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How Outsourcing Can Increase Your Business Fast

Outsourcing is one of the fastest ways to increase your business if you know how to delegate what you need to get done.  There are many online services where you can post a job that you are looking to get outsourced.  Some of the more popular outsourcing sites include Elance.com, Freelancer.com and Odesk.com.

Your business will grow the fastest if you outsource those things that you find tedious or difficult to do and/or that take most of your time.  If you can outsource these things and focus solely on the business processes you do best, that you like to do and/or bring in the most money to your business, your business will grow and make much more in profits.

Once you find several quality outsourcers that have performed your tasks satisfactorily, you should initiate and maintain a working business relationship with these people so that you will always have quality workers available when you need them.

This will also increase your business as you won’t have to waste time and money training and evaluating new outsourcing workers.

To Your Success!

Brendan Franks

P.S. Need a little help with the outsourcing process? Call me. I have lots of experience in this area.

Here’s Why Your Business Isn’t Growing (and how to turn things around!)

Your business is in a rut.

And guess what? Even if it isn’t right now, it will be some day. It happens to every business. The marketing techniques that worked last year, or last month, are no longer as effective as they used to be. You try everything you can think of, but it doesn’t work.

You’re stuck.

But, the good news is that it doesn’t need to be that way. When your business gets stuck and stops growing, there are things that you probably aren’t doing that you can do to kick things back into high gear.

Ready to get things going again? Here are some of the most common things that cause business to stagnate.

1.You Don’t Have an Email List 

This one’s a biggie for me – so much so that one of the first questions I ask new clients is:

Do you have an email list?

I’m always amazed when people don’t. It’s so easy to do and email marketing earns great returns. There’s really no excuse for skipping email marketing as a method of growing your business.

And, here’s the thing. It is very easy to build a list. All you need to do is come up with a lead magnet that’s designed to appeal to your target audience. It could be a short report or eBook, a cheat sheet, a tip sheet, a value-packed video, or even a template.

Then, you create a landing page around your cheat sheet, advertise it, and boom! You’ve got an email list.

Once your email list is up and running, you can use it to nurture your leads and turn them into paying customers.

2.You’re Dialing in Your Marketing Strategy

Let’s face it – most small business owners don’t have a ton of time for marketing. They might set aside an hour or two to deal with it each week, but it’s often the first thing to get pushed aside when time is tight.

I get why that is, but it’s a mistake. A big one. Why? Because marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your existing customers and attract new ones.

If it’s been a while since you revamped your marketing strategy, here are some tips to help you get back on track.

1. Analyze your current marketing campaigns to see which ones have stopped working. If you’re not getting a great conversion rate, then keeping a campaign running is a waste of your money.
2. Come up with some killer content that’ll appeal to your target audience. It could be a video, a blog post, or an infographic. Just make sure that it’s irresistible and actionable.
3. Build a marketing campaign around your new content. Use whatever platforms will allow you to reach your target audience. They could include Facebook ads, Google AdWords, or even native advertising.
4. Test each element of your campaign and track the results. Testing can be time-consuming, but it’s truly the best way to fine-tune your campaigns until they’ve delivering the results you need.

Most importantly, make tracking your campaigns an ongoing concern. When a campaign stops delivering stellar results, make a change immediately.

3.You Don’t Have a Referral Program 

If you’re not asking your existing customers for referrals, you’re making a big mistake. Referrals are a great way to attract new customers. They’re free (or pretty close to it) and they allow you to turn your valued customers into ambassadors for your brand.

It doesn’t take much to create a successful referral program. You’ll want to start by deciding how to incentivize referrals. Your customers are more likely to help you out if there’s something in it for them. It could be a free product, a discount on your services, or even a cash incentive. Figure out what’s most likely to appeal to them.

Then, you’ll need to tell your customers about the referral program. If you have employees, get them involved. Make sure every one of your existing customers knows about the program. Then, when you get new referrals, make sure to deliver your incentives immediately.

4.Your Brand Messaging isn’t Consistent

What do people think of first when they hear your brand name? If you’re not sure what the answer to that question is, it’s a sign that your brand messaging is falling short of the mark.

Consistent brand messaging is one of the cornerstones of great marketing and business growth. If your brand message is diluted, then it’s time to tighten it up.

Let’s start with some of the most common ways that a brand message gets diluted:

1. Your brand message has evolved but you haven’t had the time, money, or inclination to update your website to reflect the changes.
2. You’ve updated your website but haven’t bothered to update your social media pages and other online content to match.
3. You’ve added new products that have expanded your brand beyond what your website says.

The key is to identify how your brand has changed, refine your message, and then standardize your branding across all platforms.

5.You Aren’t Using Social Media to Your Advantage 

How are you using social media? If you’re not regularly getting leads from social media, then you’re probably not using it to your best advantage.

Your social media posts should be engaging and shareable. That means that you can’t simply post a sales pitch and call it a day. Your social media content must be:

• Tailored to your target audience
• Valuable and actionable
• Designed to be shared

Every post you put out should include a specific call to action. Not every CTA should be sales-oriented. Some can encourage readers to comment or share your content. The key is to use every social media post as a way of expanding your reach and attracting new customers.

It’s time to get unstuck… 

If your business isn’t growing, it’s your job to find out what’s holding you back. The five strategies here can get you back on track – and get a stream of new customers headed your way.

We help small businesses become unstuck by understanding the current situation and helping you as business owner inject new ideas into your business.

To find out more visit www.peakperformancebusiness.ie

To Your Success

5 Recommended FREE Marketing Tools for SMEs

1) Mailchimp for email marketing.

Email marketing is imperative to the success of most SMEs. While building a brand on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are important relevant to the business, you’re limited to the constraints of those channels. This makes it particularly difficult to move consumers through a funnel and provides you with relatively little control.

However, email provides a more intimate interaction between brand and consumer by offering you the tools you need to control effectively and nurture leads. Mailchimp is an excellent free email marketing tool and one of the easiest for small business owners to learn.

2) Canva for easy designing.

Visual content is an increasingly popular form of marketing collateral. From custom illustrations and infographics to fully-designed sales proposals, visual content is a fantastic way for SMEs to gain credibility and build a professional appearance.

There are several free graphic design tools on the market, but one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use is Canva. Its free library of fonts, illustrations, templates and images give you a pool of graphics that you can easily drag-and-drop. From flyers and brochures to social media images and infographics, you can create it all for free in Canva.

3) SurveyMonkey for feedback.

SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular free online survey tools. Surveys are a good way to collect consumer information, engage customers, uncover trends and secure tangible insights on your business. SurveyMonkey’s software is incredibly simple. In just a few minutes, you can design, create and publish your own business survey. Additionally, you’ll be able to analyze the results in the backend.

4) Buffer for social media management.

Buffer is a social media management tool that will help you streamline your social posting efforts. We already know how powerful social media is for your marketing initiatives, but leveraging a tool like Buffer will help you increase your followers; engage your audience; and build your brand.

The benefit of Buffer is its ability to let you connect multiple accounts to one dashboard; schedule posts; create drip campaigns; and analyze the success of your posts. Buffer’s free plan is perfect for new businesses looking to grow their social presence, but to unleash the full power of the software, you might want to consider one of their upgraded plans.

5) Google Analytics.

As one of the top free tools from Google, Analytics should be part of your digital marketing strategy from the very start. It only takes a couple of minutes to add the Analytics code to your website, giving you the ability to track every action by every visitor.

This is considered by many to be nothing more than a traffic tool, but it can actually have a big impact on your marketing strategy, if you know what you’re doing.

Take, for example, the ability to see where your traffic comes from:

Maybe you realize that a particular social media campaign is driving tons of traffic to your website. With this data, you can adjust your future strategy, in an attempt to capture the same results.

Or, maybe you find that a particular set of keywords is doing wonders for your organic traffic. Again, you can turn your attention to these keywords, ensuring that you keep these in mind as you create content down the road.

Google Analytics isn’t one of those tools that you should ignore. Installing this early on is a key decision, in regards to your online marketing strategy. The data you can collect and review is extremely valuable.

Marketing – Demographics V Psychographics

Your Ideal Target Market
In our opinion its 10% about knowing the Demographic profile and 90% about the Psychographic but what’s the difference?

Demographic Profile
When you identify the physical characteristics, sometimes referred to as a demographic profile of your client, you must have a clear picture in your mind of what your target customer looks like from a physical standpoint. In the future, this information will help you to pinpoint your target customer once you begin marketing to them, making it easier to find them and position your marketing message in front of them. Examples include:

Psychographic Profile
This defines the emotional make-up of your target customer. This is typically the most important of these two categories to define since prospects buy based on emotion. They only use logic to justify their purchase. This is where you want to identify what we refer to as their “hot buttons.” Hot buttons are the problems, fears, frustrations and concerns most prospects experience when they buy what you sell. You fear pain when going to the dentist. You’re frustrated by the typically long wait time at the doctors. You’re concerned when you take something in for repair, concerned that the final price won’t match the estimate. If you can accurately identify your prospects hot button issues, and then innovate your business to solve them forever, you have just created a market dominating position. You should also consider additional psychographic areas such as their health, their hobbies and interests, sports, education, personal causes they may be involved in, both political and social, as well as leisure activities. Examples Include:

How to Strengthen Your Marketing Message?

Checkpoint:

• You know who your target market is, what their needs are, what their purchase behaviors are and how to reach them.
• You know how to use market research to find out more information about your market on a regular basis.

Let’s look at writing targeted messages for your target market.

The strength of your marketing message lies in its ability to speak to the specific wants and desires of your target market, and tap into their emotional reactions, or hot buttons.

When you push those hot buttons, you motivate your audience to take action. The more people you can motivate to take action, the more leads you’ll have in store and on the other end of the phone line.

A strong marketing message will make a huge difference in your lead generation strategies.

A marketing message is simply a statement or phrase that you use to communicate information about your business to others. A strong marketing message will do four things:

• Speak to the reader’s needs, wants or problems (hot buttons)
• Offer a solution, advantage or benefit
• Describe a point of difference
• Motivate the reader to take action

The key here is to motivate your target audience to do something after they read or hear the message. It needs to be strong enough to entice the audience to ask for more information, visit the website, pick up the phone or walk in the store.

You will put your marketing message on every piece of marketing material your business uses for lead generation, so it has to be powerful and consistent and speak to the group of people that you have identified as your ideal customers. Strengthening your marketing message has the potential to dramatically increase your lead generation before you even change your existing strategies.

Here are some examples of strong marketing messages that are used by successful businesses today.

Let’s get started with the process you can use to create a new marketing message for your business, or refine the marketing message you already have.

Work through the following questions to brainstorm and record the aspects of your business that you will communicate in your marketing message. Take your time, and be as detailed as possible.

1. Use all the information you gathered about your target market to figure out what your customer’s hot buttons are.

Write down who your customers are, and what their problems, desires and needs are.

Take some time to revisit the behavioral and psychographic information you gathered when researching your target market. This will give you an idea of what kind of emotional hot buttons you should focus on when creating your marketing message.

Hot buttons are emotional triggers that motivate your potential customers to take action. Some common hot buttons are: price, location, exclusivity, results, safety, timeliness, convenience and atmosphere.

2. Describe the value or benefit that your product or service offers your customers.

This is what your customers get when they spend money at your business – the answer to “what’s in it for me?” How do you solve their problems? How do you meet their needs, or fulfill their desires?

For example, maybe you’re a grocery store in the neighbourhood, and you offer the convenience of being just a short stroll away instead of a car ride.

When you’re thinking about this question, think about your product or service in the context of the benefits, results, or advantages customers receive, instead of the features you offer.

3. Think about the outcome of the value or solution that you provide.

Brainstorm what happens when your customers receive the value or benefit from your product or service, what happens? Are they thrilled? Relieved of worry? Do they have more time to spend with their families, or do they put dinner on the table faster?

This is kind of like the storytelling aspect of creating your marketing message. Paint a picture of how you will improve the lives of your customers, in one way or another.

4. What is your company’s point of difference? What makes you stand out from the competition?

Your point of difference – or uniqueness – is something you will want to strongly feature in your marketing message. It is the reason that the reader should choose your business instead of your competition.

For this step, do some research on your competition and see what kinds of marketing messages they are using. How strong are those messages? What benefits and results do they promise?

If you are having trouble figuring out what sets you apart from your competition, think about including an irresistible offer, or a strong guarantee to give yourself an edge. (See our previous blog on risk reversal strategies here)

5. What is the perception you would like others to have about your business?

How you wish your customers to perceive you will impact how you describe your offering in your marketing message, and the kind of language you will use. Revisit the vision you created, and write down some ideas about the image you want your business to project to the outside world.

For example, if your business is completely transforming its operations to become more environmentally sustainable, you will need to use different language and emphasize different features and benefits than you did before.

6. Based on the notes you wrote in response to the above questions, summarize the information into a paragraph of 4 to 5 sentences.

If you’ve got pages of notes, this may be a challenging part of the process, but that’s okay because it means you have a lot to work with. Take your time, and wade through your notes bit by bit.

You may want to start by writing 10 to 15 sentences, and then narrow those down to 4 to 5 sentences when you have a better idea of what specifically you want to focus on. Or, you could try writing three sentences for each question, and then working to synthesize from that point.

Keep in mind that the most effective marketing messages use strong, descriptive language that triggers emotional responses. Think about how you would describe your point of difference, or value-added service to a close friend, and write with that in mind.

7. Using descriptive language, synthesize your paragraph into a single sentence of 15 words or less.

This sentence will become your unique marketing message!

I know how challenging this part of the process can be, so to make it easier, I usually write a few different sentences that emphasize different things to give myself choices. For example, if you don’t know whether to feature your company’s commitment to unbelievable prices, or its guarantee of customer satisfaction, write one sentence each and compare which is stronger.

Aim to have two or three sentences that you’re happy with, and then test them out to see which is the most effective.

The only way to find out the strength of your marketing message is to test it. Don’t be afraid of making some mistakes – you need to get feedback!

Test your three draft marketing messages internally first.

Before you go out to the public with your drafts, test them on your friends, family, staff and colleagues first. Use their feedback constructively, but don’t be afraid to stand up for elements that you believe are effective or important.

Once you have gathered enough feedback, rework your draft messages and incorporate the suggestions you believe are valuable.

Incorporate feedback, and then test a few draft messages externally.

When you have refined your draft messages and incorporated staff and colleague feedback, you can start to test the messages out on your audience.

This doesn’t have to be complicated, or cost a lot of money. Simple tests using small-scale distributions will give you the information you need to choose which message is the most effective.

For example, place two or three ads in the local newspaper – one a week with a different message each time – and compare the number of leads each ad generates. Or, send out a small direct mail campaign, with the materials split into three groups – one for each message.

The message that generates the most leads is the strongest, and will be the one you choose to be your business’ unique marketing message.

Now that you’ve got a killer message, use it consistently on all of your marketing materials and in all of your campaigns.

Consistency and repetition are powerful persuasive tools to use to reinforce your message over time. Ensuring your marketing message appears on all documents related to your business will build your brand image and your company’s reputation.

Make a list of all marketing materials, stationery, signage and internal and external documentation that your customers and clients come in contact with. Then, incorporate your marketing message onto each of them.

Here’s a suggested list of materials to include:

• Website
• Advertisements
• Direct Mail
• Listings
• Phone Messages
• Email Signature
• Business Cards
• Letterhead

Now that you know what you’re going to say, and who you’re going to say it to, next is to dive into some lead generation strategies.

To Your Success