Marketing For Dummies

Jeanette McMurtry

GENRE: Business & Finance

PAGES: 400

COMPLETED: November 20, 2024

RATING:

Short Summary

There are a lot of ways you can market your products and services. In Marketing For Dummies, Jeanette McMurtry explains how to leverage today’s tools, technology, and strategies to create unforgettable experiences for customers and prospects.

Key Takeaways

Use Your Tools — From social media and Google Ads to email campaigns, website content, and events, there’s no shortage of great tools and strategies you can use to market your products and services. Put all of these tools to use, and don’t forget to measure your results with analytics. Understanding which marketing efforts are performing well and which ones aren’t will help you allocate your limited money and resources.

Create an Experience — The overall experience you deliver to customers and prospects sets you apart from competitors. Do everything you can to create an interesting, exceptional, and emotional experience for everyone who interacts with your company. Get customers involved, offer a rewards program, send surveys, create a community — there are a lot of ways you can build a unique experience. When the experience is memorable, convenient, and fun, customers are more likely to continue buying from you and refer you to their friends and loved ones.

Deliver Value — When creating content for direct marketing campaigns, focus on delivering value to customers and prospects. Successful marketing today is more relationship-based than transaction-based — it’s about building long lasting relationships with consumers rather than trying to make one-off sales. By using your content to deliver value and education, you can build trust and create a great experience for customers and prospects.

Favorite Quote

“Brands can imitate and duplicate your product's features, functions, and price point. What they can't do so easily is replicate your emotional experience and fulfillment. This should be the top priority of your marketing program and everything you do based on the tactics and strategies discussed in this book.”

Ch. 1: Understanding Consumer Values and Mindsets

Consumer Values Change, Psychology Doesn’t — Market conditions and consumer values change all the time. We see this in various fads and trends that seem to sweep the nation. What doesn’t change is the underlying psychology of human nature. Many areas of our lives, including how we spend money, are driven by the same psychological triggers that influenced our ancestors. As a marketer, if you can find ways to leverage those psychological triggers, you can sell more product and gain more long-lasting customers. And today, we have access to technology that allows us to create highly personalized messages that target these psychological triggers. The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini dives into the psychology that drives our decisions.
- Quote (P. 9): “For businesses of any size, the new consumer culture and economic reality can be daunting and invigorating at the same time, especially when you consider that market conditions and consumer priorities have changed, but human nature has not. We are still governed by emotions and attitudes that influence how we think, what we buy, and how we assign loyalty. The availability of affordable technology for crafting and sending messaging personalized to the emotions that trigger behavior among various consumer segments continues to level the playing field.”
Creating an Experience for Customers — It is more difficult than ever to capture people’s attention. All of us have a million things vying for our attention. We live in a very distracted world, and the average attention span is very short. Phones give us instant access to entertainment and various forms of media — social media, email, sports betting, YouTube . . . the list goes on and on. These things distract us. As a marketer, you have to find a way to create an interesting, unique experience for customers and potential customers. The experience needs to add value to a customer’s life in some way. If you don’t do this, people are going to lose interest and move on. This requires some creative thought.
- Quote (P. 10): “Additionally, you have to offer much more than a great product and value point; you have to offer consumers a fulfilling experience that adds value, happiness, or excitement to their lives.”
- Quote (P. 20): “Your marketing plan isn’t just a guidebook for getting your product out to the world and making money; it’s about creating an experience, event, or outcome that makes people’s lives better or more enjoyable and brings people together for the better.”
Be Where the Customer Is — When it comes to contact points, your messages, ads, and other marketing materials need to meet the customer in the places where they spend the most time. This requires that you understand your customers deeply. You need to know their demographics, their interests, their motivations, their pain points, and their daily routine. You need to know where they spend time and attention throughout their day. Which news publications are they reading? Which social media platforms do they look at the most? Then you need to insert yourself into those places.
- Quote (P. 12): “The best tool you have when fighting the battle for consumers’ attention is a good marketing plan that directs your messaging, actions, resources, and customer experiences across the channels your targeted customers use most while going about their daily lives and making decisions for the short and long term.”
Build Relationships — To gain long-term customers, you need to build relationships with them. The way you to do this is by building trust with them through shared values, beliefs, and purpose. As a company, be clear about what you stand for beyond the bottom line. Be clear about your mission. Communicate the good deeds that you’re doing in the community, and find ways to get your customers involved in your giving back efforts. Have a clearly-defined culture. When customers align with your mission, values, and culture, they are more likely to stick with you.
- Quote (P. 15): “Your biggest competitive advantage isn’t dependent on how clever your marketing and social campaigns are but rather on your ability to build meaningful and sustainable relationships with customers. The most powerful and lasting relationships are those built on trust, shared value, personal relevance, and a common purpose.”
- Quote (P. 15): “Beyond just communicating the causes to which your brand donates funds or goods, involve your customers in your charitable activities.”
- Quote (P. 14): “Communicate your impact: Porter Novell’s Purpose Premium Index for 2021 shows 73% of U.S. consumers choose to support companies that explain how they are making positive change in communities and the environment.”
- Quote (P. 50): “71% of consumers prefer to buy from brands aligned with their values.”
Be Transparent — Be transparent about everything that goes into creating your product or service. If you mess up or don’t meet expectations, own it and tell customers how you’re working to fix the issue. Customers appreciate the honesty and willingness to take accountability. The last thing you want to do is act like nothing is wrong when it’s very clear that the company has fallen short in some area. Leaders need to own it and outline the measures being taken to correct it. Domino’s Pizza is a good example of this — they knew they had a low-quality product, admitted it, told everyone how they would fix it, and successfully changed how they made pizzas. Revenue went up 14% from 2010-2020.
Chapter Takeaway — The best ways to connect with customers include appealing to proven psychological triggers, creating an interesting experience that adds value to their lives, and by building trust through clearly outlined values, purpose, and mission. If you can do these three things right, you will be successful, even as consumer trends come and go.

Ch. 2: Triggering the Psychology of Choice for Lifetime Value

The Unconscious Mind & Decision-Making— The unconscious mind plays a bigger role in human decision-making than most people realize. While price, brand reputation, quality, and convenience are factors the conscious mind combs through while making a purchasing decision, appeals to emotion are also highly influential. Many research studies have proven time and again that what people think guides their decisions isn’t what actually guides their decision. This is why focus groups shouldn’t always be trusted. People think they know what they want, but the unconscious mind and emotions drive decisions more than people realize.
- Quote (P. 25): “Traditional thinking has it that consumer choice is based upon price, quality, reputation, brand awareness, convenience, and the like. Although these things are influencers at some level in most decision processes, the most powerful influencer is the unconscious mind.”
- Quote (P. 27): “What you can take from this is that what people say and think often is not what they really do. This has huge implications for what marketers need to emphasize in marketing content, communications, and experiences and how they should emphasize it.”
Pain & Pleasure: Target These — There are two emotional motivators in particular that guide human behavior: pain and pleasure. Target these in ads and other marketing materials. The key to good copywriting is communicating how your product or service helps the customer live a better life in some way, whether that’s by alleviating a pain point or gaining something.
- The Avoidance of Pain — For the most part, humans are risk-averse: we fear loss/missed opportunities about twice as much as we enjoy gains/wins. This is worth remembering when evaluating your customers’ pain points. If you can show how your product or service can help the customer avoid losing something that they already have or can help them overcome something that is causing them trouble (i.e. a pain point), you can appeal to this law of human behavior. To help with this, ask yourself: (i.) What potential losses can consumers experience by not buying your product?; and (ii.) How can your company deliver on the promise of avoiding loss in ways that competitors can’t? Now address these in your marketing content.
  - Quote (P. 28): “Everything we do, socially, professionally, and personally, is driven by these basic needs [pain and pleasure]. When you understand the pain your customers are consciously and unconsciously avoiding when purchasing your products or services, you can craft highly relevant motivational messaging and experiences.”
  - Quote (P. 31): “As you contemplate how to appeal to emotions in your marketing, keep in mind that humans are more risk-averse than they are reward seekers. People consciously and unconsciously want to hold on to what they have more than gain a reward, especially if they may lose something in return.”
- The Pursuit of Pleasure — Humans have always been drawn to pleasure. How can your product or service help the customer live a better life and achieve their goals? How can it bring them pleasure? How can it make them feel good? Answer these questions, then communicate them in your copywriting. Use your marketing materials to help the customer visualize a better life with your product.
Target Emotions — Building on the point above about pain and pleasure, you should try to appeal to emotion with every piece of marketing content, whether it’s digital ads, landing pages, videos, social media posts, or anything else. This is a major key to successful marketing. Emotions connect on a deeper level, transforming customers into loyal brand advocates. What are you really selling? It goes deeper than the product or service; anybody can build similar features and price points. What you’re really selling is a better life, prestige, status, comfort, longevity, beauty, etc. Identify the emotions that you’re really selling and emphasize them in all of your marketing content. Speak to the customer’s “wannabe” identity (see Ch. 8 notes) by helping the customer visualize the better life that you’re selling.
- Quote (P. 32): “Brands can imitate and duplicate your product’s features, functions, and price point. What they can’t do so easily is replicate your emotional experience and fulfillment. This should be the top priority of your marketing program and everything you do based on the tactics and strategies discussed in this book.”
- Quote (P. 162): “The best marketing copy uses words to create feelings that move people to act.”
- Ex. Rolex — Rolex isn’t selling expensive watches; it’s selling feelings of glamour and prestige. It’s selling status. It’s selling superiority. It’s selling confidence. You want a Rolex because you want to look like a high-status, well-off individual. If you watch their ads and visit their website, you’ll see that their marketing materials communicate those emotions to customers.
- Ex. Nike — Nike isn’t selling shoes; it’s selling the athletic lifestyle. It’s selling the belief that greatness is attainable for everyone. With every piece of marketing, Nike taps into the emotion of ambition, making customers feel like part of a global movement of athletes and dreamers.
- Ex. Toxin-Free Household Items — Companies that sell toxin-free household items aren’t selling a bunch of chemicals to protect the house, they are selling to consumers the confidence that their home is protected. They are selling the joy and peace of mind that come with knowing that their kids and loved ones are living in a house that is toxin-free.
- Ex. Cambridge — Cambridge isn’t selling a partnership as a broker-dealer and RIA; it’s selling the promise of a strong supporting partner for independent financial advisors who want to build the business of their dreams. It’s selling the status, lifestyle flexibility, and personal wealth that come with being a successful business owner. It’s selling the ability for advisors to build their business without limitations. Finally, it’s selling the confidence that Cambridge will be independent for the long term, which in turn gives advisors the peace of mind that their independence is protected.
Psychological Triggers — There are certain psychological and social triggers that — when targeted in messaging, ads, and other marketing materials — can increase the chances of a consumer buying your product. Below are a few of them. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini has a lot of information on these levers of influence. As Cialdini writes, these triggers act as shortcuts as we navigate a life full of decisions.
- Authority — People tend to put a lot of value in the words and actions of those who are in positions of authority. This partly explains why companies pay athletes and famous people to endorse their products.
- Social Proof — Customer testimonials and reviews are very powerful. Many people, myself included, put a lot of value on the number of product reviews and the general opinion of those reviews when evaluating an item. Think Amazon reviews and GoodReads reviews. Video testimonials are also very powerful. We use the opinions of other people as a shortcut to help us make quick judgements.
- Reciprocity — Doing something nice for somebody else tends to make them feel like they “owe you one.” This idea can be used in creative ways to engage your marketing.
- Scarcity — People want what they can’t have. When an item is scarce, its value tends to go up. Many marketing people use this trigger with tags such as “limited time deal” and “while supplies last” and “seats are filling up; act fast!”
Chapter Takeaway — Many of our decisions are driven by our unconscious mind and emotions. In marketing, it’s critical to appeal to these emotions that drive decision-making. What are you really selling? How will the product help the customer overcome a pain point or live a better life? What feelings would come with that? These are the deeper questions that you have to hit on in your marketing content. Help the customer visualize the outcome. Anybody can make your product; what is the underlying emotion you are selling?

Ch. 3: Engaging Experiences and Journeys That Drive Sales and Loyalty

Create an Experience — Customers don’t just want a transactional relationship with companies anymore; they want to be engaged in creative ways. They’re looking for an experience. Your goal should be to make the purchasing experience as easy, smooth, and convenient as possible. When you create an experience, you create an emotional connection. When the experience is memorable, convenient, and fun, customers are more likely to continue buying from you and refer you to their friends and loved ones.
- Quote (P. 43): “In business, and all aspects of life, how you make people feel during interactions is more memorable than the tangible goods you might deliver. We often remember our childhood birthday parties with friends, birthday cakes, and fun fames, but you may not remember the gifts. This concept illustrates the importance of integrating meaningful and memorable customer experiences into each step of a customer’s journey with your brand.”
- Quote (P. 45): “The customer experience is far more complex than just monetary transactions for goods and services. Success for any business, large or small, in any category, is dependent on the emotional fulfillment you deliver in addition to products or services that garner high satisfaction ratings.”
- Quote (P. 125): “When products and prices are similar to competitors’ offerings, it’s the experience that elevates one brand over another. Customers often care more about how they feel when doing business with you than the prices or benefits you offer. Note that posts on Google, Yelp, and other review sites frequently describe the service received, the attention and concern showed by employees, and other experiences with a business instead of the price or product features.”
Ways to Create an Experience — Personalize your emails and messages, offer incentives (e.g. discounts or freebies) for buying, provide opportunities for customers to get involved, have great tech support and customer service . . . these are all ways to enhance the experience when customers buy from you. Below is a more complete list of ways you can create a convenient and memorable experience for customers. Remember, it’s all about creating a sense of partnership and community. Don’t just make it a purely transactional relationship.
- Have a CRM System — All of these ideas begin with having a great CRM system where you can log information about your customers. This is where you store all of your data about your customers. You can use AI and other tools within the CRM to get key insights about your audience base. Many CRM systems are really sophisticated and offer a lot of great tools for managing your customers. It’s all about being able to monitor what your customers are doing. Important — within your CRM, you need to track consumer data that is specifically relevant to your business goals and what you’re trying to accomplish with your customers. This will help you know what your customers and prospects want and need. A CRM is only as good as the data that goes into it.
  - Quote (P. 47): “Many large companies use complex technology to monitor just about every behavior and purchasing trend possible among individual consumers and segmented groups. That technology includes predictive analytics, real-time monitoring of consumer purchasing intent, agent-assist programs that spark upsells and cross-sells, and even sentiment analysis. Data mined from multiple systems creates in-depth insights on individual consumers, personas, and segments, generating a lot of data for marketers to sift through, analyze, and act on.”
  - Quote (P. 48): “Small businesses can document and track customer interactions, needs, emotions, and expectations with a simple CRM system.”
- Involvement — Find creative ways to get your customers involved. When they feel involved, they’re more engaged and are more likely to return. LEGO allows customers to submit ideas for LEGO sets. Tesla incentivizes customers to refer the company to others, offering rewards for those who do. Doritos once allowed customers to help create the company’s Super Bowl ad. Coca-Cola offered a chance for customers to customize their own Coke bottles. Nike allows customers to design their own shoes. GoPro allows customers to submit videos that are then featured on the company’s website. The opportunities are endless.
  - Quote (P. 55): “Asking your community for input on product development and new product ideas is a smart way to involve contacts and customers in your brand development and make them feel valued at the same time.”
- Rewards Program — Reward customers who are repeat buyers. Most big companies have a rewards program in place. Chipotle gives points for every purchase, allowing customers to build points toward free chips, burritos, sodas, and more. SuperCuts does the same thing — repeat customers can build points toward a free haircut.
- Personalize Messages — Personalize your emails and communications to customers. Every communication should have the customer’s name at the top. Many email platforms and CRM systems allow this to be done fairly easily. You can also consider crafting personalized offer emails based on the products a customer previously viewed on your website.
  - Quote (P. 49): “Customer experience strategies that include personalized communications, transactions, offers, promotions, and so on are not just expected by consumers — they also pay off.”
- Use AI — AI and machine learning can be used to personalize the customer experience. Netflix offers show suggestions based on a customer’s previously watched shows and movies. Amazon gives suggested items to buy based on the customer’s purchase and viewing history.
- Chat Bots & Live Support — AI can be used to create a chatbot for your website. You can also hire people to manually operate a chat service for your website. Both of these options help customers get answers and support quickly.
- Mobile Texting & Apps — Today’s marketing technology allows you to text customers with offers and special messages. You can also build an app for customers to engage with. It’s all about finding unique ways to contact and engage customers. All of it contributes to a highly personalized experience.
- Satisfaction Surveys — Use consistent and frequent surveys to give customers a chance to send feedback. These are critical. They allow customers to voice their opinion, giving you valuable information on what is going well and what is not going well. You can then make improvements. These surveys also make the customer feel heard and valued.
- Sense of Community — Organize a community chat board where your customers can connect and talk to each other. Not only will a chat board allow customers to connect with each other, it will allow you to eavesdrop on their conversations and see where you can make improvements. You can easily learn about their frustrations. Cambridge has the Cambridge Nation chat board. You can also set up a Facebook community page. People love to feel like part of a community, so seize every opportunity you can do build that sense of camaraderie.
  - Quote (P. 55): “The key to building successful communities is not using them to advertise to customers you’ve already secured, but using them to gather insights, intelligence, and ideas on products and services your loyal customers deeply care about.”
Chapter Takeaway — The days of milking a purchase out of a customer and never seeing them again are over. It’s critical for companies to create long-lasting relationships with customers so they continue to come back. One of the ways you do this is by creating a convenient and memorable experience where customers feel valued and part of a community. This chapter discussed several strategies for doing that.

Ch. 4: Laying a Foundation for Growth

Segmenting & Niches — For most businesses, it makes sense to narrow down your target customer base. Target a certain group of people that most align with your products and mission, then break that group into even smaller groups. Create marketing campaigns for each of these subgroups. Many independent financial advisors at Cambridge, for example, choose to serve a certain niche of clients. Some advisors serve women. Some focus on serving retirees. Some work exclusively with clients interested in ESG investing.
- Quote (P. 69): “A market segmentation strategy is more than just sorting customers into like groups so you can build marketing campaigns around specific personas. It involves building distribution strategies to reach your best segments first and then trickle down to your secondary segments. If your sales are best among millennials, for example, prioritize sales channels that reach them easily. If your sales do best in states with consistently warm climates, consider dropping out of channels in colder states where sales may only be seasonal even though you’re paying for shelf space year-round.”

Ch. 5: Researching Your Customers, Competitors, and Industry

Know Your Stuff — Never assume you know everything about your customers and competitors. In marketing, information is critical. The more of it you have, the better decisions you can make. This means knowing what your consumers like and dislike about you. This means watching your competitors closely, studying what they are doing well and how you adopt certain things they are doing. This means studying the ROI of ad campaigns and other marketing efforts. This means keeping up with news in your industry. All of it can give you an edge.
- Quote (P. 77): “One of the biggest mistakes any marketer can make is to assume. Yet assumptions continue to be a common foundation of many business decisions. Avoiding the trap of assuming you know what your customers think, like, or don’t like about your brand, products, and category and what inspires their purchasing behavior is critical to growing your business.”
- Quote (P. 78): “The foundation of any successful marketing is a solid research plan that helps you understand your customers’ needs and expectations, market influences, competition, which offers and messages work, and which do not, and provides insights that guide your strategic business plan and product development.”
Ways to Get Information — With the Internet, there are a lot of ways to gather information about your customers, competitors, and industry. It’s important to keep tabs on all three of these areas. Ways you can do this include:
- Manual Research — Google is a powerful tool. Search the web for the information you’re looking for. Visit the websites of your competitors to see what their branding and user experience is like.
- Industry News — Subscribe to websites and magazines that cover your industry. For example, InvestmentNews, ThinkAdvisor, and WealthManagement.com cover the financial services industry. These publications can often give you great insight about what is happening in your neck of the woods.
- Surveys — Surveys are an extremely helpful tool for understanding what your customers think about you. Surveys allow customers to express what they think you’re doing well and where they think you’re coming up short. From there, you can make adjustments to give them more of what they want. Use surveys frequently, but don’t overload your customers with them. Get the most out of your surveys by being very strategic with the questions you use.
- Social Listening — Social listening refers to having a pulse on what people are saying about you on social media. You can do this manually by inserting your company’s name on the various social media platforms, or you can use tools specifically designed for social listening. Hootsuite, for example, has a built-in social listening tool that gives you all sorts of insight about what people are saying about you. Social listening allows you to understand the conversations surrounding your brand.
- Analytics — You must track and measure the success or failure of your marketing efforts wherever possible. This information is crucial because it allows you to know which initiatives are working and which are not. You can then direct more money and resources toward the projects that are working. Without this data, you’re operating in the dark. You’re blind. How do you measure ROI on your projects? There are many analytics-focused tools that will give you good information. Google Analytics can give you information about website traffic. Marketing software like SalesForce delivers a bunch of data about your emails to customers, including open rate, click through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and much more. You can also set up tracking links.
- Ask Questions — Outside of surveys, ask questions of customers whenever the opportunity presents itself. This can be in-person, on an email thread, or by any other means. Be curious about what is working and what is not. This feedback will guide your company’s direction and your marketing efforts.
Chapter Takeaway — Constantly look to gather information about your customers, competitors, and industry. This information can guide you and give you the best chance of delivering the products and experience that customers want. It will guide your decision-making.

Ch. 6: Creating a Winning Marketing Plan

SWOT Analysis — One of the ways you can position your business for success is by doing a SWOT analysis, meaning strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This is a key part of any marketing plan because it helps you understand where you hold advantages over other competitors and where you can improve. Good marketing is all about promoting your strengths to the world and showing how you can help them live a better life or overcome a pain point. The SWOT analysis will help make your strengths very clear to you.
Testimonials & Customer Reviews — Consumers recognize that companies are trying to sell them something and will always trust the word of other people over the word of the company. This is why customer reviews and testimonials are so powerful, and it’s why you should always flaunt your positive reviews and testimonials everywhere, especially on your home page. Gather these up and show them off as often as possible.

Ch. 7: Content Marketing and Marketing Content

What Is Content Marketing? — Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain customers. It’s used to build brand awareness, get earned media from publications, and communicate how the position of the brand is different than competitors. Content marketing pieces aim to educate customers and provide them with value. You can attribute some of the written content to your senior leaders to position them as subject matter experts. All content marketing plans publish content regularly and are diverse in the content they produce (e.g. social media carousels, webinars, video, blogs, articles, checklists, whitepapers, guides, podcasts, etc.). Again, these pieces of content are designed to create a relationship with prospects and consumers by delivering value to them. If all you put out are sales pitches, you won’t get any engagement.
- Quote (P. 138): “Content is a relationship building tool. To engage customers and spark relationships that lead to sales and loyalty, you need to produce content that is meaningful to their lives beyond the products you sell. If your content is plain old promotional, it’s likely that customers won’t engage with you.”
- Quote (P. 141): “Your marketing content needs to add value to a decision process, a job requirement, or one’s ability to live a better life.”
What Is “Marketing Content”? — Opposite of content marketing, various pieces of “marketing content” are designed to deliver offers and communicate a message. Marketing content includes things like ads, email campaigns, signage, and so on. Rather than educating consumers and providing them with value like content marketing does, these pieces of marketing content are more “sales-y” by nature.
Content Marketing: Growing Your Email List — One of the main objectives of content marketing, which involves social media, is to grow your email list in your CRM. When you create valuable, informative, educational content that helps the audience in some way (i.e. whitepapers, guides, webinars, podcasts, etc.), you can gate the content and ask for email addresses and phone numbers in exchange for the piece. This email list is incredibly valuable. Everyone on it is a lead that you can now contact in your email campaigns. This is ultimately the purpose of content marketing — to grow your list of leads.
- Quote (P. 186): “When choosing digital tools and activities, you should focus on those that can best help you build your visibility, expand your social networks, and, most importantly, grow your in-house email list. Building your email list is truly one of the most important outcomes of all digital activities because email drives some of the best return on investment (ROT) you can get from any marketing activity today.”
- Quote (P. 192): “A big reason to do webinars is to build your contacts database. You’re giving people knowledge for free, so make sure you get their email address in return. Require contact information to register for the event and to access any archived files.”
Content Marketing: Create a Plan — The first step to effective content marketing is building a plan. The plan needs to include themes you’re going to cover in each piece of content. It needs to include all content delivery vehicles, such as articles and blogs, videos, podcast episodes, social media posts, whitepapers, webinars, email campaigns, and more. The key is to post frequently; the more content you can pump out, the better. Your content helps you build brand awareness and deliver value to customers and prospects.
Content Marketing: Break Big Pieces Into Small Ones — One of the keys to content marketing is publishing content consistently and frequently. But it can sometimes be very difficult to create the volume of content needed, as content creation is time consuming and requires a lot of energy and focus. Taking bits and pieces of long-form content is an effective strategy that can help with this problem. The idea is to create long-form pieces covering various themes and topics that you jot down in your content marketing plan, then use excerpts and small chucks of the long-form piece for your social media posts and short-form videos. For example, you can easily make a 5-slide social media carousel out of a long-form article about cybersecurity. Find ways to repurpose content.
Keys to Copywriting — Most pieces of content marketing require strong, persuasive writing. Make no mistake, good copywriting is an art. There are certain tactics that can be used to better resonate with the audience and inspire customers to take the action you want them to take. Below are some keys to good copywriting. To read more on each of these, see the notes for The Wizard of Ads, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, Everybody Writes, Made to Stick, $100M Leads, Ogilvy on Advertising, and others.
- Write to the Target
  - Define the ‘Why’ or Purpose of the Piece
  - Summarize the ‘Why’ in 1-2 Sentences
  - Put the ‘Why’ at Top of Page
- Persuasive Headlines/Subheads
- Use Curiosity
  - Ask Questions
  - Give Interesting Facts
  - Tell an Interesting Story/Anecdote
  - Create Mental Images
  - State Something Unexpected
- What’s In It For Them?
  - Benefits, Benefits, Benefits
  - What Will Customers Get From You That They Can’t Get From Your Competitors?
- Create Emotion
  - What Underlying Emotions are You Selling?
  - Speak to Their “Wannabe” Identity
  - Make Them Feel Something
  - Vivid Mental Images
- Good Rythm
  - Short, Medium, Long Sentences
- Use the “Weapons of Influence”
  - Reciprocity
  - Liking
  - Social proof
  - Authority
  - Scarcity/Loss Aversion
- Deliver Value
  - Education
  - Info to Help With Purchase
  - How-To
  - Step by Step Breakdowns
- Prove Your Claims
  - Data/Stats
  - Testimonials
  - Examples
  - Customer Reviews
- Make It Easy to Read
  - Good Spacing
  - Bullets
  - Short Paragraphs
  - Design Callouts
- Clear CTA
  - Scarcity
  - Urgency
Copywriting: Communicate the Benefits — As harsh as it sounds, customers don’t care about you; they care about themselves and their problems. They care about improving their life. Don’t waste words trying to boast about yourself as a company. Communicate the benefits! What is in it for them? To drill down even further and separate yourself from competitors, ask yourself this: What will customers get from you that they can’t get from your competitors? Answer this, then make it the focus of your content. An amazing example is Geico’s slogan: 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. This is brilliant and communicates the benefits quickly.
- Quote (P. 241): “Beyond the products or services you offer, what will your customers get from you that perhaps they can’t get from someone else? Quality, customer service, rewards? Give contacts a reason to purchase from you instead of an alternative provider of the same or similar products/services.”
Chapter Takeaway — Content marketing involves publishing content that is educational and valuable to customers and prospects. These pieces of content should help inform the audience. Publish content on all possible channels, and make sure you’re uploading content regularly and consistently. Content marketing isn’t “sales-y”; it’s educational and doesn’t push for a sale.

Ch. 8: Creative That Engages the Mind

Photo & Video > Text — When it comes to absorbing information, we are wired to prefer photos and videos over text because they are easier to understand and remember: the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it processes text. This idea has a name: the Picture Superiority Effect. Researchers who study this effect have found that, three days after seeing content, we remember 65% of it when it is delivered in photos or graphics versus only 10% of it when it is delivered by text alone. Researchers at BuzzSumo have found that social media posts that include images generate twice the engagement of posts that don’t.
- Quote: (P. 153): “The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it processes text, according to research conducted by 3M. We have far greater recall for images we see than for text we read. This phenomenon is called the Picture Superiority Effect. The studies behind this theory show three days after we are given information through images, we are likely to remember 65% of the content. If the information is presented to us as text or audio, we’ll recall just 10% of the content on day three. This concept also applies to social media. Posts with images generated more than the twice the engagement than those without, according to a study by BuzzSumo.”
Colors Have Meaning — Decades of research has proven that colors influence mood, productivity, and even appetite. And a large majority of people make instant unconscious judgements about something based on color. Blue is a color that relaxes and calms people, while red is known to increase heart rate, anxiety, brain energy, and appetite. Additional research has found that the likelihood of a purchase is lower when the background is red and higher when it is blue. This information about colors is important to remember when picking brand colors or campaign colors. Visit brandcolors.net to see the color palette that big-name brands use. Below are some underlying messages that researchers have found different colors can communicate:
- Blue — Blue is the color of trust, intelligence, respect, purification, honor, security, and faith
- Purple — Purple reflects wisdom, maturity, dignity, virtue, and long life
- Red — Red generates energy, courage, glory, inner strength, and passion. It can also increase heart rate and produces feelings of anxiety and urgency
- Orange — Orange triggers energy, joy, creativity, excitement, and enthusiasm
- Yellow — Yellow inspires enlightenment, awareness, consciousness, optimism, and warmth
- Green — Green represents healing, awakening, learning, independence, and change
Build a Brand Style Guide — If you’re just starting a business, it’s important to build a Brand Style Guide inside of your marketing plan. This guide should include your color palette, preferred font type, graphic standards, logo usage, and more. Maybe more importantly, the guide needs to outline your company’s overall attitude and positioning. What do you as a company stand for? Who are the people you are trying to connect with? The colors and fonts you choose will be based on the company’s overall attitude, mindset, and values.
Speak to the “Wannabe” Identity — When you create campaigns and related marketing materials, it’s important that you speak to the overall state of being that your customers want to get to. This is one of the ways you can infuse emotion into your content. What is it that your customers want? What is their ideal identity, and how can your product or service get them there? What is the pain point they are trying to overcome? Describe what it feels like to reach that ideal state or overcome that pain point.
- Quote (P. 167): “Appealing to the current identity of your customers isn’t enough; you also have to appeal to their wannabe identity. All young adults have a vision of who they want to be in the near and long-term future. This vision usually projects their future self doing something on their bucket list that’s out of the norm, or working in a successful career or owning their own business and living their dream. On the flip side, many middle-aged and older adults have an image of what they once were or wish they had been when they were young and had more agility and freedom. Tap into these visions of wannabe personas in your marketing campaigns to attract and capture the attention and interest of your targeted consumers. Large brands with large research teams do a great job of staying on top of multiple wannabe personas and creating graphics, imagery, and customer experiences accordingly.”
Chapter Takeaway — Decades of research has proven that photos and video resonate with consumers more than plain text. Photos and videos do a better job of creating feelings and emotion, and they are easier to remember. Try to use photos and video in your marketing content.

Ch. 9: Optimizing Digital and Social Tools and Tactics

Social Media — Traditional media is fading, and it’s fading fast. Today, social media is the most used channel among today’s consumers. Whether you’re creating content for Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or any other social media platform, social media platforms are where you can reach audiences, and it’s one of the best ways to build brand awareness, deliver updates about the company, and direct people to your website. This is where you can have some fun and show off your company’s personality. It’s important to remember that every social media site has its own vibe; you should only post content that aligns with the platform’s natural aura. My notes on the book Crushing It! by Gary Vaynerchuk have detailed breakdowns of all the major platforms.
Social Media: Building Relationships — Just like content marketing, social media is primarily about building connections with your audience rather than making sales pitches. You absolutely should mix in a few posts that include some kind of offer, but your social media content should mostly focus on building relationships with people. You do this by being fun, posting high-quality information/education on a topic (e.g. carousels), delivering information about your products and services in creative ways, and asking questions to the audience to get them to engage with you. Keep in mind that study after study has shown that posts containing images and videos get much more engagement than posts without these assets.
- Quote (P. 181): “The best content isn’t always about driving a sale — it’s more about engaging your followers and creating rapport, trust, and dialogue. When you achieve this connection, sales will follow.”
Videos: Make Them! — Just like photos, videos have become incredibly important pieces of content in the world of marketing — 90 percent of viewers say that videos help them make purchase decisions, and 92 percent of those viewing videos on mobile devices share them with others. People simply find photos and videos to be more stimulating and interesting ways of absorbing information than reading text. When I am researching a product, especially a big purchase, I intentionally go out and look for videos of it on YouTube. I also look at the videos when looking at Amazon products. Below are some tips for making videos.
- Product Demos — Create product demo videos to showcase the features that set your products apart
- Feature Executives — Include statements from your company leaders to show their vision and help tell your brand story
- Customer Testimonials — Include customers talking about their experience with your product and your team. Video testimonials are powerful because viewers can see happy customers’ body language, smiles, and looks of relief, and hear the excitement in their voices that written testimonials don’t convey.
Create a Podcast — These days, almost everyone listens to a podcast. Your company should have a podcast — it’s yet another way you can bring value to your customers and prospects, which helps you create a relationship with them. Again, the focus of the podcast should be on delivering value and education rather than making any kind of sales pitch. For example, LPL Financial has two weekly podcasts that cover the investing markets in great detail. Two of their top leaders host the podcasts and give their perspective and insight. These podcasts are extremely valuable for LPL’s clients — independent financial advisors.
Create a Blog — Creating a blog is beneficial for a number of reasons. Firstly, a blog gives you a platform to write about key trends and topics in your industry, which allows you, or your executive team, to build a reputation as a thought leader. Secondly, it helps you build content for your website, and you can repurpose that content by breaking it up into pieces and sharing on social media. Thirdly, it helps with SEO (discussed in a later chapter). Without even trying, you’ll be creating content on a variety of keywords that people in your industry are searching for. The key here is to do some keyword research and understand what your target prospects are searching for, then create blog posts about addressing those topics/keywords. Google’s algorithm likes when you offer value to searchers, and it will reward you by placing your website and webpages higher up on the search results page for those keywords. In your blog posts, you can link to other pages on your website, which also improves your SEO.
Use Giveaways — Giveaways are a sneaky good way to engage customers and get email addresses for your CRM database. The goal here is to promote a giveaway and require people to sign up with their contact information in order to enter the contest. You can give away almost anything — tickets to an event, VIP access to something, one of your products, access to a service you offer, some kind of trip, and more. Find creative ways to incorporate giveaways once in a while.
- Quote (P. 197): “In a blog post, RafflePress shared an example of a promotion by KnivesShipFree, which ran a regular monthly contest to give away a knife set. In just three months, they added 5,000 new email addresses to their database and more than $10,000 to their revenue.”
- Quote (P. 197): “Consumers like to win experiences, not just ‘stuff’. Think about offering unique content, special access to VIP services or offers, or a chance to do something people wouldn’t normally get a chance to do.”
Chapter Takeaway — Social media is where you can have a little bit of fun and show off your company’s personality in creative ways. This is the place where you can really build strong connections with customers and prospects. Focus on delivering fun, creative, informative, educational content.

Ch. 10: Embracing the New Age of Advertising

Advertising on Social Media — Today, social media is the most used channel by consumers worldwide. With billions of users pumping out content regularly, it’s incredibly hard to stand out on social media, which is why advertising is a great marketing strategy. Consider running a few ad campaigns throughout the year on the various social media platforms. This is a great way to reach people; you’re meeting them where they already are.
Advertising on Facebook — Facebook is a powerhouse. Even as other platforms have grown in popularity, Facebook is still king with more than 3 billion active users. The question with Facebook advertising is not when, but how much? You need to run ads on this platform. Below is a look at the process involved with advertising on Facebook (this process is similar on all of the social media platforms):
- Pick an Objective — The first step is to decide what you want to achieve. Do you want your ads to generate brand awareness among a targeted group of people, or are you looking to drive traffic to your website to download a piece of content, register for an event, or make a purchase? This decision will influence how you set up your content and ad budget. Worth noting — Facebook offers retargeting and lead generation forms to capture interest and information you can follow up on.
- Define Your Audience — All social media platforms, including Facebook, allow you to target a set of consumers based on demographics and interests. In addition to the audience selection tools below, you can also integrate your CRM and email lists to create a target audience for your ads. You can also use a “Facebook Pixel” to automatically create a custom target audience of people who visited your website and completed an action, like filing out a form, so you can retarget them with ads. Below are Facebook’s audience selection tools:
  - Core Audiences — This group reflects the age, demographics, interests, behaviors, and other attributes of the people you are targeting
  - Custom Audiences — This group includes people with whom you’ve had a prior interaction
  - Lookalike Audiences — This group is built around the profiles of your best customers. You’re essentially trying to target the qualities and characteristics that are present in your best customers. The idea is that people who are similar to your best customers will respond better to your ads and want your product.
- Choose Where to Put Them — You can program your ads to be placed automatically across all the platforms owned by Meta — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger — or you can choose to have your ads appear on just one of these platforms at a time. You also have the ability to choose exactly where the ads will be placed: on mobile feeds, in Facebook Marketplace, on videos, in the column or side bar, in a user’s Messenger inbox (like LinkedIn inbox ads). It’s up to you.
- Set a Budget — You can choose a daily, weekly, monthly, or campaign lifetime budget for your ads. By giving the system the maximum dollar amount you want to spend and a start and end date for your ads, you are able to have complete control over what you spend.
- Choose a Format — Your ads can appear in the form of photos, videos, or stories. They can also be sent as direct ads in people’s Facebook Messenger (similar to the LinkedIn inbox ads). You can create carousel ads with up to 10 photos. You can create rotating slide shows. There are a lot of possibilities. There’s no perfect format; it really comes down to trying all of the formats that are available, then measuring which formats tend to be most successful for you.
- Test & Monitor Ads — Once they are live, constantly test and measure the impact of your ads. See which ones are performing best and which ones aren’t, then adjust your settings and budget to put more money behind the ones that are performing best. Remove and replace ads that are not performing well at all.
Advertising on YouTube — Outside of Google, YouTube is the top search engine in the world. People love videos. And people love YouTube. All of this makes YouTube a great place to run ads. Businesses large and small have had success with YouTube ads: One survey found that 70% of YouTube viewers are more aware of new brands from watching videos on the platform. Below are a few steps to advertising on YouTube:
- Pick an Objective — Decide if you want your ads to point back to your YouTube channel for more content, or to your website to complete an action of some sort (e.g. download a piece of content, make a purchase, reserve a spot, etc.).
- Define Your Audience — You can choose the geographical region you want your ads to run in. You can also choose demographics, interests, and other key characteristics to ensure your ads are only being shown to the type of people you want to show them to. What’s great about YouTube is that you can show your ads to people who have already watched videos related to your topic. It taps into people’s browsing history to do this. YouTube can also show your ads on videos that reference keywords, topics, and locations related to your ad.
- Set a Budget — As you select your variables and target audience, you will get an estimate of how many views and impressions YouTube expects your ads to get. The cost per view (CPV) will also be given, so you have an idea of what the ads are going to cost you. You can then select your daily budget based on the CPV estimate. You can program your budget for awareness or consideration:
  - Awareness — For awareness, you can use a bidding approach that charges you for every thousand views of your ad.
  - Consideration — For consideration, or to get viewers to fulfill a call to action, you can pay per single view. You can also set up a targeted cost per action or conversion if you want to pay only for the conversions from viewers to engaged visitors to your website or some other site.
- Choose a Location — Your ad on YouTube needs to be in video format. It will either be placed in the menu feed users see when they are surfing the app/website, or it will play before, during, or after a video the user chooses to watch.
Advertising on LinkedIn — LinkedIn has become more and more popular over the years. Advertising on LinkedIn is a great way to build brand awareness and reach Business-to-Business (B2B) prospects. You never want to be too sales-focused in your LinkedIn ads; focus on delivering valuable and educational content in the ads. Use specific keywords and hashtags. The ultimate goal is to get users to enjoy the valuable content you’ve provided in your ads and click on your profile and website to learn more about you. From there, you can follow up and start a dialogue. Some information on setting up LinkedIn ads:
- Define Your Audience — Just like all social media platforms, you can choose a target audience for your ads. Rather than selecting consumer behaviors and interests like you do on Facebook, you build your target audience in the LinkedIn ads platform by selecting people based on the industries they work in and the titles they hold. For example, if you want to reach people responsible for choosing manufacturing partners for aerospace parts, you would select aerospace as your industry and target profiles of people that have job functions related to manufacturing, including quality assurance, engineering design, product management, and so on. You can also sort your audience to reach people by their job titles, such as directors, VPs of operations, engineering, manufacturing, or product development, chief manufacturing officers, and so on.
- Set a Budget — As you select your target audience characteristics, LinkedIn will give you an estimate regarding how your ads will likely perform. It will show you a breakdown of the functions represented by the audience you select, and the projected reach, cost, and frequency of ads over a 30-day period. You can then set your daily or weekly budget accordingly. Going back to the aerospace example, LinkedIn may show you an audience size of 30,000+ people with a function breakdown that shows 70% of your audience working in operations, 23% in engineering, and just 9% in program and product management. These forecasted results give you a glimpse of whom you will be paying to reach, and you can adjust it as needed.
- Choose a Format — The most common ad formats on LinkedIn include single images, carousel images, and videos that create links back to your home page or website. You can choose to have your ad appear in someone’s news feed, in a sidebar, or even in their LinkedIn messages inbox. In a user’s news feed, your ad will look like any other organic post, with the only difference being the word “Promoted” in small type in the corner of the post. You can create LinkedIn posts specially designed for advertising, or you can promote an organic post you already published by clicking the “boost” button and setting up a target audience and budget. This latter option is a good choice when you have an organic post that performed really well — it has proven to resonate with people, so consider “boosting” it.
In-App Advertising — Advertising on apps is another option. People spend a lot of time on various apps. If there’s an app that your target audience uses frequently, it might be worth trying to place an ad on that app. Another good opportunity for in-app advertising is when a special event comes around, like the Olympics. When the Olympics are on, millions of people download and use the NBC app to get full coverage of all the events. Placing ads on the app in a situation like that can be advantageous.
Sponsored Content — Yet another way to advertise involves sponsoring content that is posted on the websites of various publications and magazines that cover your industry. You essentially pay for the opportunity to post a story, article, press release, or any other kind of editorial content on the publication’s website. Cambridge does this a lot with publications like InvestmentNews and ThinkAdvisor — we pay these outlets to run an article we’ve written (the article is usually bylined by one of our executives). The content is then uploaded to the website and tagged as “Sponsored Content.” E-newsletters are another form of sponsored content that allows you to include a piece of content in a newsletter that the publications send out to their subscribers. A couple tips about sponsored content:
- Education > Sales — All of these pieces of sponsored content should be written to educate rather than sell. The goal is to provide value to the reader (who will likely be part of your industry) in hopes that the reader will visit your website to learn more about your company.
- Get the Email List — Often, the publisher will provide the email addresses of readers who clicked through to the paid article. You can then use this email list for future marketing and sales follow-up. Asking for this list adds value to your investment in the sponsored content.
- Quote (P. 211): “Instead of waiting for editors to decide to use your press releases, feature stories, and other editorial content, you can opt to publish it as sponsored content. This is the content that appears in editorial sections of online magazines, e-newsletters, and so on, scattered in between actual editorial articles, and usually with a small tag that says Sponsored. It’s designed to look like a staff article, although it’s actually most often written by a marketing team.”
Sponsoring Third Party Content — Another advertising option involves sponsoring third party content, like webinars, events, and podcasts. We do this a lot at Cambridge. The idea is to sponsor an industry event, webinar, or podcast — “This session is brought to you by Cambridge.” Or “Cambridge is our social media sponsor for tonight’s event.” By sponsoring some kind of industry event or podcast, you typically get to include some of your branding on various pieces of signage, and you get to participate. For example, some of the podcast episodes we sponsor feature one of our executives as a guest. Sponsoring this kind of content helps you get your name out there to people actively involved in your industry. Our third party sponsored content at Cambridge helps us build brand awareness with financial advisors.
Digital Banner Advertising (“Display Ads”) — This method of digital advertising involves placing various types of ads (e.g. banner, pillar, pop-ups, etc.) on popular websites, including ones that cover your industry. Some people call these ads “display ads.” These ads typically have a terrible click-through rate (a great CTR rate for these ads is 2%). But that’s OK — that isn’t what they are meant for. Display ads are primarily meant for building brand awareness with people in your industry. In the industry I work in, these ads are all over the place on websites like InvestmentNews and ThinkAdvisor. Firms across the financial services industry pay to have their display ads appear on these websites, which are often visited by financial advisors. If you’re an e-commerce company, you can use these to advertise discounts and promos (10% off for new customers!) A few tips for display ads:
- Button & Landing Page — Even though CTRs tend to be low with display ads, you should always have some kind of button on them. The button should lead to a specially-created landing page that prompts the user to do something. At Cambridge, our display ads often lead to a landing page containing a form to download a piece of content or a video showing off one of our services. The landing page also includes written testimonials from our advisors, key metrics about the firm, awards we’ve won, and more. This landing page should give a quick snapshot of the firm in addition to prompting the user to enter their contact information in exchange for a piece of content you’re promoting.
  - Quote (P. 214): “Your banner ads should always have a button that clicks directly to your website. For best results, link the button to a special landing page you’ve created to specifically address the topic or offer teased in the banner ad. Sending people to your home page can be confusing, because they’re looking for an article that directly supports the banner ad copy, and if they don’t find it, they’ll likely leave.”
- Retargeting — Retargeting with display ads involves using a fancy piece of code called a “pixel” that allows you to track who has visited your website, follow them to other websites they browse, and show your ads on the websites they are looking at. For example, if someone visits the Cambridge website, the pixel will show our ads to the user on the other websites he looks at. Retargeting is especially useful for e-commerce companies because the pixel can follow visitors who abandoned their shopping cart, serve up ads specific to the abandoned products in their cart, and encourage consumers to come back and finish their transaction. There are several popular retargeting platforms, such as AdRoll, that will automatically retarget your ads to people who visit your website. Leading retargeting platforms will create responsive ads for mobile and desktop, and serve them over hundreds of ad networks, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Instagram.
  - Quote (P. 215): “Retargeting is simply serving your ads up on third-party websites to consumers who recently visited your site. You encode a JavaScript pixel in your website that tracks who came and left, connects with a platform or service that follows the visitor to other sites, and then populates your ad on those sites for that specific viewer.”
Google Display Network — The Google Display Network allows advertisers to serve video and display ads to over 2 million websites, reaching 90% of global Internet users. The network includes mobile apps and YouTube, and is available across all devices. The best campaign to run within the Google Ads Network is called a ‘Display Network Only Campaign,’ where your display ads are shown in/alongside content that is related to your business or your customers’ interests. Below are some display ad sizes that are commonly used:

Print Advertising — Although the world is becoming increasingly digital, you can still get some nice value out of print advertising. Your primary focus as a marketer should be on the digital channels available to you, but below are a few print mediums that you can consider if you have the budget. Back in the day, these were the channels all marketers and advertisers used:
- Local Ads — For small businesses serving local and regional markets, print ads play a big role in establishing your presence in the community. Local newspapers and magazines offer a good opportunity to get your name out in the community, especially with older folks. For independent financial advisors trying to add clients in the local area, this is a useful channel.
- Industry Publications — In almost every industry, there are a handful of magazines, journals, and publications that cover the industry and deliver the latest updates and news. In financial services, InvestmentNews, ThinkAdvisor, WealthManagement are examples. Often, the people who read the monthly magazines these publications put out are prospects for your business. Therefore, purchasing full-page ads, partial page ads, and sponsoring the content in the magazine are solid options. Below are some best practices when running an ad in a magazine (these tips also apply to digital ads).
  - Clean Images — Use high quality images of your product, leaders, or concepts related to your promise or value
  - Clear CTA — Build a clear call to action directing consumers to call, email, go to your website, or register for an event
  - Have an Offer — Make sure there is a reason to go to your website. For example, to download a paper, read case studies, browse product or service details, etc.
  - Include Contact Info — Provide your contact information, including your URL, email address, and phone number
  - Focus on the Benefits — As with all ads, create copy that shows how you can solve a problem or eliminate a pain point
Broadcast Advertising — Broadcast advertising consists of radio and television advertising. These two channels have declined in popularity as people have become increasingly enamored with scrolling social media, streaming shows, playing games, and watching YouTube and TikTok. But they are still effective advertising channels, especially for small local businesses. Because radio and TV ads are played, then disappear, the key with these ads is to be memorable and catchy. You have to find a way to stick in the consumer’s head. Below is some information about radio and television advertising:
- TV — Linear TV advertising involves paying to air a 30-60-second ad during a show, or before or after the show airs. Your cost for each spot depends on the audience reach and time slot of the show. Connected TV advertising involves placing ads on streaming services, like Hulu. These ads play at certain intervals during a show a consumer is watching. Whether you’re pursuing linear or connected TV advertising, it’s worth selecting shows that are in the same genre as your company.
- Radio — Radio continues to decline. The new normal for listening to music is online streaming via platforms like Spotify. Still, for a small business, radio can be a very effective way of getting your name out in the community. If you want to reach bigger, national audiences, consider placing radio-like ads and jingles on Spotify or Pandora.
Chapter Takeaway — There is almost no limit to the number of channels you can use to advertise your company, promote your offerings, and build brand awareness. Consider your options, then begin creating ads. Advertising is an essential piece of every company’s marketing plan.

Ch. 11: Building Individual Value With Mass Personalization

What Is Direct Marketing? — There are two main approaches to marketing: direct marketing and mass marketing. Direct marketing is the process of marketing to your customers individually with personalized messages. Text, email, and postal mail are the primary channels. This is shooting at specific targets — you’re picking specific groups of people that align with your vision and interests, then you’re marketing to them via channels like email, text, and others that allow you to personalize. Thankfully, there is a lot of direct marketing technology, like SalesForce, that can help you do this. Direct marketing should be a core component of your marketing strategy. Mass marketing involves marketing to everybody. You’re just shooting at the hip here. You don’t really care who you’re marketing to; you just want to get your name out to as many people as possible, regardless of their interests. Typically, mass marketing involves TV, radio, and print ads placed in well-read newspapers and magazines. Below are some key features of a direct marketing strategy:
- Strong Database — You need a database of current customers, prospects, and leads
- Customer Segments & Profiles — Within your database, you should have customer segments that outline purchasing preferences, needs, lifestyle, locations, readiness to buy, and so on
- CRM Platform — You need a CRM platform, like SalesForce, to build campaigns, deploy emails, document response, track customer history, manage communications per customer, and document a lead’s engagement through the sales funnel, from start to finish. Make sure you’re tacking data well — a CRM is only as good as the data that goes into it.
- Personalized Messaging — Your CRM and database information will help you build personalized messages that can be sent to customers with relevant offers and calls to action
- A/B Testing — Good direct marketing involves testing to identify the messages, offers, copy, subject lines or envelope teasers, graphics, and so on that drive the most opens, clicks, responses, and, ultimately, sales
- Analytics — Metrics in your CRM system will help you determine not just open rates, which don’t matter if no one buys, but the actual impact of each campaign and customer segment on your company’s short-term and long-term growth
Direct Marketing: Get a CRM System — An essential part of direct marketing is the customer relationship manager (CRM) you use. SalesForce is an example. This system acts as a central hub for your direct marketing efforts. It holds your email list, it allows you to A/B test, it allows you to build personalized email and text campaigns, it tracks analytics on your campaigns, and it helps you segment your audiences based on their characteristics. It also helps you see customer behavior (e.g. transaction volume and history), monitor the number of sales you’re making in all of your different segments, identify follow-up tasks, and much more. Consumers are being bombarded by messaging via email, social media, advertising, text and traditional mail, so it’s necessary to have a CRM that can accommodate all of these touchpoints and give you data about what is resonating with particular client and prospect segments. A CRM is only as good as the data that goes into it, so make sure you’re doing a great job of adding quality, relevant, and current information and data.
- Quote (P. 231): “The essence of direct marketing is gathering and managing customer data centered on individual needs, life cycle, values, transaction history, and more, and then using that data to craft and send highly personal communications that contain a clear call-to-action or offer. The foundation of direct marketing is to organize customers according to the data you gather, build campaigns that appeal to segments of like customers, and then use a solid customer relationship management (CRM) system to fuel ‘personalized’ campaigns sent to many customers at once. Your CRM system will help you document customer transaction volume and value, recency of purchases, tasks for follow-up, and monitor sales among segments, and more, allowing you to identify the customers and groups that represent the most revenue and warrant more of your resources and time.”
- Quote (P. 235): “Setting up a robust CRM platform is an important step for organizing, categorizing, prioritizing, and managing customer data and documenting conversations and engagement. Most systems store key data about customers and monitor their transactions, frequency of purchase, rate of engagement, and overall relationship with your brand, allowing you to communicate with high levels of personalization.”
Direct Marketing: Data Matters — As the author puts it, “data is king when it comes to direct marketing.” In direct marketing, you’re only as good as your database. You need to focus on building a database with detailed information about your customers, prospects, and leads. This will make marketing to them with personalized messages very simple. You can integrate your database into your CRM system and begin building campaigns. Below are some characteristics of a strong database:
- Who Your Customers Are — Things like demographic, generation, ethnic and social groups, and so on
- Where Your Customers Shop — Do they shop online, in-store, direct brand sites, or reseller sites?
- How They Shop for Your Category —The recency and frequency of their purchases, and what offers they respond to most, such as discounts, reward points, or free gifts
- Purchase History — Including products, services, packages, etc.
- Relationship to Company — Are they a prospect, lead, customer, repeat customers, evangelist?
- Channel They Engage With — What do they engage with most? Social media, email, or text, and open rates for each segment.
Direct Marketing: Create Customer Profiles — Because one of the keys to direct marketing involves personalized messaging, it’s important to break your customer base into segments so you can create content that specifically applies to certain groups of people. One way to do this is to create 3-5 “customer profiles.” Each profile will explain the target customer in great detail, including their demographics, interests, motivations, pain points, lifestyle, and more. For example, maybe one of your groups is millennial men who enjoy fitness. Your content for that group will be far different than your content for baby boomers who are in the twilight of their fitness journeys. By creating groups and explaining their lives in great detail, you can create content that resonates with those groups and use it in your direct marketing campaigns.
Direct Marketing: Email Marketing — Email marketing is a sub-strategy within direct marketing, and it is one of the top-performing options you have available to you. Email marketing involves sending personalized, targeted emails to customers in the various customer segments in your database/CRM. Your CRM, like SalesForce of HubSpot, will help you build these campaigns. The beautiful thing about email marketing is that you can see exactly how many people opened it, deleted it, unsubscribed, clicked on your landing page, completed a purchase, etc. This helps you understand what content, subject lines, links, and landing pages are resonating with people. Typically, email marketing involves sending a series of emails over several days or weeks (i.e. a “journey”), with content tailored to each stage of the sales funnel. The goal is to keep the customer engaged along the journey and guide them toward a purchase.
- Quote (P. 246): “Email is one of the most cost-efficient and highest-producing methods of direct marketing, especially among existing customers and warm leads. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better return on any other advertising or communications channel.”
- Quote (P. 248): “Printed direct mail or email needs to be viewed as a series of communications. Although the first piece is designed to get a sale, it typically takes multiple touchpoints to achieve the desired behavior. Creating a series of touchpoints helps you increase your return and conversion rates.”
Direct Marketing: Trigger Emails — Trigger emails are part of email marketing. These are emails that are sent to customers automatically via your CRM after some kind of “triggering” event occurs, like when a person browses your website, adds something to their cart, or displays any other kind of behavior. For e-commerce companies, these trigger emails are very effective at getting people to return to their shopping cart after they’ve added something to it then left the website.
Chapter Takeaway — Direct marketing is similar to picking targets to shoot at: you’re narrowing your audience to people who align with your company’s interests, then sending personalized messages to the group in an effort to guide them toward a purchase. This process is somewhat difficult to execute because it requires a well-kept database, a robust CRM, and lots of content that is tailored to each of your customer segments. Despite the effort involved, direct marketing remains one of the most impactful strategies and should be a foundational part of your marketing plan.

Ch. 12: Building an Engaging and Winning Website

Building a Strong Website — Your website is where all the action is. It’s where you’re constantly trying to direct people via social media, email campaigns, digital ads, etc. Once somebody actually reaches your website, the user experience needs to be nice and there should be a lot of great content waiting for them. Below are some tips for creating a great website that not only performs well but leads to conversions.
- Lead With Clarity & Value — Your very first headline is critical; it needs to communicate the benefits and value that your product offers to the customer. It also needs to inspire curiosity to capture attention and inspire further reading. If you don’t communicate the value you offer right away, there’s a good chance the person will leave. Don’t bury the value you offer to the customer on some other page — state it right away on the home page.
  - Quote (P. 263): “Lead with clarity about your offerings and value. It’s amazing how many times I scroll through a website and leave wondering what the business actually does. A headline that clearly states what you offer and what your offerings mean for customers is a critical element for keeping people on your site.”
- Blast CTAs — Whatever you are trying to get the prospect to do, it should be clearly and prominently featured throughout your website. You should have buttons all over the place. At Cambridge we have a button that follows the user everywhere they go on the site. LPL Financial has a “Connect With Us” button in the header of the website that essentially does the same thing. Your landing pages should also have clear CTAs. If you’re trying to get somebody to fill out a form and download a whitepaper, for example, the CTA should be clear and easy to find.
- Clean Design — The website should be very easy to navigate and read. You have to make it as easy as possible for the user, or they will leave. They will get overloaded if there is too much text on the screen. Be very brief with the copy; use short bullets and big, clear headlines. Try to have a nice amount of white space on the website. You should aim to make the website “scannable.” People simply aren’t going to sit there and read a bunch of text. Bullets are your friend.
  - Quote (P. 257): “One of the most important elements of design is white space. Websites crammed full of copy and photos take too much time and effort to read and understand. Visitors don’t want to have to work that hard to follow your message and discover your offers and value to them. Maintaining white space throughout your site makes it easy for visitors to scan your content and quickly find what they’re there to find.”
- Include Valuable Resources — The content featured on your website should be educational and valuable to the user. Mix it up and use all of the different forms of content and media: podcasts, blogs, checklists, guides, how-to articles, press releases and media mentions, product videos, customer testimonials, leadership statements, case studies. . . use them all! Build a Resource Center to house a lot of the content, although you can also stick some of your best stuff (e.g. customer testimonials) on the homepage.
  - Quote (P. 262): “All brand communication must present something of real and direct value to consumers. Otherwise, they will not stay on your website, browse through your pages, open your emails, and move toward completing a sales transaction.”
- Use Video — Brief videos lasting 30-60 seconds are extremely powerful pieces of content to have on your website. As mentioned throughout this book, people today LOVE video. Most people would prefer to watch a video than read text. Make sure you have videos sprinkled throughout the website on your various pages. Product videos, customer and employee testimonials, videos that show your office culture, leaders speaking about key topics. . . these are all great pieces of content to have on your site.
- Community Forum — People love being part of a community. If possible, build a forum for your website where customers can message about things related to your company. Not only will this give your customers a place to chat, it will allow you to see what people like, and don’t like, about your products and services.
- Focus on the Benefits! — This was mentioned already in the content marketing chapter, and it’s something that many other copywriting and marketing books have also discussed at length. The customer does not care about you. They want to know how your product or service is going to help them live a better life or overcome a pain point. Your website must do a great job of showing how your offerings will do that for them. Focus on benefits and emotion. Try to communicate how the customer will feel when they get that result that they’re after or overcome that pain point that has been plaguing them. Your pictures, videos, and other content should focus on benefits and emotion, not yourself.
  - Quote (P. 262): “Your mission is to assure your website uses words and images that relate to the customer’s needs, not yours. Showing a photo of your product in its packaging is not as compelling as showing the joy someone might receive from the product or service you offer.”
- Have a Company Page — Although most consumers care more about themselves than your company, it’s nonetheless important to include an ‘About Us’ company page. This is where you can talk about your company’s background, values, mission, etc. On all other pages, keep the focus on the benefits of your offer and how they can help the consumer.
- Present Your Leadership Team — Have a page specifically dedicated to showing off your executive or senior leadership team. This could be a sub-page of your ‘About Us’ section. People want to know who is in charge. Give customers and prospects a page where they can view headshots and bios of your leaders to get a sense for who is running the ship.
- Build a Social Responsibility Page — Today’s consumers care how a company is making an impact beyond business. Create a page, or pages, dedicated to showing off your community and social responsibility efforts. LPL Financial, for example, has several of these pages under the ‘About LPL’ section of their website. Going to About LPL > Social Responsibility leads to several sub-pages focused on DEI, Environmental Sustainability, Community Involvement, and more.
- Consider Chat Functionality — More and more businesses are adding customer service chat capabilities to their websites. These chats, whether powered by employees or AI bots, give customers and prospects instant access to support without having to email or find a phone number to call. Chat functionality is very convenient for people who visit your website and is worth considering.
Chapter Takeaway — When people reach your website, they are only a few clicks away from converting. This is why your website needs to be very easy to navigate and interact with. The keys discussed in this chapter can help you do that.

Ch. 13: Succeeding With Affordable SEO Strategies and Tactics

What Is SEO? — SEO is the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic search results. Think of search engines, like Google, as libraries that, rather than books, store copies of websites and web pages. When you search for something, the search engine will look through the library for the best results that match the user’s search. SEO is the practice of trying to get the search engine to consider your content as the best match for certain searches, which leads to your website and landing pages appearing toward the top of the search engine results pages (SERP). Use a website like SEMrush to “spy” on your competitors and find out the keywords they are using. There are two main approaches to SEO:
- Organic SEO — This refers to using keywords and links to push your rankings higher on the SERP. In other words, you’re not paying to rank higher — you’re trying to rank higher using no-cost tactics. No matter how good your organic SEO execution is, you’ll never rank above websites that are using paid search.
- Paid SEO (“Paid Search” or “PPC”) — This refers to Google Ads campaigns (text campaigns). With this method, you pay Google to rank your website and landing pages at the top of the SERP when certain keywords are entered by the user. You are then charged every time somebody clicks your link (i.e. “pay-per-click” or PPC). Although this method is guaranteed to put you at or near the top of the page for certain keywords you select, it often backfires because people don’t trust “sponsored” ads like these and skip over them.
SEO Key No. 1: Keywords — Keywords are words and phrases people type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. Keywords are very, very important for SEO. The whole goal of SEO is to rank your website and pages for certain keywords that your audience and customers are searching for. If you’re ranking high for keywords that don’t have a lot of volume, your SEO work is pointless. You want to be ranking high on keywords that your audience is searching for a lot. How do you do this? Keyword research. Go through the following steps as you do your keyword research:
- Search Demand — Does the keyword(s) you want to rank for get a lot of search volume? Look at the volume of monthly searches made for a certain keyword. You can find search volume for a keyword by using a keyword research tool, like the one Moz or ahrefs has. For example “kilometers to miles” gets 478,000 searches per month in the U.S. But search volume alone can be misleading — 86% of those 478,000 monthly searches don’t click on any pages after they’ve searched. This is because Google has a handy calculator at the top of the page after this phrase gets searched. So search volume is a bit misleading and shouldn’t be the only thing you consider in your research.
- Traffic Potential of Topic — The way you determine traffic potential is by looking at the traffic the top-ranking pages are getting. You do this by using a free SERP tool (like ahrefs) to look at the top 10 pages ranking the highest for certain keywords. This will tell you the total traffic these pages are getting, as well as the number of different keywords those pages are ranking for. If these top pages are getting a lot of volume and ranking for a lot of keywords, it tells you that topic has a lot of search traffic potential.
- Assess the Business Potential of Topic — This is the value a keyword has to your business. The best way to assess this is to assign a value of 1, 2, or 3 to the keywords you’re considering. The higher the number, the more important it is to your business. For example, if you’re selling golf clubs, the keyword “buy golf clubs” signals that the searcher is interested in buying. This would get a 3. A keyword like “best golf clubs” would get a 2 because it signals that the searcher is interested in buying but wants to do some research first. Ranking for this keyword would be beneficial. A keyword like “what is a handicap in golf?” is still decent, but it’s definitely not as good. You can still find ways to create blog posts about this topic and plug your products, but it’s not as strong as the others — it would get a 1. Any keyword that you score a 0 is not worth pursuing. An example would be “Happy Gilmore review.”
- Match Search Intent — You can easily tell what the search intent is for any keyword. All you have to do is Google the keyword. If e-commerce pages that are selling the product are the dominate pages, Google has determined that search intent for that keyword is to buy. If the primary pages are blog posts or articles, it tells you that the search intent for the keyword is to learn more info. To have any chance of ranking for a keyword, you have to match the search intent. Otherwise, you just won’t rank.
- Rank Difficulty — If it’s going to be really hard to rank for a keyword, it may not be worth trying that one
- Assess — After you’ve gone through the above steps, you have to assess and decide if you’re going to try to rank for a certain keyword or keywords. Ask yourself: “Does the topic drive enough traffic and have enough business value for us to make it worth the effort?” If so, create pages for these keywords and try to rank. If not, move on to others.
SEO Key No. 2: Links — When your website is linked by other websites, it gives you credibility. The Google algorithm that searches, indexes, and ranks pages likes when there are credible links to your website and pages. The algorithm wants to give the user the answer they’re looking for. A website that is linked a lot by other websites is likely more useful and credible than a website that isn’t being linked by anyone. One helpful tip here is to link to your own pages when writing content for your website. For example, if you’re writing a blog post for your website, link to other parts of your website in the blog post.
SEO Key No. 3: Tags & Meta Descriptions — It’s good to try to include important keywords in your meta description and title tags. You can manage both of these for all of your pages using the backend of your content management software (e.g. WordPress). By having keywords in these spots, you will help your organic search results because the keywords will be displayed on the SERP, which is the webpage that shows all of the website results after you Google something. More information on these:
- Title Tag — After the main body copy, title tags are the single most important on-page element to get right. They are the first part of the listing that a user sees after they run a search, and search engines pay close attention to the words that are provided. This in turn influences how well your webpage will rank. Ideally, your title tag will work in your top keywords and include a line pillar followed by the name of your company (i.e. Build Your Business, Your Way | Cambridge Investment Research, Inc.)
- Meta Description — Meta descriptions are the short piece of descriptive text that you see under the title tag in a SERP. Meta descriptions are important for on-page optimization, but they’re not actually a direct ranking factor. Including keywords in your meta-description won’t have a direct impact like title tags do, but it will influence whether someone’s going to click on your listing. Above everything, meta descriptions should be punchy, informative, and build curiosity! A user will read this section and decide if they want to click on the page.
Leveraging Google Ads — The Google Ads platform is one of the best for all kinds of advertising and for pushing your website and landing pages to the top of a SERP. Below are some of the different things you can do with Google Ads:
- Text Ads — This is the most common format that consists of a text block that includes your URL. These are the “Ad” results at the top of a SERP when you search for a certain product. It is paid search at its finest.
- Image Ads — This format allows you to include an image in your ad and appears on Google’s display network, which consists of over two million websites that reach more than 90% of internet users worldwide.
- Display Ads — These are ads with images that look like banner ads and are served throughout Google’s Display network. A previous chapter in this book covered display ads.
- Responsive Ads — These are ads that automatically resize to fit the devices upon which they are being used. Google will rotate headlines and copy you provide to create various ad combinations of your content. This is why we create a bunch of different titles and descriptions in our Cambridge recruiting campaigns. We use this Responsive Ads option within Google Ads. These ads require a bunch of different headlines and descriptions so they can create dynamic ads that are never the exact same.

Google Ads: Setting Up a Campaign — How do you set up a Google Ads campaign? It’s pretty easy, but you need to have a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish before you set up the campaign. You also need to have your keywords and copy ready to go. Below are the steps to setting up a typical search/text campaign:
- Provide Keywords — Your keywords are one of the first things Google Ads will ask for. Have these handy. Again, your keywords should match the search query terms associated with your product, service, industry, and business.
- Establish Cost-Per-Click — When somebody clicks on your link at the top of the SERP, you will be charged for that click. The campaign will ask you how much you’re willing to pay for that click. This is your bid. Once you establish your bid, Google will not serve up your ads to more people than the cost of your budget allows. If you set up a $10 daily limit, for example, Google will serve up your ad until you’ve collected $10-worth of clicks.
- Set Your Location — For most businesses, you only want to show ads to people in your area. This setting will allow you to do that. Maybe you’re a big business and want to target a certain region of the country. This setting will help you do that. Your ads will be shown to people in the area you choose.
- Choose Your Audience Segments — Google Ads will allow you to choose segments within the broader target audience that you have selected. For example, if you sell marketing software products, you can choose audiences looking for marketing software. You can also select a cost-per-click for each audience segment.
- Write Headlines — You will be asked to create 15 headlines of 30 characters each, which Google will rotate randomly with the descriptions you create. The key here is to do great keyword research and use your chosen keywords as much as possible. In a nutshell, you’re trying to match your headlines and descriptions with keywords and phrases that your prospects are searching for. Below are some good headline examples:
  - Top handcrafted log furniture
  - Best Colorado log furniture
  - Handcrafted log beds all sizes
  - Log furniture Colorado-style
- Write Descriptions — After writing your headlines, you will be asked to write four description blocks of 90 characters each. You want to include phrases and keywords that your prospects are searching for. Google will randomly match your headlines with your descriptions to create multiple ads for your campaign. Be as detailed as possible about what makes your product or service stand out. Below are some good examples:
  - Top-selling handmade log beds, tables, dining sets at best-in-Breckenridge prices
  - One-of-a-kind handcrafted log furniture for every room in downtown Breckenridge, CO
- Assess Results — After you’ve launched your campaign, assess the performance of your ads. You can remove the ones that aren’t working and put more money behind the ones that are. You can change the dollar amount of your bids and daily budgets at any time.
Google Ads Keyword Planner — The Google Ads Keyword Planner tool is great to use when doing keyword research for paid campaigns. It allows you to search keywords, and related keywords, to see the search volume per month and other trends. It also shows bid estimates for every keyword. You can use this tool to help with keyword research for both organic SEO and paid search campaigns.
Chapter Takeaway — Organic SEO and paid search (i.e. Google Ads) are two ways you can help your website rank higher in Google search page results. The key to both of these strategies is keyword research. Take the time to investigate the keywords and phrases that your prospects are entering into the Google search bar, then create content, ads, title tags, headlines, and descriptions that align with those inputs.

Ch. 14: Leveraging Networks and Events

The Power of Referrals — People will always trust the word of their peers more than a company. This is why one of the most powerful forms of marketing is consumer-to-consumer marketing, which is another way to say referrals. Referrals are a testament to the quality and overall experience you deliver. When your customers are referring you to people in their lives, they feel so strongly about you that they are willing to put their own credibility on the line. Referrals are a great way to grow your business, and many of Cambridge’s independent financial advisors use this as their primary marketing strategy. In addition to customers referring you on their own, you can ask them to refer you and offer incentives like discounts, cash rewards, and free gifts for doing so.
The Power of Events — At the end of the day, we are social creatures. We want to get out there that talk face-to-face with people who share our interests, values, and mission. And because effective marketing today is about creating great experiences, hosting your own events is key to building relationships with customers and prospects. Events should be part of any marketing plan. Not only do they allow your customers to connect, they give prospects and people in the community a chance to see what you are all about. Here are a few event ideas:
- Annual Conference — At Cambridge, it’s Cambridge Ignite. At LPL Financial, it’s LPL Focus. If you are a fairly big company with the money and resources to do it, you should host a national conference where you share thought leadership, updates on the company, keynote speakers, networking sessions, etc. The key, as always with any form of marketing, is to provide value to the consumer. Make the event educational and fun. Make sure there are great takeaways for the attendees. If you can raise money for a charity during the conference, like we do at Cambridge Ignite, even better.
- Community Fundraisers — Find a local charity or nonprofit and create a fundraising event to raise money and support for it. Get your customers and employees involved. This is a powerful way to create emotional bonds and friendships with people in the community. A construction company in Colorado, for example, hosts an annual kickball tournament where they bring businesses and community members together to raise money for local charities.
- Educational Workshops — At Cambridge, we host events throughout the year, like Advisory Summit and Retirement Plan Summit, that are designed to educate the advisors we serve. These are typically 2-3-day events that offer a lot of value for advisors trying to grow their business. For a small business, you could host your own workshop or seminar and invite people in the community to check it out. By collecting contact information during registration, you can grow your database and email list. People who attend these workshops and seminars are high-quality leads because they are clearly interested in what you’re talking about.
- Sponsorships — For small businesses, such as a financial advisor’s practice, sponsoring local opportunities can be a strategic way to build brand awareness and connect with the community. For example, sponsoring the local high school baseball team not only gets your name out there but also shows your support for local youth and community development.
Chapter Takeaway — Events are a great way to bring customers and prospects together while getting your name out in the community. As with all marketing, the key is to make sure you’re delivering a great overall experience and providing a lot of value.

Ch. 16: Prospecting and Selling for ROI

Customer Retention & Lifetime Value — Generally, it costs a lot more money to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing ones. A report by Harvard Business School showed that even a 5% increase in customer retention can generate a 25-95% increase in profits. It’s worth putting in the extra effort to turn every customer into a lifetime customer. Over time, lifetime customers will prove to be one of your best tools for keeping costs down, allowing you to put more money toward growing the business in other ways. For B2B companies, it’s especially important because losing one big customer can lead to huge losses in revenue. Focus on ways you can retain customers once you get them!
- Quote (P. 341): “Retaining customers is far cheaper than acquiring new customers and can grow your business faster than almost any other activity. Various studies show that it costs five times more to acquire customers than to retain them, and a 2% increase in retention is akin to a 10% decrease in operating costs.”
- Quote (P. 344): “You need to sell and nurture sales with the goal of capturing lifetime value at all times. So you need to think of a completed sale as the beginning of a relationship-building process. More sales calls, further presentations, and efforts to find new ways to serve the customer can help you retain and grow the account.”
Customer Loyalty Programs — What are some ways you can retain customers? One way involves incentives and loyalty programs. For example, Chipotle has a loyalty program where customers can earn redeemable points with each visit and build up to a free burrito. Understanding the value of retaining customers, many companies now have these type of incentive and loyalty programs in place. Other ways to encourage loyalty include excellent customer service and offering value (e.g. workshops, webinars, events, etc.) in as many ways as possible.
- Quote (P. 342): “Loyalty programs for consumers most often involve points they can redeem for discounts or goods. Successful programs allow consumers to choose how they want to be rewarded and give them options for using the points they’ve earned.”
The Power of a Free Trial — When it comes to acquiring new customers, sometimes the hardest part is getting the prospect to take a leap of faith. A proven method that works well in both B2B and B2C sales is to give prospects a free trial. Many people like free trials and don’t cancel free accounts when they expire, so that “free” trial often results in revenue. Most important, It takes the fear out of making a commitment that’s hard to cancel and makes the initial purchase easier.

Mack's Book Notes

Mack's Book Notes

Mack's Book Notes