One Profound Question That Can Drastically Improve Your Marketing

May 1, 2013 | By | 8 Comments

Improve Your Benefits-Based Marketing With This One QuestionI’ll bet you started your business to follow a passion, to do something you love, or to create your own future.

And yet, marketing is what you find yourself wrapped up in all the time.

After all, you need leads, clients, and customers, and no one can hire you, buy from you, or learn from you if they don’t know that you exist!

Why Marketing Is So Hard

You’re good at what you do. You know it. In fact, you’re brilliant at what you do. But unfortunately, for most of us marketing isn’t what you do best.

Learn the one question that will make marketing with benefits easy

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Start A Sales Conversation With Your Marketing Message

March 22, 2013 | By | 4 Comments

Jennifer Bourn and Ali BrownRecently I flew to LA for Thrive Live, Ali Brown’s Elevate member event. The two day event, was mainly taught by Elevate coaches James Roche, Joy Chudacoff, and Sue Painter (as Ali is very pregnant with twins!), and was focused on basic business concepts like your mission, your marketing message, and your business model.

One of those areas caused some serious grief and stress for many of the attendees… and the exact same thing causes several of our clients who are newer to business ownership to freak out a little. Can you guess which one it is?

It wasn’t understanding and communicating their mission, and it wasn’t choosing a business model.

It was figuring out a marketing message and how to communicate what you do in a way that is clear, easy to understand, and in alignment with your mission and values.

As I sat in the room, I couldn’t help but think that if this many business owners at this event were struggling with crafting their marketing message, then imagine how many others around the world are struggling with the same problem … Yikes!

Learn what a marketing message is used for and get a step-by-step formula to write your own marketing message

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VIP Treatment: A Smart Marketing Lesson From Lego

February 14, 2013 | By | 20 Comments

Lego Valentine's Day Special PromotionWhat does VIP treatment equal?

For your clients and customers, feeling like a VIP often equals spending more money!

I think we all can learn a valuable marketing lesson from Lego this Valentine’s Day on marketing and VIP treatment.

For Valentine’s Day, Lego put together a special promotion. As a VIP member, I received a gift in the mail containing special early bird opportunities, discounts, and opportunities to earn double VIP rewards.

It’s no secret we’re HUGE Lego fans in the Bourn household.

Heck, we’re remodeling our entire bonus room into one giant Lego utopia. So when this little package arrived, we were excited. We’ve received special Lego packages like this before and they’re always brilliantly done and well designed.

Learn the Marketing Lessons Lego Teaches Us

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Are you missing opportunities to improve and create success?

May 29, 2012 | By | 4 Comments

Missing OpportunitiesAs coach and team parent for our kids’ sports teams, we learn quite a bit about parents and politics — If you have kids in youth sports, you know what I mean!

This week some parents’ behavior (not showing up at all or showing up really late to practice) got me thinking about business and all the opportunities for learning, success, and sales that get missed.

Why do you miss these opportunities?

  • You don’t take action
  • You don’t show up

Often, an opportunity to create success is right in front of you and you miss out simply because you don’t take action — or you think, “I’ll do it or follow up on that later” and then forget all about it.

Read More About Siezing Opportunities

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Closing the Gap Between Prospects, Patrons, and Profits

March 5, 2012 | By | 11 Comments

Are You Leaving Money on The Table2008, a year of near economic collapse in the U.S., is not so long ago. American citizens in some sectors are still reeling from the great slump in the housing market, the widespread loss of jobs, and the ongoing outsourcing of work overseas, among other catastrophes.

When it comes to our economy, unrest and uncertainty seem to be its calling cards. In such a climate, it’s easy for us entrepreneurs to focus on the negatives, mostly that consumers don’t have any money to spend on our goods and services.

But what about focusing on the positives?

Kiplinger reported at the end of last year that "Consumers are finally loosening the purse strings." Couple that good news with Time magazine’s January announcement that 2012 is "The year of the entrepreneur."

Learn How to Close the Gap Between Prospects, Patrons, and Profits

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Bait the Hook: Market with Benefits, not Features

February 10, 2012 | By | 8 Comments

Bait the Hook - Market with Benefits not FeaturesIf you’ve ever been shopping for higher-end technology, you’ll resonate with the marketing ideas I’m going to share with you today, because part of shopping for technology involves reading about features, and today we’re going to learn why marketing with features isn’t enough to capture your customers.

To begin to understand what I’m talking about, just read (or try to read) this list of features posted on Amazon for a Nikon digital camera:

  • 14.1-megapixel CCD sensor for superb image quality
  • 21x Wide-Angle Optical Zoom-NIKKOR Glass Lens
  • 5-way VR Image Stabilization System
  • EXPEED C2 for enhanced image quality and processing speed
  • 3-inch Ultra-High Resolution (921,000-dot) Clear Color Display

Now, if you’re NOT a photographer versed in digital photography, the features listed above aren’t going to tell you much. But if you’re a savvy shopper, you would be asking, “Well, just what IS a 5-Way VR Image Stabilization System, and how can it help me?”

In other words, reading a list of features can only take you so far. What you really want to know are the benefits. Now, sure, a few of the items above state that with the given feature, “image quality” will improve, but none of them says exactly how or why.

And that’s exactly the problem with marketing with features instead of benefits.

Learn About Marketing With Benefits Instead of Features

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Who is Your Ideal Client? Do you know?

January 28, 2012 | By | 9 Comments

Find Your Ideal Clients By Grading Your Current ClientsWhile getting started on brand strategy and design and website strategy with my clients, one of the first things I want to know is who the ideal client is. Who is the person the brand and website must resonate with and speak to. Who does it need to attract to my client?

How do you know who your ideal client is? Your Ideal Client is some one who:

  • Has problems and challenges you can easily fix and solve with your eyes closed
  • Sees you as a valuable necessity they treasure, instead of a necessary evil
  • Likes you, appreciates your hard work, and will tell their friends, peers, and contacts about you
  • Will pay you what you’re worth and will be happy to do so because they know you’re worth it

But how do you find out exactly who they are?

Grade Them.Look at all of your clients for a set time period and give each one a grade — A, B, C, D, F. Don’t think about it too much. Just go with your gut instinct and be honest — Don’t worry! No one will see this but you.

Learn More About Finding & Defining Your Ideal Clients

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How to Succeed at Marketing

December 30, 2011 | By | 9 Comments

How to Succeed at Marketing

Marketing includes any contact a person has with any part of your business. It is an ongoing process not a single event.

When you look at it that way, marketing can sound pretty "big" and overwhelming — After all, every contact with your business is a lot of space to cover!

I want to you think about marketing a bit differently though. Think about marketing as a whole bunch of opportunities to educate your audience on how to achieve their goals, grow their business, improve their life, etc.

One important thing to remember though, is that people only read and pay attention to what interested them. That means it’s your job to provide them interesting content, images, videos, audios, and messages so they pay attention!

It’s also your job to market your business. You owe it to the people whom you can help that are suffering and just haven’t found you yet. They need your help and they need to be able to find you. The only way to do that is to market your business.

Now you don’t need to be a marketing guru, expert, or maven to succeed at marketing a small business — you just have to be committed and consistent. Consistent mediocre marketing with commitment will work better and produce more results than brilliant marketing done inconsistently without commitment.

Here’s what you need to know about successful marketing for small business:

Learn How to Succeed at Small Business Marketing

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3 Simple Keys to More Profits, Less Stress and More Visibility

August 24, 2011 | By | Leave a Comment

Sydni Craig HartGuest Post from Sydni Craig-Hart, The Smart Simple Marketing Coach

Building your business, increasing profits, and growing your business to support the lifestyle you want is the whole point of becoming an entrepreneur.

The first step in doing so is to define what success means for you. Perhaps it means that you work a certain schedule. Have the ability to travel extensively. Or maybe it has to do with the amount of income you generate. Be OK with whatever success means to you and resist the urge the be influenced by what the “gurus” say you should be doing. Instead, focus your efforts on bringing your vision of success to life! This means taking action to works towards your goal.

Remember this quote: “There is something more important than believing; ACTION! The world is full of dreamers. Those who are successful will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to ACTUALIZE their vision” (- Unknown).

In order to build your business and your profits, you will need to do just a few things very well:

Learn the 3 Simple Keys to More Profits, Less Stress and More Visibility

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Marshmallow Sculptures and Marketing

August 15, 2011 | By | 8 Comments

During our recent camping trip, I created something brand new …
and we named it Marshmallow Lava.

Marshmallows and Marketing

In one of our previous camping trips, I started a new family tradition of building sculptures out of marshmallows. We LOVE arts and crafts projects, and this is just another way for us to express our creativity.

Learn How Marshmallows Can Help Your Marketing

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