For Small Business Owners & the Self-Employed

Insider Secret:

Creating Customers: Marketing Secrets of Gold Mine Businesses

Any business can sell a product or service, but only a gold mine business knows how to create a customer.

by Alex Goumakos, CPA

When you create a customer you create more than just a sale; you create a relationship. This mutually advantageous relationship is the key to above-average growth and profits.

When you cultivate a relationship with your customers and offer them what they want at the right price and with customer service that meets or exceeds their expectations, they’ll not only buy from you again and again --- they’ll recommend others to buy from you too.

In order to create customers you must know three things:

• who to attract,
• how to attract them and
• what to attract them with.

This process ---called marketing --- is one of the most important functions you’ll perform as a business owner. Unfortunately, many smaller business owners don’t understand marketing as well as they should. As a result, they don’t get the business growth they desire.

If you want to create a killer marketing strategy that will generate a profitable stream of customers, here's what you need to know:

1. What Exactly is Marketing?

Essentially, marketing is a series of business activities designed to plan, price, promote and distribute your goods and services to present and potential customers. In a nutshell, it involves:

• Discovering who the customer is and what they want
• Planning and developing a product or service that will satisfy those wants, and
• Determining the best way to price, promote and distribute that product or service

Most of all, successful marketing is about selling stuff. It’s about moving customers and potential customers to action --- the action of buying what you sell.

Successful marketing is not a popularity contest. Many small business owners make the mistake of ignoring the principles of successful marketing and instead focus solely on getting maximum exposure. Maximum exposure is great, but your marketing has to be engineered properly in order to generate sales.

How do you engineer and implement the best possible marketing strategy for your business? You learn each of the.....

2. Essential Elements of Marketing

Marketing is simply the process of selling goods and services. It involves focusing on four co-equal elements: product, price, promotion, and distribution.

In order to develop an effective marketing strategy, you must focus on all of the elements and not just one or a few of them.

A marketing element cannot survive by itself. For instance, you cannot focus on price while ignoring promotions.

By the same token, you can’t concentrate on promotions if you haven’t determined an effective price. What’s the sense of trying to attract potential customers if the price you’re going to charge won’t pay the bills?

Successful marketing depends on how effective you are at utilizing each element. The better you are at understanding and integrating each one, the better you’ll be at attracting new business and converting prospects into sales. Keep in mind that each element must be given equal weight.

3. Know Your Market Inside and Out

Knowledge of your market has a tremendous impact on the overall success of your marketing efforts. If you want to succeed the rule is simple: know your market inside and out. The way to accomplish this is through market research.

Market research is simply an orderly and objective way to find out about the people who buy or will buy from you. It’s another way of “looking before you leap”. It involves getting answers to these and other important questions:

• Who are my customers?
• What kind of people are they?
• Where do they live?
• How much money do they have?
• How many competitors do I have?
• Can I improve my product or service?
  

Having an intimate knowledge of your market allows you to sell more of your products and services because you can tailor a promotional campaign to attract the specific customers you're looking for.

In addition, knowing your market inside and out gives you the insight you need to introduce and sell new products and services that customers want.

4. Establish "Positive References"

This is the real secret to creating customers. People make purchasing decisions based on references.

References are simply standards, guidelines, or criteria that each of use and rely on when reaching conclusions. Whether it’s choosing a pair of shoes, buying a vehicle, or deciding what to eat for dinner, references such as brand, price, quality, reputation, service and convenience help steer us to a particular choice.

If the references are positive, we reward the business with a sale. If the references are negative, we’ll shop elsewhere.

In order to maximize sales, you must aggressively show current and prospective customers clear and distinct reasons why they should buy from you and not one of your competitors.

These reasons, or references, will help you generate selling momentum.

Sadly, many business owners don’t take full advantage of this extremely powerful selling force.

The good news is that business owners have a measure of control over the references they convey to customers. By actively promoting positive references and eliminating negative references, a business can successfully differentiate itself from competitors.

Clearly, the more positive references that you can identify and communicate, the better your chances for making a sale now and in the future through repeat and referral business.

My business training manual: Gold Mine Tactics: The Business Owner's Success Manual. explains the concept of "positive references" in detail and shows you how to develop your own set of unique and powerful references.

5. Plant Money Seeds

One of the single most effective ways to build a gold mine business can be summed up in three simple, yet powerful words: outstanding customer service.

While numerous factors are responsible for success, by far the easiest way to expand your business is to provide customers with customer service that is beyond industry standards. Doing so is like planting money seeds that will grow and yield basketfuls of profit.

Sadly, many business owners don’t provide the level of service that is frequently the difference between success and failure.

Here’s another reason to provide better-than-average service to your customers:

Outstanding customer service is the key to generating repeat and referral business.

If you want to grow a gold mine business relatively quickly and on solid ground, seek repeat and referral business at every opportunity. Why?

Because focusing on repeat and referral customers is like sprinkling Miracle-Gro on your business. It also makes complete financial and economic sense because these types of customers cost virtually nothing to acquire.

On the other hand, acquiring new customers through advertising costs money.

Gold Mine Business Owners Know How To Create Customers

As you can see, there is more to marketing your products and services than simply trying to attract potential customers with advertising. If you want to grow and expand your business beyond your wildest expectations, you need to focus on creating customers.

In Gold Mine Tactics: The Business Owner's Success Manual I show you exactly what you need to do and focus on in order to create all the customers you need.

For more information click here.