Feel free to carry on reading, or watch the video summary below.

I’ve personally been in sales and marketing for around 25 years (I’ve almost stopped counting how many years) and, during this time, I’ve heard the arguments for the direct approach and the “let the customer come to you” or reverse marketing approach.

And, without sounding like a politician, the best approach is a blend of both. It also depends on your line of business, the industry dynamics, how big your budget is and how aggressive or direct you decide to be with the traditional marketing approach.

Before a customer buys from you, they need to trust the brand. Without that level of trust, they either won’t buy or they’ve been effectively forced to “sign up” to what you offer.

However - even with the highest level of trust, it doesn’t mean they will buy. I’ve often told clients that “if you don’t ask for the order, you risk not getting it”. This means having to use a more direct approach in the right way - and at the right time.

To achieve sales and marketing success, a blend of reverse marketing and traditional or normal marketing is needed. You can succeed by just using one of them and they are both proven to be effective, but combining the two leads to better chances of success.

At Think Twice Marketing, a large number of our fabulous customers are from referrals and word of mouth. Having happy customers or brand advocates is the ultimate way to go but we still actively reach out to our target audience with lead generation campaigns as part of an overall marketing strategy.​

A reverse marketing strategy or plan should be part of a wider marketing strategy that includes a range of sales and marketing activities to grow the business.

Make sure you are clear on your brand message, who your target audience is and where they “hang out” or how you can reach them. This should be done before creating a marketing plan with campaign activities.

The marketing plan should include activities that have the highest ROI (return on investment). Make sure you are clear on what campaigns you should run that will help raise your brand awareness as much as possible and in the most effective way.

If you need help creating a marketing plan, we can help. At Think Twice Marketing, we use a proven process that involves the 3 core elements (defining your target audience, differentiator and message) before creating a clear, effective marketing plan for growing your business, and your brand. Contact Think Twice Marketing for a free discussion to find out more.
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In this blog post, author and marketing expert Darren Hignett talks about the importance of building trust as part of the sales and marketing process.

​Would you buy from someone you don’t trust?

With so many scams and businesses not delivering to expectations, we have learned over time to buy only from people and brands that we trust.

This makes sense. The problem is that, as marketers and business owners, we often underestimate how important it is to acquiring customers and generating sales.

As customers ourselves, we don’t buy a product or service unless we trust the person or the brand, but when we get busy running marketing activities, we forget or ignore how important it is for generating sales.

Take a simple one-off marketing campaign. Many businesses are often disappointed with email, telemarketing or advertising campaigns that haven’t got the results that they had hoped for.

Like all good marketers, they start to look at the insights to see what’s happened.

Maybe they got plenty of impressions and clicks in their ad but no conversions, so the website isn’t getting results. So they start making changes to the landing page.

Or maybe their email campaign had high open rates but no clicks, so the call to action in the email isn’t working. More changes are needed.

This is all good stuff, but while we are busy looking at the metrics, it’s easy to overlook what is potentially the real reason the one-off marketing campaign didn’t work.

The real reason their campaign failed (drum roll…) was due to a lack of trust.

But how can that be, I hear you say? How can a business with a professional brand and quality products suffer from a lack of trust?

When I say trust, I’m not suggesting that their campaign looked dicey or deceptive, or that they were promising something that looked overly exaggerated.

The lack of trust I’m referring to is simply that the potential customer, who received their marketing campaign message, doesn’t know the brand or the person selling well enough to want to buy from them.

You might call this familiarity – “sorry I don’t know who you are, so I’d rather not buy from you”, but it’s very much about knowing enough about the business, the seller and/or the brand to trust them.

You hopefully noticed earlier how I used the wording “one-off campaign”. That’s for a very good reason. You can’t build trust with one email shot or within 2 minutes of talking to someone at a business event.

A business might send out an email campaign to a thousand recipients from an email list that they bought from a third party.

Those thousand recipients have either never heard of the brand or know very little at all about them.

Sending a single email to someone who doesn’t know the brand has got a very low chance of being a success, even with the best content copy in the world.

Whether it’s networking, social media, telemarketing, email marketing or something else, trust needs to be built up.

There are various articles as well as research that show that most potential customers need to interact with you or your brand on average 5-7 times before they commit to making a purchase.

Let’s think about that for a second… how many times do you approach or interact with a potential customer before giving up?

There’s no point beating on the door of someone who isn’t going to buy from you, but that doesn’t mean you should give up after the first point of contact with them.

If you aren’t sure how many times you approach or interact with someone, let’s look at what others do…

80% of purchases are made after 5-12 interactions*
48% of salespeople never follow up after the FIRST contact
And only 10% of salespeople will make more than 3 ‘contacts’

These numbers show how businesses (or in particular, those in sales and marketing) aren’t doing enough to build trust.

80% of the business comes after 5 interactions, yet around half don’t even interact twice with a customer.

And that’s the real reason why a one-off campaign might have failed.

And then there’s the other form of trust…

Trust builds over time, but it also builds with credibility.

If your product has an average rating of 1-star on a website after a thousand reviews, no amount of time is going to give the consumer the confidence that your product is a must-buy for them (“Look Cassandra, this product has a thousand poor ratings, let’s by that one!”).

On the other hand, you can speed up the process of building trust by using social proof such as positive reviews and recommendations. The more positive reviews and social proof you have, the more someone is going to trust you.

Another way to build up trust is by offering a trial or a sample of what you offer. This reduces barriers to sales by allowing potential customers to see if what you offer is genuine, and in line with their expectations.

Here are some ideas for ways to build trust:

- Use words in your marketing such as ‘proven’ or ‘money-back guarantee’
- Grow your 5-star ratings and communicate it to your audience
- Offer a trial or a sample of what you offer
- Ask for recommendations
- Tell people how long you have been established or how many customers you have served

Summary

As you can see, trust is key to someone buying. Before you go live with your advertising campaign or click send on your email campaign, ask yourself if you are doing enough to build and develop trust. After all, it could be the primary reason you didn’t get the results you expected.

Need help?

In my book Psychology in Marketing and Sales, I talk about building trust as well as the use of various tactics that you can use to increase sales. Make sure to grab a copy.

If you need help with your marketing and building trust with your target audience, get in touch with Think Twice Marketing.

Thanks for reading! I trust you found it useful…

*https://jmjdirect.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/how-many-contacts-does-is-take-to-make-a-sale-follow-up-is-the-key/

In this blog post, discover...

Are you busy?

If you are a business owner reading this, then the chances are the answer is yes, you are busy - but let’s expand on that: Are you busily working on the right stuff?

It’s easy to get busy in the modern world. When you aren’t delivering to a customer, managing staff issues or doing sales and marketing activity there’s always finances and bookkeeping to manage or general admin stuff that’s outstanding. For the typical business owner, there’s even stuff on the list that will probably never actually get done!

At this point, you might be expecting some tips for how to prioritise what’s important and manage your lists of endless tasks better. There’s no top tips or discussion on to-do list management in this blog post. Instead, we are looking at a much more effective way to get results in your business… outsourcing.

Let’s understand the definition of outsourcing as well as how you can use it in your business and the benefits of outsourcing.​

As well as freeing up your time, outsourcing has another huge two-sided benefit.

It allows you to recruit expertise in an area that you aren’t strong in…

And it allows you to focus on what you are good at.

Let’s take a plan to outsource sales and marketing as an example.

As a business owner, you might be really good at designing and delivering the product or service that you provide to your customers. A manufacturer has expertise in making a great product while a personal fitness trainer provides a great service in helping clients stay fit and healthy.

Both the manufacturer and the fitness trainer have proven skills sets and knowledge in their respective areas of expertise, but neither of them might be any good at sales and marketing.

In fact, many business owners we talk to dislike the idea of selling and find the art of effective marketing to be overly complicated and tough. We can empathise with those feelings.

On the other hand, a marketing agency that delivers marketing campaigns and activities throughout the day and on a daily and weekly basis (and has done for years) should know how to get results out of marketing - whether that's support with email marketing, Google Ads or any other marketing activities.

Outsourced sales and marketing could be the perfect answer to a business that wants to grow its business while focusing on delivering great products, services and customer service.

Should the busy business owner try to learn in-depth how to do effective marketing, or should he or she outsource to an established expert that can fast-track results?

From a different perspective, for every hour a business owner works on a task such as bookkeeping or marketing, that’s an hour less that they can focus on what they do best.

There are only so many hours in a day and spending it on things that a business owner is not good at is lost time that could be spent on what they are good at.

A few months ago I was out for a walk with my son and we passed a For Sale sign for a property, and the contact details at the bottom of the sign included an email address that was Hotmail (such as name@hotmail.com).

​My teenage son called out jokingly “at hotmail, I’m not buying that!’ - which got me thinking about the importance of professional branding (the fact a teenager is suggesting he’s interested in buying a house didn’t bother me, knowing that anything on the market is clearly out of his budget in the short-term!).

For many years, I’ve always argued that businesses serious about growth need to look professional, and seeing signage or wording on vans (such as for electricians or plumbers) that have a gmail or hotmail email included is likely to put doubt in the mind of the buyer. If you don’t know the two electricians, would you rather buy from john@premiumelectrician.com or gary123@gmail.com?*

But I would argue the importance for having a professional brand, right? Afterall, I’m in marketing and brand reputation, and building credibility and trust with customers is something at the front of my mind on a regular basis. But in this scenario, it wasnt me. It was a teenager with little knowledge about marketing concepts and who has no experience of buying high priced items such as cars or a property who clearly pointing out that the lack of professional branding in the contact details could be a reason not to buy.

Potential customers seek credibility

When a potential customer looks to buy from a business, they want you to show credibility that you are a trustworthy brand. If there is any doubt about your credibility then they will look at buying elsewhere, and not from you.

Think of it like a job interview. When recruiting, a business might receive a stack of CVs to find their ideal candidate. They can’t interview everyone and if they all look good then there’s a dilemna, so what to do?

An easier option, which is usually deployed, is to find a reason to discount a candidate with reasons such as ‘there are a couple of spelling mistakes, do we really want that lack of attention to detail in that role?’.

​Finding reasons not to hire or interview is as powerful as finding a reason to hire someone, and when it comes to brand reputation the same applies. The copywriter that sends you a badly worded proposal, or the accountant that messes up the figures in their quote they send to you, are sure to reduce the chances of getting the business. Of course there are many other factors that come into the decision making process but building trust and credibility is a major reason for someone to buy.

Attention to detail

Often it doesn’t take much effort to re-check wording on your website or in proposals to make sure that there aren’t any obvious mistakes, and having a professional email address or company logo doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to implement. In fact, the cost of having a registered domain that looks professional should be compared to the cost of losing business from potential customers who decide to go with your competitors!

In the example above, an estate agent makes thousands of pounds on the sale of a single property. The cost of registering a domain and setting up an email address with that new more professional domain can be as little as £20-80 a year (in fact, you can use Zoho mail which is free and the total cost can be even lower).

Is your brand up to scratch?

If you are worried that your brand isn’t providing the professional image that you need to win business then get in touch for a free marketing review. We would be happy to provide you with some top tips and suggestions. Call us today to find out more.

*These email addresses are made up. I also mean no disrepspect to hotmail and gmail accounts. On a personal level, they are great to use.

The number three is a magical number which if used properly in your marketing, can help get better results. I was trailing through my archived emails the other day when I came across an email talking about how remembering numbers is easiest when they are grouped into sets of three, and it got me thinking. How can this apply to marketing and sales?

Using the concept of grouping things into 3 means that you can do the following:

• Make your marketing and messaging clearer, and more memorable
• Nudge customers toward buying the product or service you would like them to buy
• Explain how your product or services works so that customers will want to use them

The way that the power of three works is simple (I could say I will explain it in 3 simple steps but on this occasion, I won’t). On its own, a single number, price or product seems ‘lonely’. It’s not comprehensive and there’s nothing to compare. The human mind can absorb a lot more information than that so lets at least double it…

Two is good, but it could be better. If I ask you to remember a set of numbers, let’s say 702393, you could remember them individually as six separate numbers. You could remember them in groups of two, such as 70, 23, 93 or in groups of three such as 702, 393. You are more likely to remember them - and longer groups of numbers, in groups of three.

In his book, How to Write Short, author Roy Peter Clark talks about how using the rule of 3 can be more entertaining and satisfying as well as being more effective.

Before we apply this to marketing, let’s consider some real-world examples of how three is being used:

Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister,  was involved in using a simple 3 worded slogan during the EU referendum campaign that was simple and easy to understand: Take Back Control. He then became Prime Minister and won a general election with the three worded slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’ which almost seemed like his answer to everything… but it worked. In 2020 during the COVID-19 outbreak, he also made the message clear ‘stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’. Ok, so the first and last part are only 2 words, but the slogan is split into 3 sections that are easy to understand, memorable and made sense. Staying at home helped protect the NHS and helps to save lives.

The power of 3 can be covering 3 words in a slogan or three individual concepts. 

Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights activist, often used the power of 3 with lines such as “insult, injustice and exploitation” in one of his speeches* followed by “justice, goodwill, and brotherhood.”. Listing 5, 6 or even 10 things would have been harder to remember and would have diluted the message. Listing three things also makes the presenter seem more knowledgeable.

Julius Caesar said “I came, I saw, I conquered”, Winston Churchill once said “Blood, sweat and tears” while the American Declaration of Independence says “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The power of three is not new, but it’s often forgotten when trying to make marketing more effective.

Using it in your marketing

In my book, Psychology in Marketing and Sales, I talk about Decoy Pricing which involves offering a third pricing option. This third option increases sales conversions and also results in customers opting for higher-priced products or services. This works for various reasons, one of which is that it takes the mind away from comparing lower-priced products, or not buying at all.

In your marketing communication you can also use the power of 3 as follows:

• To make your product memorable for when people are ready to buy
• To get the benefits across quickly and easily without losing the attention of your audience
• To highlight how easy to use or implement your product is, resulting in higher trust and consequent sales

Here are some examples to consider:

An accountant might highlight they offer ways to save on tax, avoid fines and grow your business as the main benefits.

A web designer might increase the value of a service by offering a 3 in 1 package: web design, blogging and social media for one single price.

A software company might communicate that their product can be set up in 3, easy to follow steps.

A fashion designer might use a slogan such as ‘look great, feel amazing, be different’

Whether you use 3 or another number in your marketing, it’s important to keep messages simple and easy to understand - while making your product attractive. If you would like help defining your marketing messaging and communicating to your customers then get in touch today.

*His speech “Non-Violence and Racial Justice”

​I’m sure you’ve been to many presentations/meetings where you get to the end and think you’ve wasted an hour or more of your life. If it’s been a whole morning, it can be even more exasperating. Your time is valuable. Work must be done or you’re running late. But you’ve just wasted 10% of your working week. 

So, when it’s your turn, you get the nod saying ‘please present X to 2-20 people,’ how do you react? In most cases you realise that it’s quite a responsibility. Others freak at the thought and have sleepless nights and palpitations.  

However, it is fair to say, that when you get it right, it can do your career a lot of good. That’s what ‘Cracking Presentations’ does for you. It makes you good at this art.

I cannot condense a whole day’s course material into a few hundred words so for now, let’s just look at the first stage – Preparation. 

For a start, 80% of the success of a presentation hinges on your preparation. Sadly, many go off on their pet subject like an avid train spotter, but this is all about confidently showing others a smart piece of work so that they understand and agree with your proposition. 

I often hear people saying, ‘But, I’m not a sales person!’  Well, you are now! Presentations are meant to sell a concept or viewpoint. You want everyone on the room to agree with you or argue a point. Then the essential points that should be implemented. It may be only to bring people up to speed. Whatever else happens, they cannot leave the room confused, doubting you or your material. 

So, with preparation of your material – decide on the end goal first. What should your audience walk away with?

• Everyone works on WIIFM – What’s in it for me? How will your presentation benefit them? 
• What is the compelling proposition that they will hook up to?  If they leave saying/thinking ‘So what?’ you’re sunk! 
• They must leave the room feeling as if their time has been well-spent or, for sure, they will need to be far more convinced that they should give up their time next time. So, respect their time and effort.  
• Exactly what should a good result look like?  Agreement? Harmony? Some going off to implement your ideas? Gaining their support for funds or policy? 
• So, who’s in the room?’ When you’re inviting people, find out their roles and seniority. You cannot play to an audience unless you know why they’re there. 
• Are they the decision makers or just gatekeepers who will report back to their boss?
• Ask HR for the average cost per hour across the company of all middle grade people. Then understand how much your meeting is costing the company. (It focuses the mind on how productive your presentation must be!) 

There will always be cynics (‘I don’t really need to be here/ I’m too busy.’ ‘Let’s get this over with.’) That is why you have to overcome any objections or reticence, so bring people onside. 

You only get one chance to make a first impression, so decide on what that should be. Hook people from the introductory 30 seconds and you’ve got a chance!

Seth Godin in his clever book, Tribes says:

People don’t believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them. 
They often believe what their friends tell them,
but they always believe what they tell themselves.
What leaders do is tell stories they can tell themselves,
stories about the future and about change.
Seth Godin, Tribes ​