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We specialise in implementing the world’s most effective sales, marketing and business growth solutions to increase your sales, attract new customers, and dramatically increase your profits.

Check out our blog below for examples of leading-edge strategies that we can help you apply to accelerate your business growth…
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Consultant
How well does your copy sell?
Being able to communicate effectively to customers and prospects in writing is a vital skill for any business. The more effective your copywriting, the better your business will be at conveying benefits to the minds of your customers and prospects, and the more sales you will make.
It’s important to realise that people buy for emotional benefits, i.e. to avoid pain and/or to increase happiness. Logical linking between your product or service and the emotional benefit enables people to justify the purchase decision, but the decision itself will be largely determined by how well they perceive you to be able to you meet their emotional requirements. And, generally-speaking, the avoidance of pain is the greatest motivator.
Even professional copywriters can find it hard to write good copy for themselves. But the good news is that it’s like any other skill – anyone can learn the core fundamentals…
5 KEY PRINCIPLES
Here are the 5 key principles to writing great copy in any form (web pages, emails, letters, brochures, ads, etc):
AIDA Step #1 – ATTENTION – Headline
People are bombarded by information. Your words need to stand out from the crowd. This is normally done in the form of a headline; this is the top line in an ad, the first words in a letter, the subject line of an email, the first thing seen by visitors when visitors come to your website, etc.
The goal of the headline is to grab the reader’s attention and ensure that they read the rest of the copy.
AIDA Step #2 – INTEREST – Main Body of Text
Once you have someone’s interest, you then need to create an interest in what you have to offer. This involves stepping into the shoes of your potential customer or prospect and coming up with copy that communicates how your product or service will benefit them.
AIDA Step #3 – DESIRE – Your Offer & its Benefits
The next step involves taking the initial interest and converting it into a strong desire for you have to offer. You need to explicitly state how you or your product/service will impact their lives.
Imagine you are reading the copy as a potential customer for the first time. How does it make you feel? Is it just interesting, or does it create a strong desire?
Test your copy with others before you let it loose on the world. Value their feedback. Unless you have thousands to spend on market research, take advantage of family, friends and colleagues.
AIDA Step #4 – ACTION – The Close
Desire alone is not enough. Many of us read brochures, letters and ads and plan to follow through with a purchase, but never get around to it. Your copy must end with a direct call-to-action (CTA). Tell your customer precisely what to do (e.g. click here to register, call us now on xyz, email us today, etc) and ask them to do it NOW.
SPLIT-TEST & OPTIMISE
Finally, recognise that Copy is a marketing element that’s to be tested, measured and optimised for best performance just like any other marketing element.
You’ll want to split-test, where you test two versions, changing ONE thing at a time (headline, main body of text, offer & benefits, CTA, layout, etc), to determine which converts the most sales.
Whatever works best becomes your control version, and you then work to create another version to outperform it. And you keep doing this until you can’t improve it any further – this process can double or even triple your conversion rates.
Follow these copywriting top tips and you’ll be amazed at the compelling copy that you can create.
Otherwise, hire a great copywriter but still test and optimise for best sales results.
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Expert
P.S. Click Here To Email To Arrange Your Free Business Growth Consultation
Nov 12
28
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, particularly Google PPC, is the most important breakthrough in online marketing so far. It is an extraordinary tool that has produced more millionaire entrepreneurs than any other method. However, not everybody who advertises on Google Adwords has this kind of success because they don’t know how to do it properly. Like with all marketing methods, there’s an art and science to it.
Now, you can do well at Google PPC without really knowing what you’re doing… but if you’re willing to master it at a more advanced level, your rewards will be immense.
WHY USE GOOGLE PPC?
1. Unprecedented Targeting – Until PPC came along, we had to chase customers. PPC instead brings the customers to you.
2. Global or Local Ads – Size and location of business is irrelevant. We can set ads to reach a global audience, reach a specific country audience, or even reach an audience within a geographic radius of a postcode. This makes suitable for small, local or huge, global businesses alike.
3. Attraction Marketing – Customers come to you. It’s a different psychology to going out there to convince how good you are rather than people coming to you.
4. Accurate Results Measurement – Google Adwords was built as a testing system. This means you can quickly determine whether something is working for you or not.
5. Fast Results – You can make a change today and see impact on results within a couple of hours, or worst case, a couple of days.
6. Predictable - If you can get a couple of hundred people to come to your site from PPC ads and spend money, we can predict that if a couple of thousand people to come to your site, that will also make you money.
7. Scalable - If you can make it work on a small scale, then you can roll it out very quickly on a much large scaler by simply increasing your daily PPC budget. If you are global or have the opportunity to be, what’s working in your country will likely work well in others.
8. Rapid, Profitable Improvements – This isn’t seen in any other form of marketing where implementing it produces such dramatic improvements so quickly. You can test an ad or landing page today and see difference in response rate tomorrow.
9. Rewards You for Better Ad Performance – Google Adwords rewards marketers in an unprecedented way, where the better you ads perform in getting click-throughs, the lower your cost-per-click (CPC) but the more traffic you get. If you have existing Google Adwords campaigns, it’s very possible to both double your traffic AND halve your costs through split-testing and optimizing.
10. No Staff – Adwords can work as your sales team. It’s an incredible automated tool. When you automate AdWords and have your landing page, email system and auto-responder automated, you can scale a business considerably without any human involvement. This can easily bring you thousands of customers every week on autopilot once set up.
For all these reasons, we recommend you start with Google PPC Advertising to acquire new customers and grow your online sales. Once things are optimized and working profitably with Google PPC, you’ll be in a position to easily succeed with other forms of online marketing like banner ads and SEO.
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Expert
P.S. Click Here To Email To Arrange Your Free Business Growth Consultation
The top 1% of businesses tap into their customer goldmine and sell to their customers over and over again. This enables them to maximise the average lifetime value of their customers and also maximise the return on their marketing and advertising spend to get the customers in the first place.
Getting your existing customers to buy more often is just as important as getting new customers. And the first place to start is with your existing, active customers – this represents your lowest hanging fruit because it’s 30-50x easier to sell to existing customers than new prospects.
Here are the top 3 ways to achieve this, starting with the simplest… communciate more often with your active customers.
1. INCREASE FREQUENCY OF EMAIL COMMUNICATIONS
Most businesses do not contact their customers often enough. So one of the easiest and fastest ways to increase your sales is to increase your communications with customers.
Increased Communication = Increased Sales
Are you emailing your customers at least once, preferably twice, a week? If not, you’re leaving sales and profits on the table.
2. TREAT YOUR TOP 20% OF CUSTOMERS EXTREMELY WELL
The 80/20 (Pareto) principle should drive customer relationships, i.e. 80% profits come from 20% customers. Not all customers are equal.
Review your customer list to identify your top 20% and 1% of customers, then segment and treat these extraordinarily well.
Test the impact of using different forms of media to reach your best customers, e.g. direct mail, postcard, telephone, meetings, etc.
The top 5% of customers can be 10x more financially important to you than the rest. Innovate and test ways to treat this segment like VIPs. Create high-end products and services for this critical group.
3. CONTINUALLY DEVELOP YOUR BACK-END PRODUCTS & SERVICES
These are the additional products and services you offer to customers after the first sale and over the lifetime of your customer – it ties in well with the above.
It doesn’t have to be all your own products either. You can also use joint-venture marketing to work with other, complementary businesses as part of this.
For example, if you’re a hairdresser, you could offer massages, manicures, pedicures, spa treatments, tanning, etc from other businesses to your existing customers and receive a % of every sale made, which will be pure profit for you. This is a good way to build your back-end products with minimum time and effort, add increased value to your customers, and grow your sales & profits, all at the same time.
Two questions to ask yourself about your business:
Apply the above strategies, remembering to test, measure and optimise like any other form of direct response marketing, and you’ll tap into your customer goldmine to increase your sales and profits.
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Expert
P.S. Click Here To Email To Arrange Your Free Business Growth Consultation
A lot of people make internet marketing tougher than it needs to be. This is the simple yet powerful formula to use to drive your online marketing efforts:
SALES = TRAFFIC X CONVERSION
Everything you do online needs to be about:
Most people focus on just the first part. Instead, use a DUAL APPROACH for maximum success.
Here’s an example that demonstrates the impact of this dual approach…
Now if you do this every few months, increasing traffic by 50% and conversion by 50%, you’ll get huge increases in your online sales.
So how do you actually achieve this? Use the magic 3 step success process below, testing and optimising each part.
3 STEP SUCCESS PROCESS
Now compare this with the process that 99% of business owners follow, which doesn’t work out financially:
Only <1% people will buy from you immediately, so this old-style of online selling no longer works.
Instead, the 3 step success process is a 180 degree shift in marketing thinking and works like magic.
Why does it work so well?
Because it’s a natural fit between process and how most people use the internet. Less than 1% of someone’s time online is actually used for buying things, so the chance of them spending money immediately is minimal. Most of the time, they are using the internet to gather information. So, by providing them with valuable, relevant information in return for their email address, you’re meeting them where they are.
Now let’s look at each step in more detail…
STEP 1 – Attract HIGHLY-QUALIFIED PROSPECTS to your website.
There are hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your website in both free and paid categories, but not all are created equal. The key is HIGHLY-QUALIFIED TRAFFIC and it’s the PAID methods that will bring you this, so focus most of your time and efforts on these.
GOOGLE PPC is the recommended traffic method to start with because it brings you the most highly-qualified traffic out of all the methods available. Then, work on several traffic methods at the same time, using the best elements from your Google PPC campaigns (headlines, ads, etc) to bring you a growing source of highly-targeted traffic.
Here’s an overview of the best, proven traffic methods to use:
1. Google PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Ads
2. Facebook PPC Ads (B2C) / LinkedIn PPC Ads (B2B)
3. Display/Banner Ads
4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
5. Social Media
6. Integrate Online Marketing with Traditional Ads & Marketing
7. Email Marketing
8. PR
9. Affiliate Programs
STEP 2 – Use PERMISSION-BASED MARKETING to begin a relationship.
This simply means offering something of real value to people in exchange for their permission and contact details (name & email address) to begin a relationship with them.
Examples of what you can offer visitors to begin the relationship:
Here are a few great examples of businesses doing this:
Don’t underestimate the power of this. Because most people don’t buy from you immediately, they expect you to try to sell to them. If you don’t even try to sell to them, it makes you more appealing to the visitor. It works a bit like reverse psychology. Even if you’re an eCommerce store, you still want to build this process in.
Once you decide what you will offer your visitors, start with offering it in return for just their NAME and EMAIL ADDRESS. Then, if appropriate, test adding more information capture fields and see the impact on sales. The more value you offer to begin the relationship, the more info you can ask for to qualify them as a potential customer.
There’s a trade-off here in that the more info a visitor gives you, the more qualified and the hotter the leads, but the more info your request, the lower the opt-in conversion. In B2B, the tendency is to go for more info and focus on only high-quality leads. So, just like with any other method of marketing, you want to test this over time to find what works best for your business.
Another key point is that the COPY is important – You must work just as hard and smart to sell something free as something paid for. This is because you’re still asking of something for people. So make it enticing. Include bullet points of the key benefits. Test impact on conversion of adding video.
STEP 3 – Use EMAIL MARKETING to secure the sale.
We spend most of time in online marketing talking about websites. But, most selling doesn’t actually happen on website. The real selling happens by email.
Email is still the real killer app of online marketing – this is where the majority of sales actually take place online.
Why? Because when a prospect comes to your website, your window of opportunity to convert them to a customer is between 10s to a few minutes. If they’re willing to give email address, window of opportunity jumps to weeks, months and even years.
Use an AUTO-RESPONDER to do this…
Here’s a typical auto-responder email sequence:
This ongoing email communication builds relationship and greatly increases the chance of sales taking place.
And, once the system is set up, it can run on auto-pilot to help you automate lead generation and sales for weeks, months and even years.
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Expert
P.S. Click Here To Email To Arrange Your Free Business Growth Consultation
A lot of businesses live in a poverty mentality where they always want and expect customers for free. It’s great to get new customers for free when it happens, such as by word-of-mouth, but extraordinary businesses are made by being willing to buy new customers.
So, to build a world-class business, this is a key question you want to ask every day:
HOW CAN I BUY MORE CUSTOMERS?
Most businesses come up with a marketing budget, but that concept is flawed. This is because, if you have tested and measured your marketing, then you know how much it costs to get each new customer.
E.g. Hairdresser – 1. Costs £75 overall to acquire each new customer. 2. On average, each customer stays a couple of years and spends about £700.
If you know these two values, then why limit yourself with a marketing budget? Instead, you want to continually invest in buying more customers.
You want to get to the point where:
So how do you reach this point? These are the steps…
1. CALCULATE THE TRUE, LIFETIME VALUE OF YOUR CUSTOMERS.
E.g. Going back to the hairdresser example earlier – Each customer worth £700 on average over their lifetime.
2. TEST & MEASURE A MARKETING METHOD.
3. OPTIMISE THE MARKETING METHOD, OR DROP IT.
For most businesses, it’s a very smart marketing strategy to be willing to
BREAK-EVEN ON FIRST SALE.
Always remember that the real wealth is in your long-term relationship with the customer, through having a strong back-end of products and services that bring you repeat sales and profits over their lifetime.
Have a relentless focus on buying new customers and you’ll find your business reaches a whole new level, regardless of where it is now.
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Expert
P.S. Click Here To Email To Arrange Your Free Business Growth Consultation
If not, don’t worry, most people don’t. But you will understand the differences shortly and why direct response marketing is fundamental to your business growth.
BRAND MARKETING
This works to promote and push a brand. It works by creating ads that change your state of mind. Then, once in that altered state, companies hit you with their brand. This uses a psychological technique called anchoring. Examples include McDonald’s, Weetabix, Haribo, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Honda, etc – just think of all the brands that appear on TV.
To succeed with this form of advertising, you need millions of pounds. For companies like the above, it’s vital to their marketing success. But, for most SMBs, it just doesn’t work
DIRECT RESPONSE MARKETING
This form of advertising produces a response and it must be a MEASURABLE RESPONSE.
It costs a certain amount to implement (e.g. run a print ad) and it gets you a certain number of leads (e.g. calls, emails, web visits) or sales.
If the ad breaks-even or makes you money on the first go, you keep it and optimise it through split-testing to maximise the response rate and ROI. If it loses you money, you drop it.
So, direct response marketing enables you to test, measure and improve your marketing. Since marketing drives your sales, it gives you increased control over your sales and profits
The great news is that all good direct response marketing is also good brand marketing, so you’ll automatically build your brand awareness and value doing so.
Be a DIRECT RESPONSE MARKETER.
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Expert
P.S. Click Here To Email To Arrange Your Free Business Growth Consultation
TWO THINGS TO TEST
There are two main things to test in marketing:
Many businesses do not even test the method. A few will test the method but not then go on to test elements within the method, and tend to give up after doing the first part.
To test the actual marketing method, choose a piece of marketing, e.g. Google PPC, and if it kind of works, i.e. it has a heartbeat to it and brings in some kind of response, go to step 2 and test elements within the method to improve it. This can radically improve your results.
USE SMART TESTING
Remember to use smart testing – Never spend money on marketing that you aren’t willing to lose. Test across multiple marketing methods and always begin small each time.
You can always improve response rate, and your sales and profits, by testing and optimizing your marketing. This works to give you a higher ROI and increases the value of your business. It also helps you to insulate your business from external shocks by getting your marketing pillars strong.
MEASURE RESPONSE
For testing to work, you must MEASURE RESPONSE. Little point innovating to improve something if you can’t quantify the impact the change is having. If you don’t measure, you can’t answer the question: Is it working or not working to improve business?
For example, if using ads and sending people to a website, send people to a different page for every single ad – best to use separate URLs.
If using ads to generate telephone enquiries, use a separate telephone number for each ad. A simple, cost-effective way to do this is with 0800 numbers routing to your existing landline (each tel number costs about £4.99 a month and 0800 encourages higher call-through rates as freephone).
BE WILLING TO FAIL TO DETERMINE WHAT WORKS BEST
If you test 12 methods, 4 won’t work at all, 4-6 will do ok, but 2-4 will be stunning successes.
It’s the stunning successes that make the upside of testing so huge – they can bring you business in a predictable, measurable and scalable way for years to come.
Do more of what works best and eliminate what doesn’t – it’s a continual process of quantified and orchestrated improvement.
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Expert
P.S. Click Here To Email To Arrange Your Free Business Growth Consultation
Kelly Ritchie, Co-Founder of SalesPartners Worldwide and facilitator of the Always Start Big workshop, shares a story about how powerful the words “Thank You” are in business.
Sales increased by 32% from just this one change…
Many businesses rely on just 1 or 2 ways to bring in new customers. For example, referrals, ads, direct mail, SEO, etc.
The problem with this is that it’s very risky for your business. Supposing one of your top ways stops working, e.g. Google changes their algorithm so your site moves from Page 1 to Page 10 in Google search results, and stops delivering anywhere near the number of new customers it was before. What would the impact be on your sales & profits? How long would it take you to recover?
To avoid this, to protect your business from such events, and to insulate your business from any recession, you must use MULTIPLE MARKETING METHODS..
You want to have 6 TO 10 MARKETING PILLARS in place supporting your business and do this as soon as you can.
Once in pace, this will solve your sales and marketing problems of never having enough customers, and eliminate the associated worry and frustration. It’ll also increase the value of your business as it demonstrates expansion potential and longevity of revenues.
Examples of marketing methods you can use:
To benefit from multiple marketing approaches, you must:
Take the time to learn and implement one new marketing method at a time to build your 6 to 10 strong marketing pillars. This will sustain your business for years to come and protect it against events beyond your control.
Best Wishes
David Parker
Leading Marketing & Business Growth Expert
P.S. Click Here To Email To Arrange Your Free Business Growth Consultation