- Compete on value, on what makes you different and better. In the world of marketing, this goes by the name positioning. It’s critical. You need to discover or create your unique value proposition. Never compete on price. If you do, you will have accidentally found yourself in a race to the bottom, and that’s one race you don’t want to win! The insidious thing about competing on price is that once you start, it’s almost impossible to stop.
- Treat your best customers like royalty. This doesn’t mean give them discounts—this is a reflexive action, but resist it—there are plenty of other ways to reward your best customers. Give them more than they ask for, extra touches. Send them cards. Give them first pick of the new stuff before anyone else gets it. Put them on a separate “elite” email list and sell them the really high-end stuff.
- Expand your online presence with blogging and social media. I can’t think of a single business that wouldn’t benefit from this. If you’re bricks-and-mortar, this will bring people into your shop. It will increase tourist, holiday, and local traffic. How? Among all the other benefits of blogging and social media, use these channels to send out notices about specials. Send out information about recent arrivals and channel-only discounts (send out a discount code to be mentioned at the register during purchase). Retailers who blog get sales.
- Start selling your product or service online. Start a Yahoo store and get moving. Use Ebay. Get 1Shopping Cart. Heck, just use PayPal and your WordPress blog site, but for crying out loud, start selling online. Do not rely on only on locals for your business if you can help it—the whole rest of the world is out there! Take advantage of your existing systems or get new ones that facilitate both on- and off-line inventory, ordering, fulfillment, and POS. And don’t forget to have a blog with your ecommerce site, too.
- Package and bundle your services up and “productize” them into things anyone can purchase in advance through PayPal (forget accounts receivable–paid in advance is the only way to roll in my book).
- Take your knowledge and turn it into information products: If what you do is consulting or coaching, start creating home training courses or learning sites. Instead of coaching one person at time,coach groups of people: it’s more profitable for you and a value-rich investment for your clients. You can repurpose material from coaching calls into other information products. The possibilities (and the profits) are endless.
- Start an affiliate program for your online sales. Imagine having an army of people out there selling your stuff for you. They get their cut, you get yours. You never would’ve had these sales otherwise, so do not begrudge a high commission of 30% – 50%. Treat your best affiliates in the same royal manner as you treat your best customers and help them sell (the more they make, the more you make). E-junkie makes it easy to do information product and physical product fulfillment and affiliate programs.
- Get into email marketing… HARD. Actively grow and regularly put offers out to an email list. I am stunned speechless at how many businesses fail in this. Do you want sales, or not? Do you want to make money, or just “play” at running a business? WORK YOUR LIST OR YOU ARE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE. There is tons of information online about email marketing. Start reading, start implementing. Even businesses who have a list don’t email it enough. The more offers you make, the more bites you’ll get. You can’t sell if you’re not selling.
- Productize your processes. If you figured out a great system for how to run a software training center, turn it into a product and sell it to other software training centers. Amazon has become a master at this. Every system they use internally, they will gladly sell to you to use for your business. Tom Peters calls this “managed asset reflation.” Many successful businesspeople find that after they’ve achieved success in their original business, they can achieve ten times that success by helping others do what they did.
- Forget about the economy: I don’t know if you figured this out, yet, but the things on this list have Jack Shit to do with how “bad” the economy is. If you had been doing these things all along, your business would be killing it while everyone else blames the economy for their own lack of imagination and action. Whatever your first instinct is as a response to bad economic news, it’s probably dead wrong. For example, don’t cut back on marketing, increase it and steal the customers away from others who foolishly cut back. While other businesses freeze investing in themselves, you go all out and leave them far behind. Don’t treat investments as if they were costs. They’re not. They’re weapons against your competitors.
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