Want to START a business? Go here: https://bizwebjournal.com
Want to GROW your business? Go here: https://dominoleads.com
FREE Ways to support me:
- Like this video
- Subscribe for more
- WATCH all the way to end
DISCLAIMER: Some of the links I share are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase (at no extra cost to you). Rest assured, I only recommend what I use, trust, and pay for myself. The information in my videos is for entertainment and educational purposes only. I am not a financial advisor. There are no guarantees of income or success, and any results mentioned are not typical. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.
So why do 90% of all agencies fail and how to pull off five of the most powerful business growth strategies by fixing and avoiding the most common mistakes that nearly every agency makes.
So let's get started with one of the most common and painful mistakes of all, random acts of marketing. One of the biggest mistakes that most business owners, entrepreneurs, and marketers make isn't doing too little, it's doing too much.
But doing that too much in too many of the wrong places, which results in doing too little of what actually works.
In business, you have three resources that you can use and invest in order to achieve a desired result. These resources are time, money, and energy. Now, if you spend and invest your time, money and energy well, your business will grow, but if you waste them on ineffective marketing strategies you're far more likely to end up failing.
And this approach leads to what I call random acts of marketing, making stuff, posting it, and doing things just for the sake of it with no clear goal, intention, or strategy behind it.
In every business, there's a segment of the market, a group or collection of people that are going to love you and love what you do and want to tell everyone they know about just how great you are.
Those people are your ideal customers, your ideal target market, and it's your job to get in front of as many of them as possible. But here's the thing, despite what you may have heard about how your business needs to be everywhere all the time, doing all the things in order to reach the most amount of people possible, none of that is true.
In reality, your ideal target market and that group of people that you actually want to serve are likely focused in one, maybe two different places, which means that all you need to do is identify where those one or two different places are and then go there, ignoring everything else.
For your audience, maybe it's Facebook, or maybe it's YouTube, maybe it's Instagram or Linkedin, but it's unlikely to be all of them. And when you stop investing your energy in the places where none of your ideal target market is present and active, it frees up valuable time, money, and energy for you to allocate to better locations that are going to provide a bigger ROI.
This is why in marketing, we're always talking about segmenting a market, which is essentially carving up your market into different groups with similar needs or characteristics or traits.
The trick here though is that this is often where so many businesses swing way too far in the other direction by over-segmenting and over-targeting their market. So, let's make sure that doesn't happen to you now.
To really understand this whole targeting versus over-targeting, segmenting versus over-segmenting thing, we need to take a look at your TAM, which stands for your Total Addressable Market, and it represents 100% of your total possible market.
So for example, if you sell to home improvement service businesses in the United States, your TAM would be 2.5 million businesses. But having an audience of 2.5 million businesses is just way too big to go after all at once, which is why we also need to take a look at segmentation.
It's here that you want to break your TAM down by segmenting your audience into different categories based on their geographic details like what city or state or country they live in, and their all-important company details like company size and revenue.
But this is where things start to get tricky and can go one of two different ways, neither of which is right. The first is to not segment at all, just blasting out your marketing message to everyone.
But this always results in a watered down message that's too bland and too boring to be interesting or relevant to anyone. The other way then is hyper segmenting down to the smallest detail.
Anyway, when you go through this process, it gives you a perfectly dialed in segment that speaks to the exact wants and needs and desires of your ideal target market. But what's more than likely when you start to over segment and carve up your market into too many different areas is that you never end up with enough data or information on any one segment.
This means you often end up creating campaigns based on random guesses and talking about things that just don't matter to people. The solution then and the antidote to all of this is to find the one, two, or maybe three most common characteristics between your top customers. Build out your ideal target market from there and expand later only if you feel it's necessary.
Like maybe you've determined that most of your best customers are men or women or they all live in a certain spot or they all have a certain activity or lifestyle or something that they're all into.
Whatever it is, make sure that you've dialed that in first before adding other criteria to your segmenting list. But if you really want to dial in who your perfect customer is while at the same time boosting your business's profitability, then you're definitely going to avoid making this next mistake.
Depending on which study or statistic you read, it's generally agreed upon that the cost of acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
And in a report by Bain & Company, they found that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits anywhere from 25 to 95%. This is why maybe the single most important marketing strategy to grow your business comes down to focusing inwards on your existing clients and customers, making serving them your absolute top priority.
Now, as someone who loves growth and new and exciting and marketing and advertising and all that fun stuff, I appreciate this is a hard concept to wrap your head around.
But I'm not asking you to stop marketing, just to redirect some of those marketing efforts towards your existing customers and clients, people that you already have.
It's tempting to think that the secret to unlocking massive business growth is to run more ads and generate more leads and try to crank up all of your marketing at the same time.
When in reality, what you really need to do is take a step back, look at everything that you already have, and try to find new and innovative ways to serve the people that you already have better.
Many years ago, I heard Ryan Lee talk about a concept that he called GTKT, which stands for Get Them, Keep Them. And his advice was to spend 50% of your time on getting new clients and customers and 50% of your time working on existing relationships with the customers that you already have. A solid split considering the profit potential by just better serving the customers that are already in your world.
Of course, in any business, occasionally you're going to have some bad fit customers that slip through the cracks, which is what this next mistake is all about. I'm all for doing your best, trying to provide as much value as you possibly can and doing everything in your power to make things right for your customers.
But sometimes one of the crazy ones slip through, and they intent on making your life as challenging and difficult as possible.
Now, if you mess up, or there's some kind of miscommunication or misunderstanding on your part, then obviously do your best to fix it and make things right. But if that doesn't work, please do not be afraid to fire disaster clients or disaster customers.
These are the kind of customers that take up 80% of your time and destroy your motivation, destroy your desire to even get out of bed in the morning, and will happily allow you to destroy your own business all in the process of trying to make them happy. Something that's never going to happen and something you're never going to be able to do.
Back in the day before I learned how to avoid these kind of people, I used to have email phobia, where I was afraid to check my email in the morning.
This is because I was terrified of what kind of hurtful or hateful email I was going to find from a client or customer that I never should have taken on in the first place. Fortunately, I now have put systems and processes in place to avoid these people like the plague and ensure that I only attract high quality people that I really enjoy working with. So here's how you can do it too.
Now, obviously the best place to start is by avoiding taking on bad clients or customers in the first place, which you can do by being crystal clear about who you serve, how you serve them, and what they can expect along the way.
And a lot of this comes down to simply acting on the previous few strategies like avoiding random acts of marketing and making sure that you're segmenting people based on things that actually matter. And of course, prioritizing retaining your best customers by serving them to the best of your ability.
But if somehow a bad one slips through, and sometimes they do, then here's what to do next. First, you're going to want to regularly make a practice of listing out and ranking all of your customers from best to worst. You can create a couple different versions of this if you like, one for profitability and one for enjoyment you get from working with them, but ideally, it's going to be some combination of both of these things.
Then use the top 20% of your absolute best customers and the ones that you'd love to get more of in order to create an ideal customer avatar profile from. In other words, what are these top 20% of clients or customers all have in common?
Are they mostly men or mostly women, mostly centered around a certain industry or market, do they all have a similar pain or problem that you're helping them with? This should sound familiar, as what you're doing here is segmenting your customers. The better you're able to drill down on this, the better you're going to be able to create marketing and messaging that attracts more people just like them.
After that, take a look at your bottom 10% of your customers and do everything you can to start firing them or referring them to someone else. There's an expression I heard once that says everybody deserves to be someone's best customer. So just because they're not a good fit for your agency it doesn't mean that they can't be a good fit for someone else.
But if time and time again, you constantly find yourself attracting penny pinching, tire kicking, pain in the neck customers, then it could very well be because you're making this next mistake.
One of the most valuable business lessons I ever learned was that I was responsible for training my customers and clients on how to treat me and my business. If a customer sends an email at 8pm on a Saturday night and I respond immediately, I am training them that I can be reached right away, anytime, anywhere.
If a client makes unreasonable demands that go beyond our initial agreement and I caved in, well it trained them to keep on making crazy requests that they would then expect to be delivered. And if anyone asked for a discount and I gave it, then you can bet they are going to expect the exact same thing next time because nobody likes paying more for something that they previously got for less. And that's what makes discounting, sales, and slashing your prices, even for promotional events, just so dangerous.
It can be a useful tool to help push people who are sitting on the fence to finally take some action. But do it all the time and it'll start to become an expectation and it'll train your customers to just wait for the next sale before buying. Now, there are other things that you can do to increase sales without compromising your value or how people see you.
For starters, you could simply replace the word discounts with upgrades, which take advantage of a psychological phenomenon known as exclusivity that makes people feel special. So try providing an additional service or benefit worth 20% more rather than offering a 20% discount.
Also, don't be afraid to offer rewards, which take advantage of another psychological principle known as reciprocity. This is where people are more likely to want to give back after they've received something nice from you.
Rewards can also help increase customer loyalty and retention. You can use rewards as a way of saying thank you as a kind of a bonus, or you can offer them with no requirement or stated expectation of purchase.
Now, if you want to try out some of these marketing strategies check out the first link in the description where I give away all my marketing training for free to get you started.
Thanks for watching and I will see you in one of the next videos that should show up right about now.