Guy walks up to another girl… Slap!

Again… Slap!

Slap!

Slap!

Slap!

Bingo! We have a taker. It only took 20 tries, but sore face and all a “sale” was made. It was a fantastic 5% closing rate. This guy should be in sales.

Guy never talks the the girl again. Next night, new place …. Slap!

Do you get the idea? This isn’t a poorly told dirty joke. This is your sales process. I call it “one night stand marketing.”

Now contrast that with guy #2. He walks up to a girl and says “those pants look great on you, Macy’s has nice cuts like that, but in some really wild colors, you should check em out.”

“I will” she says. “Whats your name…?”

“I’m Roger” he replies. “Can I take you out for coffee some time?”

Do you see where this is going? He is building up familiarity and creating a relationship. Pretty soon he is going to be spending lots of time with this girl and making lot’s of “sales.” That’s the power of relationship marketing. When you ask for the sale too soon, you end up getting slapped. If you have a sales force of direct sellers, you can make their lives alot easier by engaging in relationship marketing. Build trust by offering your customers something of value and deliver benefits. When it’s time to ask for the sale, they will be very likely to respond in a positive way.

I call this creating monogamous customers. These are people that you can sell to over and over again. They like you. They trust you. And they are the key to doubling or tripling your profits. Monogamous customers are educated about your services and require less customer support. They require very little in additional marketing. And they can become mavens that help you promote your business.

Using all of the communication tools available in web 2.0, you can start making real connections with your customers by answering their questions and giving them immediate benefits to forge lasting relationships.

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How do you form that relationship in the business world? You do it by giving value. By being credible. You deliver results first and then you follow up with a call to action that takes the relationship to the next level. Every successful encounter leads to more and more trust.

As the trust grows, so does the potential for bigger and bigger sales. And those sales create valuable testimonials and social proof that lead to more and more business. Relationships are critical and they start by showcasing your talents in a way that benefits your target prospect.

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Branding is important. Recognizable brands can charge twice as much as their non-branded competitors for the same product or service. That’s called brand equity. The reason that can happen is because Brands have a relationship with their market. They have made themselves liked and trusted. Which brings me to my brand suicide point.

How can you create a positive brand relationship with your market if you are constantly interrupting them with ads that offer no real value to them? What starts off as slightly annoying becomes outright rejection. And when the time comes when they might actually need what it is that you are selling, they have built up a conscious or unconscious distaste for you. That is brand suicide sold to you as a “powerful branding campaign.”

Positive branding comes from giving people what they want, how they want, when they want; before they even know they want it. You can only achieve that sort of precision through online marketing that puts real knowledge in your customers hands. Turning your sales message into a teaching message is going to create familiarity, trust and a higher perceived value. All trademarks of a strong brand.

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Don’t worry though. There is a better way. Its called Expertisement. It replaces your advertisements that go off in all directions, just trying to hit that one right person at the right time and instead turns your knowledge into highly valuable content that your best prospects are looking for. Hope marketing is like confetti. Expertisement is like a sledge hammer on the head of a nail. Deliver results and the sales won’t be far behind.

Hope marketing budgets are bloated and ineffective. Their ineffectiveness leads to more poor decisions and if not fixed, they can lead to the demise of an otherwise good business.

Your knowledge is your best marketing asset and it’s the thing that your clients want most from you.

So give it to them!

Results matter. Your marketing should give both you and your clients sound results. When it does, the only hope you will have is the hope that you can grow your business fast enough to meet demand.

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Working in multiple modalities will also allow your audience lots of options to consume your content in a way that best suits their learning style and schedule.

I like to start in video because that is the most well received way of getting ideas. From the video its easy to pull out the audio sound to create an audio podcast. And from their you can load those files onto your blog where your RSS feed will deliver the link to the files to your subscribers and to itunes. Blogs are also good for linking to your videos on Youtube and vice versa.

Create one high quality message and get it to the masses in multi-media fashion at the push of a few buttons. Isn’t life in the digital age great?

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Take their unique selling points, the thing that gives them an advantage in the market, and turn into something that you give away in exchange for prospects contact information. The effects of this are extremely powerful. You take their cash cow and turn it into your sacrificial pig. The perceived value of their offering is going to plummet, while your stock as an expert is going to climb. Deliver a direct benefit through education and interlaced into the content is going to be the education about your product and why its the “must have solution” to their needs. Make the give away a lead-in to your offering and funnel customers into your sales channel. This is called the “give away gateway.”

With your database of their prospects you can start taking their business and create more demand for your services. It’s not unlikely that you will be able to raise your prices and expand into new markets.

Google has done this fantastically well from a service model. They provide numerous free services in the areas of: analytics, landing page optimization, RSS readers, widgets and web developer tools.

All of these service are a lead in to their main revenue generator Adwords.

What can you give away that your competitors charge for? How will it lead into your offering and position you as the go to source?

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At Expertisement.com we have have broken content creation down into 8 main templates. They are as follows:

1) Story telling- Audiences love a good story with its twists and turns, anticipation and resolution. Stories play heavily on metaphor and mental imagery. Stories allow each viewer to add to the imagery with their own thoughts and interpretations, thus making it their own.

2) Public service- Companies are always doing something good for their communities. Public service shows the audience that you share their same concerns. You can use public service to organize around ideas in the online world and in the offline world. Public service features build a positive brand relationship and pave the way for future communications.

3) How to- One of the most common searches online is for information on “how to” do something. Showing someone “how to” do something gives them a direct benefit and opens the doorway to future business. Make your “how to” features complimentary to your business, so the information that you give moves them closer to needing your products or services.

4) Presentations- Convert your powerpoint presentations and public speaking engagements into online media that you can share with the rest of the industry. Presentations are great for positioning yourself as an expert.

5) Interview- Bring in a reporter or show host to ask you questions. The two person dialog is interesting to watch and can make it easier for first-time or less experienced communicators.

6) Infotainment- Make your blatant marketing message fun and exciting to watch. A blender company called Blendtec producers a show called Will it Blend? that showcases their blenders standing up to the challenge of blending iphones, marbles, and even picket signs. What is really smart about what they do is they create a question that people are dying to know the answer to. Everyone wants to see the blender fail, but when it doesn’t, they are awed by it. Its a powerful testimonial to the strength of the equipment. Another brilliant thing they do is tie their shows into current news stories, so they also get picked up in search. The iphone & writers strike episode are great examples of this.

7) Episodic shows- Create a weekly show that people become used to searching out. Or better yet deliver it by RSS. This is a powerful way to build large audiences. You build familiarity to your audience that can segue nicely into sales and other promotions.

Interactive classes- Teach a complex subject that will in turn lower the barrier to future sales. This strategy is great if you have a new concept that your audience isn’t completely familiar with and that lack of knowledge keeps them from buying. You can further enhance your class with interactive elements like comments, forums, phone call-ins and even more advanced means like membership sites. Membership sites can even become a new revenue source, creating continuity income.

However you decide to reach your audience, be sure to offer immediate benefits to them and they will return the favor with sales and word of mouth marketing.

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Why is that remarkable?

Because the gatekeepers haven’t blocked the internet yet. Anyone with an internet connection and something to say has access to large audiences of people without the constraints that traditional advertising has.

So why haven’t businesses jumped in and taken advantage of this opportunity? 

Good question. When you figure it out please tell me. The ability to directly reach your prospects in numerous forms of media is  ground breaking. It’s like free money for life. In the digital age everyone is their own media outlet.I think what holds businesses back from taking full advantage of web 2.0 are three things: 

1) Fear of losing control of their message.

2) A lack of knowledge and understanding of the medium.

3) Fear of giving away too much information. 

Fear of losing control is understandable, but online, rational minds prevail when you are honest and forthright. Sure there are bad apples, but its a small price to pay to engage so many people. Being online and under the watchful eye of your audience can make you a better company. A lack of knowledge is not surprising because of the rapid change in social media. There are resources and companies that specialize in this space to help you get your media plan working. Fear of giving away too much information is based on a scarcity mindset. There is no scarcity of information in an information economy. In fact their may be too much random information. By answering your customers questions you save them valuable time and energy sifting through the internet trying to get at what you already know. When you become a resource, you are building a relationship. You establish familiarity, repetition, rapport, and reciprocity. These are all powerful triggers in people that will make your sales process much easier.

If you aren’t a producer yet; where do you start?

Start simple with  a blog. Get the feel for the conversation online and understand RSS. RSS is a method of subscribing to online content that allows you access to it in real time. It powers podcasting which will be your next step. You can get a free blog by going to www.wordpress.com.  Podcasting is easy. Sites like www.blogtalkradio.com let you call in and record audio podcasts by phone. They already have an audience that you can tap into. Podcasting is very easy and very inexpensive to do.  The next step is video. Video is the hottest thing in media. Video allows you to fully engage your audience. According to Comscore, there were 10 billions videos played by U.S. consumers in December of 2007. That represented 144 million people. Thats a majority of the U.S. population. Your customers are online in a big way. If you aren’t there for them to find, who is?  

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What is revolutionary… 

 Give people immediate benefit whether they buy from you or not. Change your marketing message from “Buy from me” to “Learn from me.” When you do that you are not only providing your customer with real value; you are providing yourself with tremendous leverage. The buyer feels comfortable with you, they trust you and they know that you can deliver benefits. You have now catapulted yourself above your competition. Does it cost any more to teach people with your marketing messages? No. It may cost less. Much less. Ads have to be distributed to thousands or millions of eye balls to have any effect. At great expense. Knowledge is an oasis that draws people in. They will find you. You just have to be where they are looking. 

What is the common need among your clients and how can you answer this need? 

In the information age, the people with the best information win. Provide your audience with valuable information and you both win. Expertisement is the new model for sales success and long lasting customer relationships. Benefits matter. So deliver them early and often. 

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No, I don’t mean place two or three ads. I mean place high quality content in the natural search that reaffirms your credibility and popularity. Something that answers the question the person is searching for. When people see your domain name in the natural search first and then see it again in the advertiser column on the right, they are at least twice as inclined to click on your ad than normal. We did some informal tests of this and were shocked by the result.

What does that mean for your business?
It means you have cast a much wider net for a targeted prospect and Doubling your click-through rate makes “The Google” very happy. They reward advertisers with high click-throughs. You get lower click charges and you get higher placement. For a committed PPC advertiser, this can mean a savings of thousands of dollars.

Getting to the top of natural search requires the same keyword targeting that you are used to, but the missing ingredient is relevant content that provides real value to people. Videos and podcasts are even more loved than blogs and as such, they get rewarded with top placement.

When you see how effective online media can be at getting you targeted leads that don’t have any recurring cost, you might reconsider PPC advertising altogether. But until then, you will boost your sales tremendously by creating synergy between your paid and unpaid search marketing with relevant content.

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