Do You Inspire Action?

How to get Great Response to Your Marketing Efforts?
Have a Great Call-to-Action!

The current election race in the USA has given rise to a lot of comparisons between the public-speaking styles of the various candidates in either party – not that deep analysis of potential presidential candidates is anything new! Perhaps one of the most powerful sound bites of any election race was a self-effacing comparison made by Adlai Stevenson between himself and John F Kennedy during the election campaign in 1960. Stevenson invoked the memories of two great orators of the Greek and Roman eras when he said: “When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke’, but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, ‘Let us march’.”

Of course, JFK was an outstanding orator, but then so was Stevenson (by reputation, at least – I have never heard a recording of him). So what made the difference between the two in terms of their ability to inspire action? One commentator, in discussing Stevenson, put it this way: “His speeches were isolated works of art rather than stations on a line along which he wished to travel.” So, in my own words I’d say that when Stevenson spoke he enjoyed the moment, but when JFK spoke he never forgot that he was trying to get people to vote for him!

What on earth does all of this have to do with marketing? It’s quite simple really: We must never forget while marketing that we are trying to get people to do business with us! If we do, we might leave a room full of people thinking: ‘How well he spoke’ and then turning to other things. Has that ever happened to you? It certainly has to me! I’m going to take this opportunity to share a story with you that was related by a friend and colleague, and I choose his experience rather than my own for two reasons: Firstly, he is a consummate professional whom I would never have imagined capable of such a blunder (where my own are depressingly regular) and secondly, because the circumstances make it all the more painful and therefore memorable. So, to the story!

My colleague is a Life-Coach who specialises in working with actors and the like, and is good enough to have been invited to address a group of three hundred recent and past graduates at Giulliard (the premier school of acting in the world, in case you haven’t heard of it). By his own accounting, my colleague gave a ‘kick-ass’ presentation extolling the virtues of working with a coach and the resultant benefits for the career and life of the coachee. When he had finished, he wrapped up by saying something like: ‘There are a pile of my business cards on the table by the door. If you’re interested, take one and call me.’ Guess how many calls he got? Yup – zero! Now I’ve seen this person speak – and he has a rare gift – so it wasn’t because he didn’t speak well. It was because for a crucial moment he lost sight of the fact that he was trying to get people to do business with him.

So what should he have done? What should you and I be doing each and every time we talk to a prospect, either one-on-one or as a group? Simply this: Take them by the hand and lead them to the next station on the line which leads to a sale.

Let’s illustrate: You’ve met a potential client at a networking event and in a few minutes of conversation you’ve determined that there is a potential fit for your services. You may try giving the prospect your card and suggesting they call you, but what is your likelihood of receiving that call? As an alternative, why not ask for their card and call them? That’s better because you’re in control of the next action, but there is still room for improvement.

Why not try this next time you’re in that situation? ‘Sally, I sense that there is some opportunity for synergy in what we’ve discussed, don’t you agree?’ If they do, then you say: ‘May I have your business card? I’m going to send you an article that I wrote on that very subject. It will be in your Inbox by midday tomorrow.’ You now have a clear path for this prospect to the next step in your marketing process. (You DO have a marketing process, Right?!)

Of course, if this is a prospect you’re already familiar with and who you believe already has a level of trust in your credibility, you may feel that sending an article is insufficient progress. So you could carry on with: ‘Do you have your diary handy? I’d like to buy you a coffee and explore this area of opportunity further. How does 10 o’clock Thursday work for you?’ Wow! An appointment for a sales call! That was too easy!

You may be saying: ‘I couldn’t do that! It would be an imposition!’ Would it really? Why do you think that prospect came to that event? Why did they share their situation with you and then give you their card, if it wasn’t because they were looking for help addressing their issue? Another colleague put it this way (he’s Australian and doesn’t mince words!): ‘Most people are walking around with their umbilical cord in their hand, looking for a place to plug it in.’ A graphic image – but ultimately an accurate one. So you would be doing both yourself and your prospect a disservice if you didn’t make sure they got plugged-in to your value-adding services as soon as possible!

But it won’t happen unless you take them by the hand and say: ‘Let us march!‘

©David Deakin and Zee2A Limited 2008.

This article was first published in The Marketing Edge on 1 December 2007

 

Would you like to reprint this article? You may do so as long as you include the copyright notice and the following paragraph: David Deakin, CEO of Zee2A, is a marketing mentor who works with Professional services Executives yearning to take their business to the next level. Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes he helps them to create sustainable marketing strategies that attract more clients at profitable rates. To learn more, sign up for his e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit www.zee2a.com.

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Do You Inspire Action?

If you regularly give talks, presentations, or speaking engagements in the course of your work, do you inspire action in your listeners? If you apply the principles in our article: How To Get Great Response to Your Marketing Efforts: Have a Great Call-to-Action! you will know how to lead your listeners, by the hand, to the next step in their relationship with you.

Please feel free to leave your thoughts here after reading it.

Don’t Place Another Ad Before You Read This!

These days there seems to be a bewildering profusion of magazines, newspapers, blogs, networking sites, television stations and the like all of whom want us to pay handsomely to advertise our services via their medium. Plainly we can’t do so on all of them – our advertising budgets restrict us to only a very few. So how do we get the most out of our advertising budget?

Let’s look at four areas we must give careful attention to before we sign on the dotted line or hand over the cheque. Making sure that we get these four components in place will have a massive positive impact on the return we get from our advertising budget!

Are You Talking to the Right Audience?

It may be hard to believe, but time and again I see this basic mistake being repeated. The question is simple: If you run an advertisement through this medium, what is the likelihood that a large number of the kind of people you want to do business with will see it? Don’t take this for granted, nor should you believe everything the salesperson tells you! I’m not suggesting that they are (all) dishonest, but do remember that they want your money – and they don’t guarantee results!

So how might you determine the answer to this question? Realise that every advertising medium has an editorial focus, and it uses this focus to attract readers/viewers. Broadly speaking, you need to understand the editorial focus of your chosen medium on three dimensions: geography, demography, and interest. Sometimes it’s obvious: A monthly magazine called Scottish Field & Stream, for instance, is likely to count lots of relatively well-heeled (so probably older), outdoor-focused male residents of that area north of Hadrian’s Wall among it’s readership. It’s not always that clear, though; so take your time and ask specific questions.

Is Your Message Clear and Attention-Getting?

If I had sixpence for every time I’ve seen an advertisement and wondered what it was trying to say … well, you know! There seems to be a school of thought that your ads don’t actually have to say anything, they can just make the audience feel something.

Understand this: you and I do not have the budget to do that, so we cannot afford to waste our money on ads without a message! How would you feel if you went to a fancy restaurant, ordered a fillet steak, and got a plate full of parsley? Would you go back – or even pay the bill that night? Similarly, your target audience needs something to sink their teeth into or your ad will not move them to take the next step.

One final thought on key messages: Your audience is far more likely to pay attention if you engage them with something of interest to them than if you bore them with lots of information about your business. (If you are a subscriber to The Marketing Edge and have not yet downloaded and worked through our free Verbal Signature^(TM) workshop, I cannot urge you strongly enough to do so now! It will really help you to develop key messages that catch the attention of your ideal clients.)

Is There a Clear, Appropriate Call-to-Action?

How would you feel if your favourite sporting hero did all of the hard work to completely dominate their opponent and then – just as they were about to finish things – they went and sat down on the sidelines leaving the opponent to come back and win the game? Pretty stupid, huh? So why run an ad that catches the attention of your desired prospect, then not tell them what to do next?

‘Oh,’ I hear you say, ‘they can see our telephone number – they’ll call if they want to.’ Why should they? What reason have you given them to do so? A piece of ancient wisdom tells us: ‘If the trumpet sounds an indistinct call, who will get ready for battle?’ Similarly, without a clear powerful call-to-action your ad is useless.

So should you ask the prospect to call you for a quote? Offer money off if they place an order? Really, your prospect (assuming that the ad is the first they’ve seen of your organisation) doesn’t know or trust you enough to do business yet, and will probably not respond to such a call. Rather focus on getting them to ‘learn more …’ perhaps by giving away some free information.

Are You Ready to Measure the Advertisement’s Effectiveness?

Once you’ve placed the ad the hard work is done, right? Er, no. Marketing is not a precise science at the best of times, so the hard work is actually in figuring out what worked and what didn’t. Yes, we might as well acknowledge right now that not all ads will pay for themselves. If we know which ones didn’t, we can be sure not to place them again. You might think that’s simple logic, but I know of many organisations that renew ads month after month, year after year without any idea whether they are working!

How could you measure the effectiveness of an ad? First, you need to know exactly what the cost of the ad was (including graphic design/copywriting costs etc), then you need to find out how much signed new business it generated. That means you have to find out which ad brought you each new lead your business gets. To do so, you might offer a slightly different free gift in each ad – then when the prospect calls to collect you’ll know which ad they are responding to. Or you might try something a little sly, like saying ‘Ask for Jim’ when there is no Jim! Prospects who call asking for Jim must be responding to that ad. (Make sure everyone who answers the phone is ‘in’ on this one, please!)

Follow the four guidelines above whenever you place an advertisement for your business and you can be sure that you are getting maximum bang for your advertising buck.

©David Deakin and Zee2A Limited 2008. Would you like to reprint this article? You may do so as long as you include the copyright notice and the following paragraph: David Deakin, CEO of Zee2A, is a marketing mentor who works with Professional services Executives yearning to take their business to the next level. Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes he helps them to create sustainable marketing strategies that attract more clients at profitable rates. To learn more, sign up for his e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit www.zee2a.com.

How To Get Great Response To Your Marketing Efforts

The current election race in the USA has given rise to a lot of comparisons between the public-speaking styles of the various candidates in either party – not that deep analysis of potential presidential candidates is anything new! Perhaps one of the most powerful sound bites of any election race was a self-effacing comparison made by Adlai Stevenson between himself and John F Kennedy during the election campaign in 1960. Stevenson invoked the memories of two great orators of the Greek and Roman eras when he said: “When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke‘, but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, ‘Let us march‘.”

Of course, JFK was an outstanding orator, but then so was Stevenson (by reputation, at least – I have never heard a recording of him). So what made the difference between the two in terms of their ability to inspire action? One commentator, in discussing Stevenson, put it this way: “His speeches were isolated works of art rather than stations on a line along which he wished to travel.” So, in my own words I’d say that when Stevenson spoke he enjoyed the moment, but when JFK spoke he never forgot that he was trying to get people to vote for him!

What on earth does all of this have to do with marketing? It’s quite simple really: We must never forget while marketing that we are trying to get people to do business with us! If we do, we might leave a room full of people thinking: ‘How well he spoke’ and then turning to other things. Has that ever happened to you? It certainly has to me! I’m going to take this opportunity to share a story with you that was related by a friend and colleague, and I choose his experience rather than my own for two reasons: Firstly, he is a consummate professional whom I would never have imagined capable of such a blunder (where my own are depressingly regular) and secondly, because the circumstances make it all the more painful and therefore memorable. So, to the story!

My colleague is a Life-Coach who specialises in working with actors and the like, and is good enough to have been invited to address a group of three hundred recent and past graduates at Giulliard (the premier school of acting in the world, in case you haven’t heard of it). By his own accounting, my colleague gave a ‘kick-ass’ presentation extolling the virtues of working with a coach and the resultant benefits for the career and life of the coachee. When he had finished, he wrapped up by saying something like: ‘There are a pile of my business cards on the table by the door. If you’re interested, take one and call me.’ Guess how many calls he got? Yup – zero ! Now I’ve seen this person speak – and he has a rare gift – so it wasn’t because he didn’t speak well. It was because for a crucial moment he lost sight of the fact that he was trying to get people to do business with him.

So what should he have done? What should you and I be doing each and every time we talk to a prospect, either one-on-one or as a group? Simply this: Take them by the hand and lead them to the next station on the line which leads to a sale.

Let’s illustrate: You’ve met a potential client at a networking event and in a few minutes of conversation you’ve determined that there is a potential fit for your services. You may try giving the prospect your card and suggesting they call you, but what is your likelihood of receiving that call? As an alternative, why not ask for their card and call them? That’s better because you’re in control of the next action, but there is still room for improvement.

Why not try this next time you’re in that situation? ‘Sally, I sense that there is some opportunity for synergy in what we’ve discussed, don’t you agree?’ If they do, then you say: ‘May I have your business card? I’m going to send you an article that I wrote on that very subject. It will be in your Inbox by midday tomorrow.’ You now have a clear path for this prospect to the next step in your marketing process. (You DO have a marketing process, Right?!)

Of course, if this is a prospect you’re already familiar with and who you believe already has a level of trust in your credibility, you may feel that sending an article is insufficient progress. So you could carry on with: ‘Do you have your diary handy? I’d like to buy you a coffee and explore this area of opportunity further. How does 10 o’clock Thursday work for you?’ Wow! An appointment for a sales call! That was too easy!

You may be saying: ‘I couldn’t do that! It would be an imposition!’ Would it really? Why do you think that prospect came to that event? Why did they share their situation with you and then give you their card, if it wasn’t because they were looking for help addressing their issue? Another colleague put it this way (he’s Australian and doesn’t mince words!): ‘Most people are walking around with their umbilical cord in their hand, looking for a place to plug it in.’ A graphic image – but ultimately an accurate one. So you would be doing both yourself and your prospect a disservice if you didn’t make sure they got plugged-in to your value-adding services as soon as possible!

But it won’t happen unless you take them by the hand and say: ‘Let us march!‘

Are you a Professional Services Executive yearning to grow your business without sacrificing your quality of life, but not sure how to take the next step? You may be ready for The Marketing Edge programme. Contact us now at info@zee2a.com to discuss how the programme can help you to fill up your fee-book with profitable clients.

©David Deakin and Zee2A Limited

Would you like to reprint this article? You may do so as long as you include the copyright notice and the following paragraph:  David Deakin, CEO of Zee2A, is a marketing guru who works with Professional services Executives yearning to take their business to the next level of profitability and success.  Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes he helps them to create sustainable marketing strategies that attract more clients at profitable rates. To learn more, sign up for his e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit http://www.zee2a.com