone up and check that they’re okay. A week later you can send them a box of chocolates. Depend on your price point and so on and how many clients you have.
If you don’t have many and they pay a lot of money, you could send them a bunch of flowers. You may have asked for their birthday at some point. You can send them a card on a birthday. Wouldn’t it be cool if you asked for their spouses birthday and send their spouse something as well on their birthday including something that’s better than your client.
How cool is that when their husband is going to say “Cool I just got a bottle of whiskey from so and so” or whatever it is. “You make sure you keep buying from those love.” Marketing is everything.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
Tuesday’s toolbox tip today is BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo is an online service. It is paid, but there’s also a free version. The free version is plenty good enough for most of us.
When we are generating content or generating ideas, or thinking of infographics and creative ways to share, this app is perfect for that.
If I want to come up with an idea or a title for something, I’ll go enter it in BuzzSumo and see how many times that kind of item gets shared and where it gets shared, and also who shares it.
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I can even then use the top result as an influence and then go find who shared it. Then I can contact those people and say, hey I’ve got an updated version of that and a slightly better one with twice as many tips. Thought you might be interested in taking a look.
That’s my tip for the day. I’ll have more next week.
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