Tag Archives: marketing

Sep 27

how to sell – sales approach simplified

 

If you want to sell service or product, your sales approach need to be as follow:

    what am i selling?

I dont have to mention, you should be knowing everything about your product or service in detail, at least the selling points.

    to who am i selling?

Know to whome you are selling and define them, age brackets, geo distribution, there are many categorization out there.

    where my buyers hangout?

Know where you customer will hang out, where they spend their time, i hope you get the idea – the advertisement you see during your favorite football match is classic example.

    where my buyers are searching for me?

where they gather information, whome they talk to for product/service suggestions, conferences they take part in, journals they read, all these places your customers specifically searching for your product/service.

    what is my buyers language?

We call it as keywords, classic example is “where do i get ruby?” For one customer they meant the gem stone Ruby, and another customer meant the ruby programming language and installer for it, so you need to understand all possible keywords,languages customer will use to find your product.
:)

Jun 16

how making money online works in simple terms?

you probably heard this concept of making money online, i am not a guru here to tell you how to do things, but i am here to tell you what i have learnt about it, there are several ways to make money online, one of the way is to write blogs and earn money through it, how does that work? lets take a look at it.

before we go in details please try to get answer from your own self for the following points:

  • if you want to make purchase decision, where do you turn to, to do the research on it? library or newspaper or friends or Internet
  • if you want to know about something that is relevant for your work, where do you turn to, to do the research on it? library or newspaper or friends or Internet

if my estimate is correct, almost 80% of them will turn to internet, why? they are

  • free
  • have most updated information
  • easily accessible
  • trusted resource in most cases

now you get the idea, we promote the product in internet for the customers for the companies who are willing to pay the money for the purpose.

does it mean we are replacing TV adverts? No, we are not replacing TV adverts, at least for now, why? TV adverts are push markets and internet is seek markets.

push market is – we push product to customers even if they want the product or not, we position brands.

seek market is – customer search for the particular product, and we show the relevant advert for the customer to choose.

seek market has very good success rate since customer is already searching for the information, all they have to do is prove the customer that they are better than their competitor, how that is achieved? that is achieved by bloggers and internet content writers who persuade the customers.

now you are even clear why companies are willing to pay for the bloggers for having adverts and even write content about their product.

does it mean companies will pay for every blog owners for posting their adverts? NO!!! they pay only to the productive blogs - how they determine productive? that is determined by how much sales they make for their product, and how much valid visitors are visiting their blogs. what is valid visitors? say you are running a blogs that talks about music, you get music loving visitors to your blog, and

1. you have placed the music label advert – you and advertiser win,

2. you placed the advert for dog food, the chances of the sales are very slim, why? do you think the one visited to your blog to know about the music will end up buying the awesome dog food? Chances are very slim!!!

so you need to make articles that is good for the niche and you need to get traffic that are interested in the niche you are writing about and finally analyze the visitors and place the relevant adverts. that is were you start making money begins

Jan 17

should my company have a blog?

 

what is a company we are refering to?

1. Company is the one that sells product or service to its customer.
2. Product or service(solution here after) is the one that satisfies/solves customers requirement/problem.

and how someone becomes customer?

By buying the solution from the company, he becomes the customer.

and how does he make buying decision?

earlier customer reach company through predictable set of mediums.

1. Through media advertisements(brand recognition too)
2. Existing customer referals
3. Or through a consultants(in case of B2B business models)

now customer reach the company through same methods listed above, but the pie percentage it takes has reduced, new item has been added – ‘internet’ and that is taking much of a pie.

Now we are clear (well, fairly) about what company is, who is customer, and how he make decision to buy something from the company. In this blog post we are going to focus on this internet that has become major deciding factor for the customer.

The internet we are referring to is growing every second, and new information is flooded every second, information becomes obsolete very quickly, if the company need to stand out and be recognized in the niche when customer searches for the solution, company need to keep up with the information that customer is searching for, that is done by corporate blogs.

Like i said before internet is growing every second with the content fed in, it is almost like the whole web is breathing, and we need to do our part to stand in the race.

Look at the case below:
Customer is doing a basic research on the solution he intended to buy, he will search using search engines and happens to visit couple of websites that guided/helped him make decision, need not we lured him to buy the solution from the company, but helped to make decision, here customer have visited the blog, got a help, now we have established the brand (company) – authority over the niche we are dealing with.

Blogs need to be updated regularly that is relevant to the subject, with all possible contents, possible scenarios and examples.

The content we write in blog may not be the direct solution for the customer’s problem. Eg: customer might want to know about reaching his potential customers and leaving promo message for his business, and corporate blog might have content for outbound dialer which will do voice drop for the customers, these gaps needs to be addressed. This can be addressed easily when different minds of the company gets involved in the blog, from director to housekeeping (ok i exaggerated), the point here is, same problem – same solution will be seen from different angle, and that will keep the corporate blog breathing.

There are other kind of corporate blogs, where they post one in a long while with the updates and releases with their solutions, i am not sure if this one will yield any result of reaching customer, but helps to keep their news posted for existing customers.

Those days are gone, where product developers will leave the premises when his part is done, and sales man will take the product to market and sell it, both parties wash their hands when their part is done, that’s is not going to help, every possible people in the company need to contribute, each should act like a “important” visiting card for the company y taking part in many third party forums, group discussions, events, social media etc and with respect to companies blog different product ideas, challenges, possible improvements has to be shared, use cases for the products should be well written, customer expectations and problems should be shared,  market research, sales projection can be shared as well, this way the company moves faster and smoother.