Use A Shotgun and The Rule of 3 To Make More Sales
October 31, 2007
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Are you using the shotgun method in your marketing? If you’re not you’re losing sales.
The fact is, most potential customers will need to see your branding three times before they decide to use your product or services. So you need to focus on one small group at a time and ensure that this happens. And this is true whether you have an online business or bricks and mortar.
Here are a few tips for ensuring this happens:
1) Don’t use the machine gun approach and fire a dozen different marketing strategies at random consumers. Use a shotgun - target a specific group and make sure they see you at least 3 times.
2) Notice I said see what you are offering, not just hear or see your name. Most people are visual, or kinsthetic. So, you should have a clear, simple, logo. And your message in your advertising should give them an idea of how they will feel when they use your product or service.
3) Make sure you target a small group of people at a time. Choosing your group and how to market to them is easier than you think. First, pick a recent customer - not just any customer, but a good one. Someone who has made a decent size purchase from you, paid on time and hasn’t been a complete pain. Then you target customers in the same area, using the same marketing methods.
4) You already know how your great customer found you, because you asked them. If you didn’t - give yourself a dope slap and make sure you know where all your customers come from in the future. This bit is dead easy. If you take your orders by telephone, you simply ask them how they heard about you.
If you take orders online, you make the question a simple part of your online order form. And if you have a retail outlet, when they’re paying you tell them you run special offers from time to time and ask them to fill out a form so they can receive them. Your question should be part of this simple form.
5) Use every opportunity to discover as much as you can about your ideal target customer. If you’ve followed the steps above you already know how they found you, and you know what area they are from.
6) Once you’ve defined your ideal customer make sure they see your product or service at least three different times. Eg: If your ideal customer hangs out in niche forums, make sure you are a valuable contributor to that forum, consider advertising on the forum. Focus on what keywords potential customers on that forum may be using to find what they’re looking for, and set up a targeted Google adwords campaign.
If you have bricks and mortar business, you could drop flyers in the customers local area. At the same time, you could target that area with a mailing campaign. You could also advertise in a local publication. Small publications such as community or parish newsletters are far cheaper than local newspapers.
7) Don’t give up to easily. Remember most potential customers need to hear your marketing message at least three times. And it does work. Just to give you an idea on how well it works - we were getting mediocre results in a particular target area. So, we chose just one street in that area to test, using three different marketing methods. The results were astounding - 7 jobs on that one small street within 2 days.
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9 Responses to “Use A Shotgun and The Rule of 3 To Make More Sales”
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Catherine,
I’m glad you brought this issue to light. It is so true.
Many years ago, I worked for a new company. The owner had broken away from the competition, and started his own business. His logo had the name of the business repeated three times (in a very classy fashion).
Through his keen knowledge of “3 times”, and his expertise, he built his business to be much bigger than the competition ever dreamed he could.
Now, he is the biggest competition for others.
That’s some sound advice. It reminds of Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week where he states that most of his time was taken up by a few bad customers. When he finally just let them hang, his business took off because of time and money better spent.
I kinda feel blessed to have the internet. It’s so much easier to do shotgun marketing (the ones who fail don’t take advantage of this).
The… rule of 3 is new to me… makes me think now… thanks for making me think
It is so true that we waste an awful lot of time (and money) marketing to everyone instead of just someone.
Your best customers wil have something in common - in business to business for example, if you’re best customers are professional services, then why don’t you create individual campaigns for accountants, solicitors, insurance brokers etc.
And tell them why your business is uniquely positioned to help them. And include testimonials from other people in their profession.
You will spend far less on marketing, and get far better results because you know they share the same characteristics as your best customers.
It’s a really simple but amazingly effective way of growing your business.
In freelance, I need to learn more of the sales side of things. I’m decent when pitching my services, but could use improvement. Thanks, Cath.
Barbara - that was a great idea to repeat his logo three times. And it’s great he’s done so well.
Carl - it’s so true. When I think of the time I’ve wasted on some pain in the a.. customers and the hassle involved I really regret dealing with them. Shotgun marketing is pretty easy everywhere though - not just on the internet.
Ian I know you spend a lot of time targetting specific groups, such as solicitors and it seems to work really well for you. I’m guessing that having a lot of professionals as clients is pretty good for referals too, as people are more likely to trust the referal from a solicitor (maybe not an accountant tho!)
Hi MW - for sales techniques I highly recommend the Brian Tracy DVD’s. We use them - much cheaper than going on a course - plus you have the DVD to keep referring back to.
Hello Catherine,
These are great tips, and it works not only in the business-to-business environment, but also in the business-to-consumer environment. In my job, I often found that the significantly part of sales on the nationally distributed consumer products could come from very skewed regional areas. And it tends to be because somehow the regions got some advocators, or critical mass of the advertisement exposures through different medias. And many cases, companies try to spread the budget to improve other regions, but often it pays off better to spend more advertisement budgets in the areas that are rather better performing. (Of course, unless those were completely saturated)
And many cases, the word of mouth by people who have used the product is the most powerful marketing. So you would like to focus on the areas where awareness is generally increasing to get to the purchase stage.
And also you will find even in the one region, one media is more effective than others to get to the purchase decision.
Or for a new startup into the retail world, sometime a startup fails because they got a deal with Target, then, instead of really servicing Target, they try to expand to Wal-Mart immediately.
It is amazing how we can build a hugely successful business by really figuring out the target customers and target channels.
It can be so tempting to take on as much work as possible, but you’ve really got to ensure that you have the resources to deal with your first major contract before taking on more.
I too know about wasting a lot of time and energy on just a small amount of clients. When I used to sell my web design/development services I had this one client that every day was emailing me with updates that she wanted done and complaints she had (on stuff which she told me to implement the week before). It took out a lot of time and energy that I could be using on finding new clients - and I knew that she wouldn’t be the type to refer new clients to me.
Long story short, she eventually became not my client anymore and things got better!