I recently talked on Dale Beaumont’s Stage about ‘Incentive Based Marketing’ and how to ‘think and act differently’ for different results.

The reality is, the game has changed when it comes to marketing. There’s more competition than ever. You need a way to stand out from the crowd and to give your customers a compelling reason to choose you over your competitors.

Sure, you can offer an amazing product with great service at a reasonable price, however that’s not really enough to make you stand out from those doing the same already. Sure, you can compete on price. However, competing on price and being the cheapest isn’t the most profitable way to run your business.

What if there was a way to stand out, with an irresistible offer led with value which meant you never had to compete on price again?

Incentive Based Marketing is the next big thing in marketing.

It’s being used by fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Starbucks, McDonalds and more to completely dominate their competition. It’s actually been around for a long time.

But what’s new about this particular strategy I’m going to show you, is that it has previously only been available to the largest corporations in the world.

Now, Marketing Boost has helped thousands of companies across all industries use this strategy to increase their profits by as much as 10X.

Imagine You and I Have Similar Offers But You are Offering a Free Vacation to the Customer if they Purchase with You, and I am not – You will Win the Business 9 times out of 10.

Win the Business on Value, Don’t Compete with a Race to the Bottom on Price Ever Again.

Check out my presentation at Dales event to Discover How Give Away Free Vacations + Other Incentives Plus Get Business/Marketing Training to Grow Your Business Faster Than Ever Before.

Have you had success using incentives and bonuses in your marketing and sales campaigns before? Does the idea of using a free holiday as a bonus sound good to you? Let me know how you would use this in your business below.

Have a great day,
Greg

The post Incentive Based Marketing – Think and Act Differently for Different Results appeared first on Greg Cassar: Your Mastermind Coach for Business, Investing & Marketing Success.

I recently talked on James Schramko’s stage about how we made $1M in sales in amazon in our first year…..despite our success using this platform, we also need to think about ‘do we really want to be 100% dependent on one platform’?

The answer is probably no.

So this blog post is about the 4 things you need to balance when building an e-commerce brand.

When it comes to only building a store on one platform, If you do the right things, there’s not really that much risk of them knocking you off their platform. I have seen it happen to some people, but I think if you keep up to date with your knowledge, your education, and you do the right things, you don’t really have that much of a risk.

But you still don’t want to build a business that’s 100% dependent on Amazon. Which can be tempting because when I look at our success with Amazon, we were making say 20 sales on Amazon, for every one sale we were making on our ecommerce store.  So partway through last year we had to make this decision: (I’ve got the saying that he or she who chases two rabbits catches none) ‘let’s park our e-commerce store for awhile even though we’ll lose on some of the money and let’s double down and really, really get good at Amazon and then we’ll come back to it’ (which is our plan for later in the year).

I’ll get into the 4 essentials we need to balance in a moment, but first, here’s why it’s something you need to consider:

‘Winter is coming’ from an internet traffic point of view.  (and it doesn’t matter which traffic source you talk about, whether it’s Google, whether it’s Facebook ect) Everyone thinks of the internet as a cash spewing machine, where we put a dollar in and we want to spit $2. And it still does work right now. But due to supply and demand, there’s only so many placements available and the cost of traffic continues to go up. The cost of traffic continues to go up and the cost of goods and services is going down. So you get to the point where after a while, (maybe it might be three years out, four years out) where you can’t profitably buy traffic on day one anymore. So that’s why we need to think in advance as well. Here’s the 4 things you need to balance out for the perfect Winning e-commerce Store:

#1. Authority Blog

So this is talking about building something beyond just Amazon.  We always start with an authority blog. So in this case we have been using a professional content team that have been building out a blog, churning out around 16 blog posts a month in the baby products market.

We’ve been building content and doing good SEO but not monetizing this space. We effectively have an under utilized asset, that we now need to turn that into money. But I remember back to the whole catching rabbits analogy, we couldn’t do everything at once. So did we do a good job on the blog last year? Probably not. But we did a great, job on Amazon so that’s okay. And now we’ve come back and we’ll fill in those other pieces. But you will have heard James Schramko talk about ‘owning the race course’. And this comes back to the ned to have content and the need to publish it on our own platform.

#2. Amazon

Amazon really is a cash spewing machine and it’s really about cash flow, but you don’t own the customer so they don’t share the customer Info with you. You can get that info. But if you want to keep 100% within the rules, you can’t really scrape their customer data and then use that info to go and email them. Some people carry out those kind of tactics, but  I don’t recommend it. And the reason why is because, is it a hobby business for you or are you playing the long game? Either way I look at it, I always play the long game, so I’m doing the right thing. But Amazon is an amazing, amazing cash spewing machine.

#3. e-Commerce Store

Add on an ecommerce store, so you own your own brand, domain and brand terms in search. We recommend Shopify in this regards and then do all the standard ecommerce stuff. But from our experience, it’s easier to get momentum on Amazon and then come back to your own e-commerce store.  If you’ve already got momentum on your own e-commerce store, great! Optimise and build that up first, then add on Amazon.

#4. Audiences

Email used to be the primary audience, but as we all know, it’s becoming less and less effective. It’s not uncommon for 10% and 20% open rates. Newer social Platforms Like Facbook Messenger that can send sequences like a traditional email campaign are so, so important to tap into and get skilled in. For example, lead magnets, we’re now changing over to messenger rather than email list because it’s just so much easier and effective.  90% open rates are possible instead of 10%. Obviously cookies and custom audiences come into play as well, all basically for the goal of using audiences to drive traffic.

Have you had more success with your own e-commerce brand, or with Amazon? Let me know below.

Cheers
Greg

The post ‘Winter is Coming’ – Win Long Term with The eCommerce 4 Leg Stool appeared first on Greg Cassar: Your Mastermind Coach for Business, Investing & Marketing Success.

We’ve been lucky to work with over 300 business owners now. And what we found is success leaves clues. So I’m going to share with you 10 traits or 10 things we see in the most successful business owners. I think this is worth writing down and giving yourself a bit of a scorecard as far as ‘how am I tracking on these things?’ Because if you’re missing any of them, then it may just be an opportunity to work on that area. This video is not about technology and assets which might surprise you. When it  actually comes down to it, these things I’m going to share with you are in fact the most important things because If you don’t have them in place, then the other stuff doesn’t happen.

#1 Clear Vision or Goal

Where do you want to go? If a space shuttle takes off and it’s going to go into the moon, if it doesn’t have clear coordinates, there’s no chance that it’s going to get there. So you really, really do need to know where you want to go and document it too.

#2 A Good Business Vehicle

And I’m talking about about driving around in Mazeratti.  An example would be Amazon because it’s leverage on a global scale. So in traditional business, you’re relying on selling in a market for example and then whoever came past that were your customers. Here,  we’re talking about, if we get on a winner, we can literally scale this thing around the world and very, very quickly, like within a year.

#3 Continual Learning

This is so, so, so important. I see some people that think once they get a certain way along, I’m too good. I don’t need to keep doing this stuff, I know it already. The most successful entrepreneurs are continual students and just keep getting better and better all the time.

#4 Ongoing Focus on Mindset

Your mindset is really your most important asset. Tony Robbins says, success is as much as 80% mindset. From my experience, I 100% agree with this.

#5 Manage Your Emotions

You might why I’m talking about emotions? The reason is because business isn’t all smooth sailing. You’ve got some real peaks and you’ve got some troughs. And the most successful business owners we meet, they actually manage their emotions like rolling hills instead of sharp climbs and steep decents.

#6 Be Resilient

Be willing to pick yourself up and keep going.

#7 Be Decisive

Actually decide you’re going to do it. The amount of people that I meet who are in, ‘research mode’ at the moment….. yeah, that’s great. But at some stage the rubber’s going to have to hit the road and you’ve actually got to do things…. you’ll fail, but fail forward and then learn and keep going. And success follows speed.

#8 Moved Forward with Speed

Which is really related to point #7. Make a decision and just make stuff happen. One of the most common things that I see is people work on everyone else’s business but they don’t focus on their own business first. The rich people pay themselves first with money and they pay themselves first with time. So your most, so like the first two hours of your day, don’t go to your inbox, don’t work on everyone else’s stuff. Work on your own business growth or your own mindset. You know, that kind of stuff pays off first with time.

#9 Leveraged Model

The model that I’m going to show you about, the reason we’ve been on the fast track on Amazon and made over $1 million in the first year on this platform, isn’t what everyone else is teaching. It’s actually sort of counter intuitive. And you’ll see why on my amazon blog post.

#10 Track and Measure

This is about cutting your, losers short and running your winners long. Really important especially in the digital advertising age. We all need to become essentially mini media buyers, and you can’t do this effectively without track and measure.

The post The Top 10 Traits The Most Successful Business Owners Have appeared first on Greg Cassar: Your Mastermind Coach for Business, Investing & Marketing Success.

A Heads Up:  This is not just your ‘average blog post’.  What you have in your hands is a summary of how to scale any business and make it more profitable.  This framework is the results of Greg Cassar learning as he worked with over 300 businesses and spent over $250k on his business, marketing, sales & mindset education. Let’s get stuck in on how to make you a puppet master or rainmaker in any business you choose to scale.

STEP 1 – Business Must Have Pre-Requisites

I Like To Think About Business Like A Cake. If You Don’t Have The Right Ingredients – The Reality Is… The Cake Just Won’t Rise. These are the first things I look at when seeing if we can scale a business. If one’s missing, then it’s not going to be a good fit. This step 1 in the systematic and proven approach within my business profit accelerator concept.

1. Abundance Mindset – Think Like a Millionaire

The first one is an abundance mindset, and you might be thinking, why is he starting with mindset? Mindset can be as much as 80% of success in your business according to Tony Robbins, who is certainly an authority and one of my teachers in this space. What ‘Abundance Mindset’ is about is that everything can be 100% right- supply and demand, customers, sales, everything. But  as the founder, as the CEO, as the leader of your organisation, you’re actually bringing yourself to the deal so if you’re not thinking positively, if you’re not thinking bigger thoughts and dreaming bigger dreams, than you can actually sabotage a deal without even knowing it. I have turned down working with businesses on this one factor alone, that’s how important I believe it (and have witnessed it) to be.

The big Difference Between the Rich and Poor

So having an Abundance Mindset as your default is just so important. The reality is millionaires think, act and behave in a different way and they even control their emotions in a different way to what the average person does. The other huge difference between the rich and the poor is that the poor and the middle class will do the work and then get paid afterwards. The mindset of the rich is they will get paid first and then they’ll deliver on the product or the service. This is not something the read over lightly. What mindset do you carry?

2. Supply, Demand and “Selling Santa Suits In February”

The next real ‘Must Have’ requirement is Supply and Demand. I often tell this story of our Santa Clause suits business. There was demand for my Santa Clause suits, no doubt about it. I could have sold a heap of them, I’m a good marketer. I was getting sales. Then…We ran out of stock and the supplier couldn’t fulfill a new order. I remember having a conversation with my supplier, and he’s like, “Yeah, sorry, we’ve got none in stock.” And then he rings me back in February, saying, “We’re good to go again.” …. helpful right? Because everyone wants to by their Santa Clause suit in February…So Supply and Demand was just a disaster in this example.

When one Becomes the worst Number In Business:

As you grow, you need to be able to make sure that you can keep up. There’s a saying that one is the worst number in business. You don’t want just one product, you don’t want just one service, you don’t want just one channel of advertising, and you don’t want just one supplier either. Make this a mandatory requirement in your business and don’t make the same mistake as myself and thousands of others have.

3. Sound Maths – Your Financial IQ

The next one is Sound Maths. So Sound Maths is talking about financial IQ. We had a business selling books about investment property. We were actually doing really, really well if you look at it as far as the number of transactions go… But… We were selling a really small ticket item, a low-cost book around $30 and there just wasn’t a high enough profit margin. If you look at your business, you may be looking at sales but revenue is just one aspect. Profit is great as well but we really want cash. The fact is you could actually go broke but have profit on your books… Weird? So you want to figure out with your business if you’re making sales and making profit, are you left with actual cash in the hand? That is just crucial.

4. Repeat Business – Love the One You’re With

The last of our Mandatory Requirements is Repeat Business. Perhaps you’re thinking “why does he think repeat business is a mandatory must have?” Maybe you’re doing okay at the moment selling just one item. But really if you just have one product or one service, you’re really more of a promotion than you are a long term business.
The reality is the cost of traffic, the cost of getting eyeballs, the cost of getting people through your doors is going to continue to rise. And what is happening is the less efficient businesses who only have one product or service are getting pushed out.

If you think about it, it’s really no different to when you were a kid, there was little convenience stores everywhere and then over the years they got pushed out by the bigger grocery stores or shopping malls. They couldn’t compete anymore.

There’s that saying of ‘Love The One You’re With’ which is true with your husband or wife or significant other. But it’s also true with your customers. Genuinely love your customer. Genuinely care about him/her and don’t just look at it as ‘how can I sell them more stuff.’ Think Lifetime Customer Value, think ‘Ok, they bought this item from me, what else is of genuine benefit to them?’ I’m really all about the win-wins.

Ok, so we’ve covered the 4 most crucial “ingredients” that will ensure a successful business long term. If you’ve passed the test at this point, it’s time to do a deeper dive into some of those pieces, in particular, the sales and marketing side of things. Then we can look at the main financial drivers for getting more available cash in your business.

STEP 2 – 3 Sales & Marketing Levers That Will Systematically Grow Your Business!

Have You Truly Harnessed The Power Of These 3 Sales and Marketing Levers In Your Business?

Lever 1: Traffic & Visibility

Traffic and Visibility really comes down to the fact that there are 4 main ways people get found these days; Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon. These channels are so important in the overall internet ecosystem. Individually, they are massive online machines that need more then a paragraph each to explain.

I will say this though, what they allow you to do from a Search and Display point of view, also from a targeting point of view is incredible. As an example, for an e-commerce business here’s a 12 step approach we’d use to get more eyeballs onto and ultimately more leads and sales in a business:

1. Optimise Store & Cart Conversion
2. Add Google AdWords
3. Add Google Shopping
4.  Add Google Remarketing
5. Add Dynamic Remarketing
6. Add Facebook Remarketing
7. Bing Ads
8. Tripwire Offer using Facebook
9. Ebay
10. Amazon
11. Comparison Shopping Sites
12. Pinterest Promoted Pins

Lever 2: Increased Leads – More Power in Your Business

I love this one, and this is usually one that we look at first because increasing leads can have a dramatic effect on a business. We say, “Leads equals power.” What we’ve found is, as you add more lead flow into the business, the business can make better decisions.

They can price better, they can also decide, you know, which clients they want to work with and which clients they don’t. And that can save a whole bunch of money hassles, time hassles, and even just happiness of your team, that kind of thing. So…and obviously, as you double the number of leads, in theory, you’ll double the number of sales, you know, all things remaining equal.

There’s two main ways that you can get leads. One is with marketing funnels and the other one is with leads from direct, to calls, to action off your sites.

Lever 3: Increase Brand, Trust & Authority

I’ve always been a direct response marketing guy myself, and I didn’t really put a lot of thought into brand, except for in recent years. I was always about how can I spend X to get Y, which is at direct response marketing and at the other part of direct response marketing is emotional direct response marketing where you’re using emotion to get people to take responses, because as you know, people buy based on emotion and then justify with logic.

So, direct response marketing is massive but, branding and direct response marketing are now merging together. Platforms like Facebook are sorta pushing this where they don’t want all your messages hard sell, hard sell, hard sell. They want you to be putting out positive messages into the marketplace.

So, building a brand is about building that concept of singularity, you know, for your product, your service or yourself, you know, even you are a brand. So what identifies you as unique? And once you know branding and once you get more in depth into it and once you get to a more advanced level, there’s also a thing called intrinsic value. And, what intrinsic value is talking about is, how can you value within your brand so that you can charge more for your products or services than everyone else because the market believes it’s worth more. And you think about a luxury, you know, handbag brand like an Oroton or something like that. They’ve built intrinsic value, you know, into their brand.

So, this whole branding and direct response is a massive, massive area together and what if you get this right, what it can make the difference of is instead of you having to sell all the time, it’s really about people wanting to buy from you rather than you selling all the time. So, it’s not really a lever people think about but it’s just so, so powerful, and it has a flow on effect on so many other things.

STEP 3 – Grow Your Profit Using the Profit Triad – Get More Customers, Who Spend More and Buy Again

Level 4: Get More Customers

The first part of the Profit Triad is how do we get more customers? Often everyone thinks about “we’ve got to get more traffic’ , which yes that’s true, if you can double the amount of traffic, you may be able to double the amount of sales BUT it’s also an  expensive way of doing it –  if you first haven’t done this:

What we want to be doing first is optimising the website, optimise the presence, the calls to action, the sales page. In every business, everyone thinks every page on my website is exactly the same, but within every business there is around 3-4 or at least a few hero products, what we call “money pages” so not every page of your site should be created even.

You have to figure out, what are the money pages within your website and how can you optimise those?

One of our clients focused on this as their first action with us. We wrote new sales copy, added videos, headlines, sub-headlines, calls to action and made the order process so much easier. They gave more payment options and took away the risk with a guarantee and it had a dramatic affect on the amount of customers they received.

Another point that you might not necessarily think of with getting more sales is adding an enquire process. This same client added an enquire now option on their website. What this is about is using those four magic words “How Can We Help?” When people put up their hand for this, they might be all ready to buy but they might have just have one objection that they need to overcome, something that could be stressing them, something they want to know. If you pick up the phone and engage with them you’re more likely to get them over the line. So our client added all these things to their sales process and saw a significant increase in customers.

Lever 5: Get Them Spending More

So we now need to look at, ok how do we get them spending more? With this same client, now that their training programs were 100% full, there was actually room to increase the pricing. There was more demand and supply was limited so we were able to increase the pricing by a couple of hundred dollars. This then added more profit into the business which was fantastic.

Another thing we were able to implement with this client was, once someone had purchased that training program, the client was able to then think, ‘ok what is logical and would add value that we could tac onto their experience?’ So when they checked out and before they got to the thank you page, they added what’s called a One Click Upsell. So they were able to then say, ‘Ok, you bought this first training, this second training could add on another qualification to your experience with us, would you like to add that to your purchase?’

The result? 40% of customers who bought the first training also added on the second training which gave them another industry qualification. You can start to see now how they went from half-filled training programs to full training programs, to now having more money per order to now getting a second order on top. That’s the kind of thing they were doing to get the customer spending more.

The other thing related to getting their customers spending more was added merchandise and items that would help them while they are away attending the training programs, which just adds another income stream. So now this client has more customers and they’ve got them spending more.

Lever 6: Get Them Buying Again

So once you have more customers and you have them spending more, the next focus point is how do we get them coming back again? With this same client and their customer, it really came down to, once a customer has come and completed the in initial training course, what are some complimentary trainings that are of a more senior level that you can then offer them.

Following that, adding in auto-responders, remarketing sequences with banner ads and Facebook ads that take them on a journey and shares the story of other people who have done the more senior training course and also nurture them towards that. Then when that more senior course is coming up for registration, you can add in one or two powerful levers working together of “scarcity” and urgency” to get them coming back and buying again.

STEP 4  – The Most Important Financial IQ Levers That Influence Your Profit!

Let’s Get More Cash In your Business to Play with. We want to not necessarily make more revenue first, we want to prune wasted cost. This means more cash (profit) for you without having to spend first.

Here’s How We Do That:

Lever 7: Reduce Expenses & COGS

If you’re selling Widgets, how do you reduce the expenses of those Widgets when you’re buying them? If you’re a services Business, how can you reduce the cost of people or software ect that is takes to provide that service. You want to know this because it is actually the fastest way to double the profitability of nearly any business.
Actually, the truth is the fastest way to double the profitability of nearly any business is to reduce expenses by 10% to 15%. If you think about it like this, often what happens is, when you increase your income, increase your revenue, your expenses might increase along with it. But if you can reduce your cost, your expenses by 10% to 15% you’re actually adding profit through your whole business. It’s not really that sexy and people don’t really focus on it that much but it can have just such a massive difference because it’s pure profit.

There’s that concept called the profit wedge which is how do we keep ourselves growing but how do we make our expenses go down so that we get a bigger gap between income and expenses? It just makes so, so much difference and I wish more people, and I hope you take something from this and not only “know it” but also implement it in your business.

Lever 8 & 9: Reduce Receivable Days + Increase Payable Days (the one-two punch)

When working together, these two levers can have a dramatic effect on the amount of cash in your actual bank account without even increasing your sales at all. It’s a very powerful combination.

Reducing your receivable days: this is talking about when businesses and people owe you money, claiming that money much much faster.
We teach six proven strategies for reducing your receivable days. There are one or two that are really, really stand-out that are just so easy. It’s one of those things where once you’ve seen it you’ll go, “Oh, damn, that’s so obvious.” You’ll be thinking “Why wasn’t I always doing that?” I’ve got this saying, “To know and not to do is not to know.”

Reducing Receivable Days is a very, very powerful lever. But not on its own. It’s got to be used with the next lever which is: *Cash Flow Your Life Line – it’s important to add that cash flow really is the lifeblood of the business. Without cash, the business can die even if you’re promised a whole bunch of other money. So it’s very very important to get that in. You want it sitting in your bank account rather than someone else’s or another business’ bank account. Imagine how different it you will feel when your bank account starts to rise.

We’ve had some of our clients in business that we’ve taught this to that are now saying that their cash in the bank has risen between $30,000 and $100,000 just between these few Financial IQ levers. Not by changing anything in their styles of marketing space, but just with the Financial IQ levers.

Let’s now work into our next financial IQ lever which is our second last one.

Increased Payable Days:

This is talking about accounts payable. This is when your organisation, your company, owe money to other businesses. If you can slow that down as well as getting paid faster, what it does is, it frees up the amount of cash that’s in your bank.

This is like a one-two punch, and that’s why I love these because they work so well together. It’s so important to get these two right. As I said above, we teach six strategies for each one and it’s really about choosing one, two or three that are going to work best for you to be able to increase the cash in your business.

Lever 10: Reduce Inventory Days

Last but not least, we need to look at Reducing Inventory Days. This is not relevant to every business, but if you are holding stock it is very very relevant. What we’re talking about here is hold less stock or move your stocker faster. As you may know, when you are holding stock you can be tying up so much cash that you are always cash poor just in your stock and inventory.

Some of the businesses that we’ve taught this to has said this has ended up being their most powerful lever. It does really depend on what type of business you are but if you’re holding stock, you will begin to love this lever because it will end up freeing up the amount of cash that you have.

So imagine this is you and your business and you went from half-full sales to full capacity sales, each transaction is worth considerably more, and your customers are buying again – you can understand the dramatic difference this Profit Triad could have on your business. Plus you’ve created a system, an architecture to constantly feed new leads and new sales through and make your business more profitable. It’s exciting stuff right?

So I leave you with this question: What are you doing as far as the business profit accelerator process goes? Are there things you could be doing better to reduce cost, get more customers, get them spending more and get them coming back again? 

The post How to Become a Sales, Marketing & Business Puppet Master / Rainmaker… Systematically Scale Any Business appeared first on Greg Cassar: Your Mastermind Coach for Business, Investing & Marketing Success.

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A better goal is to grow profit, and an even a better goal, again, is to grow more cash in your business. What we have seen is what you focus on is what you get. Check out this 2 minute quick video below.

A Common Scenario for Business Owners

With most businesses that we see, they focus on growing more sales and revenue, but what happens at the same time is that expenses and cost of goods sold (COGS) go up with it. See in the diagram below how profit remains consistent even though sales revenue is going up. So you don’t necessarily drive more profit in the middle.

Talking about this ‘Running the Business End of the Business’ is not very attractive to a lot of business owners and marketers who just want to focus on the next bright shiny object, but what we are talking about here today is very important as we are now going to look at you can engineer your business to be more profitable and ultimately produce more cash for you.

Engineering Profit with The Profit Wedge

What we see that can make a massive, massive difference for a lot of businesses that we work with is that if you focus on reducing costs and reducing costs of goods sold, and at the same time focusing on growing the top line of sales and revenue, you can create what we call the profit wedge.

You can imagine this bit in the middle is profit. See how its getting bigger month by month. You might get to the point where you can’t reduce your costs or your cost of goods sold any more.

You might flat line your expenses and can’t reduce it anymore – that’s fine, its calls Zero Overhead Growth (ZOGS) and if you’re still able to grow the top line of revenue and sales, then you can still be more and more profitable over time.

The important thing here is we are not just ‘hoping and praying’ that your business is profitable. If you want your business to have more profit and cash you need to focus on this area and engineer your own Profit Wedge. This could easily be one of the most important things you learn in your business journey.

The Two Team Profit Wedge Approach

One way that we have found in our business of ensuring that we create a profit wedge is by having one team (or key team member) focused on growing revenue and another team (or key team member) focused on reducing expenses. Try this in your business for a few months and you will be surprised at how much more profit and cash you are able to generate.

What Are Your Next Steps?

Give it some thought – How can you implement the profit wedge in your business? How will you achieve focusing on reducing costs and reducing costs of goods sold at the same time as growing your sales revenue?

I hope this is useful for you. I know we got a lot out of it when we first learned it. I firmly believe that this profit wedge concept can have a positive effect on many businesses. It would be great to hear your thoughts or experiences on this subject. Pls share below if you would like to hear more of this type of ‘business end of the business’ stuff of if you just want ‘digital marketing’ from me and my team. Cheers Greg.

The post The Profit Wedge… Engineering More Profit & Cash appeared first on Greg Cassar: Your Mastermind Coach for Business, Investing & Marketing Success.

Acquiring Customers At Speed

One of the things we’ve learned from Jeff Bezos of Amazon, is he or she who acquires the most customers wins. And you might be thinking why is this?

Traditional Verses a Modern Mindset

Traditional thinking is all focused on ‘you need to acquire the highest number of leads’, which is definitely valid but what we do know about acquiring ‘customers’ as opposed to ‘leads’ is that customers are 10 to 11 times more likely to buy from you again than leads.

So, you’re actually better off with a database of 1,000 customers than you are with 10,000 leads. One principal which was just pivotal for us was when we learned the principal of the Tripwire. I learned this from Perry Belcher.

I was in LA and Perry shared a story with me that really hit home with me, and I hope that it does the same for you. Perry lives in a place called Austin, Texas, and he lives in an affluent section of Austin, Texas which they call Millionaire Mile. It’s basically five or six streets of really, really amazing houses.

It was a Saturday afternoon. He gets a knock at the door. His wife get the door and there is a guy there offering to mow his lawn for $5. Perry thinks about it and is standard mow is $42, so he is thinking this a good deal. He talks about it with his wife, and then they agree to go ahead.

The guy goes out. He does an amazing job on the lawn, which is important – You’ve got to do a good job of it. He comes back. They pay him the $5, and he gives them a fridge magnet and a voucher that says we’ve got a special at the moment for second mows of $10.

So then when they need to get the lawn mowed again, rather than get the $42 mow which is their standard mow, they use their voucher. The guy comes back. He does an amazing job, then they do the same thing again. Fridge magnet, voucher, third mows of $30 and basically steps him up so he’s nearly at the same price. But what he’s done there is he’s acquired a customer, which is really, really smart.

Acquiring Your Ideal Customer

But he hasn’t just acquired any customer, he’s thought about who his ideal customer is – in this case the affluent customer, and then he hasn’t just hit up Perry. He’s made the same offer to all the affluent houses in those streets. What we do know from a business owner point of view is if you can get all your customers geographically together you can reduce your costs – and that’s going to be so much better from a time and profitability point of view.

But the really, really smart part of this whole story is that he isn’t actually a lawn mower. He’s a landscape gardener, and Perry went on to spend $26k with the guy because after he was a customer, he was able to then create some value by saying “hey guys have you thought about if you do this with your lawn and if you do that”.

So, it’s a really, really smart concept of how can you acquire your ideal customer. You might be thinking okay, well that works for the landscape gardener, but what about me?

You know in our business we deal with free plus shipping USB’s sticks, other people do it with free plus shipping DVDs. See example below

We do free plus shipping USB sticks, or it might be a splinter offer where it’s part of your product or info product. The real thing is figure out later exactly what you’re going to offer as a tripwire, which is a low price irresistable offer. The real thing about it is take that concept on board and figure out how can you apply it in your business and just make it happen.

I hope you got some good value on that. I know we certainly did when we learned about it. It would be great to hear your thoughts or experiences on this subject. Please share below have you had any success with the tripwire or do you have any questions about what may or may not work?

The post The Fastest Way To Acquire Your Ideal Customers Online appeared first on Greg Cassar: Your Mastermind Coach for Business, Investing & Marketing Success.

There is more to business than money. It’s really about creating freedom.

Here Are The 4 Freedoms:

1. Time Freedom
   • Choosing When You Want To Work
   • Travel While Your Working
2. Location Freedom
   • Choose To Work From Home Or In An Office
   • Experience The Laptop Lifestyle
   • Gmail Email Behaviour
3. People Freedom
   • Choosing Who You Want To Work With
   • Choosing Who You Hang Around
4. Purpose Freedom
   • Knowing Why You Do What You Do
   • Love Doing What You Do

The post Creating Your Four Freedoms appeared first on Greg Cassar: Your Mastermind Coach for Business, Investing & Marketing Success.

Here are the things what we really want to get right:

1. We want to get Awareness and Thought Leadership.
2. We need to get Branding right and get your message out there. A lot of people are not so focused on branding but the advantage of when you get a brand really right is that you don’t have to hard sell to people as much. People want to buy from you if you get your branding right. Don’t think, “I’m a direct response guy. I don’t want to know about branding,” because you’ll see in a moment those two really come in together.
3. We need to get Traffic so which is a lot like awareness, and we need to get Leads, so getting people on our database and building lists.
4. We need to be Ascending people through our Marketing Funnel. What we’re talking about here is we might get them in on a low ticket sale, but over time, we want to add more value and we want to increase the average order value, that kind of thing.
5. We need to get more Sales. We need to ultimately get Repeat Sales, because we know when we acquire a customer for the first time, that’s the most expensive. So if we can have them on our database and market to them again, obviously that’s gonna be a lot more efficient.
6. We need Brand Advocacy. Wouldn’t it be great to be like Apple where people are so steadfast behind your brand and they’re telling everyone else about it and all that kind of stuff?

In a previous blog Internet in Stats 2017, I spoke about mobile. Your audiences are starting on one device and they’re finishing on another. So they might be starting their search, their research on mobile, but they might be converting on a tablet or converting on a desktop. You might be thinking, “Well, how does that affect me or how do I use that?” Stick around over the next few weeks, that will become more clear as we get into deep eCommerce strategies tactics.

We can see 67% of people who start on one device end up on another. About a month ago we bought a tent a month, not because we were downsizing but because we we’re going camping with our friends. We didn’t have a tent, so it was on my list to organise.

So I started researching it on my iPhone and then later on I was sitting down on the iPad and researching so more, and then talked about it with Jules, got the management to sign off which is as a husband always important to get. We both agreed. Then I sat down on my laptop and went straight to ordering it, because I’d already done the research. I don’t think I’d be alone in that buying process, it’s pretty common when you look at some reviews, do your research and that kind of stuff, and then you’re buying later usually on a different device.

There is this current concept that the single ad campaign is dead. If you think about it, everyone used to think “Okay. I’m gonna run some ads and that’ll get me some customers.” Whilst that’s still working in some instances, I think we need to think bigger than that now. So if you think about how an army general wins a war, it’s not, “okay, we’re going in with the infantry, and that’s it, on one front”. No way. He’s going in with the infantry on one front, then he’ll send in ships around, and then he’ll have an air attack so they’re attacking on multiple fronts.

A better analogy could be thinking about your campaigns like they’re a relay, where one person starts with the baton, and then they’re running and passing it onto the next person who then runs and passes it on to the next person, that kind of thing.

That’s how modern advertising works as well, you’re doing initial ads that are really just about awareness or creating value, and then you’re passing the baton to presell articles and building a list. You’re building lists of people that you can then market to again, and then you’re showing them ads that move them further down the funnel towards becoming a lead or towards becoming a customer.

We look at the customer buying journey in phases (this was what we’re talking about with Funnel Ascension). The first thing is awareness. The people that you market to and the people that you sell to, there’s now some who know you, like you, love you, trust you and want do business with you. They’re already your “warm” or “hot” market. You may not need to do much awareness for them because they’re already on your database or they’re already in your tier.

Then there’s other markets, bigger mass market and at some stage you have to make your brand be in their consciousness, or your product be in their consciousness, or the problem that you solve be in their consciousness. And that’s really what awareness is about.

From there, we move into acquisition. Here we’re acquiring leads and we’re acquiring customers. Then from there, we’re getting loyalty and repeat. These are the things that we need to think about as we go on this relay run. Effectively, we need multiple touches to get a conversion. I was in Africa on holidays a while ago and I can remember watching how the lions work together. Picture this: you have two lions over in one space slowly walking and pushing their prey towards some bushes where there’s other lions waiting to prey, waiting to pounce. That’s effectively how I view an entire online advertising strategy.

So I’ve always been traditionally a direct response guy, one of my first coaches pretty much told me that direct response was the only way that you need to go. That’s the only thing you need to know. Direct response marketing, direct response marketing, direct response marketing. For those of you reading this thinking, what exactly is “direct response marketing”, it is when you do some sort advertising and expect a direct response, so if the whole purpose is to get a lead or to get a customer, then direct response marketing would mean getting that sale or lead immediately,

Branding is more about getting your message out there, getting the awareness, building intrinsic value. Intrinsic value means that there’s value in your brand. So, I don’t buy much in the way of handbags or more so I don’t buy anything in the way of handbags :), but I do know in that market there’s some handbags that looks very similar. Except one’s worth $99 and one’s worth $2,000. Correct me if I’m wrong ladies, but there’s really nothing much different between the two yes?. Okay, so one might be a little bit better in quality but really what it’s about is the intrinsic value that’s built up in that brand. So ideally, we wanna build up intrinsic value in our brand right? It just makes good sense.

What we think about with branding and direct response is effectively, if you’re always just putting your message out there and never asking leads to make an order/purchase, then you could go broke. But if you’re like one of those crazy, discount-type places where everything’s black and red and “Get it now,” they’re screaming at you, that kind of thing, you’ll basically annoy everyone. So we’ve really gotta find that balance somewhere in the middle, and it really is a balance.

It’s kind of like an emotional bank account with your customer or your prospect.

Branding can just be like silly branding that you’ll see some really, really big corporations do, just putting their logo on stuff, but that’s not really gonna do much – certainly doesn’t fill up your customer or prospect’s emotional bank account with anything of quality.

Branding can also be creating awesome value in the marketplace, putting out a high value video content, high value blogs. It could be making entertaining videos, everyone has seen those funny business videos that go viral and spread around and just explode a company overnight? That kinda thing. That’s branding as well.

So when you’re putting out good stuff, you’re putting a deposit into the emotional bank account of the prospects or customers. Then later when you’re asking for the order, you’re effectively making a withdrawal from that emotional bank account. What we know with our financial bank accounts, our business bank accounts is that we can’t just keep withdrawing forever. We need to put money in right? (unless we get into overdrafts, credit cards which is how a lot of people live.

As a general rule, lead with value first, the value-first approach, rather than just thinking, “How can I get the most money out of my market?” Start thinking, “How can I influence my market the most? How can I help my market the most?” This is called “Helpful marketing.”

An example of this is with an e-commerce store we’ve have where the main site looks like a big authority blog and we’ve got it’s sister site selling the actual products. We researched what our exact target market really, really needed. Then we published content answering those questions out as helpful content. Then we amplify it with social media. Then the e-commerce store is actually on a sub-domain like shop.domain.com, that kind of thing. You do really need to think about that value-first approach. We call this content and commerce.

Content doesn’t have to be ‘content’, it could be entertaining media, it could be instructional videos. The important concept here is how are you going to create value first and then get a transaction?

My prediction is that those who don’t move towards this content and commerce model and who aren’t receiving “earned media” (publishing high-quality content that gets you found in Google organically and that is helpful marketing to your marketplace) could and most likely will end up like a dinosaur (and I think we all know it didn’t really go that flash for them which is probably an understatement 😉 ).

It’s a great time to be reading this post as right now we’re running a FREE Web Class Training on ‘Winning the Game of eCommerce’. If this is something of interest to you, click here to watch the training!

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