It is incredibly easy to add a facebook Like button to your website with a new free bit of script available from a facebook developer. This has enormous potential to help market your site to all the millions of facebook members who might be interested in what you offer! And it is REALLY SIMPLE TO DO!

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Did you mess up again?

Have you ever thought about the marketing value of knowing the mistakes you have made in the past? I am here to tell you that learning about your mistakes is a gold mine  of marketing wealth. Most of us would like to think that we are providing good services to everyone who takes a chance on using our businesses.  Unfortunately, this is rarely true for absolutely everyone who patronizes our businesses.

If you are competent and have a pleasant disposition, odds are that you are able to meet the needs of the vast majority of your clients. However, none of us are one hundred percent successful and the gold is found in understanding what caused us to lose clients. Somewhere, your marketing and customer service systems failed you and more than likely it will happen again unless you address it.

The real problem here is studies have shown that up to 96 percent of people who experience a bad interaction with your business will never spontaneously complain to you. Why is it a bad thing you don’t have to deal with their complaints?  Because they just leave and never come back!  Despite the fact that they don’t complain to you, they will be more than happy to tell everyone they know to stay away from your business.

Typically for every complaint you hear about, about 25 others are unhappy with you and don’t bother to tell you. Again, they just leave!  If that isn’t enough to motivate you, realize that up to 95  percent of them would have continued to patronize your business if you had resolved the problem quickly.

In today’s economy setting up a system to track client feedback about your business may be the most cost effective marketing task you will ever accomplish. It really isn’t that hard to do. First you need to have a system to track who patronizes your business and how often. Second you must have their contact information. Finally, you must develop a system to actively solicit their feedback about the experience with your business. Of course there are a lot more details to put all this together, but the  overall system is that easy. The vast majority of business never bother to set it up!

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It's no secret to anyone breathing that in the US we are in the worst financial crisis of most of our lifetimes. If you are worried about your business you are certainly not alone! The next few days bring great uncertainty about what the governernment is going to do to try and help. Will they bail out the banks, or will the hard line republicans win out and nothing will be done immediately? Who knows! What is clear is that the vast majority of Americans are very unhappy with the situation and not keen on sinking billions of dollars into saving an industry known for greed.

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The Washington Post last week had an article by Stephen Perlstein which compared the recent collapse of major financial institutions to a category 4 financial storm.  It is quite an eye opening article and clearly points out the dangers of our current situation. He described it as perhaps the greatest destruction of financial wealth the world has ever seen! The most important part of the collapse we are seeing on small businesses will be the inability to obtain credit and loans and the loss of customers who are becoming ever more tight with their budgets.

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I used a direct marketing mailing approach to solve a very big business problem for me many years ago. I didn’t even know what  the term direct marketing was at that time, but as a business person I understood how it worked intuitively. More importantly, I knew I needed to do something quick and a direct mailing approach seemed to me the best way to reach the people I needed to respond.  From one letter I obtained clients that paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars over the following years.

Direct marketing is, in my opinion, by far the most effective means of advertising available to almost any small business. There are unending ways in which direct marketing can be conducted, but all successful campaigns have several things in common.  First, you must target the audience most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Second,  you must understand what that audience needs and how any products or services you offer can fulfill their needs. Third, you must tell them how you are going to solve their problems better than any other option out there. Fourth, you need to provide clear reasons to respond right away. And finally you must provide clear instructions on exactly what they need to do right now to benefit from your offer.

Most business people who are aware of direct marketing think of it in terms of long hype filled letters that they have received for some particular product or service. However, not all direct mail is like that. Direct response mailing for professionals needs to be considerably more… well professional in it’s presentation. In my opinion the most lucrative use of direct mail is for businesses that can use it to pull in customers or clients who will use their services over and over again.

Business to consumer is the most traditional use of direct mailings. However, business to business may well be the most valuable form of direct mail. When mailing to consumers there is often a focus on making an immediate one time sale as opposed to using the approach to develop a relationship. In a business to business direct marketing approach you are much more likely to be interested in finding new long term clients,  rather than making a quick sale.  In this situation the effectiveness of your mailing is not measured in immediate sales, but rather in long term clients or customers who may pay you many thousands of  dollars over a period of years.

So here is my story of the six figure direct mailing I did. The health care industry was in a state of severe upheaval and change. Managed care had wiped out or severely hurt many psychologists in private practice. I was one who suffered these times.  Now I only do a very narrow specialty that does not rely upon insurance companies at all. However, back then I was, like many others, entirely dependent upon insurance companies for my income. The problem with insurance companies was not only poor pay, but an incredible amount of work needed to even get paid by them.  You needed a billing specialist just to deal with the companies on a daily basis.  Traditional referrals from other health care providers became problematic due to the complexity of the insurance situation.

For some years I had been very gradually  transitioning  to  working  in rehabilitation centers and long term care facilities, because I had experience in those populations and knew that once I was able to get a contract with such a facility I would have  a steady flow of referrals and a much less complicated billing situation. However, I had always wanted to maintain a traditional outpatient office as long as it was financially viable. Managed care made it no longer viable for me in a very brief period of time. I decided that I needed to close my office and move to a full time consultation practice.

However, in order to make that change I needed to get a number of contracts with facilities, and I needed to get them as fast as possible. Complicating the situation was an explosion in relatively large companies marketing to these facilities claiming that they could better serve their needs than individual professionals such as myself. In reality these companies were often no more than glorified marketing and billing services for local practitioners whom they hired for a percentage of the profit. However, they had full time marketing people and slick presentations to try and take every facility they could get. Once they got a contract any practitioner who had worked there before either had to come work for them or lose all the business from that facility.

I knew from experience that the people who really understood the situation in such facilities were the social workers. While the big companies were marketing to the corporate people or facility administrators, the social workers were the ones who had to deal with the services they provided on a daily basis. I knew that may social workers were quite disillusioned with the quality of services these companies provided and also had the behind the scenes power to influence the administrators who made the decisions on contracts. But how would I find the social workers who had a real need to make a change in service providers? It would be impossible for me to call them all and go to meeting after meeting to find the ones that might be receptive to me.

Direct response mail was my key to success. I  made a large list of facilities in my geographic area,  knowing that I only needed a very small number of contracts to fill my schedule. I created a very professional   letter addressed  to the head of social services in each facility. I laid out my experience and credentials. I discussed the problems they likely experienced using the large companies that I was competing with, and my main selling point was that they would have a direct line of communication with me as person who provided the services. I also made it clear that I currently had a number of contracts and was only looking for a few more to fill my schedule. I strongly, but very politely, suggested that they contact me right away if they were in need of my services.

I sent out the letters all in one mailing and had no idea if I would even get one response. The next several days were very anxiety producing. I waited and hoped. Within one week I had enough responses to fill my schedule and ended up turning down contracts. I had gone from a very difficult situation to a very secure situation with one letter! I continued to service those facilities for many years and made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of that one letter. I continued with many of  them until I decided to no longer to that work. It was actually a sad day for me when I quit doing that kind of work as I had made many friendships with facility staff members. That one letter was the most effective marketing tool I have ever used! You may be able to do something very similar if you follow a similar approach in your  business niche.
 

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I never ceases to amaze me how short sighted some salesmen can be.  I had an experience today with a car salesman who embodies the typical complaints people have that make us hate to go shop for cars. My wife is looking to replace her car and we have been looking for some very specific models to consider. We are looking at getting one that is about a year old to avoid the dramatic depreciation that often occurs the first year. There was one specific car  we found online (a Nissan) that was at a local  Ford dealership. So we went to have a look.

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Well it appears that Yahoo has rejected the unsolicited bid from the evil empire! In my opinion this is a great day for small businesses. I can imagine nothing worse for the future of the internet than a domination by Microsoft. While Google may have a strangle  hold on the search and advertising business on the internet, they have gotten it the honest way- by commitment to an ever improved service to their user base. They early on developted a corporate strategy of "do no evil" which is about the polar opposite of Microsoft.  Google has gone to the top based upon a free market choice of their services due to the quality they provide their users. Microsoft has historically made it to the top by rolling over competition and forcing their users into  having no choice except what they choose to provide. Their products   typically are  either a rip off of someone else (i.e. Windows) or  promoted by forcing competition out of business   by bundling tactics (i.e. Internet Explorer).

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 There are some in business who believe there is no such thing as a bad paying customer. Often times this is the same group that believe there is no such thing as bad publicity. Nothing could be further from the truth for any business owner looking to build a viable growing business. You need to choose your own customers from the pool of ones who wish to buy from your business.  That's right, you need to be in control of choosing your customers!

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As is evident from the posting dates, I have been only intermittently  posting to this blog since I launched the site several months ago. I do this as an area of interest to me , and at this point it is not a significant income source for me. I had focused on promotion to achieve a decent pagerank, which I think I have accomplished with a respectable pagerank of 4 in a period of less than 6 months of lmiited effort. Much of my internet  marketing work has   been on other sites that are bringing me a regular stream of income. However, the main things that consume most of my time are my work as a forensic psychologist, my family, and other hobbies. Those always come first in my life, but I think I have developed a plan to allow me to focus more time on this blog.

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Google apparently has been doing another update of  the pagerank visible in  the toolbar. This appears to have been happening over the last couple of days. There are many reports of  people with dramatic drops in page rank happening on sites. I have one old site which I only just began reworking in the past week which has dropped considerably. However, the homepage of this site – BizRave has gone up from a PR 3 to PR4 on this update.  I have some other sites that don't appear to have yet changed up or down. I think things are still in motion, so who knows what will be the final changes. You can watch my video explaining visible pagerank at  http://www.bizrave.com/pagerank-exposed-video/  .

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