In school, kids love show and tell. They bring something to school and they get to tell all their friends about it and it is great. It makes the kids really excited.
Their friends love it and it is always exciting, so why not use this same concept in your business?
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In the online business world, I have learned from running my Fire Protection Online company is that the difference in our businesses is that people cannot actually touch the goods.
These days, we are adapted to going to a store, finding an item we like, looking at it, and then going home and looking it up online to see if we can buy it cheaper.
Big businesses don’t have that luxury, so we have to find a way to be able to help them achieve that online.
They come to us online so we have to think in terms of show and tell. For example, at Fire Protection Online, we are busy behind the scenes recording videos.
We have over 2,000 products, so this is going to take us a while. But, by recording a video, we put it on the product page, and I show even right down to the box it comes in.
I do a lot of these myself (so you will see me everywhere). I take it out of the box, show you everything inside, how big it is, what all comes with it and more. I give you a show and tell of what you are getting.
This is real life stuff and you get to see everything. It takes me about 2-5 minutes per video. Some are a bit more complicated than others.
For example, we sell smoke alarms that connect wirelessly, so you have one here, and one in the living room, and possibly one upstairs, and they don’t connect with wires so there are ways to do it.
Reading the instructions from the book or online may sound a bit technical so I will show you how you actually do it and how easy it is.
This is show and tell.
Now, if you go to visit clients, it gets even better. Why not take a couple of items or one of those little videos you may have on your website, or another video you just might have recorded and bring it on your ipad.
Perhaps your product is too big to take anywhere. Maybe you want to show how the item is made and it is done somewhere else but you have the video — show it to the client.
The more you can show people that it is real and that it does exist, then they will be on your side. They will trust you more because it seems real.
When you go to visit them, you are a sales person. In their mind, you are going to bamboozle them with facts and figures, but they want some evidence that it exists.
You can tell them that you work for a large company, and you can show them. Bring pictures and show them the building, the staff, and more.
How about invite them to your premises? You might think, “Oh it’s a bit scruffy.” This is real life. It doesn’t matter how scruffy it is.
Not everyone works in a brand new building like Google or Facebook. Real companies work in real buildings where they do work. That’s all anyone wants to know so think of it.
Whether it is the product, service or detail — you can do it by video or on an ipad, or you can bring them into your building.
You can take your product to them with explanations, and show them and let them feel things. Show them something — some evidence — even if you have to cut it up.
You can show them how thick the metal is or the cylinder is better. Then take a competitors and base them against each other and show why yours is better.
You can learn a lot of the old school days.
The other thing — if you are going to make videos do not spend a ton of money on this. I record all my videos using a simple tripod, a mic, and my iphone (and really you don’t even need all of that).
Just make the video yourself. In our office, this is what we do. They are just simple videos of me sitting at a desk with the product in front of me explaining all about the video.
We have real customer service people that answer the phone, so when we started out making these videos the calls to our customer service people reduced dramatically.
We offer downloadable pdf’s that share tons of info about the product, but we never include the price that way we do not have to update it.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
Today is Tuesday and that means it is time for a Toolbox Tip. In recent weeks, I have been going back to some things you may have forgotten so today I am going to remind you about Audible. Audible is owned by Amazon and you pay a monthly subscription for your choice of a number of books per month whether it be one book or two books per month. They have all kinds of genres of books available on Amazon. I pay my subscription yearly which makes me get an even cheaper price and I download tons of books from there to listen to. Yesterday I suggested Zero to one by Peter Thiel and I think on Audible that it is about a 5 hour read. You can change the speed in how it is read to get it done in an even faster time. Many times I will read a book on double speed. I highly suggest you trying out Audible. It keeps you from having a library of books at home that you are never going to pick up and read again. It even makes it cheaper buying them this way. Click here to instantly download our FREE Book “The 71 Ultimate Marketing Tools”
Of course like any program, there is always a free trial and with Audible, you can try it out and get one book free. My two favorites that I suggest are either The E-Myth Revisited or Built to Sell.
Either of those would be my recommendation for the first book you read.
Tomorrow, I will be interviewing Jeff Goins and he is all about writing. This is one you will not want to miss and then I will be back on Thursday with another marketing tip.
