The Very Good Marketing Guide E-Book

Amy Miocevich

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Grow your business faster with this revolutionary marketing framework Do you want to stop wasting time and money on marketing that doesn't get results? The Very Good Marketing Guide explains exactly where to spend your next marketing dollar and where to focus your attention -- so your marketing will make a real difference in growing your business and profits. In this book, marketing expert Amy Miocevich shares a simple but genius 5-step model for marketing your small business. She reveals crucial insights into why marketing fails, including common mistakes and marketing myths, and shows you how to assess where and why your marketing is most effective. With The Very Good Marketing Guide, you'll create targeted solutions for turning strangers into customers -- and customers into superfans of your business and brand. Whether you're a manager, a small business owner, or an entrepreneur, you'll learn how to: * Understand and use your marketing data more effectively * Improve conversion rates at every touch point * Nurture your most valuable customer and client relationships * Make sure your website and social media are doing what they should * Create a marketing strategy that's uniquely suited to your business's needs With a clear and practical framework, real-life examples, and timeless principles you can apply, this is the ultimate practical guide for marketing success. The Very Good Marketing Guide will help you to direct your energy where it gets the best results ... which ultimately means you can get back to doing what your business does best!

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

INTRODUCTION

Coffee crunch

Going viral

Out of office

Technicians vs Visionaries

The system for success

PART I: THERE'S A PROBLEM

ONE: YOUR MARKETING PLAN IS FAILING AND TAKING YOUR PROFITS WITH IT

The promised land

Top ten myths about SME marketing

TWO: THE VERY GOOD MARKETING FRAMEWORK

The five Cs of Very Good Marketing

The Very Good Marketing Model

The journey

How strong is your marketing?

The

Very

Simple Principle

THREE: BEAT YOUR MARKETING BOTTLENECK

The marketing promise

Julia's bottleneck

Beating your marketing bottleneck

The ticket to arriving at your goals

FAQ: Everything you might be wondering about The Very Good Marketing Framework

PART II: BEATING YOUR BOTTLENECKS

FOUR: HOW TO TURN A STRANGER INTO A VISITOR

Marketing gone cold

The art of attraction

Channel: How do I get in front of the right people?

What is a marketing channel?

Eliminating the scattergun approach

Bullseye

So how do you choose just one marketing channel?

Messages and channels

Creating your marketing message

The Customer is the hero, not you

Getting the message right

Actions: What are my next steps?

Action plan example

Did it work?

Why growth stops

FIVE: HOW TO TURN A VISITOR INTO A LEAD

The price of a website is confusing

Websites use up a lot of your marketing budget

Your website and marketing channel don't match

Building a website is more than just design

Website technology is complicated

Your website tries to talk to everyone

Website data is never tracked or used

Someone will always have a better-looking website

Linda's bottleneck

The 7 essential Ss for a high-performing website

Why people stop marketing here

SIX: HOW TO TURN A LEAD INTO A CUSTOMER

The 6 fundamentals of converting Leads into Customers

Overselling and underselling

Creating and delivering a sales process

SEVEN: HOW TO TURN A CUSTOMER INTO A FAN

The growth dilemma

Net promoter score

Setting the bar

Defining the bar

Raising the bar

The mindset needed to create lifetime Fans

EIGHT: HOW TO TURN A FAN INTO JAM

The mindset you need to engage raving Fans

The 3 Jam Rs

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

INDEX

END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

Guide

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

Why I wrote this book

Introduction

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Bringing It All Together

Index

Advertisement Page

End User License Agreement

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First published in 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd Level 4, 600 Bourke St, Melbourne Victoria 3000, Australia

© John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd 2023

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

ISBN: 978-1-394-18455-2

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.

Cover design by Wiley

DisclaimerThe material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based on the information in this publication.

Thanks to my family and support network, I was able to bring this book to life whilst also growing my agency and raising a toddler. I thought it couldn't be done, but they proved me wrong. A great deal of love also to my husband: my biggest fan and the world's kindest soul.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Miocevich is the founder of Lumos Marketing, a marketing agency that works exclusively with small businesses.

Over the past decade she's worked with hundreds of Australian SMEs in a consulting and advisory capacity, supporting them to simplify and supercharge their marketing to great success.

The framework developed by Lumos Marketing and documented in this book has helped businesses across Australia to reach their goals and tackle marketing with confidence. It is the only framework in the world that you can turn into a caterpillar by drawing a smiley face in one of the circles.

Amy is surrounded by a network of passionate individuals, both inside her Lumos Marketing team and amongst the clients, professionals and friends she has been fortunate enough to work with over the last decade.

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

I've read my fair share of business books: marketing, leadership, culture, strategy and finance books. I am fortunate to have been influenced by the greatest business minds of my time. But when I was growing my own business as a sole trader, I felt like there was a huge void between these amazing stories and theories, and the actions I needed to take for my business, especially when the case studies referenced in my favourite books were about Apple, Google and IBM. I felt so distant from their references of leadership teams, big meetings and high-level strategy plans when it was just me and my laptop and my dining room table.

Australia's small-business economy is growing rapidly, and I truly believe there aren't enough resources out there that help shape small business or give them the practical and simple tools they deserve to make running a business just that little bit easier.

There will always be a place for marketing theory, but unless we create more learning opportunities that bridge theory with action, we will keep seeing the same failure rates in small business that have plagued the industry for the last decade.

I wrote this book to bridge that gap and support business owners on their journey to their dream business and use the best marketing theories in a simple and effective way. It is my hope that this book will make marketing a little bit easier for Australia's biggest dreamers and future world-changers.

INTRODUCTION

Coffee crunch

Shane is a software engineer with a firm in Perth. He's 38, married, has two kids, likes his job, but what he really loves is coffee. He loves playing around with different beans, trying new flavours, blending profiles and learning how it all works. He started off roasting his own beans for his morning hit, but his friends loved his coffee so much, they asked him to sell them some coffee beans.

So he did.

His coffee became so popular, his local café asked him to supply them with some beans. So he did. That got so successful, he thought, ‘Why don't I make a go of this and build a coffee roasting business?’ Everyone wants coffee, right?

So, he quit his job, bought a premium coffee roasting machine with $40 000 from his mortgage, invested $10 000 on packaging design and branding, and paid $7000 to a website developer to build him an e-commerce website.

It started well, but after five months, a new, much larger coffee roaster negotiated deals with his coffee shops. Deals too good for them to refuse.

To make matters worse, the supply contracts he had negotiated with a major hospitality group were cancelled when the company was bought out by a multinational.

And his new website? He was getting some hits and a few 250 g bag purchases, but not nearly enough to cover his costs.

Now Shane's in deep. He's got a warehouse, stock, overheads to pay and no customers. He's bleeding cash, losing sleep at night, and wondering what he did wrong.

Shane did a lot of things right.

He had a passion for his product. Tick.

He found some early customers. Great.

He invested in some marketing assets and advertising. Awesome.

But he failed to do the thing that would secure a steady supply of new customers.

He failed to do the thing that would guarantee growth and protect his business from competitive threats.

He failed to do the thing that would create a recurring, regular source of income.

Going viral

David is a retired mechanic who loves tinkering with machinery in his backyard warehouse. Over the last ten years, he developed and produced a winch that helps extract trucks and cars when they get stuck in the sand or mud.

It's not your everyday winch. This one hooks onto the wheel instead of the chassis and has 75 per cent more grunt than the others.

Looking to supercharge his growth, David decided to spend $4000 creating a promotional video for the winch. He then uploaded the video to YouTube, spent $5000 on a Google pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to drive traffic to the video and waited with bated breath to see what would happen.

Day one, it racked up 100 views. Day two, 500 views. Day three, 10 000 views. Day four, 70 000 views. By day ten, the video had over two million views. In other words, it went viral.

David was beside himself with joy. This was the beginning of his legacy! This was the start of his new life. The mansion by the sea, the Lamborghini, the first-class travel, the designer suits.

The only trouble was, he didn't sell any winches.

Yes, the views of the video were off the charts, but those views did not translate into sales.

Like Shane, David got a lot right too.

He knew what the customer needed.

He created a unique solution.

He launched a great campaign that went viral.

But he failed to do the thing that would secure a steady supply of new customers.

He failed to do the thing that would guarantee growth and protect his business from competitive threats.

He failed to do the thing that would create a recurring, regular source of income.

Out of office

Helen owns a property management company. She has a small team of property managers and has spent the last decade dedicated to growing her business.

She got to the office by 7 am every weekday and regularly worked late to support her customers.

But as the business grew, Helen began to step out of the day-to-day work of property management (that's what owners did, right?), and started spending her time on things she was really passionate about. She started taking lunch breaks again, going to property seminars, networking with people in the property industry and taking holidays.

And the business was still thriving.

Until it wasn't.

Suddenly, Helen was being notified of contracts being cancelled multiple times a week. Ones from the clients she had been working with for years. The website she had paid $10 000 for wasn't getting her any new customers either. And there were new competitors in her space that had better offerings at a cheaper price.

What was going on?

Like many business owners, Helen was dedicated to her customers.

She had built a name for herself in the industry.

Her business was growing.

And she was ready to start stepping away from the day to day.

But she failed to recognise one important thing.

The thing that would ensure her legacy could exist within her business without her day-to-day involvement.

The thing that would keep her business growing and her customers happy without her presence.

What do Shane, David and Helen all have in common?

None of their marketing is working.

They've got some pieces of the marketing puzzle — they have demand for their products, and they have a business ready to accommodate the sales — but their marketing isn't bringing people in the door and keeping them there. It's inconsistent. There's no structure to it. There is no plan. And even when they think they're checking that marketing box, it rapidly slips right out of their grasp again.

Why? Because Shane, David and Helen are all Technicians.

Michael Gerber coined the term back in 1992, but the principle remains as relevant as ever and these three entrepreneurs are right in the thick of it.

What is a Technician?

Technicians vs Visionaries

The Technician operates in the present and is focused on doing the work of making, troubleshooting and delivering a product. They struggle to grow their business because they're working in the business rather than on the business day in, day out.

Most people start their business as a Technician. As we've seen, coffee lovers make coffee, mechanics build machinery, property managers serve customers. And they're so overwhelmed with keeping the wheels turning that they don't stop to develop a vision and build the structure needed for their business to thrive.

Unfortunately, Technicians will always struggle to succeed in business. Not because they aren't great at their craft or don't have a great product, but because they haven't built the key foundations their business needs to enable them to move to the Visionary stage.

The Visionary stage is what every business owner craves but rarely achieves. It's the phase when they can walk away from the business and let others run it, with systems in place that automatically find customers, build revenue and weather any storm that comes its way.

When you reach the Visionary stage, you attain true freedom, absolute independence, and total control of your life, your business and your destiny.

So what separates a Technician from a Visionary? What are the steps needed to move from one to the other? And what are so many businesses that ultimately fail every year missing?

The answer is simple: it's called a system.

A system for business operations.

A system for growth.

And, most importantly, a system for your marketing.

If a Technician can let go of their need to do everything, control everyone and manage everybody, they can let the systems take control so they can get on with what they really want to do in life: roasting coffee, making winches or talking about property. They have the choice to do what they want to do, not because they have to, but because they want to.

What would you like to do with your life? How do you want to spend your time? If you want the freedom to step out of the day-to-day running of your business, then you need to embrace a marketing system.

If you want to control your growth, predict your cash flow, build a new product line or go on a five-week holiday, then you need to embrace a marketing system.

As it turns out, I have that system.

This system has been used by over 2000 businesses in the last five years to help them become the Visionary they have always dreamed about.

I have worked with startups, service providers, engineers, consultants, health professionals, technology companies and publicly listed companies.

I have seen them go from being unable to explain their products and services to winning every tender they submit.

I have seen businesses go from struggling to pay their bills to acquiring their competitors.

I have seen owners dishevelled and stressed about their future make marketing decisions with confidence barely six months later.

And it's all because they embraced The Very Good Marketing Framework: a marketing system for small businesses.

So how does The Very Good Marketing Framework work?

Let me demonstrate by showing you how it helped Shane.

The system for success

When I met Shane, it was very clear that he had a great product and was really great at building relationships with customers. But he assumed that great coffee was enough to help him reach his revenue targets. He had a few pieces of a system in place (a website, branding and a product), but was missing a lot of other elements that would enable his business to grow without his constant involvement.

Together, Shane and I rebuilt his entire marketing system using The Very Good Marketing Framework, identifying how to attract new customers, how to convert them, how to onboard them, how to deliver product to them and, finally, how to turn them into his biggest fans. All automatically. Leaving Shane with complete clarity on where he should spend his time, where he should invest his marketing budget and where he is heading in the future.

The Very Good Marketing Framework also helped David who had an amazing way of attracting strangers to his business, but no system for converting them into customers. Together, David and I built a system that would maximise the conversion rate for every viewer of his viral winch video and perpetually grow his leads so he could focus on product development and delivery.

And for Helen, we used The Very Good Marketing Framework to build a system that codified the exact way she grew her business, from how she identified strangers, to how she converted them into customers and how she delivered her products and services so that the method for her success could live on in her company without her.

If you want a marketing system that:

grows your revenue

brings new business in with or without your involvement

makes marketing your business easy

delivers the kind of success I helped Shane, David and Helen achieve, then The Very Good Marketing Framework is for you.

In this book you will find a step-by-step guide on how to implement this powerful marketing and growth system into your business. Once implemented, you will see a dramatic shift in the way your business operates and how you operate it. You will have more confidence when making decisions and a better chance of reaching your goals, and you can finally start to live the life you've wanted since you started your entrepreneurial journey.

Are there other marketing systems on the market?

You bet. There's the 7Ps Marketing Matrix, Porter's 5 Forces, Acquisition funnels, Pirate Metrics, The Hook Model … so many marketing models and systems that are inspiring and game changing. They are created by the best minds in the marketing world to accurately predict human behaviour in a consumable market.

‘Here is what the customer wants to hear’, they'll say.

‘Here are seven Ps you need for your business.’

‘Three triangles … ’

‘A matrix … ’

All slightly different, but all missing one big piece of the puzzle: the how.

How exactly do I use this theory to grow my business? How do I identify this type of customer? How much is it going to cost me? How do I know if it is working? How do I know what to do next?

I love a good marketing framework, but what I love more is a plan to execute it. With a small marketing budget, a small amount of time and a whole lot of risk, a good marketing framework is just not enough for a small business.

If you're lucky, your small business has an $8000 annual budget for marketing and only two hours per week to use it. And whilst you know exactly how to roast coffee, make a winch or manage someone's property, when it comes to spending that marketing budget, you probably don't know where to start.

The reason The Very Good Marketing Framework is so different is because it's practical.

It isn't just a great strategy (it's so much more than that) that's well researched (you bet) and very visual (right-brain thinkers rejoice), it also helps you identify exactly what your next move is. And the move after that, and the move after that, until you have a system in place that operates entirely on its own.

It is so simple and actionable that the likes of Shane, David and Helen have seen it, understood it and used it to drive their business towards their dreams.

It's embedded within hundreds of organisations, it's referenced at university and presented to small-business associations.

It is unbelievably popular because nothing like it exists. And trust me, I've looked. After eight years of supporting small businesses in building websites and executing social media strategies, our agency kept hitting the same roadblocks when it came to giving advice to our small-business clients. There was no framework that was both holistic and practical that we could talk to or hand over or use to give context to the marketing services we were selling.

Most of the clients we worked with were small businesses either growing or starting out. They were (and still are) Technicians looking to live the Australian entrepreneurial dream, who seldom come to the ABN party with a suite of marketing knowledge and technical prowess. So anything we created had to be simple and easy to use.

That's when this marketing framework came to life. It was over four years and with the support of nearly 50 businesses that enabled us to take very complex marketing knowledge, strategies and leading frameworks and create something that has helped so many people reach their goals. It has truly been a collaboration between marketing minds and small business needs as we embedded ourselves within teams and amongst peers to prove that this system works and could continue working for decades to come.

I wrote this book to support as many businesses as I can to become empires, and as many Technicians as I can to become Visionaries. Whether you are just starting out or deep within a growth phase, this book is accessible, simple and easy to implement, and will give you the clarity you need to make decisions about your business with confidence. I've seen too many businesses fail under the weight of poor marketing plans and expensive assets that are not used to their full extent.

But it doesn't have to be yours.

If you want to make confident marketing decisions …

If you want to eliminate marketing guesswork and wasted money …

If you want to move from being a Technician to a Visionary …

This book is for you.

PART ITHERE'S A PROBLEM

Regardless of whether you've been in business for one month or 40 years, the same harsh reality rings true for all of us: running a business is hard.

Really hard.

Couple that with the responsibilities of raising children, caring for loved ones, being in a relationship, and looking after your mental and physical health, running a business on top of that is near impossible. So if you're giving up your time right now to further your business through marketing and to challenge your thinking, then I salute you.

It takes a great deal of effort to step outside of the day to day and commit to the Visionary lifestyle. And you have everything you need to achieve it. There's no question about that.

As your make your way through the first part of this book, I want you to remember that the things that got you here are not going to get you ‘there’ (i.e. where you want to be). So set aside everything you think you know about marketing and business growth, because in your unknowingness you're going to find the ingredients that grow your business into the vision you've always had for it.

ONEYOUR MARKETING PLAN IS FAILING AND TAKING YOUR PROFITS WITH IT

No matter how many years your business has been selling to customers, you're probably no closer to unlocking a secret marketing formula than the biggest Fortune 500 companies. Consumer behaviours, communication platforms and a million other external factors mean locking in a ‘marketing formula’ that stands the test of time is virtually impossible.

Trust me, the ones that lead the way are not in possession of a secret formula; they just have enough cash flow to have top marketers experimenting 24 hours a day, seven days a week to find what works for their business. Most entrepreneurs are lucky to find two hours a month.

If you're familiar with the popular marketing saying, ‘50 per cent of marketing works; if only we knew which 50 per cent’, then you'll know exactly what I am talking about. Trying something new is a risk. It'll cost you a lot of money, it's not guaranteed to work and there are a million avenues to choose from.

Of course, many businesses make it look easy.

And many experts claim to have the ‘seven-figure-guaranteed marketing secret’ or the ‘20k per day sales hack’ that they used to generate $1 million worth of income with next to no work.

Are these guys for real? Maybe.

Is there really a secret marketing hack? Definitely not.

The promised land

Several years ago, I fell into a bit of a marketing trap that I am almost too embarrassed to admit. It was early 2021 and I was two months away from giving birth to my son. Before this, I was absolutely in denial about going on any kind of maternity leave, but as the date crept closer it was really beginning to sink in that my business-development hat was about to disappear from our company for a while and I needed a quick solution for sustaining our lead flow.

Out of desperation, or possibly just exhaustion, I started a search for a marketing agency dissimilar from our own that could bring in high-value leads for my company while I was on maternity leave. A brand new, cold marketing strategy.

I found an agency in the UK that served me a series of Facebook ads about their secret, proven marketing formula, and I believed they were telling the truth (I should have known better). The first time I met them over a video call late in the evening (because of the time difference), I remember feeling sceptical. They were vague about their special marketing sauce, but fantastic at convincing me it was going to work. I assumed the lack of detail in their proposed strategy was due to the fact we had not signed any contracts yet and I was somewhat of a competitor.

In the weeks to come I was sent a contract and some brief info about a potential campaign, which looked OK. It was the equivalent of AU$10 000 for the campaign set-up and a further $2500 per month for management, plus any advertising spend, which they recommended be between $2000 and $4000.

I signed it.

The first month of the project was labelled as a ‘set-up month’, which I could only assume involved setting up the campaign copy, and creative and technical elements. They insisted on using a third-party website builder instead of our own website and produced two landing pages using Click Funnels (a funnel building website). It looked OK. I couldn't find the secret formula in it though — it looked straightforward to me. Possibly the secret recipe was in the advertising set-up?

So after four to six weeks of setting up the landing pages, the ad campaign began. I quickly scoured the ads manager to see what was so special about their set-up/creative/wording/imagery.

And much to my absolute disappointment, there was nothing. There was nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing my team could not have set up themselves. It was Facebook advertising 101.

So, naturally, I panicked. We had just invested $12 500 in a strategy that was not even close to what we would recommend to our clients. It was a disaster. I was embarrassed, and I was out of pocket a lot of money. And, to top it off, at this point I was in hospital on strict bed-rest orders so there wasn't anything I could do even if I wanted to.

I had to let it run its course. Give the campaign some time to deliver some leads. Long story short, I pulled the plug when we hit $20 000 of expenses and no leads. Not one.

The agency was less than cooperative. They wouldn't entertain new ideas on the campaign without us paying more, they didn't seem to have a further strategy beyond what they initially came up with, and they kept claiming that we just needed more time for the campaign to run before we saw results. I felt tricked and taken advantage of and utterly embarrassed.

I have thought a great deal about what transpired in those months over the last few years. It was absolutely one of those pivotal learning experiences that entrepreneurs always reference in their ‘journey-to-success’ speeches — and not because it sent us broke and brought disaster upon the business, but because it taught us the very lessons that we were trying to teach others. There is no quick marketing hack, no marketing secret, no sudden-millionaire weapon.