Never Get a ”Real„ Job (23 page)

At Sizzle It!, we have our clients sign off on our Services and Assumptions Agreement prior to any work taking place. This is a document that lists everything they need to know about their sizzle reel, its exact production time line, and instances where additional fees may apply based on changes to the project’s scope. Not only does this keep us efficient and keep the clients in-the-know, it also protects our company from potential disputes that may arise over lacks of clarity.

If you let them, your clients will take advantage of you. So do yourself a favor: Don’t leave room for clients to get more than they paid for. Keep all of your written correspondence with your customers on file in case trouble arises. Be meticulous in your construction of your own Services and Assumptions Agreement. Mandate every client to sign a document that acknowledges they understand their purchase in no uncertain terms. Believe me, this will save you countless headaches later on when, inevitably, a client will fight with you over something that wasn’t made clear to them—even though it probably was.

Principle #15: Make It Easy to Do Business with You

Just because
you
think something is easy doesn’t mean it is for anyone else. You live and breathe your company every day, but your clients don’t. They have their own lives, schedules, and priorities to deal with. To them, you’re a mere pit stop. This is why it’s important to regularly assess how easy, simple, and convenient it is to do business with your company.

Be prepared: What you find may shock you. You might discover that your ecommerce store forces customers to jump through one step too many, or that the company phone tree might confuse callers with too many generic options.

Be mindful that you are
not
your customer. It doesn’t matter if you “get” something if your customers don’t get it or worse—don’t like it.

There is always a way to make things easier—and no one knows how to do that better than your existing clients. So give your customers a reason to criticize your business. Offer them incentives in exchange for participating in surveys. Ask them where there is room for improvements.

Most importantly, don’t just sit on feedback—act on it. Show your clients that you’re actually listening to them. Be sure to let them know if their insights lead to real changes in your business.

10

Facebook Isn’t a Marketing Strategy

Above all else, I credit the failure of
the company that shalt not be named
to one key flaw: The fact that our marketing was practically nonexistent—and what did exist quite frankly sucked. From our useless “evolution needs a spark” tagline to our lack of a cohesive campaign, we never marketed our services effectively. Here is a sampling of our marketing failures:

 

• Our brand message was poorly developed, generic, and impractical.
  
 

 

• We were reactive—not proactive—marketers.
  
 

 

• We focused too much on brand marketing and not enough on actually selling our services.
  
 

 

• Our marketing campaigns were highly untargeted and un-unified.
  
 

 

• We spent too much money on ineffective ad placements.
  
 

 

• We failed to leverage the credible clients who were already on our roster to help us secure others.
  
 

Many aspiring entrepreneurs nowadays foolishly believe that all they need to do is sign up for a Twitter account, blog about special offers, hand out a flashy looking brochure—and they’re set. Leads will come pouring in with every status update. Every flyer handed out or newsletter sent will generate big results. Each mention of the company in the press will convert into revenue. And in no time, the business will become the leading service provider simply because “that’s what happens.”

This flawed logic couldn’t be further from the truth.

These social media fantasies and free marketing delusions would have amateurs believe that thousands of loyal customers are a mere five minutes away. Yet the mere existence of a market for your product or service does not guarantee that anyone will listen or care about your brand. People are bombarded with thousands of messages every day, which makes it difficult for business owners to garner attention and convert that attention into income.

It’s true that there are a million ways to let the world know about your brand these days. However, without a quality message, creativity, and supportive offers, your business will undoubtedly get lost among the glut of content already clogging the channel. To break through the clutter, you will need to produce a marketing system that effectively converts time, energy, and brand awareness into revenue—and the only way to do this is to create effective marketing messages, become an expert in your field, and build an ever-growing multichannel platform from which to sell your products and services.

MESSAGE BEFORE PLATFORM

Face it: Any idiot can launch a Facebook Fan Page, upload a video to YouTube, or tweet about a well-written magazine article until he gets carpel tunnel. Effective marketers don’t base their entire campaigns on individual tools, platforms, or channels. Nor do they simply spout off discounts or promotions ad nauseam hoping for a return on their investments.

Think about it. If someone doesn’t believe in your brand or care what it stands for, what makes you believe they’ll give a second look to your 20-percent-off coupon?

Effective marketing is about crafting and distributing
targeted
messages through the appropriate consumer touch points to build and maintain a powerful brand identity. The key is to develop the right supportive media—relevant information, content, call-to-action messaging and complimentary offers—that work together to attract and form bonds with prospects—and compel them to make purchases and referrals as a result.

All of this begins by creating a powerful, viable brand message that establishes your market position, effectively sets the foundation for your marketing efforts, and lets customers know what you stand for.

Create a brand language
. Begin building your marketing campaign by conceiving and owning a solid
brand language
—a series of keywords and phrases that capture customers’ attention. This language is used to inform those consumers of what you do and—with enough attention, consistency, and effort—will one day become synonymous with your brand name—like “copy” is to Xerox, “online search” is to Google, or “sizzle reels” are to Sizzle It!’s

If you own your brand language online, your site—as well as other Web sites and media that support your Web site and its offerings—will be the first result that prospective customers see every time they type your keywords and phrases into a search engine. Start this process by identifying keywords and phrases that are highly relevant to your product or service. In the early stages of your company, your brand language should consist of no more than three or four words. Likewise, it is important to make certain your brand language is uniquely yours so you can really “own” it. For example, an environmentally friendly car-wash business may never be able to own the words “car wash” because of the sheer number of car washes in the world, but it may be able to own the phrase “eco-friendly car wash” or “Smithtown’s eco-friendly car wash.”

Owning a language is worthless if it doesn’t create mental associations and connect customers to your product, service, or brand. It’s important to check your brand language’s strength for consumer relevancy by finding out how often these keywords are searched online.
Entrepreneur.com
offers a keyword search tool, and other sites such as Network Solutions or Google Insights can help you narrow down your verbiage. The more relevant your keywords and the more often they are searched online, the better they’ll serve you for both offline and online initiatives.

Once you’ve selected your main keywords and phrases, you’ll need to incorporate your brand language into all of your consumer touch points—from taglines to company bios to voicemail boxes to marketing materials to social media sites. This will ensure that everything your clients and prospects see, hear, or feel conveys a cohesive brand identity.