After you get someones attention, you must keep it.

What is the fastest way to lose attention?

I believe it is this:

1). To be irrelevant.

Even if you get someone’s attention, if the message is not targeted and even if it is still funny, it still doesn’t matter.

Funny is all fine and dandy, but what we are after is results. Leads, sales, and money in the bank.

So, we’ve talked about getting attention or interrupting people, and now we need to engage someone.

How do we do that? We need to find out the hot buttons or pressure points of our target market. And how do we do that?

Research. We need to ask them via surveys, and by using common sense. Find out what they want, what they do not want, what they hate, or what they dislike.

And then you use those in your marketing.

For example, if you are a dentist one example could be that you guarantee there is no wait over 5 minutes. The same can go for a doctor. Is that a pressure point or pain for people?

It is for me. I HATE waiting at those types of place. I HATE it, because even though I always have a book to read, it still bothers me for many reasons.

Does that make sense? You need to ask yourself what are the hot buttons of the people who you are trying to target.

If you say, “the only thing my prospects care about is the cheapest price” then you are either lying to yourself, or targeting the wrong customers.

If that were true, then people would only buy the absolute cheapest food, drive the cheapest cars, and wear the cheapest clothes.

If that is the case, then you are perceived as a commodity. Something you need to remove immediately. The next post will talk about this in more detail.

-Matt

Watch a lot of commercials (specifically beer commercials) and they start with an animal talking (remember the Budweiser Frogs) or something that has S-E-X to grab your attention.

They “successfully” interrupted your brain from doing what it was doing. They got your interest. The problem is, your brain generally goes back to sleep after watching the first part, because the commercial is not relevant.

Well today let’s talk about the interrupting and we can get to the rest later.

You have to get someone’s attention. Until you do that the best commercial, sales letter, blog post, or whatever media you are utilizing is worthless.

The masterpiece you’ve written about for ages does not matter until someone reads it. Does that make sense?

This is a basic copy writing principle that is talked about on a regular basis. Attention.

Now, what are some ways you can get attention. Well, there are the traditional Health, Wealth, Sex. There are also, however, pressure points that you can utilize when you are selling to your market place.

For example, if you do basement water proofing you can use a headline (and this is off the top of my head here, normally you need to write 25-30 headlines to get an awesome one).

Most Basements Leak After Being Waterproofed Within 3 Years (yes, you need to research that stat) Here’s how to avoid this.

So, if you are looking to have your basement waterproofed and you read that ad, your brain will go “What?” and then you will proceed to move on down to the next level.

More on the next part, later.

M

We’ve talked about leverage as a concept about marketing. I’ve given some examples, let me give some more.

Recently I designed a marketing system/campaign to go out BEFORE I meet with people on an appointment.

Now this is after I have an appointment set. Why do I do this?

There are several reasons.

1). Hardly anyone else does. That alone differentiates me. You don’t want to be like everyone else.

2) The material I am sending me is designed to educate the person with whom I am meeting. That makes my job easier.

3) The material is designed to position me in their mind better. In other words, the material is designed to be a “sales tool”

Now, with that being said you just can’t send a brochure or a pamphlet. Boo, boring, snore.

No, what you send is something that is interesting, educational, and fun!

The box I included had a funny comic, a candy car, and a guarantee, and was wrapped in great wrapping paper and had a lot of personalization.

Why is this so important? Because one of the main goals is we must interrupt people’s normal patterns and routines in their life. People go on autopilot and run ‘programs or scripts’ to deal with things, and if you don’t get them out of their normal routine, you will be delegated to that normal routine.

Make sense?

More on the routines and interrupting them later.

Matt

Last post I talked about leverage and why it is so important in business.

To continue on that theme and how marketing can give you leverage imagine that a marketing piece is a little sales person. It goes out there and sells a person on doing something. That piece can be, “to get more information” or “to request an appointment” or “to buy my stuff.”

Now you must understand the context of the situation. Each marketing piece should have a goal. And a marketing piece, like written about above, can have multiple goals.

So, this leverage allows to you to deploy dozens, hundreds, or thousands of little sales people out there to do your work. The work can be to raise money for a business, to generate referrals, to collect marketing information via surveys, and on and on and on. It really is amazing.

I’ll go into more details later, but just realize that proper marketing is just communication or salesmanship through media.

Matt

Most people have heard of the concept of leverage.  And the context in which most people have heard of leverage is real estate.  In case you aren’t familar with the concept here it is:  You go and get a loan from the bank to buy some properties, then your tenants pay them off.  It really is a proven strategy, but it certainly does have its risks, pitfalls, and downsides.  Many people who have invested in real estate have discovered this recently.

Well, today I want to share with you another form of leverage.  What is this type of leverage?  Proper direct response marketing.  Why is this leverage?  Because if done correctly it allows you to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time.  Yes, it does take work, in fact it takes a lot of work, but proper marketing gives you an incredible amount of leverage in several ways.

It is beyond the scope of this post to talk about all the ways proper marketing can help you leverage your business, but suffice to say that once you can create some marketing tools that generate leads for your business on a consistent basis, you will have off and running to the bank many times.

I’ll carry on these theme in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Matt

Most entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales people are extremely busy.  Duh.

But what can REALLY increase productivity.  Two words:  Time blocking.

You need to set aside specific chunks of time for activities that need to be done every day.

Perhaps this is education, reviewing your goals, creating marketing material, but these things have to be done.

I have a list of daily activities that must be done, and then a list of weekly activities.

You also need to budget time for, “things that didn’t go according to plan today.”  and “things to ”cleanup and fix.”

If you have not ever done this before here are my suggestions.  Start easy on yourself.  Don’t try to setup a schedule to where every 15 or 20 minutes you are doing something.  Start with the most important things, and then add more as time goes on.

Remember this:  Most of your prospects or potential customers probably do not understand how to buy what you are selling.  Of course this is not true of some industries, but even relatively simple industries like lawn care have lots of information that prospects need to be educated on.

Here’s something you can do immediately.  Make a list of 5, 7, or 10 questions your prospects SHOULD ask before buy a product or service in your industry.

Example:  Five critical questions to ask BEFORE you hire a dentist.  And then you make sure that these questions are valuable questions that people do need to ask, with valuable information.  Oh, and it also helps if the answers to these questions are things that other dentists are NOT doing.  Do you get it?

Matt

I ask this to lots of people.  What business are you in?

It *seems* like a simple question, but honestly most people can’t answer it or don’t answer it.

The answer is several things.

1) You are in the marketing business.  You are marketing your products or services.

2) You are in the problem solving, pain relief business.  If you are not solving pain or removing it, you probably should rethink your strategy.

People do things to remove pain, to solve problems more than they do it to obtain pleasure.

What do I say when I say that success is messy?

Well, basically you have a plan on accomplishing something, but many times plan A does not work according to how you thought it would.

So, you need to have a plan B, and a plan C and a plan D.

If your plan A doesn’t have a plan B,C, or D then you might need to revisit your original plan.

-Matt