A Million Dollars of Marketing Advice for Nothing

by Dr Greg Chapman

For most businesses there is a giant in their industry. A business who is a household name. They dominate your sector, although they are not pursuing your customers because they are the big end of town.

They don’t even know you exist. And you ignore them because their clients are not yours.

Lets say you have a motor mechanics business with half a dozen staff. You don’t see yourself in competition with the BMW service department in the next suburb. Your competition is a guy about the same size as you a few blocks away. So what you do, is check out what he is doing.

But, if you were able to get a million dollars of marketing advice, do you think you could blow him away? You can’t afford the fees? What if you could get that advice for nothing? More...
 

Advertising Fail

by Dr Greg Chapman

One of the great things about online advertising today is the ability to finely target your ads so that they appear on sites which contain keywords relevant to your business and which attract people who fit the profile of your best buyers.

An example of this is that websites with articles on Formula One racing might be targeted by Porsche and Ferrari. Another example is a website with articles on exotic travel destinations would attract airline advertising. The companies in question choose keywords that might appear in website content that their potential customers choose to read.

So what was this advertising fail?

Ad of the Month - Seize the Moment -- Updated

by Dr Greg Chapman

If advertising is to work, you must first grab the attention of your buyers. There is so much noise, that people just tune out, but every so often, there comes along an event that provides a wave upon which you can launch your product or brand.

The May election provided one such opportunity, when Clive Palmer spent around $60m and didn’t secure a single seat.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Small Business

by Dr Greg Chapman

While running a successful business is not easy, there are rules that you can follow that will almost certainly increase your success. And there are also sins that will guarantee your failure.

Here are the Seven Deadly Sins of Business.

1. Ambiguity

If you are not explicit in what you want to achieve for your business, you are highly unlikely to be successful. Setting out clear goals for your business allows you to develop strategies to achieve your goals and to create plans which will ultimately drive your business to success. Without goals, strategies and plans, you are just depending on luck- and how has that worked for you so far?

How to Avoid Your Business becoming a Microstayer?

by Dr Greg Chapman

The biggest risk for most businesses is not whether they will fail. Most won’t. The biggest risk is that they will stay small. Whether by design or not. Recent ABS data show that 98% of micro-businesses stay that way. That is, they are Micro-Stayers.

There are a number of reasons that businesses become Micro-Stayers. It could be a lifestyle choice. Work-Life balance is becoming more and more important to many people. It may be because they don’t have the knowledge to take their business to the next level, and become frustrated Micro-Stayers. Or they may have progressed from frustrated to resigned Micro-Stayers and have adjusted lifestyle and ambition in recognition of this.

Businesses that involuntarily stay small, the Micro-Stayers, do so for five key reasons.

Small Business False Economies

by Dr Greg Chapman

I was recently discussing with a business owner the future of his business which has an innovative product but low sales. He had invested over a million dollars in the business developing this product, but had spent nothing on marketing. The owner told me how he believed that their product was superior to others on the market, but because of their size, other businesses were not taking them seriously.

Predict Your Business' Future

by Dr Greg Chapman

It’s easy to predict the future. We do it all the time. When you go for a bank loan, they look at your credit history. If you go for a job, they look at your work history.

We predict the future by looking at the past and based on the assumption, a leopard doesn’t change its spots, we will generally be right.

We are creatures of habit. We travel to work the same way each day and do our weekly shopping at the same supermarket. Why? It’s because we have finished experimenting, and we are comfortable with the outcomes we currently get.

However, results do vary. Sometimes there is a traffic jam on our favourite route, or the supermarket is out of our favourite dessert, but we still stick with the tried and true. More...

Ad of the Month - Reinvention

by Dr Greg Chapman

Imagine you had a product which had been largely been overtaken by technology in a particular market, and you wanted to get back into that market?

Canon used to be a major player in the consumer photography market, and then along came phones with quality cameras making your digital cameras unnecessary. What do you do?

You do something with your cameras that phones can’t do.

The Small Business Sales Person had No Clothes

by Dr Greg Chapman

The story is so common. A business’ sales are down, so they hire a sales person. After a couple of months with little or nothing to show for their efforts, they let the sales person go. Was the sales person not up to it? In my experience, it is usually not their fault.

In most cases, the owner has done little more than explain what their products are, and given the new sales person a list of names for the person to contact. In many cases, cold calling potential buyers who probably had just seen off their competitor moments beforehand. What sort of reception do you expect them to receive?

Know Your Competition Online

by Dr Greg Chapman

One of the best ways to understand why someone should buy from you, and what are your points of difference, is to study the competition. What is it they are doing well, and what are they doing not so successfully?

The internet makes this very easy. You can see what the competition are telling the market place, although it is quite common that people have excellent offline marketing and have just thrown up a website as an afterthought. But if online marketing is an option for your business, and there are only a few for which this is not true, the very best in your sector will show you how it’s done.

Recently someone visited my website and downloaded the preview of my bestselling book- The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success. This happens so frequently I really don’t pay much attention on a day to day basis to who is signing up. But this person immediately unsubscribed after downloading the book. Which had never happened before. It was a minute after the download- not enough time to read a 40 page preview. So I checked him out. It was one of my competition checking me out! More...

How Small Business Davids can overcome Big Business Goliaths

by Dr Greg Chapman

In the story of David and Goliath, young David challenged the mighty Goliath. King Saul wanted David to wear his armour so that he could fight Goliath in the traditional way. But David chose to forgo the armour, used a weapon of his choosing, and relied on his own speed, and was ultimately successful in slaying the giant Goliath.

Small business owners viewing the Goliaths of their industry slugging it out using all the marketing weaponry in their well stocked armoury, can be daunted by the battles raging around them. And if they choose to fight them with the same weapons, they have much to fear. For large businesses, economies of scale is their most potent weapon. A very powerful weapon. But like Goliath, their strengths are also their weaknesses.

Ad of the Month - Reverse Engineered

by Dr Greg Chapman

If your product is an input where the final outcome is multiple steps away, your contribution to the ultimate benefit could be lost to potential buyers.

In this ad, we start from the outcome and work backwards to the advertiser’s input, making clear how they contributed to the ultimate benefit.

Great Strategies for Increasing Your Prices

by Dr Greg Chapman

Why can some of your competitors increase their prices while you have to struggle even with your current ones? Do you find that when you lift your prices, you lose sales? Are most of your customers only interested in price? Are you a Price Taker?

In this interview hear Dr Greg Chapman reveal the some of the best strategies for increasing your prices.

They Always choose to pay more

by Dr Greg Chapman

The Gallo brothers were one of the pioneers in the Californian wine industry. They are now the largest family owned wine business in the world. But it was not always this way.

Ernest Gallo once called on a customer in the midst of the depression. He gave him a tasting test, one from a 5c a bottle wine (this was the depression) and the other from a 10c bottle. After tasting both, the customer chose the 10c bottle. More...

Pricing Strategy: Breaking the connection with Cost - A Case Study

by Dr Greg Chapman

I recently purchased a video recorder from a well known electrical goods outlet. It was a big name brand with great features and a huge improvement on our old one which was nearly 10 years old and was now becoming unreliable. It was a good unit, but now was old, tired and out of date, and was not a great match to our spiffy new TV.

So after doing the deal with the salesman, and before I could walk off with my new unit, he asked, do you want to get a warranty for a free replacement if it has any problem at all in the next five years- only 50 bucks extra on top of the $500 I had already agreed to pay. What a deal! (This was on top of the usual manufacturer’s warranty.)

How to Increase Prices Without Losing Your Clients

by Dr Greg Chapman

An interview with Dr Greg Chapman by the Sydney Morning Herald





SMH: What are the key considerations when businesses set prices?

Dr Chapman: The starting point is that you must understand your margins – and the gross profit you need to cover your overheads to generate a target net profit, after you have paid yourself a decent wage. This analysis helps set targets to stay profitable. For many businesses, they find that they are not charging enough to stay in business.

Then you must understand the competitive environment and your own Points of Difference without which you will only sell on price. This is about the value you provide the purchaser – you want the purchaser to focus on the value you provide rather than how much it costs to provide it. If you don’t know the true value of your product or service- will the buyer?

 SMH: Why do businesses seem to get this wrong?

Pricing Strategy - Creating Massive Price Increases

by Dr Greg Chapman

Every business would like to be able to increase their prices. How much would you like to increase yours – perhaps by 15% or 25%? How about increasing them by 100% or even 1000%? To achieve massive increases, you need to think differently.

Consider the example below of a fairly basic product, the humble shower head. Let’s play a guessing game on the price of these showerheads. Which do you think is the cheapest?

Ad of Month – Be interesting

by Dr Greg Chapman

Today advertising is all about holding the attention with the viewer who is just one click away from changing the channel or following another link, leaving your message unheard.

In this ad, rather than asking questions to build desire such as “Do your clothes make you look old and boring, etc… well look at our exciting new fashion range”, it tells a story about a situation with which we are all familiar. How will this mother deal with it? Does it have a happy ending? What are they advertising?

The Almost Magic Circle of Price

by Dr Greg Chapman

There are laws of nature we all learnt about at school. Newton's laws of physics the laws of thermodynamics and Boyle's laws in chemistry, plus too many others to remember. But there are laws in marketing as well, and here I am referring to the almost magical Circle of Price.

Someone certainly deserves a Nobel Prize for this one.

Are You Using Scripts - Words that Sell

by Dr Greg Chapman

A sales pipeline can have many steps, and the secret is to optimise each one. So let’s look at a single step.

How well do you and your team deal with your current and potential customers? Do you leave contact with your customers to chance, or do you have a set, uniform approach, especially when dealing with enquiries from those who haven't dealt with your company before? More...

Top 10 Australian Small Business Blogs Award

by Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog has already been recognised as one of the top 100 small business blogs globally (see the award to the right) but it has now also been awarded as one of the top 10 Australian small business blogs as well.

Thanks guys for the recognition. You can check out the other 9 blogs here, also great reads (not least because some have published my works as well!)

Marketing Moments - How to Give It Away to Get It Back!

by Dr Greg Chapman

One of the most powerful marketing tools you have at your disposal is the use of the knowledge that you already possess. Yet how you use that knowledge as a strategy to grow your business is often overlooked. In this podcast I discuss how to leverage this knowledge to position you as the authority in your marketplace.

Ad of the Month – When Points of Difference don’t matter

by Dr Greg Chapman

You have a service might not be that different from others, so what do you do? Perhaps make a comparison with what life would be like without any of these services, and then highlighting your own. That’s what these very slick French ads did.

How does Your Business Compare? – Free Performance Benchmarking

by Dr Greg Chapman

While owners work away in their business every day, they would love to know how they are doing compared with their competitors. Wouldn’t it be nice if they let them have a peak at their books, but that ain’t gonna happen!

But what if someone had compiled the data of ALL your competitors which would allow you to see how you rank? A database of every competitor in the country! Wouldn’t you like to get your hands on that?

Well you can, and best of all, it’s free! So who has this data, and why are these being so generous with it? To answer the second question first. You have already paid for this data, that’s why it’s free! So who is this benefactor? The Australian Taxation Department.