Some of the more common challenges come with:

• Not identifying your ideal client demographics well enough.
• Not identifying what your ideal client thinks and their purchase motivation (Psychographics)

Demographics give you their characteristics that identify their abilities, needs and interests of your customers; Psychographics identify their motivation or reason for making the purchase.

Demographics: who is buying your service

Psychographics: why they are buying your service

Where are you missing the mark?

All too often we see people jump straight into the sales process without building a relationship with that potential customer or even communicating with them in a way to suit their pace and relationship style.

If we are to look at this further have you really defined your ideal client Demographics and Psychographics enough?

To define these further we need to also look at when and how they communicate.  The type of language they use, at what speed and format it is delivered in, where they source this information from and how much creditability they place upon it.

By examining it further you may well discover that the information you have for your ideal client is too long and wordy or not even in a language they understand.  Worse yet you may be selling the benefits or features of your product rather than how your product or service actually provides a solution for their unique challenge.

If you convert this to lost leads, this may be the reason your marketing information is not performing as well as you wished.  Is it in the wrong language at the wrong speed for the wrong audience selling features not solving challenges?

Take the time to revisit your ideal client profile.  Once this is streamlined and perfected, you can then duplicate it across to another service or product.  Just like most franchises do, they start with one systemized product and then drop an almost identical product into their client base.   The language they use to capture the young children is much different to the language etc  used to capture the family meal market.

Sit back, Take a moment to reflect and get some outside perspective on your Marketing.

John Burkhardt

Apart from the initial limbic response of their brain to weigh up their environment and consider the immediate response of stay or fight/flight, there is a considerable portion of their communication style which may not connect to the way you are communicating your message or ideas?

I hear you saying, “what are you talking about” – EXACTLY.

As I may waffle on and include the details and facts of this, are you:

Just get on with it… give me the facts and move on OR

Yeah I hear you, but can’t we slow down a bit and get to know each other OR

Yep, Yep; Ok just shorten it and lets go for a drink so I can tell you a bit more about me OR

Yes, I understand that, maybe a question or two on the limbic system………….

Does one of these messages resonate with you?

This is effective communication, all I need to know is how I communicate best and then how you communicate best and adapt my style to match or at least get closer to the way you are communicating.

• Are you missing this with your niche target market and those ideal clients?
• Are you talking to them in your communication style and not theirs?
• Is the language structured to suit them and what they would prefer?

Communication (or lack of it) is the basis of all relationships and happens nearly as quickly as the Trust component.

To learn more about your Communication style, visit FACE-Matrix and do a quick, fun and easy to understand profile.

Have fun with it, share it with your friends and if you want to know more, then the best buy is the FACE, The Global Language e-book

Learn to love it and embrace it.

Let me know your results and what you think.

John Burkhardt - Amplio Business Solutions

I’m utterly amazed at the quantity of potentially effective websites receiving no traffic to them. This is due to lack of education.

Many website developers don’t seem to be educating the website owner on how the site needs to be constructed so that the search engines – i.e. Google can find them.

Some basic hints on checking your website:

Open up your site, right click just off to the side (where there is no text) of the webpage and choose View Source.
This brings up some of the coding behind your website.
Click on the Edit tab (top left hand corner) in the box that drops down click on Find.
This brings up a Find box. Enter in the Find box the word Google.
This will take you to the first Google word in the text – it will be highlighted in green for you.
The purpose of this exercise is to direct you to the Google analytics or tracking information on your site.
If the Find feature cannot find the word Google – you are in need of some basic search engine optimization (SEO).

This process can also be used to search for keywords within your website.
Once again if you don’t find any keywords applicable to your site, you are in need of some basis SEO.

The main purpose of these two functions is:

1. To let Google know you exist and to track your website traffic

2. To let Google know what keywords are relevant to that page for tracking

One of our Amplio Coaching Partner’s does SEO work and if you need some further information
please contact us and we will introduce you.

Lastly, do you have your contact details and a contact form (for email) on every page on your site to make it easier for people to contact you!

I’m sure this will help!

John Burkhardt – Amplio Business Solutions

Think of the colors used in business, been to the bank lately and been hit with power colors such as Red, Bold Blue, Black and Yellow?  This is all part of the branding process.

Colors are chosen to match up with where the business is trying to portray to you its customer how good it is and how you should feel about it.  Would you use a bank with the colors of gray and black? Probably not!

Certain businesses focus on products that already have colors associated with them.  Fruit and Vegetable shops for example usually have a lot of Green, Red and Orange in their color schemes and maximize it because of the product they offer.  These are great to work with because you can top the imagery up with great pictures of fresh, healthy fruit and people to market to your audience.

Motor sport is another great example.  Black and white, red and then other sharp deep colors dominate it.  Why? Because of the checkered flag, black tyres, black racing tracks, red, green, yellow and orange flags, the list goes on.  Try wearing a pink polo shirt to the drag racing if your not a perfect size 12 lady going out.  Somethings just don’t work.

The best news is that the colors usually sort themselves out during the organizational planning and business planning processes.

Don’t fret early on, the process will take care of itself when you keep moving along.

Next blog on using graphic design in your business branding

John Burkhardt – Amplio Business Solutions

It is easy to get lost in the product, position, your USP, demographics and much more!

The short answer is about building mutually beneficial relationships for the long term.  Getting a win/win result for both your and your product and for the people using your service or product.

By using a marketing funnel approach you identify your product, your USP, the benefits to your customer and reduce the amount of wasted marketing and advertising just by ensuring that your product or service is targeted as much as possible to your end user.  However, marketing is a process of building trust with your future customer and once they have used your product to get them to come back for more of your great product (or service) and to refer you to others.  (We all know that referrals are the best way to expand your business, but how often do we ask for them?)

The more experienced the end user, the less time they have for extra graphics, extra text and essentially things that waste their time.  Get back to basics:

Get a headline relevant to the customer and their challenge

Tell them what you have simply and concisely

Explain the benefit to them of using this product or service (to meet their challenge)

Let them know of any time restraint or delay (i.e. price only for x days etc)

Call them to action. Give them the how to contact you.  (By email, phone, calling into the store etc and the link or number to do it on)

Save yourself time and money in being clear and concise.  The aim is to get them to contact you to move to the next step.  Don’t try selling them the product then and there, arrange an appointment and move onto the next step.

Some of my best clients are those that took several steps to secure.  Guess what? They were checking me out, my ethics, integrity and building up their trust level of me until it reached a point where they were able to deal with me.  For some people this takes one interaction, for others it can be quite a few.

Just because you want them all to buy the same product or service, doesn’t mean they will all do it in the same way.

More in later blogs to come!

John Burkhardt – Amplio Business Solutions

I’m partially deaf.  Well sometimes I pretend to be totally deaf!  Last year I was researching and looking at getting new hearing aids and to get information from one website I had to enter my postal address and name etc to receive the information.

Long since forgotten about, which is a bugbear as they could have contacted me earlier; however, in the mail today they have posted me a specific letter addressing a few items:

It was personalized

It was relevant about my hearing and new technology released

Why the new technology would benefit me

It was an obligation free offer (to attend a information session, complimentary consultation)

The offer got better; they are offering a free 14 day no obligation trial of the new technology

It finished with a time window to act and telephone numbers to call.

This was a great example of using the information on your database to tailor offers specifically to a predetermined market with a great product.

This is what marketing principles is all about.  They haven’t wasted their time marketing a great product to someone who doesn’t need it.  They have explained the benefits of it and made an offer even I will take up.

With the cost of printing and postage now you need to be specific in your target market and ensure that your business marketing has the best possible chance to return a high strike rate. (Your ROI)

Other information is available at www.ampliobusinesssolutions.com

John Burkhardt