Today we are going to look at one way that you can make more money from your business. A lot of the time business owners focus solely on attracting new clients and customers. Also a lot of the time they only offer one service. Whilst this is good intially from the point of being able to clearly explain what you do and to focus, it does limit the amount of money you can earn from each of your clients.

An example of this would be the company that does the bookkeeping for my Irish business they have been doing my books month in, month out for over two years now. They charge €50 per month which is very cost effective and saves me a lot of hassle. But I think they are missing out. You see I am pleased with the service they provide, and we have built up a good working realtionship. Yet they have never once offered me any additional services and I’m willing to bet that it is the same for each of their other clients too.

What they need to do is to identify a back end product that they can provide and offer to their existing customers. To do this they could put together a questionnaire and ask me what other similar services I might be looking for that they could then provide. For example I might be interested in payroll services or more in depth financial forecasting assistance. If they didn’t feel comfortable providing any additional services themselves then they could approach a 3rd party company and offer to pass on new customers to them for a % of the ongoing residual business.

So in this example say that my bookkeeper has 100 clients and she is currently getting €50 per month from each one. This means her turnover is €5000 per month. What if she was to offer all of her customers a more detailed financial forcasting service which she charged say an additional €50 per month?

Say only 20% of her clients decided to take her up on her offer, that would represent €1000 per month additional turnover, or a 20% growth in her business. All without finding any new customers but by finding out the needs of her existing customers and meeting them.

Based on this example what other products or services could you offer your customers?

If they have purchased from you before then they already know you and must have liked or trusted you enough to do business in the past. Don’t make the mistake of not going back to them and finding out if there is anything else that you might be able to do for them.

When asked what business are you in most business owners will respond by telling you what their business provides, for example I am a dry cleaner or a shop owner.

However I want to challenge this perception.

I would argue that every business owner is in the business of marketing. If you own a dry cleaning business then your business is really to market dry cleaning services as without marketing there is no business. By making this distinction it forces business owners to reevaluate how they spend their time. In the example of the Dry Cleaners rather than working in the day to day operation of the business i.e doing the actual dry cleaning the owner should be focusing on growing and marketing the business. So for example they should be devising marketing programs, testing different forms of promotion etc

All to often business owners get so absorbed in what their business actually does that they forget the key point to actually growing and having a business that works without them is systems and marketing. Once you can get into that mindset then you start to see the difference between having what is effectively a job working in your own business to switching to the mentality of being the owner of a business.

Michae Gerber explains this much better in his book E-myth - why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it. I recommend you get a copy and start to develop a business owners mindset.

Better Business Results can work with you to create and execute a direct mail campaign to acquire new customers and also to reactivate old ones. We have access to huge archives of successful campaigns and can tailor something to suit your business with relative ease.

Some of the results achieved with direct mail are fantastic here are details from a typical small business client:

“ Our first marketing campaign was a mail out to 120 of our non-active clients. The result: 30 of them have booked the appointments, spending in excess of €750”

We specialise in multi contact nurture marketing campaigns where we develop a series of mail pieces (letters or cards) that can be sent out to your prospects in sequence.

The following table shows that it can typically take up to 9 contacts with a prospect before they chose to do business with you.

We know that sending out 9 or more sequential mailing pieces to your prospects can be time consuming and hard to manage.

You no longer have to worry as we can automate this process for you. All you need to do is pass us the contact details of your prospects and we will take care of sending out the mailings to them each month (or at whatever interval you require).

There is no minimum order amount we can set up a campaign to follow up with 1 prospect or thousands - you decide. For more information please call Better Business Results on 1850 943122

Flick through any Irish local newspaper or perhaps the Independent directory and you will see the same basic error time and time again. Business owners who have created there own advertisments and who think it is a good idea to use the name of their company as the headline for their advertisements. So you see adverts which proclaim in large letters ABC Carpentry services. This is a most unsatisfactory waste of space and effort and shows a huge misunderstanding in the way that people react to advertisements.

Lets take a step back. If you are in the newsagents and are browsing the papers and magazines what is it that makes you read a particular article or pick up a certain magazine? It is the headlines for the article either on the front cover or throughout the paper. The reason for this is that when we are reading we subconsciously scan the headlines to decide what to read next and tend to read the articles that interest us.

It is the same when looking at advertisements. A headline like ABC Carpentry services is not going to really attract us to read the advertisement. On the other hand something like ‘Homeowners: How to Get a Solid Wood Floor Laid in One Day For Less Than The Cost Of A Laminate’ is going to raise curiousity and attract all those people looking for wood flooring.

Headlines act as a filter for your advert, they should work like magnets to attract those looking for your products and services and filter out those that are not. Remember not everyone is going to be looking for your particular product or service. The idea of a headline is to appeal and attract those that are.

Having a good headline is the first step in making the advertising for your Irish small business more effective. Future issues of the Better Business Results Blog will look at other ways you can improve your response rates and get the most from your marketing budget.

We worked with Joe the owner of a small irish kitchen design, manufacture and fitting company. He used to run what we call advertise and pray type campaigns.

He would take out adverts in newspapers and run radio adverts telling people about the existence of his business. This advertising would convert a small % of people who would come to his showroom and look at his kitchens. Of these an even smaller % would be ready to buy a kitchen then and there and he would do business with them.

We showed Joe how extremely wasteful this was. What about all the people who came to his showroom, liked his kitchens, but for some reason or another were not ready to buy due to their own specific circumstances? After all, you need to remember your potential customer is busy. Very busy.

We showed Joe how to capture these prospects details, and we then wrote 12 mailing pieces which included testimonials, case studies and facts about what makes his kitchen company different, for Joe to keep in touch. We then scheduled these articles to be sent once every month and took care of the fulfilment of this for him. Now there’s a good chance the first few times Joes prospect receives his information it will go straight to the wastebasket. But after 5, 6, 7, 8 times they will start to notice.

And when they are ready to purchase a kitchen who do you think is going to be their first point of contact? The person they have never heard of in the Golden pages or local newspaper, or Joe who has been keeping in touch with them for months? It goes without saying, doesn’t it?  

Better Business Results can work with you to create effective marketing and lead generation campaigns for small and medium businesses in Ireland. 

I was in a recent discussion with a designer about whether or not start up businesses should hire a fully experianced high priced designer to create their business logo and stationery or would it be better to use a cheaper freelancer or a service like the sitepoint contests.

Whilst I agree that you get what you pay for to a certain extent I also believe that if you are starting a business with a limited budget then spending a large chunk of your start up budget on design and fancy business stationery may not be the best use of funds.

I often encounter small businesses that have spent a tonne of money on getting a fancy website and business stationery designed but have not gained any customers from it. I believe that perhaps getting a lower cost logo created initially and channeling your resources into what really matters - making sales - would be a better use of start up funds.

After all getting enough customers is the key to any new business. When the phone is not ringing and you are wondering how to pay the bills sitting looking at a fancy logo and stationery isn’t going to be much consolation.

One thing that can make you more efficient is to make a to do list for the next day the night before, that way everything that needs to be done is fresh in your mind. You can hit the ground running the next morning. If you leave your to do list until first thing the next morning you can lose valuable time trying to remember what you needed to get done.

Another suggestion is to make yourself unavailable and turn off your mobile and email and skype. In these times of instant communication and making ourselves accessible to everyone and anyone it can be difficult to actually find a block of time to get things done.I recommend turning off phones and email for set periods of time during the day and making your staff know that you are not available. You might also consider hiring an assistant or telephone answering service to take messages from callers. You can then assign a block of time during the day when you call people back.
 
Try and determine which time of day is your most productive and then plan your do not disturb time around that. Likewise then try and determine when you find it harder to concentrate on written work and use this time to return calls and meet with clients.

Set yourself realistic goals and targets. For example if you are writing a new brochure or book then set yourself a target of a certain amount of words per day. This way it will seem less daunting to try and write say 400 words per day rather than trying to find time to write 2800 words during a week.
One suggestion that works for me is to keep a daily to do list on a 125mm x 200mm spiral bound pad and tick off the daily tasks as you complete them. This will give you a feeling of accomplishment as you cross items off and allow you to see at a glance what needs to be done. This is far more effective than trying to keep a to do list in your head. My final tip is to try and complete unpleasant tasks as early in the day as you can. It is human nature to try and put unpleasant things off and this can affect our performance throughout the day as we subconsciously keep thinking that we have this unpleasant task to deal with. You are far better to get the unpleasant things out of the way as soon as possible and then they are done and out of the way.

Remember successful people and unsuccessful people all have the same amount of hours in a day. What separates the two groups is what you choose to do with your time. We all have a finite resource of time, it is up to you to spend it wisely.

Like many people with the advent of a new year my thoughts turn to what goals can I set to improve for this year. Top of my list was to start to take regular exercise, with two young children and busy business commitments one thing I have let slip over the last two years is my fitness. So this year like many others I vowed to get myself fit.

I did consider joining a gym, but initially I felt that I’d start with something that I could do from home without having to get in the car for. I decided to start with running, we live near the Griffeen Valley Park and there is plenty of space for running so I thought I’d give that a shot.

The next thing to sort out then was a decent pair of trainers (or runners as they call them here in Ireland) like most people I had experienced pretty poor service when it came to dealing with sports shop in the past. So I turned to google for advice (as I find I seem to do for most things these days). I searched for running shoes in Ireland and straight away at the top of the search results in the paid google adwords spot, I saw an advertisement for a running shoe specialist company called Amphibian King. They offer the specialised free fitting service where they film you running on a small track and then analyse the way your foot hits the ground. Based on this information they then recommend exactly the right running shoes for you.

Being a bit of a gadget fiend I liked the idea of someone filming and analysing the way I run so I hopped in the car and drove over to Bray in Co Wicklow where Amphibian King are based.

To cut a long story short Amphibian King and Darren Kelly who served me impressed me with good service and savvy marketing in the following ways:

1) They were using google adwords to attract targetted prospects to their business

2) They use a website to provide further information

3) They give you one on one dedicated service - Darren spent over 45 minutes with me measuring my shoes and trying on and testing at least 3 pairs of potential matches - all based on the requirements of my feet not on how much they could sell me.

4) Darren was able to add value by giving me additional advice on how to start a running program, he even showed me his website with free exercises for warming up and strenghtening my legs

5) When I decided on a pair of shoes and was purchasing I was asked to complete a customer details sheet which captured my contact details (very important for following up with clients) and also where they record details of my feet so they can serve me better next time

6) They gave me a €10 discount voucher to give to a friend - a great example of a referral program getting your exisitng customers to talk about you to their friends and then have a reason to visit you is a great marketing tool.

7) They also gave me a €10 discount voucher to use for myself for when I need a new pair of runners. In about 500 miles time as Darren suggested - so in my case in about 5 years time

As you can see none of this is rocket science, but how many businesses in Ireland do this - not many that I come accross.

Good on you Amphibian King and Darren Kelly.

Now I just have to get out there and use them!

I posted the following reply on the askaboutmoney forum  to a Dublin cafe owner looking to expand his business by winning customers for outside catering:

There are a number of ways you can generate this type of business. Probably the best place to start is by compiling a list of all the neighbouring businesses that fall into your target market, i.e are likely to be having meetings.

Once you have compiled the list then the next step is to target them the most effective and low cost way will be by calling in and leaving a brochure/menu with the owner/main admin person most likely to be responsible for booking catering for meetings.

You should make some kind of good offer to try and get their business, such as a free sandwich platter so they can try you out. This might sound expensive but you need to consider that giving away a little bit of free food in this manner is likely to be much more cost effective than spending a fortune on advertising.

Be sure to build up a database of prospects and customers and just keep following up with them to remind them you are there. Then over time when they need a outside caterer you will be top of their mind.

Ok so you are up and running with one or more marketing and advertising campaigns, business is flowing and you are feeling pretty good about yourself. Now ask yourself these questions, which marketing method is the most cost effective? Which method bring in customers and which is totally wasteful?

If you know the answers to these questions then give yourself a pat on the back, however if you are like most small businesses in Ireland then you probably haven’t a clue. You are subscribing to the spray and pray method of marketing, you know that if you fling enough mud then some of it will stick.

The problem with this way of trying to grow your business is that it is hugely wasteful in terms of time and money. What if you knew that the advert you took out in the paper each week actually wasn’t bringing you in any customers they we all in fact coming from your website? If you knew this information you could cancel the adverts and divert the money for this to enhancing the website further. Or what if you found out that a large percentage of your business came from your Golden Pages advert, then perhaps it would be worth considering in other Irish business directories.

So how do you go about finding out how effective a particular method of advertising is? The answer is that you need to implement a way to track and measure responses specific to each advert. In other words you need to be able to pinpoint exactly where each lead and in turn new client came from.

To do this isn’t actually that difficult you just need to incorporate some kind of unique direct response mechanism into your marketing. For example you may have one telephone number that you just use in your Golden Pages advert. Or you might run an advert in a paper that requires prospects to send back a coupon which you have a special tracking code on.

Once you start capturing this information it is possible to track exactly where each enquiry came from, you can then track exactly what process was used to convert that prospect to a customer.

Over time this will allow you to build up a very accurate picture of which is the most effective way to attract and convert customers. From this information it becomes very easy to then drop marketing methods which are not paying there way and ramp up the ones that are.