Market Dominating Position – Part 1
Do you know what is a Market Dominating Position?
Does your business have a Market Dominating Position?
The majority of small businesses are established in response to market demand for a product or service. Many build their businesses by serving that demand and enjoy growing profits without putting much effort into long-term planning or marketing.
However, what happens when that demand slows or stops?
What happens when the competition sets up shop with a “new and improved” version of your product down the road?
How do you keep your offering fresh while growing and maintaining your client base?
The answer, Innovate your business and offer extraordinary value by creating a “market dominating position.”
Consider this. Every choice you make when buying a product or a service represents a point of differentiation between one company and their competitors. These differences, whether subtle or distinct, determine which customers will buy what they sell.
Consider the well documented case of Domino’s Pizza.
Why did Domino’s become a billion dollar behemoth in an overcrowded market in just a few years?
Did Domino’s make the best pizza? Not even close!
Did they offer comfortable in-house dining? No way!
Did they offer the largest selection on their menu? They offered the exact same pizza as ALL of their competitors!
They dominated by adopting and implementing one major strategy.
They created a market dominating position, which was fast hot pizza, targeted specifically for hungry college kids.
So now ask yourself what, if anything, makes your business different from your competitors as perceived by your targeted prospects and customers?
For the vast majority of businesses that answer is price.
So then consider today’s top selling companies.
Nike offers a wide range of shoes, apparel and equipment products, all of which are currently among the best sellers globally.
As an example, the top selling Air Jordan 3 is currently selling for $150 and up.
And yet, Target sells an excellent imitation for around $40, but Nike outsells them by more than ten to one.
Have you bought a cup of coffee lately at Starbucks?
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According to their latest data, their typical customer spends between $3.50 to $4.00 on every visit.
That’s around four times higher than any of their competition.
Obviously, low price isn’t the driving force here.
So what is?
The answer, these top selling companies have staked out a specific and targeted market dominating position.
For Nike, their position revolves around being the best athlete, being hip and in style along with the perception of quality.
For Starbucks, it’s delicious hand-crafted beverages which they claim is the secret to making life better.
When you create your own market dominating position, you will consistently get businesses and individuals to choose your business over your competitors.
But what exactly is a “market dominating position?”
It’s simply any value-added customer perceived benefit, or a combination of benefits, that differentiates you from your competitors; and does so in a strong enough manner that it makes your business the logical choice in the minds of your prospects and customers.
As an example, a dry cleaner that offers pick-up and delivery would be the only logical choice for any prospect or customer that values convenience.
This simple distinction represents a market dominating position.
The key is to create added value in everything you do.
Prospects and customers DON’T buy based on price.
They buy based on the value they receive for the price they pay.
Creating added value is a marketing or customer relations strategy that can take the form of a product or service that’s added to your original offering for free or as part of a discounted package.
Like all other elements in your marketing toolkit, it’s designed to attract new customers and retain existing ones.
Another simple example of added value would be a gift shop owner that offered complimentary gift wrapping with every purchase.
If you don’t revisit the value you offer, then over time your customers will be drawn to your competitor who consistently innovate their business so they offer exceptional value that you don’t.
Ultimately, your customers will demand additional value to remain loyal – and they’re the keystones for your business growth.
Everyone can add value to their business.
And adding value doesn’t have to blow your marketing budget or take up hours of your time.
There are many ways to enhance your business in the eyes of your clients.
The key to adding value is determining what your customers and target market perceive as valuable.
You must understand their needs, wants, troubles and inconveniences in order to entice them with solutions through added value products or services.
Adding value will also add to your profits, but if you don’t focus on genuinely helping your clients you’ll have a difficult time attracting them.
Added value works for both product and service-based businesses.
If you offer a service like hair styling, try treating your customers by offering them a latte while they wait, or complimentary shampoo samples or a free conditioning treatment with every sixth visit.
If you sell a product, consider offering convenience services like free shipping or delivery to make the customer’s experience a seamless one.
The customer will feel appreciated and their needs will have been taken care of.
I hope this read opened your eyes to opportunities that are missing in your business.
In the next blog I will help you understand how to create your business’ marketing dominating position.
If you need help identifying your market dominating position, try my FREE test drive to gain access to our resources and tools.
Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions
How to Reactivate Past Clients – Part 2 – 8 Steps to Designing a Reactivation Campaign
As promised here are the 8 Steps to Designing a Reactivation Campaign
One of my clients just launched a fairly large reactivation campaign. While there are many ways to run a reactivation campaign, the following steps will set you on a straight path should you decide to launch one.
First, understand that a reactivation campaign is when you create a strategy around those sleepy subscribers. You want them to get back to opening your emails and engaging with them. This can help improve sales, click-throughs, website traffic, and more.
1- Who is your target?
Are these people who stopped buying from you six months ago? Three months? Twelve months? If you run a subscription service, are they people who canceled one month ago? Two weeks ago? Two years ago? Decide first who you want to try and reactivate. If someone bought from you four years ago and you’re just now getting around to sending them an e-mail, it’s probably too late. It’s OK to run a few different variations of the campaign if you want to target several different groups from above.
2- What’s your goal?
I’ll take a wild stab and say your goal is to either have these consumers buy from you again, re-subscribe to your services, or otherwise reengage with your company. But, are there more specific goals than that? Maybe you want to introduce a new product line, introduce a new account manager, or upsell them on something they already own (or a service they already use)?
3- Why did these consumers leave?
Unlike a normal marketing campaign, you need to understand why your consumers left. Did they not like your products? Were you too expensive? Did you not have enough content in their particular field to keep them interested? Knowing the reasons they probably left will enable you to craft a message that addresses those issues specifically.
4- What segmentation or persona data do you have?
If you can segment these consumers either by persona or by purchase habits, you can make your reactivation campaign that much more effective. The rules here are the same as for any direct marketing: don’t just send a mass “We want you back” e-mail. Instead, use whatever knowledge you have of the consumer in order to create a more relevant message.
5- Split test offers.
It’s fine to offer a reactivation discount code to these consumers. They were effectively “dead” anyhow, so you aren’t really losing a full-price purchase by offering them a discount. However, showing consumers that you understand them and have new offerings that meet their needs might just be enough. So, do a split test and create discounts for some percentage of the group, but not all of them. See how they do when compared to the group with no offer.
6- Focus on your content.
Instead of just saying, “We want you back, here’s 15% off,” make a real Show your consumers you understand them. If they used to buy video games, talk about all the new things that have happened in video games since they last checked your site out. If you run a content subscription-based site (like E-Learning), highlight the new content you’ve added to your site since they were last members. Put the relevant content first. Consumers can get a discount anywhere if they try. It’s your content and products (if they’re relevant) that will be more interesting to them.
7- Make it easy for them to come back.
If it has been a while, there’s a good chance your consumers don’t remember their usernames or passwords. Either send them this information (or at least their username) in the e-mail, or make it really easy for them to find it. If their account has “expired,” make it easy for them to renew without reentering all their information again. If you offered a discount code, make it very clear where they enter it.
8- Reach out via different channels.
Are these consumers on Twitter (and do they follow you)? If so, send them a direct message, not an e-mail. E-mail marketing is great, but try other channels if you have access to them.
Finally, realize the difference between a reactivation campaign and a regular campaign. While the above steps could be the recipe for any old marketing campaign, there is one important difference. Reactivation marketing needs to understand how long people have been gone, why they possibly left, what is different in your offerings now that would make them come back, and what (if any) incentive they might need to come back.
If you can’t answer, “What is different in our offerings that would make them come back,” then skip the reactivation campaign and focus on answering that question first!
You are more than welcome to take a FREE tour to see how I can help you grow your business:
Check it out at: www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions
How to Reactivate Past Clients – Part 1
Reactivate stale or past Clients can bring you new customers…. Most businesses ignore them, successful businesses learn new ways to get them to recognize you as a market leader.
Remember that it’s 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one
When trying to re-establish relationships with past customers, some customers will be comfortable and feel as if they just conducted business with you yesterday while others will wonder why you went to the trouble of contacting them.
Who is a reactivation candidate?
To reactivate customers, you need to be attentive to the process. First, to determine which previous customers to reactivate, define what reactivation specifically means for your organization. Most companies define reactivation candidates based on their lack of response to previous marketing efforts. The typical sequential marketing efforts that an organization may follow begin with acquisition, then proceed to resell / upsell / cross-sell / downsell, retention / competitive defense / selective attrition and then reactivation.
How do you differentiate between customers who require selling and retention efforts from those who require reactivation efforts? First, and most obviously, if you know that you’ve lost your customer’s business, then you’ve probably exhausted your sales and retention efforts and can assign the customer to your reactivation group.
If you don’t know whether you have lost your customer’s business, make inquiries. If you find that it’s too expensive to keep in touch with customers, then analyze their buying history (e.g., length of time since last purchase, number of prior purchases, length of time between purchases and average order size) or apply industry averages to determine who might be a reactivation candidate.
Whom do you select for reactivation?
Before designating customers as reactivation candidates, determine whether you have their correct contact information. Exclude past customers who have outdated information that cannot be updated through third-party sources.
Also, review any customer service or third-party data you have on reactivation candidates and categorize the reasons for lost business as “controllable” (e.g., shipped wrong product two weeks after promised delivery date) or “uncontrollable” (e.g., moved from retail area). If you’re to blame for the failed relationship, determine whether there is value in re-establishing it.
Once you select your reactivation candidates, segment this group and test offers before spending money to reach them all at once. If possible, use lifetime value to determine which segments may yield a higher return.
When do you conduct reactivation marketing?
Reactivation is not a one-time event for when times are tough. Reactivation should be an ongoing activity prioritized among other marketing efforts.
Once you have customers who meet your reactivation requirements, execute a reactivation campaign. (See “Reactivation Letters” in the Sales Letter Library). With response history, you can develop a reactivation response model to determine the optimal timing and frequency of your reactivation efforts. For example, a model developed for a health products cataloger might show that the company maximizes its marketing dollars when it tries to reactivate past customers with a buy-one-get-one-free offer after these customers fail to respond to three months of discount offers following their initial purchase.
When you accumulate significant response history from your reactivation marketing efforts, build a model based on RFM analysis (recency, frequency, monetary) or data attributes that predict purchase propensity. A life insurance company might build a model based on age, number of children, marital status, income and interest rates to determine the likelihood of a previous term insurance customer buying a variable life policy.
What do you say to customers you want to reactivate?
People change over time and so does your business, so when you’re thinking about marketing to past customers, consider that your customers’ needs and preferences, as well as your business focus, may have changed.
Profile customer’s to create more personalized communications for each segment. Use past data such as RFM information and, if possible, append reliable third-party information that will enhance your customer understanding. For example, you might use third-party information to determine each customer’s age, family situation and income. Then you could send targeted communications to various segments depending on these data attributes as well as results from an RFM analysis.
In conjunction with customer profiling, make an in-depth determination as to why the relationship ended in the first place. Was it something you did? If so, you might have a manager or high-level executive make a personal call to “high-value” customers.
When communicating with reactivation candidates, use the information you have about them in your marketing communications to show your desire to have them back as a customer. Also, if your communication is asking the reactivation candidate to call a person at your company, create a group of call specialists trained to handle reactivation customers.
Investing in acquisition vs. reactivation.
Acquisition and reactivation are both investments designed to yield profitable customer relationships. When deciding how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to each effort, calculate the ROI on reactivating old customers versus acquiring new customers.
Whether reactivation involves less of an investment than acquisition depends on the extent of your data analysis, data enhancement and list rental costs. It’s generally true that with customer data available for analysis as well as past customers’ familiarity with a company’s name and product or service quality, reactivation efforts yield higher response rates and higher profitability than acquisition efforts do.
Make the first move.
Most organizations focus on acquisition, sales to current customers and retention. They see little opportunity in marketing to people who failed to respond to their offers. These organizations, however, are typically not customer-focused.
Instead of trying to understand why a prior customer is no longer responding, they assume that the customer is the problem in the relationship. The dynamics are similar to that of a person who refuses to talk to another person unless the other person reaches out first. Start looking at your past customers and commit to reaching out and re-establishing a relationship that is valuable to both sides.
In my next blog I will show you the 8 Steps to Designing a Reactivation Campaign, stay tuned.
If you need help reactivating stale clients, try our FREE test drive to gain access to our resources and tools, or you can also contact me directly.
Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions
Tax Benefits for Your Business
Mind Your Own Business!
The concept of minding your own business means that while you are grinding away at your day job you need to be investing in your future and minding your own business. Pretty soon you’ll be able to walk away from that day job and mind your own business full time.
The best way to do this is through the acquisition of real estate.
Let’s take a quick look at where you are losing all your money-taxes. Taxes have been around since 1913 in the U.S. and 1917 in Canada (even earlier in England). While the original intention was to only tax the wealthiest of the population, obviously that’s trickled down to the masses, including those in poverty.
Now, keep in mind the more money you make the more taxes you pay. The wealthy know a way of getting around this-form a corporation. Corporations offer tax benefits and protect you from lawsuits. To learn more about this talk with one of our business coaches or your attorney.
We’ve all heard the golden rule of: Pay Yourself First.
But, many of us don’t do it. Until you learn and put this rule into effect, you won’t have any chance of getting out of the rat race. What this rule does is force you to come up with more income to pay your expenses.
There are some key areas of finance you should learn about, taking classes is one of the best ways to do this. Here are the basics you should learn:
Accounting
It pays to know how to read financial statements. When acquiring businesses or assets you need to quickly see the financial standing of the company you are acquiring.
Many grown adults do not know how to balance a balance sheet. In the long term, this knowledge will pay off for you and your business.
Investment Strategy
This skill will sharpen with experience. Talk to investors and observe how they play the game.
Market Behavior
Know the laws of Supply and Demand. No business owner can do without understanding these basic principles of the market. Bill Gates saw what people needed. Open your eyes to opportunities. Look at what sells and who buys.
Law
Do everything you can to grow your business within legal boundaries. Know your corporate, state, and accounting laws.
Once you know these areas of finances you can make them work for you. The rich practically invent money. You have to know where to find a great deal. Let’s continue with real estate. Look for houses in trouble or find the court in your area that handles foreclosed, police impound or other real estate situations. You can either renovate and sell or rent for residual income.
So, essentially there are two main types of investors:
- Those who buy pre-packaged investments
- Those who create their own investments
You know which are the most successful. In order to be one of those people you need to know what to look for and how to respond.
You must:
- Find a good deal other people have missed.
- Raise the capital needed for the transaction.
- Put together a svelte team to execute the plan.
There is risk involved in every acquisition. The goal is not to avoid the risk, but to respond to the risk with confidence and a steady hand.
If you need help identifying potential money-makers, where to get the capital you need and how to put together a smart team, try our FREE test drive to gain access to our resources and tools.
Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions
Getting Out of the Rat Race and Onto Your Journey of Creating Wealth
Get Out of the Rat Race
We’ve all worked jobs we hated. We were underpaid, underappreciated and bored out of our minds. We either quit these jobs or were fired for poor performance because we just gave up. Instead of taking that approach you need to consider every job an opportunity to learn something new that you can apply down the line to find success.
When you give people the tools they need to come up with unordinary solutions, you are enhancing their lives for the long run. You need to take this approach. What if one of your terrible jobs had been one with no pay at all and you needed to come up with some ingenious ways of making money? I bet you could have found a diamond in that rough. This idea can also be used in your own company.
Now, I don’t recommend going into the next meeting declaring that no one will receive pay anymore, but you can tell them that their potential raises, bonuses and other perks are now dependent on their creativity in ways to enhance business.
Let’s talk about a great concept called financial literacy. This certainly isn’t something they taught you in school, but is still essential to know. So, what is financial literacy?
The old school way teaches people to be good employees and not employers. This mindset will never make you wealthy. You need to focus on becoming a good employer. You also need to learn how to not only attain wealth, but sustain wealth for generations. This is what financial literacy is all about.
So, how do you get out of the rat race and start working toward a wealthier future? You need to understand the difference between an asset and a liability. Take a look at your own life and you’ll probably find the following:
Assets
- Real Estate
- Stocks
- Bonds
- Intellectual Property
Liabilities
- Mortgage
- Consumer Loans
- Credit Cards
You’ve probably been fooled into thinking things like your house, car and entertainment system are assets. They aren’t! Assets should be continuing to MAKE you money. When you continue to struggle, you are not building wealth. If you’re primary income is from wages and each time you make more money, you pay taxes-you’re not really creating wealth either, are you?
So, if buying a house isn’t an asset (and, it’s not because you spend about 30 years of your life paying it off), then what is. Here are some of the best assets to attain and when you can start to actually see wealth being created because of it:
Average time of holding on to an asset before selling it for a higher value:
1 year
- Stocks (Startups and small companies are good investments)
- Bonds
- Mutual funds
7 years
- Real estate
- Notes (IOUs)
- Royalties on intellectual property
- Valuables that produce income or appreciate
So, here are the steps to getting out of the rat race and onto your journey of creating wealth:
- Understand the difference between an asset and a liability.
- Concentrate your efforts on buying income-earning assets.
- Focus on keeping liabilities and expenses at a minimum.
- Mind your own business.
If you need help getting out of the poor mindset and into the wealthy one, try our FREE test drive and let’s look at working together.
Check it out at www.BestEntrepreneurSolutions.com/guidedtour
We went through the first three and next time we’ll talk about how to mind your own business to keep your eye on the prize.
To Your Success,
Nancy Baki at Best Entrepreneur Solutions