Boyd Bowker, Author at Leverage 123 | Profitable Marketing Made Simple

Boyd Bowker

Author Archives: Boyd Bowker

How To Better Bond With Your Customers

“Know, Like, And Trust!”

Those are some of the most important three words in marketing. Customers need to know, like, and trust you. Often we do that through salespeople or support staff. But, you can deepen your relationship with your customers and clients in other ways.

Here’s a great way to easily do this with video:

Create a video series of 5 minute interviews of your key people who work for you. Put theses videos on one page on your site. Invite your visitors to go to that page and watch them…and comment on them too! Put this up on YouTube and in general spread it all around the Internet.

How To Implement:

This is very easy to implement. For a camera use your smart phone. (Hold it sideways so that the video is horizontal!) Get with each of the people you’re interviewing and write a quick script of what you want them to cover. Let them be natural. Don’t script everything. Keep these short. 3 minutes is perfect!

Need Help?

If you would like help implementing these marketing tips, or would like to discuss the many ways that we can help you make “More Sales Now”, visit our “Contact Us” page and let us know how we can help you!

Making Money By Giving Stuff Away

Thanks for being on my list and reading my emails and posts. If I can help you implement any of my tips, just reach out to me!

Having said that, just because you’re doing all this fancy online stuff please don’t forget the basics of good selling.

Here’s a case in point.

The free trial! I can’t tell you how many business owners I’ve approached and asked if they’ve ever considered a free trial. Sure, everyone’s thought about this, but few have actually done it.

Consider implementing a free trial for some product in your business. You’ll probably be delighted at the results.

How To Implement:

You’re going to have to put your thinking cap on and consider which products or services could even been turned into a free trial. Done right, you’ll implement the free trial for a certain period. Let’s say 90 days. Keep track of the added (or subtracted) revenue from that. Make your decision to continue, discontinue, or tweak based on real numbers not gut feel!

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Why You’re Having Trouble Building Your Email List

I see this a lot! Businesses try to build an email list and… not much happens. The issue is this. Marketing online is very detail oriented and actually takes quite a lot of experience. It’s hard for people to just come in from another business model and succeed at it.

Here’s an example.

A lot of businesses assume that they need to collect more not less information on their squeeze page. So, they ask name and email, of course, but then they ask for the phone number, the mailing address, and also ask the visitor to fill in a few answers to some generic questions.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Why? Well, in a word, TRUST! The person just landed on your page and you want to know their life history.

Do this instead.

Have a two step process. On your initial squeeze page ask for name and email only. Then in your follow ups ask for the extra information. Incentivize it if you need to!

How To Implement:

Try it both ways and split test it! There are click tracking apps that keep track of how many people landed on a given page and how many clicked on this and that. Use that intelligence to see which page your market responds to the most. Let me know if you need help with this!

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Turn Your Blog Into A Sales Machine!

You need to sell on every inch (or centimeter) of your blog!

One page that probably needs reworking is your About page. When I look at most business’s about page, I normally see a very ho hum, even boring summary of what’s so wonderful about the company. That’s good, but not great!

Even an About page can be turned into a sales page. What should you sell? 9 times out of 10, you need to see your readers on the idea of clicking a link and submitting an email to get something.

Rework your About page so that it sells the click! You’ll get more sign ups, and as a consequence, they’ll know more about your business too!

How To Implement:

1. You need what we call a lead magnet. Write a short report about something virtually every customer you have should be interested in. Save that a s PDF.

2. Next get your web gal or guy to create a squeeze page for you.

3. Link to that from your About page!

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How To Increase Business Buzz

Advertising is great. PR done right might even be better. We talked about HARO in another email. (Help A Reporter Out) If you missed that, let me know. I’ll send you the information.

Here’s more PR you can do for your business. Works even if you’re on a tight budget, too!

Buzzsumo is a website that tracks media buzz on various topics. Go there and enter your business type into the search bar. You’ll get back articles that are online along with metrics that show you how well they are performing.

The goal here isn’t to microanalyze all of this. The goal is to find names of journalists for you to send a pitch to about your business. Most by lines will link to a journalist’s page where they’ll have ways of contacting them through either email or social media or both.

Next, take a short pitch about your business and mail it to them or use social media to message them about it. Do a lot of these and chances are you’ll get some replies back.

If you keep at this, you might even end up with an article in USA Today or the Wall Street Journal!

How To Implement:

Remember the Nike tag line? Just Do It!

Also, try just going to big business magazine websites, like Forbes, Inc, or Entrepreneur. Search for relevant articles there. Contact those journalists too!

Need Help?

Big Thing All Your Emails Are Lacking

An email has four important parts.

1. The subject line.

2. The body.

3. The call to action.

You already knew about those three, right?

There’s another one and it’s your signature.

If you’re like most business people, your signature is boring, and even worse, it’s not selling anything.

Most folks put in name, title, phone numbers, website. Something like that.

How about adding some stuff to this?

1. A repeat call to action

2. A coupon

3. A free consultation

4. A giveaway of some sort

5. A link to even more free content

You’ll want to vary this up some. We do this for two reasons…1. To take advantage of the online real estate that’s available to you. 2. To train people to read your whole email!

As always, if you need help with this, let me know!

How To Implement:

This is a matter of brainstorming and then trying out different variations. If you’ll include a link to something that’s not linked to otherwise (a giveaway), you can track these links and see which one has the best click through rate.

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Ready To Step Up Your Marketing Game?

Very few sales people like to cold solicit business, cold calling, knocking on doors, or even sending out cold emails. I mean, you really feel like you’re invading someone else’s space, right? But, here’s the deal. If you want to make more sales, you have to get more assertive! If you don’t talk to that potential customer, one of your competitors probably will at some point, and their business will be lost forever!

In other words, I’d suggest you get over your aversion to cold solicitation, if you have one. It’s the way big businesses are built!

Cold email is a great first step, because it’s actually not that time consuming to do, and it’s perfectly find to send cold emails to businesses (not consumers).

How To Implement:

You’re going to need a few things to do this:

1. A way to gather the emails. There are several software programs out there where you can type in a business name and a location and find email addresses of prospects.

2. You’re going to need an autoresponder for this. Warning, DO NOT use your normal account for this, just in case your current autoresponder company decides they don’t like you doing this and shut your entire account down. Either use an inhouse mailing solution or find an autoresponder that doesn’t mind cold email solicitation.

3. Make sure you get a competent copywriter to write your cold email. You can’t “spit ball” this. Your email is basically like a very short sales letter.

4. Finally, as always, make sure you include a call to action. Sending them from your cold email to a squeeze page is a great idea.

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Answer Your Customers’ Questions In Advance! Make More Sales!

A FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is one of the stealthiest sales tools you can have in your arsenal. Think about yourself. Have you ever avoided calling a business, or reaching out to them, because there was some niggling detail about what they sold that you didn’t understand? Have you ever almost bought, but were held back by one little question…and that question never got answered, and you never bought!

It’s happened to all of us. There’s an old marketing adage…the confused mind never buys.

How many sales are you losing because your customers are confused, and you don’t know it?

Let’s solve that problem right now. Create an FAQ. Put that FAQ prominently on your website. Print it out for your promotional materials. Give it to your sales people. Get it as widely distributed as possible!

Doing this one thing will save you time and money in lost sales!

How To Implement:

Either think back to questions you’ve been asked by real customers, or if that doesn’t work, just put on your “customer hat” and look at your product/service from their point of view. What questions do they have, or would they have? Answer these as thoroughly and honestly as possible.

Next, publish this on your blog. You’ll want this to be a page that’s linked to from the navigation bar on your website. It’s that important!

Need Help?

Great Content (And Sales) Starts Here

By now, if you’ve been following my posts, you should understand that great content leads to more visitors, which leads to more leads, prospects, sales…and revenue!

So, now the elephant in the room is…

Creating great content.

Like so many things, you can hire this out. I do this stuff for a living. So if you want, reach out to me.

If, however, you want to DIY (do it yourself), here are some critical tips:

Make your content customer/client centric. Nobody cares what you know, until they know you care.
Write in terms of benefits, not features.
Brainstorm! Don’t just go with the first idea or two. Write down twenty. (Keep the rest for a later date.)

Finally, be consistent. You can’t be Albert Einstein all the time. Having said that, you don’t win baseball games with home runs. You win with base hits. (How’s that for mixing metaphors!)

How To Implement:

A great way to start is with a case study of a recent purchaser/client. Get them on the phone and ask them a few questions about their experience.

Also, make sure to keep “Idea” files and “Swipe” files. I use Evernote for this because I can easily capture inspirations no matter which device I have with me.

Need Help?

Doing More With Less Online

In my experience, businesses give up on marketing themselves online because they get overwhelmed. One way of dealing with this is hiring someone like me to do the marketing for you. Another way is by repurposing content.

How To Implement:

Take a product and describe it in a blog post. (Or service.)

Next, make a YouTube video of you reading the description. You can show the product or not, where applicable.

Turn that post into a PowerPoint presentation. Make another video with that.

Take the PowerPoint and put it up on SlideShare.

Link to all of this multiple times with social media. You can even hire outsourcers do to this for you.

Take that same content and use all the tips and tricks you’ve learned from me so far and spread the content around even more. Make sure everything has a call to action. Make sure it all has links to your website.

Sure, it’s still a lot of work, but the benefits will last for years! (or, you can hire me to do it for you !).

Need Help?

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