Wednesday, January 24, 2024
One thing people always ask me is how to get fast business growth.
Many of the people asking this question also have something called a get-rich-quick mentality. People ask me how to get fast business growth, when what they really want to ask is this: “What magic button can I push to get rich overnight?”
If you’re one of these people then the first thing you should do is to get a reality check.
Sure, you’ll see a couple of news articles about some entrepreneurs’ “overnight success”, but the reality is that “overnight success” was built up from months, if not years of consistently working hard, making mistakes and creating newer assets.
Let's imagine for a second – you do happen to get lucky and make millions of dollars of cash in one go, thinking you won the lottery. You still don’t have the skills to sustain such money.
See, making money is a skill. Spending money isn’t. It is not hard to spend money — but creating money out of thin air requires pure skill.
Now let’s come back to reality.
The first step — everyone must do is recognize the reality of their business.
I can’t teach you how to massively grow your business in one night but I can teach you how to grow it faster than how it’s growing right now, without going through the trial and error business owners often go through.
Technically speaking, there are only two ways of growing a business. Either making your current customers worth more, or acquiring new customers.
Fast business growth is not often glamorous, and daily efforts will seem tedious at first – especially when trying to figure out the client acquisition game. But as time passes by you’ll notice your results growing significantly, adding more customers on a daily basis.
“Stability has left the building.” This quote by Thomas Friedman is one that eloquently describes the scene of marketing today.
Our playing field is made out of tissue paper, not grass. Our referees make up the rules as they go, but nowadays even fellow players get to stomp on the status quo. In this age of digital marketing, it's either you keep up or you get left behind.
One of the few sources of stability you’ll have is a strong relationship with a cadre of outstanding customers or clients committed to your businesses, for whom you can continue to provide compelling value.
Even after 9-11 attacks, the then CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner, was able to reassure Disnery’s army of employees to go ‘full speed ahead’ because, quote, “WE can trust OUR customers.”
I built that asset for GKIC (now Magnetic Marketing). If you have not built it for yourself, you’d better change your priorities damn first. If you possess it, you’d better not squander it. Anybody who thinks managing the inner game isn’t important can’t really be playing in the actual game.
And to play the game, you need to start taking action NOW. Losers wait until they have time or money. You’ve gotta have the DO IT NOW attitude – work on multiple things at once, be decisive, and act quickly.
Before I became a world-class copywriter, I was just Dan Kennedy. Just-Dan-Kennedy used to take pieces of sales copy to hand copy it for at least an hour a day. There are many others at the top of their field who attribute success to studying their topic diligently.
After that study comes the practice. I’ve written dozens of books, given dozens of high-ticket, multi-day seminars, and I’ve been making millions selling the info-products I created.
Most of which, by the way, you can gain access to by joining our Gold or Diamond Membership today.
By joining Gold, you will receive over $19,997 worth of free gifts delivered in your inbox and your doorstep.
If you join us at the Diamond level, you’ll receive over 7 Years Of Marketing Gold, straight to your doorstep as well. It’s a book compiled of weekly letters I sent to my Diamond members for 7 years. Most of my lessons, especially marketing lessons are inside.
Now, circling back to my point, you may be wondering what the secret to all this content is, and the secret is this: I write at least 1000 words of content every day.
That’s around 365,000 words a year, in case you want the math. That easily makes up a book or two, but for you, it could look like infographics, direct mail, infomercials, or even videos.
Either way, it should all have relevant and valuable content for your customers to see.
This is one of the many ways you can nurture and attract more customers to your business. You need to make it a habit to constantly promote yourself, your products, and your services. You need to make it a daily effort.
To the young Dan Kennedy back then, this meant cold calls or direct mail, and sometimes it meant joining networking events or business conferences. Either way, I made it a habit to get myself out there and connect to my potential clients – you need to do the same.
Over time I’ve learned how to automate it with systems built to promote me even in my sleep.
All my books promote all of our recurring membership programs such as the NO BS Newsletter, leading up to our Diamond Membership. Most of my ad campaigns with webinars and challenges have been running on autopilot for months and years — all promoting and getting people into our continuity. It’s a concept I call MIFGE (which we will discuss later) – but the lesson is I made it a habit to promote myself every day.
Additionally, I made sure to promote myself to the audience I was looking for. I sent the right message at the right time. This is called Market Match, and it means selling to people who have a pronounced predilection to believe your claims and assertions.
One great example of this is Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the Man and the King, AKA the greatest team in the history of comics.
They created most of the Marvel characters you know today, but the very first one that worked was Spider-Man. Why? Because before Spider-Man were heroes like Superman and Batman, both of which are cool, but not particularly relatable unless you happen to be either an alien or an orphaned billionaire.
Spider-Man, on the other hand, was a character whose personality was designed to match a particular audience. Who was more likely to read comic books than anyone else? Pre-teens and teenagers. So, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby built a character that a very specific audience can identify with – they made the character match the teenager.
They understood their key audience and what they wanted most – which are often things they don’t get much of in the first place. Business owners, for example, often feel underappreciated, disrespected, overworked, and underpaid.
This means they want appreciation, respect, acknowledgment, and admiration. If you market to them using all the things they want to hear, they are more likely to listen to what you want to sell which, in this case, should be something that can make them even more successful than they already are as business owners.
That is how you get and retain customers. By understanding the kind of customers you want, you’ll make the kind of content that attracts them. This content should be consistent.
If you’ve been following me and my work, then you know I’ve said this before: you always want to look for ways to increase the average transaction amount, meaning the amount of money a customer spends with you each time they spend money with you.
There are plenty of ways to do this, but the main way I want to talk about is with upsells.
Most businesses don’t use them at all or don’t understand them, but in direct response, we all understand that upsell is what happens to you when you add a one-time offer after the initial order is put in place.
Following that, they’ll say something along the lines of, “Oh, by the way! As a result of…” or “Because you’re buying today” or “Because it’s a Tuesday!” And they’ll add whatever to the order. It should be done in retail, yet it rarely is. It’s done in the restaurant business as well.
An example of this is McDonald's. One question saved McDonald’s from bankruptcy in the 1980s.
What they did was: after the customers placed their orders, the cashiers were taught to ask, “Would you like fries with that?”
That single order bump increased McDonald’s revenue by margins and ultimately helped save the franchise, and the restaurant chain has improved on that strategy ever since by creating their “value meals”, or packaged meals. All of this improved and maintained the transaction size for the restaurant.
You need to look for ways to do upsells in your business, and increase the frequency of purchase activity. Get ‘em back more often. If you are a marketer who already does upsell, you should do them more often.
Most marketers underuse their house list and under-market to their customers. Their customers have a greater capacity and desire to consume than what the marketers are fulfilling because – instead of focusing on those customers, they’re out chasing after new customers.
Make customers multiply with little or no cost by looking for ways to stimulate referrals, to get customers to bring you customers. Can't get a better customer than one that refers. And generally, referrals cost less than any other mechanism you can use to get ‘em.
There's an inherent thing in our kind of business, which is called the “pass along”, which is when your product itself gets shared and it's why you always wanna make sure to have marketing information and information in every product because it gets passed around.
It’s kind of simple, but for some reason, a lot of people don’t do it. Those who do are usually those who’ve paid to learn and get my monthly newsletter, and if you pay for the NO B.S Newsletter, you also get free access to my “Midas Touch for Selling” course.
We’ve already talked a lot about existing customers here, from how to make content for them, to having them buy more, and now we’ll talk about customer retention.
Your existing customers are, obviously, customers that know who you are and what you sell. They know where to find you, trust you, and they understand how your offer differs from competitors. They are the warmest possible leads you’ll get, and ones you never want to lose, because these existing customers can help multiply and scale your business faster than any strategy.
There’s a lot out there on customer retention, most of which I’ve discussed in my “No B.S. Guide to Maximum Referrals and Customer Retention” book with Shaun Buck. I know it can be really difficult to know which ones to implement, or how to do all of them, so today I’ll tell you about the three-step formula that my co-author, Buck, explains in an edited excerpt from the book.
The complete formula for retaining customers is simple:
Shared Interest + Shared Space + Shared Concern = Customer Retention
This is far from a new concept. After all, we’ve all used this formula plenty of times to make friends, find a spouse, etc.
First, you need to find shared interests – those areas in your life that overlap. For example, Buck has five kids and they’re all boys. Each year, their family goes to Universal Studios. With just those two sentences you can connect with a large number of people, including:
You should never communicate with your customers just about things like your products, services, or your business. Doing that positions your customers as “just customers”, who exist solely to benefit your business. If you want real customer retention, you need a relationship. To have a relationship, you get personal.
To get personal you share your life, your interests, your experiences, your ideas, who you are and what you’re about – all so your customers can find any shared interests with you.
This is something a lot of business owners find difficult to understand or do. Oftentimes when I work with a client who sells B2B, they feel that opening up on a personal level is crossing some invisible boundary. This is ironic because, at the end of the day it’s still a person, not a business, who decides to buy your product or not.
Ever heard of the saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Regardless of whether you’re selling B2B or B2C, people would rather do business with someone they know.
Sharing an interest is important, but so is sharing a space, and it's simpler to accomplish than you might think. You want to be present in the lives of your customers.
The supermarket gets you to buy insulated canvas tote bags with their logo on them to bring with you shopping. It hangs in your pantry or by your door, rather forcefully reminding you to shop at that store and interfering with an impulse to go somewhere else. That's a retention strategy.
Another way to do this is to give your customers another kind of memento, like a plaque they can hang on their wall or a book to put on their shelves. Your goal is to be in and around each prospect and customer in as many different ways as possible.
Here’s a short list of some of the ways you can maintain a presence in your client's homes, offices, and even vehicles:
Sharing space in someone's physical world is not a new idea.
Walk around your house tonight and look at all the logos and branding that's all around you. Those seemingly random stickers that come with Apple products? The ones that you see some people stick onto their cars, their water jugs, and whatever? That’s sharing space. Customer retention.
Shared concern is the final piece to this formula.
Relationships don't thrive when they're one-sided – you have to genuinely want to help every customer and prospect. You have to work to help them come up with the desired outcome that they not only want but find to be in their best interest.
Too many business owners put their own needs ahead of the needs of their customers and prospects, and although you may do well for a time, your customer retention rates will eventually suffer. Your referrals will be nonexistent, and ultimately, your business will decline.
This is because customers want to believe that your concern for them is genuine, going beyond getting into their wallets. The more ways you can demonstrate that the stronger your customer relationships will become. Better and longer retention and more frequent referrals will follow.
With all that being said, if you'd like to learn of even more ways to get fast business growth, I highly recommend you register for our NO B.S. Newsletter, where we share everything from essential business principles, secrets of marketing, and even Behind-The-Scenes walkthroughs of Magnetic Marketing’s success.
Want a flood of new dream clients that beg to pay, stay, and refer… so you can watch your business explode in 2024!? Give us just 90 minutes a day, and over the 5-day sprint, we'll show you exactly how, for free!
Every online business is different, employing different strategic approaches and organizational structures, and offering different products and services. Therefore, individual results will vary from user to user. YOUR BUSINESS’ INDIVIDUAL RESULTS WILL VARY DEPENDING UPON A VARIETY OF FACTORS UNIQUE TO YOUR BUSINESS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO YOUR CONTENT, BUSINESS MODEL, AND PRODUCT AND SERVICE OFFERINGS.