Secrets to Success
Secrets to Success
You know what I find simply frustrating? Watching perfectly viable businesses go down the tubes -- or worse, struggle for years -- because they don't know how to effectively market their goods and services. I'm driven by my passion to optimize every resource a business has so that profits can be maximized. Equally important to that benefit, is that a better life can be created for every person who is served by, and works for, that company. Leverage your
Part three of a five-part series
marketing dollarsAnd that's exactly what this series on maximum profit marketing is designed to help you do. Boost your profits and create a better quality of life for you and your team. If you aren't satisfied with your profits, the number of new clients coming into your business or if you'd just like a systems-oriented business, this 5-part article series on maximum profit marketing is for you.
Today, in part three, we'll look at how you can optimize and leverage every marketing dollar you will ever invest from here on out, as long as you own your business.
Principle four addressed how to leverage your assets for maximum efficiency and profits.
Leverage is a very broad topic that can't possibly be covered in this short series, but I will give you a solid introduction.
In the simplest financial terms, leverage means to multiply the productivity of a resource; any resource. For example, I recently worked with one of my clients to train his sales team on how to get customers to increase their average purchase amount by 15 percent with no additional cost or effort. He just leveraged his sales staff. He increased his productivity and his profits by 15 percent.
Another client recently changed her copy in an ad and the new ad out-performed her previous ad by 9 percent. That's 9 percent more profit in her pocket for exactly the same cost and effort.
The number of resources you can leverage significantly may surprise you. You can leverage ads, headlines, prices, publicity, in-store sales, field sales, average purchase amounts, repeat sales, referrals, new customer leads, lead conversions, and on and on. Plus, we're not even talking about your employee team or your business systems. That's an entirely different arena of exponential leverage that we'll take a look at in future article series.
If you apply this principle, I assure you that leverage can have a compounding impact on your business. If you increase the response to your ads, and boost your average sales amount, and increase the number of times each customer buys from you annually -- the leveraged affect is exponential. The compounded impact can quite easily double or triple your annual profits.
Principle five involves headlines.
All ads, sales letters, brochures, flyers, news releases and commercials need a headline. Period. This isn't for reasons of style or preference. Test after test has proven that a promotional piece with a headline -- any headline -- will out-perform a promotional piece without a headline. And if you can craft a headline centered on the major benefit you bring to your customers, the difference in response can be astounding.
Just recently I made some changes in one of our headlines that pulled twice as much as an ad with a weaker headline. The copy and graphics were exactly the same. The offer was exactly the same. And the sales letter reached precisely the same audience. The only change was a different headline. I don't know about you, but I'll take improvements like that any day, year round. And you can have them too, with great headlines. (In an upcoming installment of this series we'll look at the critical nature of testing and how it relates directly to headlines.)
In the next installment of this series you'll learn two more fundamentals for maximum profit marketing that you can immediately put to use for increased profits and a surging cash flow. This article series is based on our telecourse book, "Small Business, BIG Profits."
John-Paul Micek is a small business strategist
and chief operating officer at RPM Success Group.
Reach him at JPM@RPMsuccess.com
or toll-free at (888) 334-8151.