Do you want more customers that come to you instead of chasing them?
There is an expression in the marketing world, the confused mind decides nothing.
The reason for the expression, is that your marketing needs to convey a message that is so simple and so clear, that anyone who sees it, immediately understands the message and knows what you can do to help them.
If you want new customers, and most people do, your marketing can’t be written in technical lingo.
Does you marketing look like it was written my an engineer?
Does your marketing tell your customers anything at all?
There are two basic reasons someone will buy from you.
- They believe you will solve a problem they have.
- They believe you will make their life better.
Sometimes they buy because you can do both.
Recently I was looking the website of an electrical contractor.
The banner at the top of the page had a picture of all of their vans and employees.
So I asked him, are you in the van business?
He didn’t know what I was saying.
I explained that the biggest piece of real estate on a website is the home page and more precisely, what your prospect sees when they first arrive at your site.
What they see first, without scrolling, has to convey a message that appeals to your target audience.
I told him, all a person sees now is a picture of a bunch of vans and people.
You need to convey a message in this piece of real estate and the message needs to be short and sweet and it must talk to your target prospect.
Back in November of 1992 I purchased my first business, a locksmith company in Jacksonville Florida.
I had a big problem though, it only had a one line listing in the yellow pages at the time of purchase and the new phone book didn’t come out until the end of June of the following year.
I needed to do some other forms of marketing fast or I would struggle to keep the doors open for the next 8 months.
What I did would change the way I looked at marketing for the rest of my life.
My shop had a major advantage, it was located 2 doors down from the post office so there was about 25,000 cars per day that passed by the front door.
I had a sign made that was 3’ wide and 5’ tall.
The sign said in massive letters, Keys .49 cents, and up.
The “and up” part of the sign was so small you could barely see it.
The sign cost about $90 to have it made and that one little sign went on to bring in so much money that it helped my shop to become one of the highest grossing locksmith shops in the city in just a couple years.
But let’s break down why such a simple sign worked so well.
Number one, it got my message in front of my prospective clients which at the time was anyone with keys.
I knew with 100% certainty that if they were driving a car past my building, that they owned at least one key.
Number two, the message presented me as an expert.
No one would put up a sign that says, “Keys .49 cents and up” unless they cut keys.
So those that drove by knew the person, or people, in that building were people who cut keys and as long as we did it right the first time, they would keep giving me their money.
It’s important to note, I was not the only expert in the city, that is not relevant. What is relevant is that they knew I was an expert and if they needed keys they knew where to get them.
As long as we satisfied them on each visit they would purchase other things that we sold like locks and safes.
The third item of importance was the message was simple and easy to understand.
They could read it at a glance and know what we could do to help them solve a problem.
This is massively important.
I don’t care if they are in a car or just landed at your website, you have their eyes and attention for a few seconds, you need to get a message to them quickly.
They need to know that you are an expert, they need to be in your target audience and for goodness sake, make the message simple.
If your website says, “We specialize in commercial, industrial, residential, generators, lighting, new construction, tenant build outs, commercial service upgrades, residential service upgrades, surge protection, lighting protection and renovations”, you don’t specialize in anything.
It doesn’t mean that you don’t do all of these services, but you need to pick something and attract them through one thing and then once they are happy with your service you will have the opportunity to sell them additional services.
I sold that locksmith business in 1998, but have used simple marketing messages to generate over a hundred million in sales around the world since then in many different businesses.
Now, I help contractors to get new customers using LinkedIn.
If this sounds like something you want to learn about, I will be doing a live webinar on Thursday to show you how you can do just that. Click here to sign up.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney