What is Business Marketing?
What is business marketing? How do I market my business? How do I market to get more customers?
A lack of understanding in marketing is the most prevalent reason why many of my clients seek coaching assistance in the first instance. They don’t have enough customers to sustain their business, and they don’t know how to address the issue. For many business owners, marketing is not understood or is an anathema. Often business owners are scared of marketing.
I have created the 8Cs of LOVE Marketing Mastery™, which is one of the pillars in my mega/high performance business coaching framework.
All marketing needs to be about LOVE. For me, LOVE in the context of marketing means:
Lucid (clearly expressed)
Outstanding (exceptionally good)
Veracious (truthful)
Effective (achieving intended results)
Then there are the 8Cs of LOVE Marketing Mastery™. The 8Cs are:
- Customer Avatar
- Channels to Market
- Capturing Leads
- Communications Strategy
- Conversion Rate
- Cash Value of Sales
- Customer Continuity
- Creating Customer Referrals
Let’s briefly look at each one in turn.
Customer Avatar
This is about understanding the perfect customer for your business. To work this out, what do you know about your current customers? Which ones are the most profitable for your business? What is the lifetime value of your current customers? Customers are an asset and MUST be looked after. Start looking at your current customers, and that will help you work out what type of customers your business works well with, and therefore, what types of potential customers you should start looking to build more business with.
Channels to Market
With the development of social media, there is now a myriad of ways to market to potential customers, and to start building relationships with them. What channels to market best suit your business? It is not a case of selecting all channels to market. Select the channels that best suit you and your personality and your targeted audience. For instance, if you are targeting retired people, then it is unlikely that you will find vast numbers of them by using Twitter as your key marketing channel.
Capturing Leads
Just because you are ready to sell to your potential customers, it doesn’t mean that they are ready to buy from you. When you receive basic information (usually name, phone number, email) for a potential customer (or lead), how do you capture the lead and keep the information safe and in an automated system so that you can regularly communicate with your existing and potential customers, keeping them up to date on your business?
Communications Strategy
What is your communications strategy? If you are a retailer, you can’t ring your customers to update them on what’s happening in your business. All businesses – big and small – need a communications strategy that effectively updates your existing and potential customers on a regular basis on offers you are making, and also how on you are an expert/authority in your industry niche.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of leads you have in your leads pipeline that become customers in your business. Do you know your conversion rate?
Cash Value of Sales
Do you know what the average cash value of the sales you make in your business per customer is? It is easier to keep existing customers and sell more products and services to them than it is to continuously look for new customers. In your business, how can you increase the cash value of sales to your existing customers by selling more to them? With new customers, how can you include ‘up/down and cross-selling’ opportunities in your offers to them?
Customer Continuity
All businesses should be aiming to have their customers become the business’s cheerleaders and customers for life. Are you losing customers? If so, why? There are two main reasons why customers leave a business: a) They don’t feel special or important to the business, or b) there is unresolved conflict. While you might think that customers leave due to pricing, in many research studies undertaken it has been proven over and over again that of the customers that leave a business, only 9 percent of them leave due to getting a better price elsewhere.
Creating Customer Referrals
If you are doing great work for your customers, why not ask them for testimonials and referrals? If they are your cheerleaders, then they will be delighted to assist you to grow your business.
Which of the 8Cs can you influence?
The following chart shows you how the 8Cs link into making money within your business. Which of the 8Cs can you influence to assist your business to grow?
As business owners and entrepreneurs, we can control and influence: the channels to market; how we capture leads; and how we communicate with potential and existing customers. If those tools are effective, then our conversion rate will be higher, so we can influence that too.
Sadly, we cannot make a potential customer buy from us. That is their decision. But get all the factors leading up to that right, and they will want to buy from us. We cannot influence whether our customers will give us testimonials and referrals, but treat them brilliantly and specially and they will want to help us.
We can influence the cash value of sales made to the business and how many of our customers continually buy from us. Plus we can influence our gross margin. Get all of those factors right and we increase our customers, we increase our sales, and we increase our gross profit.
So what is business marketing? Business marketing is understanding the 8Cs of marketing; creating strategies and systems for the elements of marketing we can influence and control; and implementing them with LOVE. That is business marketing.
Could some guidance from me be helpful to you? If so, please arrange a free 30 mins Skype strategy meeting with me. Here’s my calendar to book a meeting. I’d love to support you in some way to gain ‘seductive clarity’ in any aspect of your business or life.
Other articles on Branding, Marketing and Pricing:
Do You Compete on Price? Bad Business Decision!!
Is Customer Service YOUR Key to Business Success?
Creating Superior Customer Value – do you do that in your business?
Which are Your Most Profitable Customers?
Finding Customers via LinkedIn
Using YouTube for Finding Customers
Who Wants High Customer Retention?
What is a Customer?
Increase Your Prices & Make More Profit
What’s your Personal Brand?
