Love Makes the Marketing World Go Around

How Passion Holds the Key to Successful High-Level Marketing.

It sounds cheesy but it’s true. Successful marketers and business owners are those that are truly passionate about what they’re doing and are genuine in their intentions to help their clients or customers via their products or services. Customers are discerning and more importantly, they are creatures of feelings and emotions and insincere marketing tactics and strategies can be easily detected.

Make Good Money by Doing Good

This is not even about grand philanthropic gestures or saving the world or finally achieving the much elusive world peace. The art and science of marketing and selling is about presenting your target audience with a problem or with something they lack –whether they know it or not –and presenting them with a solution through your offers. It’s about building respect and nurturing relationships.

Through marketing and selling, you’re helping your clients or customers lead fuller lives or achieve their goals. This is what doing good means. Doing business with good businesses ends in win-win transactions and with customers feeling that you genuinely care about them.

Seeing the Bigger Internet Marketing Picture

Business owners who are not absolutely passionate or don’t completely believe on their offerings frequently resort to piecemeal tactics and strategies and are not able to utilize and maximize all customer touch points. With “lots of love” (as marketing guru Mike Hill puts it), marketing takes on a more holistic approach and will push you to do things you’re not doing before.

By far, marketing and sales campaigns hinged on multiple and integrated tactics produce the best results and the biggest revenues. Here is a compilation of marketing tactics that you should definitely integrate to bring your business to the next level, reach previously untapped revenue source and ultimately, earn bigger profits. If you’re not doing these tactics yet, the challenge is to start immediately. If you are already implementing the following strategies, the challenge is for you to revisit your execution and to do it better.

Interaction before Information

One of the biggest hurdles businesses need to overcome is convincing customers to give their information (address, email ad, telephone number, etc.). People have learned from past experiences – annoying snail mails, spammy emails, irritating marketing/sales calls. It’s easy to fall into the trap of explaining lengthily why it’s perfectly okay for customers to give their information.

Instead of a litany of an explanation, one under-utilized technique is using a survey before asking for your audience’s information. The truth of the matter is, you don’t know whether your business is a match with your customers’ needs and by using a survey, you are able to determine what exactly it is they are looking for and where you can come in. Further, by asking them to accomplish a short survey form, you already initiated interaction and established partial commitment making it easier for you to extract the information you need.

Mass Traffic Generation

Recently, several materials have been published talking about targeted marketing, especially for local and small businesses. As many of the advertising channels online are operating on a pay-per-click, pay-per-impression or pay-per-action model, marketers are targeting very specific market segments.

While this tactic has its benefits (mostly resource and ad spend management), mass traffic generation will enable you to reach untapped market and revenue source and even create demand in a new market segment. Traffic does not need to be in the millions and is fully dependent on the size of your operations and scale of your business. So, if you were previously targeting 100, try expanding to 500 or 1,000. The more people you usher into your conversion funnel, the better.

Offering Free Trial

First, a bit of clarification. Offering a free trial is totally different from a free sample. A free trial is letting your prospective customers or clients experience the totality of your products or services for free for a limited period of time. Free sampling is giving bits and pieces of your offerings, sort of like offering a sneak preview.

The difference between the two? People are pre-conditioned to take samples, but they never use them. Bad for conversion. On the other hand, free trial is letting potential customers try out your products and services risk-free. They get the full experience. Encouraging trial is the first step for long-term consumption.

The main hesitation marketers have on offering free trials is the fear of online “free loaders.” While this risk is present, the quality of traffic you attract is hinged on the message of your copy. If all you’re saying is “free, free, free” then you are indeed attracting people who are only interested on getting free stuff and not on what you are offering. Your copy should talk about the added value (a combination of your unique selling proposition and your brand positioning) your products or services can bring to your customers and your secondary message is the fact that people can try it out risk free.

Just keep in mind that what will convert people to loyal or even lifetime customers are your products and services so be sure to frontload this even when crafting copy for your free trial offers.

Don’t Be Embarrassed of Upselling

Do you feel guilty offering your customers more products or services? Do you feel that you are asking for too much? You are not alone. A lot of business owners don’t have an upselling system in place because of moral and ethical dilemma.

You need a change of perspective and the new perspective is this: not upselling is doing injustice to your customers. Here’s another wake-up call: not upselling can mean loss of opportunity that can sum up to thousands if not millions of dollars in revenue.

The fact is there are a lot of customers out there that belong to a category which is called “hyper buyers.” This is the type of customers who want the full brand experience. Given that they are beyond satisfied with your base product or service, they are willing to spend more on add-ons and auxiliary offerings. Not offering them an upsell means you are depriving them of an opportunity to experience the best of what you have to offer.

As long as you are truly passionate to help your customers and you genuinely care about helping them achieve their goals and objectives through your products and services, there’s nothing wrong with offering a few extras. It’s going to be money well spent and as mentioned above, a win-win scenario.