How to Slash Your Marketing Cost and Increase Your Conversion Rate

Marketing efficiently is becoming increasingly difficult as prospects are overwhelmed with more and more marketing messages daily. In fact, we have a client that needs to spend $45 a click on Google in order to secure the top paid listing spot!

In the past I have talked about the need to clearly understand what your marketing acquisition costs are for each medium/channel you generate leads from. Today I want to discuss the importance of using a Laser Marketing approach to not just cut cost, but also to dramatically increase your marketing effectiveness.

The key today is to Laser Market. What does that mean? It means zooming in on your best target prospects and devoting all of your resources into converting them into clients, customers or patients.

The full Laser Marketing System(tm) consists of 6 Processes for Obtaining New, Lifetime Customers Efficiently:

1. Invest your marketing efforts and capital on exclusively marketing to your targeted, qualified prospect.

And then...

2. Powerfully compelling these targeted prospects to purchase or at least try the product or service you provide.

And then...

3. Use The Powers of Persistence and Education to get them to appreciate the benefits you provide (deploying the marketing tools we discussed above).

And then...

4. Employ our Customer Commitment Mindset skills to convert these hot prospects into Lifetime Customers.

And then...

5. Leverage off these "new customers" to generate other new customers through a referral program.

And then...

6. Expand these new customer's buying patterns through up-selling and cross selling, conditioning them to purchase more often, and introducing them to your strategic endorsement partner's products and services.

For today's Tip I am going to focus on Process 1
Marketing to Your "PinPoint" Targeted Prospects Exclusively

The foundation of Laser Marketing is the realization that you can be far more effective reaching your targeted prospects with multiple repetitions than you can on looking for the diamonds in the rough.

If you allocate $20,000 per year as a marketing budget, and spread this among the 20,000 households or businesses in your service area, then you have only $1.00 per year to spend per household. But if you can identify the 10% of the households or businesses that use your product or service, then you increase your budget per household by 900%. And if you knew the 1% who were in the market to switch providers, you could increase your per prospect investment by 9,000%.

Pinpointing your target prospects goes beyond just the simple question of your marketing investment. If you can pinpoint the prospects that use your products or service, then you can produce far more focused advertising and promotional programs and offer far more compelling inducements to motivate these potential lifetime customers to take the first step.

For example, if a dentist knew which families were new to the area, and therefore needed to find a dentist, she could easily justify providing a "Free first dental visit" - since the likelihood that they will remain a customer are very high. In contrast, she would get overwhelmed with families that would take advantage of her offer, with no intent of coming back, if she made such an offer to the general public (mass marketing).

ACTION YOU CAN TAKE NOW

So how do you find your Pinpoint Target Prospects?

Well, before you can answer this question, you need to get clear on who your targeted prospects are.

1. What crucial factors do you know about the buying habits and personal interest of your prospects?
2. What do they purchase prior to purchasing your product or service?
3. What related products and services do they purchase?
4. What are their key demographics? High or low income, teenagers or elderly, blue collar or white collar workers, health oriented or sedentary?
5. What are their interests or hobbies?
6. What publication do they read?

One technique for determining your target prospects is to take a look at your existing clients. If you know what the profile of your best clients are, then you can use this to go after similar prospects.

Typically this involves analyzing your top 5-10% of your customers to see what the common links might be. As an example, if you sell to doctor's offices, your evaluation might reveal that ones with 3-5 doctors are the best customers. And further that ENT doctors order 50% more than family practice doctors, and further that high income area ENT's order both alternative care products as well as traditional products.

So, this example would suggest focusing on ENT doctors where family incomes exceed $75,000.

Other elements to profile might include the industry, business types, size of business, geography, niche served, etc.

Midwest Design is a premier landscape design firm that was marketing to higher-end homeowners and all businesses that might do landscaping. Upon evaluating their database, they found that 80% of their revenue came from commercial developers. Further analysis revealed that these developers fell into 8-10 groups and that two of these groups represented clients that had generated significant repeat business as opposed to one-time jobs. In fact, the lifetime value of the repeat client was 709% higher than the one time purchaser, and they represent 78% of his revenue.

I will be sharing each of the 6 Processes of the Laser Marketing System(tm) in the near future. But for now, let's get you to identify your Pinpoint Target Prospects so you can redeploy your marketing efforts to win them as customers and stop wasting money reaching unprofitable "poor" prospects.

Small Business Growth Club Member Access

Members: If you are a member, then you can immediately access the 4 Part Compelling Competitive Advantage Execution Series by going to

http://www.smallbusinessgrowthclub.com/members/135.cfm

This includes the detailed, step by step process to creating all 6 processes of the Laser Marketing System".

Non-Members

Visit us at www.SmallBusinessGrowthClub.com and take the tour.