As you learned in my previous article, we were in the Magaliesberg mountains this week on a family holiday! Look at all of us…
The mountain part of our holiday has come to a close and the trip was fantastic. When you’re in the mountains you can’t stay in the resort, you must go hiking!
We love hiking…
The resort we visited has a hiking trail called the kudu trail. The path is clear and easy (until you really start the ascent, where it is quite a steep battle). Nonetheless, they had small yellow markers tied to trees that appeared often, to remind you that you are headed in the right direction.
To some this might sound strange, and to others, wonderful. The boys love to explore (and we did find our own way up the mountains the next day), but the ladies preferred a proper path!
These markers were everywhere, and if you looked ahead far enough, you would see where the path would take you next until we reached the top…
Obviously, we took a bit of a break, hydrated, and snacked, but we were off in no time. The chilling realisation hit us soon after: we were basically lost. There were not markers in sight. At all. Anywhere.
After wasting energy exploring our various options and routes, we stumbled upon a marker and made our way down – but we almost forged our own path home.
We weren’t the only ones (in case you think we’re just horrible hikers), the next day we met a couple who mentioned how they went through the exact same thing, at the exact same spot. You don’t want people’s conversations about you to sound like this!
What you should take from our experience
Our marketing excites prospects and it aims to get them to the peak of their ‘buying thresholds’. This is the moment where they want to pull out their wallets and make their way down. But, sometimes, we are excellent at exhorting them, and horrible at closing the deal. We end up losing them to our competition.
The path we strategically lay for all potential customers, should consider all levels of the sales cycle. You want them to ask questions – but in the end, you want them to buy!
Contact an expert – Mirror Marketing and we’ll help you turn trials into perfectly designed trails!
Leave a comment if you have anything to add – I’d love to hear from you 🙂
By now, you are probably thinking that I am obsessed with spiders. If so, I admit that the struggle is real!
This time, though, amidst my disgust and cringing, a small spider actually taught me a lot:
The story unfolds…
It’s the holiday season and my sister has travelled from the mother city – Cape Town – to join us on a family vacation. We are all together, in one of our favorite places: the mountains!
If you have ever settled down for a while in the mountains, one thing is for sure – you would have encountered spiders.
Knowing this, I went to the restroom last night to shower and prepare for bed, but it was like I was walking into a trap – fully aware?!
And there it was… Dangling (creepy little thing) in the corner of the shower between the lightbulb and the wall. Though I knew I would find my eight-legged friend there, I still had some hope! This time could be different, couldn’t it?
…but it wasn’t.
Then it struck me!
Bugs, flying and crawling, were all drawn to the light like moths to a flame! This little guy was hanging there, fully aware that his food will be coming to him. He was hunting, or prospecting, as we would call it.
This in itself is the essence of marketing.
Put yourself in the middle of your targets journey.
Dangle near their favorite places.
Work smart, not hard.
Use the web at your disposal (social media/internet/website/social gatherings) and have them come to you.
But this wasn’t all my bittersweet friend taught me…
Every now and then, he would start moving toward me (away from the light) probably to further develop his little trap and then I would lightly blow at him. This made him run the other direction…
Luckily, this resulted in a win-win situation… He would run to the light (which is where his food was at) and I would have no spider near me. But, it could have been different.
Sometimes we are blown away from our clients by the winds of adversity, competition, or even confusion. Always evaluate if the results you are getting, are the results you planned to achieve. If not – it might be time to check where the light is 😉
When people start talking about marketing their products and business they come up with amazing, creative ideas. Notice, though, how the list is huge – and I’m not saying that this is wrong, or that the ideas won’t work – but for some reason, doing anything for free is right at the bottom of this list (if it even features).
The power of Promotion
If you like quality luxury goods, you must have heard of the Jo Malone brand before. Jo Malone started her line of fragrances while being a florist by day and a beautician by night. She had a passion for fragrance from a tender age. She experimented with combinations of flowers from her parent’s garden and soap to learn more about fragrances.
Though all of this is great, it’s not how her business began. In fact, one critical event gave birth to her business…
She gave her clients, a new fragrance that she created, as a gift.
Yip…That’s it, nothing more. Without selling and marketing like crazy, she freely gave away her product and the response was mind-blowing.
Many people in my industry are writing books and self-publishing them on Amazon. Some are extremely successful and others hardly sell anything. Of course, there is no certainty at the beginning that any book would skyrocket onto the bestsellers list – but you can improve your chances.
In fact, some of the authors who hardly sold anything at the beginning, turned the tables by doing one thing differently:
They gave their books away, free of charge.
Amazon has an option available, when self-publishing, that they will promote your book if you give it away free, for at least 24 hours.
This may sound like madness – but this is how good authors turned their horrible results into cash machines.
Take a long-term view
Often, we expect people to see our products and instantly pull out their wallets – but more often than not, this doesn’t happen. People don’t know anything about you and what you do; they have never heard about your products, why would they want to buy it?
Like Jo Malone, if you create exposure by ‘losing’ money in the short-term, your beneficiaries will do most of the marketing on your behalf!
“If you sow, you will reap”
For those of you who read my articles and enjoy them, you’ve probably noticed that I love using pictures as inspiration.
Well today, I cleaned out the small dustbin I have in my room. Now, I don’t know if it works like this all over the world, but here in South Africa, we place a plastic bag inside the dustbin frame. So when the dustbin is full, we pull out the bag and replace it with a new and clean one.
This got me thinking about the perspective we should have on business.
For the love of business
I love business, not in a “love of money is the root of all evil” kind of way, but in a “passion for the art of business” way.
I have my own freelancing business, I have a food business that caters to markets and festivals, and I work in the financial services. These are not the only businesses I have had, nor will it be the last. I just love it.
When you get any kind of business advice, the best advice – and these days you’ll hear it a lot – is that you should work yourself out of a job. You should have a business system; your business must not be dependent on your presence.
The dustbin is the business
Like with my dustbin, my business must allow me to plug logistics in and out, avoiding the messy consequences.
This allows you to play with new marketing strategies, key person involvement, and new products whilst making sure the bottom line is unaffected.
If you find that you can’t exit the business as easily as I remove the plastic bag from the dustbin, it might be time to restructure.
With the New Year around the corner, rethink your resolutions, and create more TIME than work for yourself and your family.
I noticed something very interesting lately and I have this feeling that I am not the only one.
As soon as I meet someone new, or hear a name, or something intriguing, I search for his or her social media profiles. Strangely enough, though I know nothing else about them, this has made meeting new people so much more comfortable.
It’s a fact that social media has also caused obstacles in actual, real, face-to-face socializing; but it can also be a tool, where you can relate and engage with someone before an interaction takes place.
You kind of know what to expect!
Well, today I am not just talking about Social Media.
All over the internet, you find all kinds of profiles. And the more of them you have, the better.
Our minds have been conditioned to relate any kind of profile to what we would find on Facebook. So the question is, does your Company have a profile.
The benefits of having a Company Profile
A Company profile is a professional way of introducing and informing an audience of a business and its products or services.
Having a professional company profile does not mean that it needs to be filled with jargon and overflowing with big words. The objective is to build trust, engage, and ultimately bring in new customers.
Everything depends on designing a profile that is unique and symbolic of all your company stands for, what great things you are achieving, and the innovation you employ to continue to do even better.
Here are some of the returns you will enjoy by investing in your company profile:
- People don’t like to feel like they’re just a number. Whether your company is massive, medium or small, a company profile will engage with the people who buy from you.
- It gives you the ability to tell your story. Every businesses and achievement has a story – with a company profile you get to tell it your way
- It’s great for promoting yourself as a brand. Whether your aim is B2B or B2C, you can alter it accordingly, to emphasize the relevant factors and as a result to make you a “household name” at the end of the day.
- If you target the right people, your profile will bring in the bucks! They get it free and it looks good!
- If you have no other direct marketing strategy, your company profile will work wonders. Use it to engage with people through direct mail, social sites, and face-to-face meetings.
Mirror Marketing knows exactly how to design the perfect profile for you. Don’t lose potential clients to competitors when all you need is a profile they want to engage with.
Do you already have a company profile? Tell us about it, we’d love to hear!
