Many people like to go away for a time and continue with a little research, to see things from another point of view, another customer’s experience; consider the costs and reliability or productivity. Perhaps their enquiry was for a future purchase and although the sale wasn’t achieved in the first instance , contact at a later date may result in a sale. Don’t be afraid to follow up enquiries, to see if there are any questions that have arisen from their research and see if there are any ways you can help them decide on their purchase. In general, surveys suggest at least five contacts with a prospect can take place before they commit to a purchase.

People buy from people they trust, so nurture and build a relationship with them so you are uppermost in their minds when they make the decision to invest. Show that you are a valuable resource and and expert in your field, remind them of what you do and follow up in different ways. There is no need to bombard with sales pitch but build a relationship that answers all their questions and keeps you uppermost in their minds. Emphasise different aspects of your product or service, supplying other advantages of investing in your product/service.

Let them know of events that may help with issues they may have that are delaying their decision to buy.  If you are speaking at an event, a sponsor or organiser invite them to the occasion.

If you discover articles that have been written about your product or service, email them the item or send a link. Likewise, if you have written an article about it, send this and a link too.

New things happening in your industry? – send them the announcement about the development. If you produce a blog or newsletter, send them copy and ask them to subscribe so they are kept up-to-date.

If you have a video of helpful tips, how to use your product, or client success stories send a link for them to review. If you have a free tele-class or webinar about your product or service invite them along.

Be consistent in your follow up and your marketing activities will produce results. Contact those that have send ‘no’ in the past, you will be surprised at the response.

Again, it’s making sure your name is the one that springs to mind when they next consider buying.

Using a sales matrix with your existing customers buying history may help you identify where you can increase your sales. Don’t forget that the customers you have had in the past, know your products and may not realise all of the products or services that you can supply.  As existing  customers, they know the value of your product or service having bought from you before. Trust has been established by supplying a superlative product or service.

Create your own sales matrix by simply placing you products or services in columns then place your customers in the rows. Tick products sold and to whom, (tick or colour cell) you can then easily see what your customers have bought and which others in the range you can sell to them. The blank cells are your  opportunities to sell more and increase your profits.

For more information, email us, or telephone Tamara on 0203 4688594.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Engaging your audience is a large part of staging a virtual event.

Let your audience determine your content. Make your content interesting and cover popular topics. Find out what your audience likes to do both on and off line. Produce your event so that the content is familiar and comfortable to them.

Promotion

Once everything is in place, event planned, sponsors on board, your twelve week time line gives you plenty of time to publicise your event.

Start your promotion 8 weeks before your event date. The ability to track your promotional activities (campaign tracking) lets you know just how well things are going. You can take immediate action if your promotion is not working.

10 ideas for a Virtual Event

For more information contact us by email or on 0203 468 8594.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Your plan needs to consist of everything you want to happen within your virtual event:

Although they are not so time consuming as their physical counterparts, you will still need time to put together the tools and technology to produce a professional virtual event. Research providers and communicate your requirements, working closely with them to ensure correct amounts of resources are available, so that things run smoothly.

With larger productions, you may need to hire a consultant to examine and advise on the look and feel of your presentation to ensure your information is transmitted effectively.

Check out previous events, ones that have worked and maybe ones that haven’t so you can avoid their shortcomings and modify to your advantage.

The amount of resources that you need to produce your event will depend upon whether you are targetting a few team members or customers or promoting the next revolutionary product within your industry.

If you know your audience and understand the best way to reach them, use the facilities within the virtual event to specifically target individuals and groups, ensuring your message reaches the right people.

Another consideration is to hold a hybrid event, one that has one foot in the physical world and the other in the virtual. Make material available electronically for additional learning and to attract a larger audience of people who were unable to show up on the day.

The needs of your audience should dictate the direction you take and if you take notice of this, it will lead to success.

Timeline

The event

See the next blog for more information about Virtual events and contact us on 0203 468 8594.

Two other webinars we have joint hosted on Eventbrite.

From Zero to Tw-ero – how to start using Twitter for business and get followers, fast! Tamsin Fox-Davies of Enthuse Marketing and Tamara Baranova of TJConsulting Virtual Assistance

Your digital presence: Developing your personal online marketing strategy & using LinkedIn Alexia Leachman of Blossoming Brands and Tamara Baranova TJConsulting Virtual Assistance

Although the events still require time to organise, 12 weeks (as proposed by ON24), it can be far less time consuming than organising a physical event. Removing the need to travel (and accommodation) your audiences expenses will be less. They will be ‘fresh’ for your virtual event and ready to utilise the knowledge acquired the instant the event has finished. Sales staff can immediately implement all the latest information about your products.

If you still have the need for a physical event the ability to integrate some virtual aspects into it can be a benefit, creating a hybrid event. The combination of both types opens the event to a world wide audience, one that is not constrained by distance or time.

Success is dependent on good planning and the following blogs give you some tips on how to plan, ideas for content and which is the right event for you and your audience, whether they are customers, employees or for training programmes. Going virtual provides an easily used medium for all of these needs. The collection of genuine customer/audience data (emails,names and locality)properly managed in a CRM, allows you to continue marketing to them and target future events/product launch.

In the next few blogs, I hope that you find a few items that help you decide about virtual events or offer you a few ideas that you hadn’t realised were possible.

Ideas for a virtual event

Trade Shows
To showcase and promote your product, individual products or services can be photographed or filmed, explaining how it works and comprehensive information added to the product
Sales Meetings and Support
Sales staff, wherever they are, can see your latest offering, learn all about it and be back out selling, armed with all the information they need. Use your virtual event to provide your staff with all relevant information throughout the sales cycle so that they have all the knowledge necessary to close deals.
Virtual Marketplace
Let your virtual event be your marketplace where your products and those of fellow exhibitors can be showcased and sold
Customer training
Provide your customers with virtual event training sessions, so they know how to get the best from your service and to keep them informed about any changes.
Community building
Build a virtual event to connect people in different locations with similar interests and build a community
Annual Conferences
Knowledge of you and your business exchanged and always available to review, this will expand your user base.
Partner Events
Share knowledge and best practices with partners and provide a forum for team communication.
Internal training
Easily accessible knowledge base, used to keep staff up-to-date as regards policies and procedures. To ensure everyone in your company receives clear and consistent messages bring them together with a virtual event and develop a good employee relationship.
Committee Meeting
If the timing of general committee meetings is difficult for some could they attend via a virtual connection? The meeting could be recorded making minute taking easy.

If we can help further, please contact us, we are here to help. Telephone 0203 468 8594 and speak to Tamara.

A business blog is the best tool for increasing your internet visibility and can be used in conjunction with other social media platforms to disseminate your words. Once your content is online you can leverage it in many ways to work for you 24 hours a day and on multiple platforms.

Create a calendar:

List the categories that are of interest to your target audience. From that make 5 – 10 sub-topics that relate to the categories, that should make 50 blog posts (10 categories x 5 sub-topics).

Add a style of post:

Mark your calendar with each subtopic and that’s a third of a year mapped out with ideas.

Don’t get laden down with the formality, if something happens, either current event or hot topic which you need to write about, be spontaneous and blog about it.

The more you blog the more you will discover things to write about. Everything that happens day to day becomes a source of inspiration. Keep a note of the different things, some you may never use but if you ever need inspiration your list is there.

Write several blogs at one time – if you really do have limited time to work on your blog, write several posts at the same time and schedule them to go live when you want. Schedule them according to your calendar that you have previously organised.

A helping hand is to occasionally invite others to guest blog for you. It’s a good idea to introduce other voices within your industry.

If you are a solo blogger, Blogger Linkup could be another avenue. You submit a request and people who write on your topic can contact and provide content for you. It’s your choice whether you want an original post or previously published copy.

Interviews:

Don’t forget to advertise the interviews in advance

Post often through the week will keep your blog fresh and up-to-date, creating content that will help increase traffic, resulting in more leads and opportunities.

Just a few ideas but you need to put together a schedule that works for you and your business, which helps you write an active and impressive blog that people want to follow and refer to.

You are not the only one using this form of communication and people’s Inboxes are full of emails all trying to do the same thing, gain your attention,make you open it, read it and take action. (Surveys show low open rates with a general decrease in the market but B2B rates being 10-20% higher)

To start a conversation,create brand awareness, educate or sell your business via your emails they first have to be opened. If your open rate is nil, your emails are not read then you are never going to be able to inform customers of how good your product/service is. Monitoring your email campaigns can give you useful feedback on open rates, so if there are problems they are highlighted and you can take action to rectify them. The various email / newsletter programs use differing ways to obtain these percentages, so it’s maybe a good idea to stay with one to get a clear picture.

Some things that may affect your open rate:

The ‘from’ field is very important as people are more inclined to open email from a sender they recognise.

Some things to change to increase ‘open’ rates:

When you are trying to decide how much your product is worth, how your client/customer perceives your product goes a long way towards whether they make the decision to invest.

Under price and your prospective clients/ customers may think that your product is inferior in some way to it’s competitors. Overprice and you could appear to be too expensive with no extras to warrant the cost.

Many may equate low prices with a poor and inferior item or service. A little research into your market may gain you insight into what your clients/customers are willing to pay or expect to pay for a similar product.

Your customers will regard your product as valuable if it solves a problem for them. Rarity and scarcity of a product and 100% no quibble guarantee can improve your sales and let you price your product at a higher level.

If your pricing is too low you will find yourself working for very little revenue with no time or money to use to improve and develop your business. Get your pricing too high and you could lose out to your competitors when your prospective customers/clients deem that your product does not contain enough value for them to invest in.

Consider the value to your customers/clients and what impact the cost will have on their business.

Check out what your competition is providing in their package and what the market expects to gain from the product. Is there a way that you can fill a gap in the market and supply a product that no one else is providing?

Your pricing structure should be consistent with your position in the market. If supplying to the budget end of the market then low pricing will be essential where as if you customer is ‘high end’ then a low price will send out the wrong message with customers/clients perceptions tainted, thinking your product/service is inferior.

Research your market to determine the impact of your pricing and ascertain what percentage of customers will buy your product at a varying range of prices. Your costings should include a profitability factor so take account of fixed costs such as rent and salaries,the cost of your product to manufacture, making sure that these costs are well covered so you are not working for very little recompense.

What do you hope to achieve from your pricing structure, it’s impact on the market and your position within it?

When you have decided on your objectives the following may help with your pricing.

However you choose to price your product or service, take time to always measure the impact on your consumers of all of your marketing, using analytics to check what’s working best. With analytics installed on your website you are able to find out what your customers want and how you need to change to fulfill that need.

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Why? Because it’s a title (like an accountant or a coach) and doesn’treally tell them anything about what I do and how I add value to my clients’ businesses.

So what would I tell them instead?

My answer is that I’m a business problem solver (or a productivity expert specialising in online marketing depending on who I’m talking to). Because that’s exactly what I do. Let’s look at a few examples of problems that you could have and how we here at TJConsulting can provide you with a solution.

Your Problem:You wish you had time to create an e-book from your blog content, articles or other original content, but you don’t even know where to start.
Our Solution: Send us your material and we can create that e-book for you,complete with images, links, exquisite formatting and proofreading. We will then set it up a product in your shopping cart along with a 3D product image to promote the ebook on your site.

Your Problem: You wish you didn’t have to run to your web developer every time you needed a special event or announcement added to your website. Or maybe you wish you could just give the entire site a facelift: for example, you’d love your WordPress site to have a more customised look, or at least a customised header and colours.
Our Solution: Let us help you move your website to WordPress, and make it super easy to add those special announcements and little tweaks. We can give it a fresh new look, with all the benefits of great SEO and social media integration.

Your Problem: You have a blog that’s been doing nothing since after the first 2 posts you managed to publish. You feel that you just don’t have time to blog!
Our Solution: You would be pleasantly surprised how much easier it will become when you send your draft content and let us complete it with links, keywords, images and proofread.

Your Problem: You are aware that using email marketing helps keep your business visible to clients, but you are not sure how to actually get started.
Our Solution: We can help you choose the perfect service for your email marketing campaigns, design a user friendly template, set up integration with your website and social media, create and implement an email marketing strategy to get your offers out to your clients on a regular basis.

Your Problem:You need to create a presentation for a conference you are speaking at but slideshows take forever to create.
Our Solution: Send us the material (Word document, hand-written or drawn slides, notes, links to online resources etc.) to be included along with your desired branding and we can create a PowerPoint template and slides for you. You will save time, stop feeling all frustrated with new technology and will get a fabulous looking, all singing and dancing, PowerPoint presentation.

Your Problem: You’ve managed to get a big report completed but don’t have time to format it.
Our Solution: We can help with formatting, styles, layouts, proofreading and creating a table of contents. You will get a consistency formatted and professionally looking document back saving you time and effort.

Your problem’s not listed? We are confident we’ve got the solution though.

Send us your problems by commenting on this blog, e-mailing directly or tweeting to find out how we can solve them (or enhance your personal productivity and business revenues by strategically implementing relevant online tools and an effective online marketing strategy – depending on how many clever long words I’m using when talking to someone!).

“People make a subconscious judgement about a person, environment or product within 90 seconds of viewing it.  Between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on colour alone” – The CCICOLOR-Institute

Beyond the Words, why colour is important for business branding

We are constantly processing information, looking for meaning to what we see.   Before we had the spoken language, our primary signaling system, our language was colour. In nature, red, black and yellow signal danger, warning to stay away and not safe to eat.  For example: red back spider and wasps.

When it comes to marketing, it’s not just the words and logo that convey your brand message.  Did you know the language of colour is communicated quicker to the brain than words or shapes as they work directly on our feelings and emotions?  That’s the power of colour psychology.

You will feel peace and calm when you look at the black and yellow example?  More likely it has the effect of making you feel ‘on alert’, perhaps tightening of breathe.  Now look at the blue example.  Notice how you instantly feel more relaxed and breathing easier.  That’s because light blue is the colour of calm and green represents peace.

Thinking about your own business branding colours, do you know the reasons you chose them? Perhaps you’ve even let someone else choose them for you arbitrarily?  What subconscious messages is your business communicating through the colours you use in your branding?

Instead of using colour in your branding as decoration or as an afterthought, think of colour as a language, another way to communicate.  To not use this to its full affect, you’ll be missing out on an important element of your brand.

In order to do this, you must first understand your Brand Personality.

Brand Personality

Every business brand has a personality, qualities that define who they are.  When these are translated into colour, your branding message is strengthened.  You are effectively communicating your Brand not only in words and images, but also through colour.  Using the right harmonious colours for your brand’s personality, your brand message will be supported on an emotional, mental and physical level.

Applying it consistently to all your branding literature and products will further increase brand recognition and trust with your customers.  Consumers buy trust.

Who do you think this company is aimed at?  If your company was selling power tools for men, would you use pink in your branding?  I’m going to guess you said ‘no’.  That’s because on a conscious or sub conscious level you know that pink is about nurturing, femininity.

Do you know what your Brand colour personality is?

The next step is ensuring that your Brand Colours will be perceived by your customers in the way that you intend them to be.

Targeting your market

Think about your target market, especially if you are targeting a particular culture.  Even though the psychological affects of colour is the same, we also need to be aware of colour symbolism, which is our conditioned conscious associations to colour.  You may, without realising it, be sending a completely different message.  The last thing you want to do is alienate your target market.  For example purple symbolizes royalty and luxury in western cultures, however in Thailand it is the colour for widows in mourning.

By using applied colour psychology with the cultural awareness of colour symbolism, ensures your company’s values are conveyed not only through words, but through the colours used. You are effectively doubling your branding message, instantly differentiating your brand from your competitors.

Karen Haller specialises in Applied Colour Psychology.  She helps business owners to communicate their brand’s authentic business personality in colour.    If you want to know more about bringing colour psychology into your business or home, visit her blog at: http://karenhaller.co.uk/blog/

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1. Increase the number of clients
2. Increase the average purchase value
3. Increase the frequency of the purchase

Many business owners focus their time and energy on the first strategy – attracting more leads and converting them into sales. They embark on costly PPC campaigns, network like mad at all possible events, send 1000s of leaflets or direct mail letters.

But the easy money in your business rests in the other 2 strategies. You are simply asking people who have previously bought from you to buy more or to buy again.

Getting that elusive first purchase is the hardest deal to close for any business, whether you are B2B or B2C.  Your prospects are terrified of making a mistake, of picking the wrong product and wasting money. Fear of getting it wrong is the main reason that stops them trying something new – you.

So why would you then put all your sales and marketing energy into developing new clients? Of course every business needs a stream of new clients but you will see stronger, more predictable revenues by encouraging existing and past clients to buy more from you more often.

How to achieve this? You will need to put in place a process to encourage customers to come back to you, and this process needs to be as formal as any processes in your business. Here are the key steps we use in TJConsulting:

1. Make regular clients feel part of something special. Set something up to reward them for their business and make them feel special. For example, you might give extra products or services to your best clients. If they believe they are getting something free that other people have to pay for, that gives your business an enormous psychological advantage. And that’s very good for retention. Our VIP clients receive a wide of range of discounts and freebies as a thank you for staying with us.
2. Set realistic expectations and plan to beat them. If you know you can deliver within 24 hours, then say it will be delivered within 48 hours. Not only can you delight your clients by appearing to deliver early, but also when things go wrong (as they do sometimes), you have an extra 24 hours in which to fix the problem. And if that fails – apologise and explain what happened. Most people will understand as long as you are honest and upfront.
3. Remember the little things. Do you know when you clients’ birthdays are? Where they are going on holiday this year? It’s easy to send a Christmas card – we all know it’s Christmas time well in advance! But it’s the little things that will make you truly stand out. You can get an automated marketing system or CRM (client relationship management) to do the remembering and reminding for you. If many of your customers use social media then services like FlowTown or MailChimp Faces can pull a lot of their personal details from the public information displayed on social networks.
4. Give things away! Clients already trust your expertise – that’s why they use your business – so when you give them valuable information for free it will be highly appreciated. Don’t be scared: clients are not going to steal your ideas or set up in competition with you but they will feel as though you are adding immense value to their business. That’s why in TJConsulting we run monthly free webinars covering various subjects related to online marketing and offer regular Business Healthchecks to all current customers.
5. Make your business memorable. If you took two businesses selling the same things at the same prices, something fun and memorable, that’s unique to your business, can seriously affect the buying decision.

And if that fails – remember at least to get a full testimonial from each past customer to help you attract new leads. High quantity of quality testimonials will significantly improve your conversion rates.

What’s your way of getting your clients to come back and buy more and often? Please share here with us and other readers.