If you’re in business, you’re in the marketing business. And you’ve been handed a gift worth $8.4 B (that’s billion!). In fact, this is a gift that repeats annually and has increased in value by 60% in the past 10 years. Run all the way to your bank with it!

Halloween is big business and there’s no reason you can’t cash in on some of it. Think about your audience and how to creatively engage them using Halloween to promote your business, your products, your services, your brand.

Happy New Year! I know I’m 4 months early but I just had to share this killer personal practice with you so you can use Q4 to get a powerful jumpstart on 2018.

If you’re not already one of the elite business leaders in the world, you can borrow their best personal practice that got them where they are and keeps them there.

There are people whose sole focus is uncovering and watching important trends in business and I, for one, am grateful for their persistence.

In an excellent article I recently read by Ian Altman on Forbes, he outlines 10 trends that will drive success in 2017. Realistically, not all of them will be critical to your business or mine but they are worth looking at and considering what the impact might be on your business and business in general.

Congratulations, you sold another product! Now you just have to confirm the order with the buyer, find a box, pull the product off the shelf and add it to the box with the correct paperwork and packing material, print the address label and get it to the post office for shipping.

All done? Hmm, what about their access to the membership site and the online part of the product or bonuses? Then what about support followup or education on how to use your product?

Recently a small business owner came to us with a lead conversion problem. She gets a solid stream of warm leads opting in for her lead magnet (free trial) but very few convert to her paid product. In fact, a minority of them actually engage with the trial. Sound familiar?

She has followup failure. Not that she doesn’t followup, she does, but clearly what she’s doing for followup is not working.

The terms brand and identity are often used interchangeably which causes confusion when businesses are trying to create relationships with their customers.

Your brand is what people see - colors, logos, tagline, etc. Your identity is who you are, at the heart of your business.

Anyone who handles customer service in their business understands that feeling when the customer or prospect asks the same question again… and again. You paste a smile on your face  and be careful what you type when you respond with the same answer again… and again.

In all fairness, sometimes it’s the same question but a different person asking it. But the frustration is the same when you have to answer the same question over and over.

Do you write? Words? Music?

Do you draw? Paint? Photograph?

Do you perform? Act? Sing? Dance? Record?

Are you protected?

When our son calls, his daughter almost always wants to get on the phone, saying “Daddy, I want to see Grandmom and Granddad!” (make the call a FaceTime call) and once we are visible, odds are she will say “Can you read me a story?” She usually asks Kerry, I guess her storytelling is better than mine, at least in our granddaughter’s eyes.

What’s the point, other than a cute antidote about Eva? The point is that we identify with stories from the time we are very young… we’ve been reading stories to Eva since she was just a few months old. We relate to stories, we learn from stories, we start to better understand our world through stories. Stories help us see things that cold hard facts would not allow us to see.

I think that you know by now we are big, big into automating everything but the kitchen sink (hey, maybe we can automate that too… hmmm). Anyway, one thing that you can easily automate is sending out holiday cards, for any holiday or occasion you want.

One of our clients is a staunch supporter of marketing automation. They manage all their lead acquisition, followup, and client nurture using email automation. And they are consistent and successful with it. That’s all they need, right?

Wrong.

With the lack of any other frame of reference, your prospects will default to a price comparison. An apples to apples comparison. Once they say something like, “The XYZ company will do the same thing for $Y dollars less,” you have virtually lost the sale, because the talk is all about price. When you tell them all the reasons (and they may be good ones) why your pricing is as good if not a better deal, you sound to them like you are making excuses to try to recover the sale. It’s over!

API is another one of those TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that we have grown to hate and it does not stand for Apple Pie International. It actually stands for Application Program Interface and one pretty good definition is:

Application program interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. An API specifies how software components should interact.

Ok, so now you’ve got it right? No? The definition made it so much more clear, NOT.

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you and your company have developed some specialized expertise in your chosen business area. Some of it is likely proprietary but much of it you have no problem sharing. Or at least you should have no problem sharing as it can be a great way to get new clients/customers/patients and keep existing ones.

An often overlooked way to share that information is through a membership website. Sure, you need to have some information on the public side of your website, but you can keep the real juicy gems for those who sign-up as members.

The answer is not obvious. A better question might be “Should I Change Hosting Providers?” The answer to that question is ‘maybe’.

You likely spent a chunk of change on your website and a reasonable amount more on other marketing driving prospects and clients to your website. In addition, you may have read my articles on why everyone needs a membership site and set one up on your site. Or maybe worst of all, you do eCommerce on your site and it’s not protected.