Fear versus Inspiration in Sales

Fear versus Inspiration in Sales

A Bottle of PainFind their pain and exploit it… that’s the basis of most sales training programs. Find their pain, find their fear, and get them at the gut.

Yes, it’s true. Going for the gut increases your sales.

And the question remains: Do you really serve yourself and your customers/prospects when you come from a space of pain/fear?

If the Law of Attraction is invariable, then focusing on people in pain or in fear will bring you more of the same. That’s great, if that is the space you want to claim as your own. More people with no money, more people with bushels of objections, more people who live in fear of their competitors.

What if you came from a higher consciousness? What if the people you want to attract are those with a chronic positive outlook, the calculated risk-takers, the “I can do it” folks?

What if your elevator pitch was less about what info you can pack into an elevator ride and more about how much you can elevate the thinking and lives of the people you meet?

 

Just for Today

Look only for the Joy points:

  • Instead of “We help people who don’t know how to…” try “We help people who are excited to learn to…”
  • Instead of “We help people who fear that…” try “We help people who dream of…”
  • Instead of “We help people who lack…” try “We help people who have room for…”

We’d love to hear how your experience of the day changed as you looked for ways to elevate those around you!

We’re Lucid Business Strategies… helping small businesses grow bigger and better.

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The Black Hole of Social Media

the Black Hole of Social Media

Social Media Black Hole

The Black Hole of Social Media

For many businesses, social media is just a black hole, a virtual money pit, unless there is a strategy behind it that drives web traffic and lead generation.

It’s a money pit because every hour you invest in it is money out the window unless you are seeing an equal, or larger, return than the cost.

Before you say, “But social media is free! It doesn’t cost me anything!” consider this:  Let’s pretend you spend 2 hours on social networking sites over the course of the average day, and that your bill rate is $50/hour.  You are losing $100 per day by not producing client work. In 2 work weeks you’ve spent 20 hours and $1,000 has gone out the window.

Maybe you try to justify it by saying, “Well, it’s marketing time.” It would be, if you were seeing at least $1,000 – and hopefully much more – coming back at you as a result of the time spent. But if you’re not, you’re just another bright, shiny object spinning around in the middle of the vortex.

Your social media success isn’t about the number of followers you have. Any business with a credit card can buy followers. It doesn’t matter how many people “like” a post or retweet anything you say.

The real measure of success of your social media efforts is the effect it has on your website ranking, which is fed by traffic on the site, and traffic on the site comes from developing a business strategy based on research, and continual monitoring and tweaking.

Do you know your numbers?

  • How many hours are you putting into social media each week, and what does that cost you in terms of lost revenue? (if you don’t know, track it for a week)
  • What percentage of your site visitors are coming from each social media outlet?
  • What percentage of site visitors convert into clients or customers?
  • Does the income equal or exceed the outlay?

Over the course of several months, you will be able to gauge the exchange. If it’s in your favor – great. If it’s not, it’s time to consider a strategic social media marketing plan.

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Online marketing success takes time and effort

We often have clients come to us with a very specific goal in mind. They may ask us to create a website that “looks better” or a pay-per-click campaign, or perhaps a presence on social media.

And although we accommodate their request (and more importantly, consult with them about the goals, metrics and outcomes of their marketing ideas) we always mention one thing:

Online marketing is a process that takes time.

As I mentioned in a previous post “You Need a Team to Build Your Website,” our company provides a team that creates your website. Even with a team, it takes time to understand you company fully, conduct research into you audience and the market, see what your competitors are doing, conduct keyword research, build a site plan, design the website, and populate it with content. Whew!

Now take that single component of online marketing, and expand it to what you really need to do for success. I think this infographic really sums up the challenge. (Note: it is a large graphic).

Yup. There’s  a lot to do. And you need people (that’s the plural of person) to do it.

Of course, when we tell clients this, there is often an understandable reaction. One that says “Holy cow! I can’t afford this!” Stop. Yes you can. And that brings me full circle to the point. Not all of these online marketing efforts need to be done today. However, you need to start getting an online marketing presence now.

It’s a matter of taking your overall budget, looking at your line item for marketing expenditures (you do have a line item for marketing, right?), and planning it out. We can help you think it through as part of a marketing plan.

If you look at it as a form of maintenance or other continuous need for your business, you’ll find it is not that bad. And as time goes along, and your online presence begins to snowball into more sales and more profits, you may begin to start thinking big. Really big.

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Top Ways to Save Money with your Marketing Agency

You have a budget. You need to stay within budget. Yet you need to get the most bang out of your marketing dollars. So, would you like to know how to save money, get great results, and move projects faster?

After all, if we can turn your marketing projects around quickly, you save money and we make a living. It’s a win-win.

Let’s look at five ways to save marketing dollars:

  • Be prepared to provide lots of collateral. By this, we mean spend a few hours taking employee photos (shoulders and up please), sending us your logos and designs; and taking lots of product pictures.
  • Offer written content. It can be very rough, and we will polish it up. But having something in the business owner’s words is invaluable.
  • Meet your deadlines. A main reason we get behind is that we don’t get things on time from our customers, from sign-offs on quotes and proposals, to the above-mentioned photos & other material. When you miss your deadlines, we have to push your project to the back of lineup. Sorry.
  • When talking to us, think from the customer’s point-of-view. Forget what you know, and act like you simply have a problem that needs a solution. Now, how does your good or service help? This will help us create your content and get you in the right mood for marketing.
  • Realize it is a process. Good marketing takes time. It takes time for Google to index and crawl your site; and longer still for web visitor information to be compiled; it takes time for radio ads, billboards, catalogs, and flyers to make the rounds. Plan your budget accordingly – not for a once & done that may or may not produce.

To paraphrase a quote from a rather wonderful movie: “Help us help you!”

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Google Announces 53 Changes to Search Updates

It is customary for Google to make 40-50 changes to its search algorithm each month.  It’s that time again — Google just announced the changes to its search results for April 2012 (http://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-april-15111.html ).

As consultants that frequently work with small businesses to improve their revenue, we monitor these changes, and study the impact that they potentially have on small businesses.  We share these with our clients regularly, but this month we thought we would share our thoughts with you.

Many of Google’s changes this month are minor and don’t impact most sites, but there are usually a few each month that are potential game changers.  This month’s changes include some that we ought to pay special attention to.  Here are the ones we think you ought to address in your online marketing efforts:

  1. Google has changed how it decides on which snippet (i.e. the description about your page that shows in under the title of your page in the search results).   They are now pulling more content from the beginning content on your pages to show as your description. This makes that 1st paragraph very important.
  2. It is not longer a guarantee that the Page Title that you place in your website code will show up in the search results.  You will need to pay very special attention to the words you use in your page titles, and which order you place them in.
  3. Google gives higher search rankings to sites with regularly updated (“fresh”) content. This month, Google made a change so that low-quality fresh content does not boost search rankings.
  4. The location of the keywords on your page has become a much bigger deal.  While Google does not want you to stuff keywords either above or below “the fold”, the specific location that they are at has become more of a ranking of signal.
  5. A change was made so that “authoritative content” ranks ahead of content that Google deems as less authoritative.  They use several factors to determine authority, including how often the content is shared and linked to.  Blogging for the sake of keywords and “more content” on your site is a thing of the past.
  6. “Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches“ (http://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-april-15111.htm).  The impact to site owners is that the content on your pages must be focused and very relevant to your targeted keywords.  Tighter content makes it more likely that your site will match the searchers intent in the eyes of the search engine…i.e. – you will rank higher for those search terms.

There are several other updates that are worth noting, especially related to local search. I suggest that you check out the updates!

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