Tag Archives: Marketing

Customer Service, its not Rocket Science….

Posted on 03/13/2012 by admin
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This blog post is inspired by a Tweet I saw this morning that struck me as really quite sad.  The tweet was about someone not delivering something that was promised, which is in itself bad enough but the person actually didn’t EXPECT the action to be carried out!  Can you believe that? What would you think if your customers actually didn’t expect you to fulfil their orders or deliver when you’ve told them you will? Do you think the customers that feel like that will end up going somewhere else? Of course they will, and they will tell everyone they know about the awful service they get from you.

There is a saying that you should always under-promise and over-deliver….. Thats the way you get happy customers! There is nothing more satisfying than ordering something and being told that it will be a couple of days and it turning up the following day, it makes you feel special and makes you incredibly happy about the service you’ve been given.

The very worst thing you can do with your customers is make a promise that you can’t keep, it is SO much better to be realistic and honest in the first place. If you cannot deliver then it is better to say you can’t, very often people are happy to wait for what they really want so if they like what you are offering they will more than likely hang on and wait.

So dont over promise something that you have doubt you will be able to deliver, always be realistic about your capabilities, you wont lost customers because of it, or very few but you WILL lose a lot of customers when you don’t deliver as promised…..

 

Claire x0x

 

If you need help with your marketing and your business growth then get in touch…….

What Are Your Words Really Saying To Your Customers ?

Posted on 03/09/2012 by admin
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I was inspired to write this blog after seeing an advert on the TV which actually made me cringe. I can’t remember what they were advertising because I wasn’t actually watching and all I heard were the words they were using. Now I’m a trained Counsellor and an NLP Master Practitioner and Hypnotherapist and for all those things WORDS are very important but they are also important for every one of us, especially if you are in sales, and if you are in business then you ARE in sales!

The words you use are what influences people to buy, especially on your website, in your brochures, through your tweets, through your facebook. The pictures of course are incredibly important but the majority of communication, especially in this social media world is in fact WORDS!

So, what are your words saying? If your spelling is bad then you need to use spellcheck – Fact! If your spelling is bad then you will be forgiven once or twice, it may even come across as cute now and then but the general impression you are creating is that you don’t care and your attention to detail is zero!

Also, be careful of the words you use. Never say cheap…. unless of course you work for the Poundstore, you can say it then but other than that you always are Value! Theres a reason that Tesco have their Value range – its dirt cheap stuff but they dont call it Tesco Cheap, its Value! Do you think they would sell anywhere near as many of these products if the name was different? At the other end of the scale they have a Finest range – its expensive, but its called Finest icon smile What Are Your Words Really Saying To Your Customers ? )

So how are you classing and categorsing your products and services? Do you have a cheap range? If you do change it! People don’t want to buy cheap, they want to buy Value, exclusive, finest, unique, original, bespoke (I know lots of you use this word).

Words can be incredibly influential, so chose them wisely…….

 

Claire x0x

 

If you need help with your marketing or growing yourself and your business then get in touch today – email me Claire@bombshellacademy.com

Are Your Customers Leaving Without You Knowing?????

Posted on 02/06/2012 by admin
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I love really nice make-up! A couple of years ago I was in John Lewis and had in mind that I would buy new make-up, I was browsing the Chanel counter, didn’t find what I wanted and then a woman from the Bobbi Brown counter spoke to me and asked if I’d like to sit and have my make-up done with all the new season colours, I wasn’t in a rush and gladly said yes please! The woman did a great job and I bought lots, and lots, and lots!  :)) They took all my details and I received updates now and then, and about a year later I received a nice marketing postcard telling me about the new colours launching and would I like to book a demonstration when they came out (nice marketing I thought) and phoned to make my appointment.

When I arrived at the counter for my pre-booked appointment I was told that the person responsible was still on her break so I’d have to wait, not happy but I waited about 10 minutes and she arrived. Then she asked my name and typed it into the computer and told me that they didn’t have my details because of a new computer system and in short she had no idea why I was there. She then did a demonstration half heartedly and surprise, surprise I bought nothing!

The next time I went to buy make-up I was looking for something specific and went into John Lewis and looked at every department except the Bobbi Brown one where I got such bad service, in fact I’ve resolved to never buy anything from them again because they obviously couldn’t give a stuff about their customers!

Its said that when you have good service you tell a couple of people about it but when you have bad service you tell about 10 times as many people about it, the people you tend NOT to tell are the ones that actually provided that bad service, including me, I was tempted to write to John Lewise an express my disatisfaction at their Bobbi Brown department but I didn’t, I just voted with my feet and shopped elsewhere.

It takes a huge amount more time and effort to convert a stranger into a customer but only a small effort to get a current customer to spend more money with you - so make sure you take care of the current customers you have icon smile Are Your Customers Leaving Without You Knowing????? ))

 

Claire xox

 

See how Bombshell Academy can help your business get new customers and make more profit from those you already have, without spending all your cash

How Do You Get Clients FAST…… ?

Posted on 09/19/2011 by admin
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Whenever I am contacted by someone new the first thing I do is have a long chat with them to establish where they are now with their business and what their biggest challenge is right now. More often than not the problem is lack of customers and people want a quick fix to get them, unfortunately the bad news is that there is NO quick fix but there are lots of immediate things you can do that can generate customers in a fairly short time and if you consistently do these things then you’ll never be short of customers again. The great thing about these tips is that they are all really cheap to do and the main cost is just your time and effort.

So, here are my Top 5

1. Kick start new leads and interest by running a competition for your product/service. This is a really great way to kickstart your business and to get people to put ‘their hands up’ to identify exactly who is interested so you can start marketing to them. Remember, it can take up to 7 contacts with someone before they will do business with you. Getting them to enter, you emailing to thank them, then announcing the winner etc will soon add up to those 7 contacts.

2. Contact your previous customers – Previous happy customers can be a source of referrals. Write to them all, ask them if they know someone SPECIFICALLY, such as someone thats just got engaged, someone getting married, etc – DONT just ask them if they know someone that needs your service – the answer to this is ALWAYS no because its too vague and obscure for them to identify someone for you even if they want to. If anyone DOES give you a referral, send them a thank you gift because then they are more inclined to do it again.

3. Add a download to your website – Offering a free download on your website enables you to identify the people genuinely interested in your product or service and identifies the people that have visited your website. There is absolutely NO point in having 00′s or 000′s or visitors to your website if you don’t know who they are. You are better off having just 10 people a day on your website, having their details and marketing to them and converting half of them into customers than you are having 10,000 anonymous people look at your website that you can never get in touch with.

4. Reconnect with other local suppliers – keeping in contact with people that have the SAME customers as you is a MUST! Have coffee and keep in touch with local suppliers but make sure you approach them with the view that YOU want to help THEM find new business. If you go in feet first with the mindset that you are going to get new business out of them then you will not find them very willing to help you at all. Gaining referrals should be a two way thing and the more YOU can help someone the more they will want to help you.

5.Assess whats working – if you are doing something that IS working, then do more of it! If you get the odd customer from Twitter or Facebook then do more, if direct mail has worked in the past do it again. Also, if there is anything you haven’t tried then try it and see what happens. If sending out emails has worked, do more!

If you are trying to generate customers fast and cheap there is one thing I would advise AGAINST is advertising! As you probably know and have already discovered it is NOT cheap and gets you limited results. One of the worse things you can do when your back is against the wall is to sink  throw more money away. Advertising is great if you are the likes of Coca-Cola or Apple and want to keep your brand in front of the public but for small businesses it can just be a costly mistake.

 

Claire x0x

 

If you need help getting clients and bringing more money into your Wedding business then join the Wedding Wealth Program, it gives you the knowledge and know-how to put in place low cost systems to generate a consistent supply of customers. Dont just take my word for it, read the testimonials others have left

How Much is Too Much?

Posted on 08/16/2011 by admin
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I was inspired to write this blog today because a couple of businesses irritated me this morning with their marketing. The first one was on Twitter and they were promoting a package they were offering and they tweeted the same thing about 4 times in less than hour. Now, I’m all for repeating yourself, especially on Twitter because your audience changed from minute to minute and hour to hour but 4 times in an hour is REALLY overkill and will just lose you followers. If you have something to promote then do your homework about your followers, find out who is online when and tweet it several times a day but at different times of day and different day of the week so that you are reaching different people each time, don’t just bombard the same poor people with the same message constantly.

My second encounter with irritating marketing was through email!  I subscribe to lots of different newsletters and sometimes I read them, sometimes they get instantly get deleted. Well one that I hadn’t heard from literally all year suddenly started emailing again and my instant response was, oh, so they are looking for business now, but ok I thought and read the newsletter. Then just 2 days later I got another newsletter from them, equally as salesy and not interesting at all, and then just 1 DAY later I got a third email from them and that when I decided to hit the unsubscribe button!

People don’t mind receiving newsletters, thats why they sign up to them, they think you are going to give them something interesting and of value and if you deliver that part then they are happy to have a bit of sales patter thrown in. But be CONSISTENT! If you send them a newsletter make sure you keep sending them at regular intervals that suit your customers. More than weekly and personally I think you are pushing your luck, but equally if you send them not often enough you will go out of the customers mind and you will be equally as irritating. You could always be super-clever and ask your customer how often they want to receive it, give them the choice!?!

Claire xox

 

Need help marketing your Wedding Business so that you get more clients and more profits? Join the Wedding Wealth Program – 100% of my clients have said that they were glad they did!

What’s Your Income Ceiling??

Posted on 08/04/2011 by admin
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I don’t know about you but when I first became self-employed one of the reasons was because the skys the limit on your earnings. My Dad has said to me more times than I care to remember ; “you’ll never get rich working for someone else”  Well this is true of course but I wonder how many of you actually work harder than you ever did working for someone else and I’m sure some of you don’t even earn as much money.

The problem with self-employment is that most people have a self-imposed ‘income ceiling’ and this is the very maximum you can possibly earn. I realised while working in my Wedding Planning business, it got to a point where I was working almost every weekend and what seemed like 24 hours a day during the week and then it suddenly dawned on me that if I wanted to earn any more than I currently was then I could either increase my prices (yep, this was possible but realistically I couldn’t double or treble them because I was already charging an amount I was happy with) OR I had to find another way to generate income that didn’t require MY time! I could do this but employing people (which I did) but the better way for me to do it was to productise something so that not only could I make money while I slept but I could also make money from the people that would NEVER be my wedding planning customers.

Now that I help people with their marketing one of the things I’m really keen about is to help them find a way for them to make money while they sleep so that they don’t have a CEILING on their income.

I know you love what you do but how can you make money out of the knowledge and expertise you have alongside what you are currently doing? If you look at some of the most successful people in the Wedding Industry they have no confined themselves to doing the thing that they first started out which was trading their precious time for money, they branched out in another direction that brings them a great income on top of all this.

 

Claire xox

 

If you want to explore how your Wedding Business can bring you maximum profits from your time AND bring you money while you are asleep, on holiday, having a day off then get in touch because the highly praised Wedding Wealth Program can help You!

Do Competitions Really Help Grow Your Business?

Posted on 06/28/2011 by admin
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On Twitter lately I see competition after competition being run and people trying to get new customers in this way but does it really work or is it just another way to throw away your precious hard earned money.

Like everything to do with marketing competitions work great to get new customers as long as you do them right!  There is only reason to do a competition and that’s to get new customers interested in your products and being able to market to them in orderto make them PAYING customers!  Running competitions is a way for people to raise their hands and say they have an interest in what your selling but this will only work if the price is relevant to your business. If the prize is a Wedding Dress then pretty much the only people that are going to enter the competition are people that are actually looking to buy a wedding dress, but if you offer a prize of £10000 you are pretty much going to get the world and his wife entering and your chance of converting any of these people into customers is pretty minimal.

People that enter competitions will not automatically turn into customers just because they’ve entered, and if you are expecting your work to stop there then you are wasting your time running it. Remember, I’ve talked before that it takes an average of 7 contacts with a potential customer before they are likely to buy from you so them contacting you to enter your competition is just the first of these! The next contact can either be thank you for entering or ‘Sorry, you didn’t win’ but you have to keep contacting them after that, after all, by entering they have shown that they are probably in the market for your product or service so to stop contact at this stage will just mean that they will probably end up buying from someone else.

So, once  your competition is finished make sure that you send the entrants a series of emails, preferably in an autoresponder set up on one of the many email companies that exist and get those number of contacts built up quickly and effortlessly.

Next week I’ll be talking about upselling, so that when you thank people for entering your competition you’ll have a way to make a sale there and then!

 

Claire x0x

 

If you would like first hand help with attracting more clients and developing your Wedding business then contact me today about the Wedding Wealth Program, 100% of my clients have said that it helped their business.

Is Your Website About You or Your Customer?

Posted on 04/24/2011 by admin
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I love looking at peoples website, when I meet them on Twitter, Facebook, at a networking event one of the first things I do is look at that website to see how pretty it is and how much business I think it gets them. I actually did this before I started my wedding planning business, I had a look at local and national companies to see what their websites were like and to see if I thought they would be much competition and I was amazed at how bad a lot of them were and to be honest thought that some of them must be very good in marketing in other ways because there was no way they would get business through the website.

When the internet first came about people had websites almost like online brochures, they gave out information about the company and that was about their only purpose, but now that the the whole way we shop has changed and most of the focus is on the net unless your website has changed too then you are being left behind and there is pretty much no point in having a website at all!

One of the biggest website crimes I see is that the website has too many ‘I’s’ and not enough ‘You’s’ -it should be all about your customer and not about you because on the website you are normally only just beginning your relationship with your new, potential client. They actually don’t want to know about what you are doing, they want to know how you can ease the pain or increase the gain of the problem they are currently seeking to solve. By all means reveal yourself and talk about yourself on the About You page, if they click on that and read it its because they want to find out more about the person behind the product or service but the rest of the website should be about your customer.

I wont go into the whole ‘features’ and ‘benefits’ lecture again, I’ve previously written a blog post just about that but when you next look at your website, look at your home page and go through and COUNT, yes COUNT everytime you’ve said ‘I’ (or ‘we’ if theres more than one of you) and everytime you’ve said ‘YOU’ – ideally you should should have mentioned your customer  (the YOUS) FIVE TIMES more than you’ve mentioned yourelf, yes thats right, FIVE TIMES!!!!!

 

Ok – so get counting right now and see how you can immediately improve your website.

 

Claire x0x0

 

If you need help with this or any other marketing problem you have and what to increase your sales and your clients effortlessly then get in contact and join the Wedding Wealth Program - 100% of my clients have said that they were glad they did…..

Are You Discounting or Adding Value?

Posted on 03/28/2011 by admin
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I often get asked whether you should include prices on a website and to be honest I have no idea whether there is a right or wrong answer to that. If someone is going to go elsewhere because of the price they see on your website then it really saves you the hassle of them making contact, you chatting, maybe visiting them and then them saying its too expensive and going somewhere else. On the other hand you could argue that without quoting the price you have a chance to ‘sell’ to the potential customer and they will be so taken with you that they’ll pay anything…… Personally, and this IS only my personal opinion I don’t think it makes any difference because weddings are so emotional occasions that if you provide something a bride particularly wants then the price aspect goes out of the window immediately and I think very few brides actually purchase based on price.

Whether you choose to display prices or not there is one thing that I often see people doing and I would really, really ask you to think twice and that is DISCOUNTING!!!!  We’ve all seen the ads on tv over and over again for DFS furniture and their sofas are reduced to some tiny amount compared to what they are apparently worth, and what are we all thinking? We are thinking that the reduced price is probably what they are worth, not the inflated price at all, and it actually deflates the VALUE of the product. Top supermarkets, who spend millions on their marketing have done extensive research on how to offer their products. Which offer would you prefer:-
Half Price
50% Off
Buy One Get One Free
Basically they are, of course all the same but Buy One Get One Free consistently gets 300-500% more sales than the others!

If you want to make an offer to potential clients, maybe at a wedding fair or as a limited time offer, rather than make a discount increase your VALUE instead. You can do this by adding something of value to your package. If you are a photographer for example offer a FREE engagement shoot (you might do this anyway but make it known!) and make sure you tell people how much this shoot is worth, add a VALUE to it.  If you are making an offering that involves just your time make sure you add a value to it and advertise that value, attach an hourly rate to your service and make it known to your potential customers exactly what they are getting.

So next time you are tempted to discount and reduce the value of YOU and YOUR service think again and get creative about how you can instead add VALUE to your offering.

 

Claire x0x

 

Do you need help to put together a Marketing Strategy for your business that will make it SOAR? Are you ready to Step Up??? Click Here NOW

Are All Your Marketing Eggs In One Basket?

Posted on 03/17/2011 by admin
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When I begin to work with someone one of the many things I want to know is what  kind of marketing are they currently doing, and what is working (the latter is in itself a WHOLE nother blog post and I’ll come back to that one!) Often the few things they are doing include a bit of social networking (often in a haphazard, random way) and advertising in magazines (Don’t even get me started on this!)  and thats generally the extent of their marketing plan – 1 or 2 things! Over the course of our conversations I ask if they’ve tried X and Y and Z and they normally say they haven’t tried it because they didn’t think it would work, to which my response is always, ‘but how do you know it wont work unless you try it?’ How do you know that the one thing you haven’t tried is the one thing that will bring brides to you in droves ? The answer is, you don’t!

One of the scarey things about being self-employed is that you often have to step out of your comfort zone and try things that you’ve never done before. This may include business networking and walking into a room of strangers and making small talk with loads of people you’ve never met before, this may include standing up in front of loads of people and telling them all what your business is, it may include doing accounts when you’ve never been happy with maths and numbers before and it WILL include you being a saleperson I’m afraid, no matter how much you resist, if you want to be self-employed, in order to get business you HAVE to be a salesperson!

Successful marketing and successful business growth consists of moving out of your comfort zone occasionally and trying new things. If you rely on only one particular way to generate your business then what happens when this stops working? And believe me it COULD happen! Years ago a car rental company I know got 80% of their business from their Yellow Pages ad, one year the ad was printed with the wrong phone number! Overnight their sales literally dried up and there was nothing they could do about it for another year and even though their ad money was refunded that was very little help to their business! They sought the help of an expert marketer I know and survived and of course these days the Yellow Pages are pretty much obsolete so it probably did them a favour in the long run but it really illustrates how relying on just one marketing method is so risky to your business. Guess what? Its time to start thinking OUTSIDE the box?!?!!? So come on, what else could you try???


Claire xox


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