Karen Skidmore's Kick-Ass Blog | CanDoCanBe

Do your customers have the Amazon experience?

Last night was my “How to Automate Your Marketing” teleclass and boy, did we pack a lot in.  We looked at each stage of the marketing cycle and how you could use different web-based marketing tools to automate each part of your customer experience.

One email I received this morning giving me some feedback from last night, commented on how well Amazon up-sell you: “I went into Amazon yesterday to buy the copywriting book you recommended & ended up buying 2 others bring the total to about £20, instead of the £8 total for just one. It's very clever what they do, because I don't feel I've been ripped off, I just feel I've had a great buying experience.”

I have always admired Amazon’s wonderful buying experience and I do exactly the same thing.  Go in for one book and come out with a library.

But back to your business.  You may not have the marketing budgets and system development tools that Amazon may have, but how can you replicate the “great buying experience” that they offer.  With a few easy to send auto-responders, a simple shopping cart and efficient on line payment service, your business could have your customers loving to spend money with you ,too.

Get in touch if you want to know how – I’m taking a break for the summer holidays but will be back working 1–2–1 with clients again in September.

Buy a dedicated domain for your individual products

For those of you who have just the one website promoting your business online and yet have several programmes, products or specific workshops on offer, having a dedicated domain for each programme, product or workshop can make your marketing messages work more effectively (as well as helping your search engine optimisation).

It is a great short cut to having lots of mini-sites created, as well as keeping your online visitor within your one site.

Let me give you an example.  You may be promoting a particular workshop called Creative Minds.  You have the page on your website listing the dates, times, agenda, testimonials, etc but that page url may be something like this:  www.YourBizName.co.uk/workshops/creativeminds.html

Quite a link if you are using this page to send people to in your marketing.  Too long a link in an email as it could easily be broken in the received version.  Too long a link to look good on a printed leaflet.  And far too long for people to remember if you are telling them.

Register www.CreativeMinds.co.uk – something short and snappy which people can type easily – and set up your web host to re-direct the traffic to the dedicated page on your website (it’s called domain mapping).

Hey presto, you have an effective marketing message.

6 Common Mistakes Made When Marketing Events & Workshops

Adding workshops and training events to your business mix can be an excellent way of increasing your revenue as well as raising your profile in your local market place.

Workshops can be run at plush hotels, coffee bars, online, through conference calls - in fact when you let your imagination run wild, events can be as big or small as you want them to be.

But there is nothing worse than spending your precious time designing an event, booking a venue and marketing it only to have more trainers than delegates!  And I am sure this is why so many people are put off by running events.

It's the thought "but what happens if no one comes?"

There are several common mistakes that many people make running live events.  Read on to find out how you can avoid them and make sure your events are filled successfully.

Mistake No 1: Offer events that people need - not what they want.  It is too easy to spot a gap in the market and decide to share your expertise on a subject that you just know is needed.  But if there is no desire for what you are offering, it makes selling your event incredibly hard work. After all, it is not just money someone is investing in a live event - it is their time as well.

Find out what your market place really wants before deciding on your agenda.  If you don't believe me, try offering a time management workshop and just see how many people pay you money to attend :)

Mistake No 2: Think advertising not marketing.  "How do I advertise my events?" is often one of the first questions people ask.  Advertising costs can eat in to your profit incredibly quickly and to be frank, will not work if you are offering an event "cold".  Unless you have a strong brand presence in your market, you need to build people's trust in you.  You need to design a marketing plan that builds a conversation with potential delegates.

Mistake No 3: Start marketing with no database.  The larger the database of interested customers you have, the more likely you are to fill your event.  If you have a database of 100 people and you are trying to market an event that you need 7 to break even and 20 to make your target profit, the maths just don't add up.  Your conversion rate needs to be 20% which will only work if you have a very desirable topic and those people all happen to be free on the same day. 

Mistake No 4: Offer the whole cake rather than a taster.  The reason that stall holders at Farmers' Markets offer a morsel to taste is that they want to tempt you to buy the whole cake.  If you want to offer taster sessions to test the market place, consider breaking down your offerings to morsels. It makes it much easier to charge the true value of the event once you start marketing it commercially.

Mistake No 5: Discount heavily as desperation sets in.  Your workshop is in 5 days and you need another 4 or 5 people to really make it work.  You start discounting and offering BOGOFFs (buy one, get one free!).  But how do you think this makes the people, who have already committed to you, feel?  It's like going on holiday, only to find that the person in the room next door got the exact same holiday for half the price because they booked on teletext the week before.

Offer early bird discounts and reward the people who book in advance. If you really need to increase the numbers at short notice, it is far better PR by offering a few free places to your favourite customers as a thank you for their loyalty to you.

Mistake No 6:  Have no follow on events.  One event does not make a business.  Always have something else to offer to people who genuinely can't attend the day of the workshop, but are interested in what you are offering.  (at the very least offer an email newsletter to keep in touch with them!) 

You may find that it takes 4 or 5 months to build up awareness for your events.  It seems a long time, but believe me it will then make filling workshop 3 and 4 far easier (and a lot more fun for you!)

What's my biggest mistake?  Not to double check the day that I had booked a training room.  I found out the day before 15 ladies where expecting to drive to Guildford from across the South East that I wasn't due until the day after!  We had a fun workshop in the staff training room, complete with mops and buckets, which actually added to the day :)

What's yours?  I am sure there are other mistakes that people make and I would love to them.  Drop me an email and tell me your story – or be brave and leave a comment

Promoting everything all of the time just confuses your customers

When you are marketing your business, you can’t help get passionate about what you do, do you?

It can be all too easy to tell all your potential customers about all your products and services, all of the time.  After all, you want to make sure they know everything about what you do, don’t you?

This is a common mistake that many home businesses make.  Just think about many of the high street shops at the moment.  Sale signs up everywhere – and yet which are the shops that you decide to go in to?

If a shop window is full of messages and big red signs shouting different messages, it is confusing and you will walk by.  A shop with a very clear message “50% on all stock” will attract a higher number of walk-in customers.

When marketing your home business, have the courage to promote one product and one service at a time. It may feel like you are missing out on opportunities to make a sale, but by giving your customers one message at a time, they will be clearer on what it is they need to do to “walk in to your shop”.

How do you eat an elephant?

How do you eat an elephant?  One chunk at a time!

Running your own business from home can feel overwhelming at times.  Being your own boss can feel like you are running around in circles.  When you are the business, there is no marketing department to delegate to and no line manager to ask for help.

I must admit I am feeling a little like this this week – too many projects that need my attention and I am flitting from one to another like a butterfly.

If this is you – STOP!  Download your mind, write down all the projects and “stuff that need doing” and see it all on one piece of paper.  I like to do this on a white board as this visually helps me in the next step.

Once you have done this, you will then have a clearer picture of what needs doing.  Take one project at a time and you move ahead quicker.  Just like eating an elephant – your business grows quicker if you take it one chunk at a time!

Had any helicopter rides recently?

I was on the phone to Sue Stockdale today – a wonderfully  inspirational lady who runs a leadership business and works a lot with women starting their own business – and we were talking about helicopter rides.

Not literally flying in helicopters, but talking about taking the time out to hover over our businesses and move away from the doing.  It is easy when you are the business to be in “doing” mode because, after all, if you are not working with clients or working on projects you may not be invoicing and making money.

I have the month of January planned for my helicopter ride.  Some time out is well over due to work “on” the business rather than “in” and spend some time on my projects that will enable me to still make money whilst not actually billing my time. Can’t wait

When are you going to take your helicopter ride?

Are you selling a condom cap for cucumbers?

Fact:  Your business is nothing to do with you!  Your business is all about your customer.

When women start up their own business, they often focus on providing a service or offering a product that they feel is fulfilling a need.  They come up with an idea that is based on their personal experience.  Using personal experience is an important part of the business building process but it can also be where a business can go wrong.

You only need to watch an episode of Dragon’s Den to see many businesses doing just this – offering solutions to problems that don’t need fixing.

My favourite example of this is the guy who presented an invention which helped preserve half cucumbers in the fridge.  It not only looked like a condom (one of the dragon’s description, not mine!) but as most people tend to use a small piece of cling film – or indeed eat them up before needing to put them back in the fridge – inventing a cap to put on the end of the cucumber was something destined for Sunday magazine supplements and not the mass market.  Yup, this is one of the businesses that they didn’t invest in.

Solving problems that don’t need to be solved may be great fun for a little while.  But for a business to be successful for the long term, you need to be selling a product or service that gives your customers what they want and not what you feel they need.

Are you selling a condom cap for cucumbers too?

Do you have a menu for your customers to choose from?

Joanna from the Business Blog Angel team asked a great question on my last post.  “I'm wondering if you also found it easier to do the marketing and selling once it was a product you were selling rather than 'you'?”

Absolutely and this question made me think about menus on offer at restaurants.  We all know that most restaurants have the same basic food ingredients to cook with.  It is the way that they cook the food that distinguishes them from being a place that specialises in fish dishes, curries or thai cuisine.  You just wouldn’t just walk in to a restaurant and ask “can I have some food, please?”

When you decide to go out for dinner, you often choose your restaurant because of the menu on offer.  The easier the menu is to read and the more enticing they make the meals, the more likely it is you will walk in and spend your money with them.

Back to your business and selling yourself – your customers will find it hard to spend money with you unless you are able to make it easier for them to understand what you have to offer.

Offering yourself as coach, NLP practitioner, massage therapist or PR consultant tells people what your job title is but it doesn’t tell your customers how they can spend their money with you.

If you were a restaurant, what would be on your menu?

Lessons Learnt in Business Part Two

In part one of my Lessons Learnt in Business, I shared with you the power of attraction, the power of effective networking and the power of creating a vision, defining clear goals and taking actions.  In fact it was the third lesson that I focused on when I shared my story at the Business Link exhibition this week.

The big message I wanted to give to the ladies who came along to the What's Stopping You event was never, ever try to climb a mountain.  When you are starting out in business, it is easy to feel that there is too much to learn, too much to do and too much risk to take. 

It is far easier to climb lots of hills over a longer period of time.  Break down your big goal in to smaller chunks and starting a business becomes much more fun, as well as getting you to where you want to be quicker.

But what about the other two lessons that I feel I have learnt over the past three years?  Here are my fourth and firth lessons.

Lesson Four - The power of productising my business

For those of you reading this who may be in the business of selling themselves, you may relate more to this lesson.  Selling a service, especially when that service is you, presents marketing challenges.  People often buy what they want, not necessarily what they need.

This is why, for example, you may know of a woman spend £200 on a new pair of leather boots but find it hard to justify investing in themselves on a personal development coaching programme.

If you know what your customers' problems are, take the time to really understand the pain that they feel when they have this problem, you are more likely to create the solution that they not only need - but also want. 

I started to learn a lot about creating multiple streams of income and about creating products to help take the pressure of selling myself by the hour.  Productising what I was offering helped make it easier for people to buy more from me.  I was suddenly becoming easier to be put in to someone's shopping trolley and taken to the cash desk.

Lesson Five - The power of automating my business processes

After 18 months of being in business, I was creating plenty to fill my diary.  I had started offering commercially run workshops on a monthly basis.  I realised how much fun it was to run teleclasses and I was offering regular sessions on a variety of topics.  All of which needed marketing, taking payment for and sorting out all the associated admin.

It was the holy bible of small businesses that turned on my lights so bright I had to wear shades :)  Michel Gerber's E-myth Revisited is a must-read book for anyone working for themselves.  It shows you how to run a business as if you are going to franchise it.  It shows you how to run a business so that you can step away from it and yes, even go on holiday, and that business still generates an income. 

And one of the most powerful business tools I discovered was the power of automating my business processes through autoresponders.  Autoresponders are automatic emails that are sent out when someone actions something online.  Autoresponders are the sexiest business tool you can ever use as a small business and allow you to personally connect with your customers without having to do every single one yourself.

Other lessons?

I know there are plenty of other lessons I have learnt.  I could write a whole book about them (and probably will, one day!).  I hope that by sharing these 5 lessons, it helps you work out what you need to do to create the business you want.

After all, you can do and can be whatever it is you want in business - you just have to decide what it is and DO IT!

What lessons have you learnt?  Leave your thoughts as a comment below.

5 Lessons Learnt in Business Part One

This is Part One of a special two part article. Part Two published on Thursday 22^nd November.

It was after the birth of our second child that I realised that corporate life was no longer doing it for me.  I was bored, needed a new challenge and with our eldest due to start school within the next 2 years, I felt it was important to create a career that could fit around family life.

I wanted to pick up our children at the end of school. I didn't want to have the headache and stress of organising expensive child care in the holidays.

After 18 months of a grumpy "I don't know what to do" period, I stumbled in to a life coaching website.  Signing up for a life coach accreditation programme was like the light going on.  I felt as if I was creating a toolkit to help me build a business around.

In September 2004, my daughter started school and I became self-employed after giving notice to my 11 year career with my company.  My plan was to create a traditional life coach practice, selling myself on a 1-2-1 basis and offering myself as a coach for women wishing to return to work after maternity leave.

A tough business to start up from scratch as I soon begun to realise! And bit by bit I begun to learn some pretty powerful lessons.

Lesson One - The power of attraction

After the first 5 months I felt it wasn't going as well as it should.  Clients where finishing with me (because they had achieved their goals but it sure didn't feel like that at the time!) and I couldn't find any new clients to work with.  The more stressed I got that I wasn't making any money, the less money I seemed to make. I was in a downward spiral.

I started to work with a coach myself and very quickly I discovered that a change of mental attitude and a touch of self-belief made a big difference to my results.  Things started to happen in a way that was infectious. I stopped attracting the no-show clients and I started to attract the women I realised I enjoyed working with - women starting up a new business.

I have continued to test this theory of attraction over the last few years.  Whenever I have felt tired or just want to slump in front of the TV and thought to myself "oh, no I have so-and-so tonight for her coaching session" surprise, surprise, they would cancel or just not be there when I called.  The power of attraction has become a powerful tool and I now know to only think in terms of what I want to attract.

Lesson Two - The power of networking

Networking was always part of the "big plan" but I didn't realise how just powerfully it worked until about month 8 or 9.  Someone once told me that the definition of successful networking was being talked about when you weren't in the room.

Well after 8 months of giving, learning and not expecting anything back in return, I realised what this person meant.  Networking is quite an amazing force when you put the time and energy in to build relationships and connect with people.

I have learnt to build relationships rather than sell.  I have learnt that the 6 degrees of separation is probably true!

Lesson Three - The power of creating a vision, defining clear goals and taking action

I did kinda know this already from my corporate life and through my life coaching.  I have always been an action-orientated person and was known by my friends from school for having a 5 year life plan in my 20's.  But it wasn't until I started reviewing my first year in business and started to plan for the next one, that I realised how much faster you can go when you totally clear on where it is you are going.

After 12 months of stumbling through and embracing what opportunities came my way, I realised that CanDoCanBe was going to be a business support network for women.  I realised I wanted to created an informative, encouraging and empowering environment for women to learn, share and connect with others. 

Having clearly defined goals and breaking down the milestones in to small, achievable "baby steps", I started taking big, giant sized leaps.

To be continued on Thursday 22nd November.

What lessons have you learnt?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.