Photo: Thinkstock.
One of the smartest marketing experts I know is my good friend Bob Serling.
Bob recently created an excellent resource called 'How to make your marketing twice as effective at half the cost by marketing less'.
This resource is very good and I highly recommend you check it out.
I've received a lot of helpful marketing ideas from Bob over the years.
And the idea I want to talk about today is a little used (yet highly valuable) marketing asset that many of us have in business.
Yet we often forget to use this asset.
This valuable marketing asset is sales and marketing activities that have already worked well for your business over the past 1-3 years.
Now here's the good news:
If they worked well in the past 1-3 years, there is an excellent chance that these same sales or marketing activities will work very well again today.
Here's how Bob suggests you utilise these successful sales and marketing activities.
Step One:
Take some time and carefully review all the sales and marketing activities you have used in your business over the last 1-3 years.
There is a good chance you have done a lot of different things in this time frame.
Now what you are looking for are the sales and marketing activities that have worked exceptionally well in the past.
What was the single best sales or marketing promotion you tried in your business? What was the second best, what was the third best and so on?
Step Two:
You then ask yourself the question
'How can I take these successful sales or marketing promotions and either reuse them exactly as they are or make minor updates or tweaks and use them again?'
(In other words you take past sales or marketing successes and reuse them again today.)
One of the big mistakes all businesses make is that we always want to invent something new.
But when you have marketing promotions that have proven to be successful in the past they will often work again and again in the future.
Bob shared some great examples on how this works.
One of them was a business in the beauty industry.
They discovered that the offer of a particular beauty treatment was very popular with their lady clients at Christmas as a lot of ladies wanted to look their best at this time of the year.
Bob encouraged the business to make a tiny change to this marketing campaign and use it on Valentine's Day because women want to look really good then too.
The Valentines Day campaign was a huge success.
Here's another way to use this same idea:
Find a business like yours who is not a direct competitor but has enjoyed great success with a particular marketing campaign or strategy.
A good clue that they have a successful marketing campaign is that you see them using it over and over again.
Ask this business if you can use this same marketing strategy or campaign in exchange for paying them some sort of fee.
Now if the business is located in a different city (or even a different country) they will often be very receptive to having you pay them a fee to use something that is working well for them.
A good example is an acupuncture client in Canada I wrote about a few weeks ago.
This client has three simple strategies that worked to build his acupuncture practice from a standing start of no clients to over $10,000 of regular business every month.
And he did this in just over 12 months.
He has now shared these strategies (for a fee) with a number of other businesses around the world in similar or related natural health fields.
These businesses are happy to use his marketing strategies because they have already proved to work.
And he is happy to receive money to share these strategies with businesses who are not direct competitors.
So why go and create an entirely new marketing offer or new campaign (that may or may not work) when you already know what worked well in the past?
Just take some of these past successful sales or marketing campaigns and try using them again.
You could be pleasantly surprised at how well some of these might work again for you.
The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
Action Exercise:
Review your sales and marketing activities over the last 1-3 years.
Which of these activities worked really well and could be used again? Either as they are or with some very minor changes to them?
Jobs for Mums' game of chance; big prize money, long odds and a little social enterprise.