Irresistible offer

Irresistible offer according to Mike Joyner is “Identity-building offer central to a product, service, or company where the believable return on investment is communicated so clearly and efficiently that it´s immediately apparent you´d have to be a fool to pass it up.”

The irresistible offer must create so much noise that everyone who is involved in making-offer-process will want to buy whatever you´re selling.

Lots of marketers think they would leave the offer to a later stage of a sales process, but they might be losing many customers at the beginning. The irresistible offer must be your starting point in any marketing efforts.

The core of your business must be highlighted in such offer. Before you do this kind of offer, you must foresee 4 questions that every buyer would ask whenever you offer them something. You can read about those questions here.

What Irresistible offer must have?

The Irresistible offer does not state your benefit, your biggest accomplishments or your special seasonal offer, which is only one time deal. But special offers can be part of the Irresistible offer, but not standing alone.

The Irresistible offer must have specific and necessary components. It should consist of the 3 core items:

1. ROI offer  2. Touchstone  3. Believability

1. ROI offer

Return on investment (ROI) is a simple idea – all buyers must know that investing in your product or service helps them to get some great investment and value in return. Offering a great value deal is a core in your message. Do not offer something that you can´t deliver, otherwise tricking customer into something which is not deliverable will only create a bad image and reputation.

2. Touchstone

This is when the sales takes place. The touchstone is an answer to 4 big questions that each buyer must have. It is a description that emphasise the following points:

-Here´s what we sell

-Here´s how much does it cost

-Here´s what´s in for you

-Here´s why you should trust us

It´s not easy to communicate above statements to a buyer. Therefore you must make sure whatever you communicate is: crystal clear, simple and brief.

Mike in his book “Irresistible offer”  uses an example of Domino´s Pizza. Their marketing statement is: “Pizza hot and fresh to your door in 30 minutes or less or it´s free”. Their message communicates 3 important points:

Here´s what we sell – Pizza. Here´s what´s in it for you – delivery of pizza as fast as possible. Here´s why you should trust us – if we do not keep our promise, we do not charge you.

2 things that are missing: a ROI and how much will it cost. So the Domino´s pizza could add a statement like “A fast pizza for a better price and quality”

3. Believability

If you state some statement that is super unbelievable and it still might be right you should prove your customers to create a believability. But how do you prove your buyer that he/she can trust your offer and that your offer is not too good to be true?

You can use social proof. You can ask your current or previous customers for testimonials, showing how satisfied they are/were trying your products. Your testimonial should be accompanied by real phrase from that person, his/her photo and name (if possible).

Technical proof could be a great way to show that your product has been scientifically validated or offering them a test of your product will create a believability.

The best order to catch your prospect´s attention is to go as following:

1. Touchstone – offering a customer concrete things to excite him or her.

2. Believability – this leads him to discover real facts about you or your products to trust you

3. ROI – if he/she finds your touchstone attractive then he gets to buy your product if you offer a great return on investment

4 questions to address the buyer´s core issues in order to sell

We wonder what is it that catches the buyer´s attention. Is it your product or a service? Well-formulated marketing message? A business card? Brand?

Mike Joyner in his book “Irresistible offer: how to sell your product or service in 3 seconds or less ” highlights that in every day life we like to exchange things. You will get a car for an exchange of money. The bank offers you a loan, you´ll pay an interest rate. Something for something!

What do all these people do? They make offers! None of the business will happen if you don´t make an offer. The tricky part is what must a good offer contain? It´s not that simple.

When making the offer, we must address the buyer´s core concerns. To catch the prospects´attention, your offer first should answer 4 big questions.

1st and 2nd question: What are you trying to sell me? How much?

I guess everyone knows that you have to offer a great quality for a reasonable price.

“Give me €1000 per day and I´ll improve your team performance within 6 months.”

“Give me € 4000 and I´ll make your breast bigger and nicer.”

At the end, if your offer is not fair, good and reasonable, only dumb people will buy it. This happens often, but they will perhaps buy once and then never more. You´ll not gain a customer loyalty with a fool offer. If you don´t gain trust by not fulfilling what you promised you may lose this customer forever.

3rd question: Why should I believe you?

When you´re offering something that seems too good, often people question: Why the heck should I believe this offer? It´s unbelievable, it´s impossible. We get that quite often.

The key is to gain trust, as mentioned earlier. Credibility  helps here.  There are various ways to get a credibility into your offer. Just consider asking testimonials, social proofs or anything that could make your offer believable.

4th question: What´s in it for me?

It´s all about value. If I buy only a healthy food, what´s in it for me is a good healthy lifestyle and great nutrition.

This is very crucial in your marketing message, but it shouldn´t be only about ´What´s in it for me´. If you´re only going to express the values, it can be pushy and too salesy.

We should address the emotions of the buyer in this part. First 3 questions are logical, this one must be emotional.

Normally, sales happens when you can impress buyer within couple of seconds of your sales pitch. You have 3 or less seconds to impress the buyer and answer these 4 important questions: What are you trying to sell me? How much? Why should I believe you? What´s in it for me?

For this to happen, you cannot just make an offer, you gotta make an irresistible offer!

How do you make your readers alive?

Every one of you would like your readers to pay attention to your article. You do not want them to find this useless or uninteresting. Guess what? Below you can find couple of types of blog posts you should write in order to catch reader´s attention! The inspiration comes from Jon Morrow, CEO of Boos Blog Traffic.

Even if your posts have very good content, it might not be enough. Different categories of the posts that readers are interested in matter a lot too. Here are the most favourite ones:

• Big List Posts 

List posts are very popular for readers. They´re straight-forward, easy to read and quick to chose the most appropriate advice from. This type of post is the best to build your authority and show your area of expertise.

The best headlines to chose from are: number of reasons, ways how something works, secrets, advices, etc.

Let´s say you want to write about building a muscle. You can name couple of lists or ways how to build muscle. See example below:

1. 35 ways how to build muscles

2. Top 50 tricks to build your muscle the right way

3. 15 rules how to build muscle fast

As mentioned, you should write big lists. Not 10 ways, but 35 ways how to build muscle. 100 top lists of muscle building blog posts. The bigger the list, the better. Why? Well, the bigger list you create, the more time you need to spend. This is highly appreciated among readers. They know how much time you have to spend to write those huge lists!

• #2: Infographics

Infographics are graphic visual illustration of information, data or knowledge that aim to show complex information clearly. You can collect data, organize them and turn them info visual charts or maps.

Why infographics are beneficial?

• We can remember information better when we see it than read it
• Infographics are extremely shareable on the web because they usually provide embed code, which allows an automatic link from the original site to yours
• Since they´re likeable and shareable, this can definitely help Google´s Page Rank algorithm, which is crucial for SEO
• Because infographics are visually engaging, they can simply bolster your brand

How to create infographics? You don´t have to anymore involve graphic designers that are really expensive, you can try create it yourself. Have a look here.

• #3: Roundup Posts

Roundup posts are group of articles, blogs or any other sources that wasn´t written by us but some other experts and we do a short list/summary about each with the links to the original source.

Why they are so good?

1. Getting information and advice from the top recognised people in the area you´re talking about is enormously valuable.

2. Great way to give inbound links to the experts and start raise relationships. They can link this back to their blogs, which create great awareness for you since they have thousands of followers on their blogs. This is a great step in building a guest blogging opportunity.

Wanna advice? Create e.g. 40 professionals knelling about particular topic and put all their links together to create a roundup post. Try to reach them out asking for one line on a specific issue within that topic. Maybe only 20% will respond back, but it will still create a lot of traffic to your blog post.

See the example on a roundup post. List of experts who advice how to save money. It´s excellent!

• #4: Ultimate Guides

Ultimate guide post is about bringing all popular blog posts together. These guides are usually quite long, 3000+ words.

How can I create these guides that are better than anything else? It requires research and lot of it! The key is to find an angle that nobody has discovered yet.

You have to read a lot and find the information that is not that easily accessible. Create for example an excel sheet where you collect the topics that are mentioned frequently and are repeated by many sources and topics that are very seldom. Information that is posted too often, do not include them into your post.

• #5: Egobait

Egobait is all about creating a list of the top people in their field – e.g. Top 30 experts in fitness.

You can just put together a solid list of rivals in the area you want to mention. It of course requires a lot of research but it´s worth it.

You can put their picture, take some quote from their website and ask for a link from everyone on the list. They will definitely agree because you will include them as a part of exclusive group. I believe most of them will want to share that and link this back to your article. It´s wonderful!

So what are you waiting for? Do these experiments and you will see how much traffic you will get to your blog. Let me know your thoughts then! 🙂

Regenerate your content

The core of each marketing activity should be the content creation. In my previous blogs, you can see a description of several types of content such as blog posts, webinars, whitepapers or e-books. Usually it is not a problem to create the content, but the challenge is to maintain its strategy and link this content to various channels or repurpose the same content to different formats. This is what this post is about.

I believe, still many bloggers or companies create single individual posts. They generate it and share it once and create another different content. This is a mistake! People should create sort of a strategy content framework and combine every piece of content to various channels. It needs a proper planning.

What kind of content do I create?

If you aim for content creation, then most probably you create various types of content:

1. Smaller pieces like blog posts, articles, podcasts or presentations. These are more common and frequently published types of content.

2. Educational pieces including whitepapers, e-books, larger reports, etc. They are larger and therefore not produced with such a frequency as the blog posts or articles. These are also designed for potential buyers or self-educators.

What are the ways to regenerate the content and link it to different channels?

1. First write couple of smaller pieces, depending on the needs of your audience or clients. Write it in a systematic way, so that it provides an information flow. You should outline the content based on your target. Thus, if you have various targets, then you should frame them separately.

2. To write a larger piece such as whitepaper or e-book, combine various smaller pieces together to create 1 large topic for your prospects or readers. Now you need to be creative to organize all content to one or several pieces. It can be time consuming. Such larger fraction can be again segmented into smaller parts and published to various channels.

What are the ways to regenerate the content and link it to different channels?

It is important to note, regenerating the content requires the solid plan. It is not only about doing copy paste, but also creating different formats of this content. As an example, imagine you create a single blog post. This blog can be then regenerated into 3 different pieces of content in different digital locations.  First, it is the blog post itself. Then you can create a podcast or other audio file on your website. You can then embed it on YouTube. And lastly, create the PowerPoint presentation which you can publish on SlideShare.

This is only about re-organizing 1 small piece of content. Now, imagine this single content can be still part of whitepaper, e-book or any larger piece. This is like a circle, it´s a great way to re-use your content but it is crucial to systematically plan it. Therefore, I like the idea of designing a framework, like the one you can see below. This framework map is inspired by the book The Invisible Sale written by Tom Martin.

Do you practice this way of publishing your content? Do you have any other suggestion or comments? I´d be glad to learn more 🙂

5 basics of a webinar

Webinars create an opportunity to build a sense of event around your ideas, value and information. Webinar can be live or recorded. Webinar is a great tool, it is time and cost effective. More than that, it is interactive for your prospects, so when you present the information, the audience can question and clarify anything that interests them.

Webinars can simply help your prospects to choose or not to choose your company. This is not like a traditional sales, you can really make this more efficient. You either let them to self-educate by great content available online or help them discover if they want to proceed with you during a webinar.

Many companies think they can make webinars without proper planning. With this I mean that they do not have any sales strategy or plan. You should perhaps think what is your goal with every single webinar. You can ask questions such: “What do I want the participant to do afterwards?”, “What do you want them to learn?”, “What further action should they take?”. You should simply transmit the clear message.

I think we should follow next 5 essentials when executing the webinar:

1. Focus on a catchy title and description: When you´re about to deliver a webinar, you probably know who is your audience and what are their needs. Adjust the title to their needs, emphasise something that would bring them high value.

2. Prepare: If you want to deliver a successful webinar, there is a preparation needed. It may sound weird, but you could practise the flow of information you want to provide during the webinar. Your goal is to inform and persuade.

3. Provide quality: The most important thing about quality is audio and video. The audience must be able to understand you well without any background noise. Depending how serious you are with webinars, you should invest in good audio tools.

4. Keep it simple & short: Giving a simple, sometimes basic but important content to your audience, is sometimes more important then trying to cover too much information in a 60 minute slot. Do not overload people with non-relevant things. If you do not find 1 hour enough, create more webinars out of the same topic for a shorter time like 30-45 minute.

5. Keep it fluent and entertaining: You must keep the audience engaged, either in live or recorded webinar. They can easily get distracted if you´re boring. Also, your slides should change every 30 seconds to 1 minute for them to stay awake and follow what you´re presenting.

There are many other key points or important information to deliver excellent webinars. Do you know any? Then share it 🙂

 

How to create a Whitepaper that will generate leads

The white paper is a great source of content. The white papers are the best to use when you need to provide more information to your customer. Blog posts are good but they do not provide such high value as white paper does. The white paper provides an educational content allowing companies to reach the buyers who are interested early in the buying cycle and let them to go closer to buy your services or products. They are designed to provide such information allowing a client to self-educate. Normally, the white paper consists of about 10-15 pages, depending on complexity of information you want to provide.

How would you create the white paper to nurture the leads?

• Find the topic that fulfils your prospects´needs: You must be well aware what your target market is and you must learn about their needs and problems. Once you identify a problem, then simply write a short solution to it in a form of white paper.
• Highlight your background: Firstly, you have to point-out that you´re among the best in the area to provide such helpful information. You should provide an overview of your past work and experience.
• Create a sales landing page: Create a summary of benefits and main topics of the white paper. You need to persuade them why they should download them and give out their contact information.
• Do a research: Good information backed by well-documented and credible research is very appreciated. Analyse your found data in easy and understandable way. Give examples. Giving examples makes it easier for people to understand your argumentation.
• Promote: You can do it in various ways. You can share it via email. You can promote a link to the white paper in social media or introduce it in a blog post. Further than that, it´s a great idea to convert your white paper in a form of webinar to reach more audience and get more leverage out of your white paper’s content.

Do you have any other ideas how to create and promote the white papers? If so, please share it 🙂

Ebooks – a great source of sales & content marketing

If you´re working within an area of content marketing or sales, you wish to provide your prospect helpful piece of information. You can create short, simple content which could be useful at the beginning of buying cycle where prospects might be looking for answers to very basic questions. This could be in form of blog posts or white papers. Another option is to create longer form of content such as ebooks. When prospects move through the buying process or are already a customer, they definitely need more specific information, often at a deeper level.

The presence of tablets create an opportunity for bloggers to publish longer documents much more than before. Readers probably won´t feel comfortable reading longer material on their computers. Therefore, ipad or kindle allows to comfortably download and read the long documents like for instance ebooks.

Ebooks are probably the best type of content to generate leads. It is not only great and helpful but also inexpensive tool for lead generation. How do ebooks generate sales? Simply, you can create valuable content in form of ebook for an exchange of contact information of your potential prospect. With that, you can build your mailing list for your marketing efforts.

If you want to start publishing ebooks, probably it´s important to know what are the options. There are two options:

1. Publish your ebooks as PDF files. They are quick and easy to create using Microsoft Word, Powerpoint or Keynote program by Apple. You can share them on your website, via emails and on social media. Readers can access pdf files on computers, tablets and smartphones, however, pdf files don’t adapt well to various sized displays and devices.

2. Create your ebooks in an EPUB style. EPUB books are more advanced, you need to use some platforms which let you to convert your text into e-format. They can be configured for Kindle, iBook or Nook. They are XML based, which means it works well with most types of software. The benefit of this is that you can actually change your text or do any editing on any device. Ebooks made from EPUB are easy to read on small devices.

At the end you have to think of how to promote your ebook. The wording of your promotion is very important. The headline and the wording should lead your potential clients to your ebook. Highlight all benefits of ebook, tell your prospects what your ebook will do for them. The good idea is to identify a specific problem and promote your ebook as the solution. This should really work.

What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions how to promote your ebook?

 

Blog posts – a great source of content

Content creation is very important to drive traffic to your websites and possibly generate some leads in case you´re aiming at it. You can naturally have different types of content you want to provide for your readers or prospects. This could be product pages, how-to-manuals, white papers, e-books or blog posts. All of them are great source of content that could be helpful to answer the customers´questions. I will describe blog posts in more depth.

Benefits of blog posts:

Blog posts can be great to drive traffic to your site when using search engine optimisation correctly. More than that, if blog posts are helpful and will aid to resolve some of your prospect´s current problems, they can be a good lead generator. Blog posts can be a sales tool for sales reps. You will definitely create a good impact on customer when you send an educational piece of content which will bring them benefits. With this means, blog posts can help you to establish authority and visibility.

What to pay attention to?

You should keep the format readable to allow reader with easy reading. Have a fluent flow of information in structured format. Make paragraphs short. Highlight the important parts or make them bold. Use simple words, avoid jargons. Everyone should understand what you´re writing about. Good tips is to use links to other sources, but do not overwhelm reader with them. Keep it neat.

There are several types of blogs you can create, here is some overview:

• Resource posts: The main motto of resource posts is to be helpful. If you´re a consultant and you want to drive your client through some process they´re working on, you may include posts that list several links or ideas or other resources (not your own) that your customers might need in order to establish the mentioned process.
• How-to posts: This is very simple. If you sell a product or a service, you want to ease your customer´s life by providing steps, directions, video tutorials or tips how to handle the purchased product or service. The customers will be grateful to you.
• FAQ posts: Your prospects definitely have standard questions before they´d purchase from you. It´s very common for companies creating FAQ on their webpage but they do not usually create blog posts about that and do not share it on social media. You can start doing this. You should try to write a single blog post collecting the main questions your customers might have about your offering and write such useful blog post.
• Extra posts: Create posts that have nothing to do with your products or services but still are relevant to the industry which your business is part of. If you´re a software provider, you could create blog posts about the latest software and technological developments in the industry in specific market area. This could be very handful information for your customers.
• Comparison posts: Why not to create posts, in which you can do competitor comparisons. You can compare two different products within the same market industry. You can bring a visibility to the companies´ benefits, including your own.
• News posts: You can create posts about any new features, products or services of your company as well as industry trends within your industry. This way, you can keep your customers or prospects up-to-date. These posts are also very effective at building an audience.

These are just examples of several ways to publish blog posts. There might be many more. You could perhaps share your own. What other blog posts you think would be useful for your customers? What other benefits did blog posts bring to you or to your business?

 

Document Templates for marketing content or blog posts

Imagine that you need to use some standard content like product description or some success stories, or even FAQs in your sales process. To make things easier for people, it´s better to create this repeatable content in form of document templates. I got this great idea from the book Invisible Sale written by Tom Martin. He states that he has been using the most common template called Point-of-view (POV) template, which is used for types of content that is highly repetitive in prospecting or digital sales.

This could be used in situation where you quickly need to answer certain standard questions or submit written proposals to your potential clients. To have such document templates makes it easier to speed up the marketing or sales activities within your company.On the other hand, you can use such POV templates for creating the blog posts. If you want to structure your posts and to draft your thoughts or ideas, it is very efficient to create POV templates.

I have started using such templates to draft the ideas for sales proposal to clients at the company where I work. If you have number of products or services that you offer it to several different industry clients, you probably need to adapt the structure of the content to each of those single products and adjust it to the nature of the business. Therefore, POV templates are super useful. See the example of the template I often use.

How to increase your organice reach on Facebook

If you´re at the early stage of your business and you don´t have a fan base, then probably buying likes is a good idea to grow quickly. But buying likes on Facebook could be more damaging than helpful. Those fans most probably won´t engage with you and won´t be likely interested in your content. Later, you will spend much time removing those fans from your social media network. Waste of time!

On the other hand, investing money in true fans could be more effective. You just need to know how to target them well. Then create good, interactive content and hope for your fans to engage and further share your content.

Here are good tips to grow your FB fan base organically:

1. Produce valuable and engaging content

I think this might be obvious but producing good quality content will likely increase your traffic. More than that, if you captivate with interesting questions that would engage your fans, it is possible they´ll pay more attention. One interesting thing, you shouldn´t use call to action like “click like if..” or “share if…”. Facebook states that these are punished so let´s try to be more creative with engaging content on FB.

2. Build the audience

First of all, we should pay more attention to ads. Target more relevant countries, spend a little bit more money on ad targeting. Take advantage of your mailing list, if you have some. You can target people on your mailing lists who aren´t your fans on FB by using “Custom Audiences”. On the other hand, you can find similar people who are part of your mailing lists, people who like pages or share similar interests that are relevant to your business. For this, use “Graph Search and Lookalike Audiences” .

3. Re-share your old content

Some people do mistakes of publishing the content only once. If you have some old valuable content that is popular and worth, re-share it once again. It´s really useful, especially when you´re getting more and more new fans. Those haven´t had a chance to see this content.

4. Track when your fans are online and post respectively

Facebook Page Insights gives you an opportunity to get a great idea who your fans are. You can get demographic data of your fans, what time they´re online and how do they engage and respond to your posts. This helps you to realise when to post so that you reach maximum of your fans. It´s a great thing!

5. Post frequently

It doesn´t help you to grow your fan base if you post once a month or on  irregular basis. It´s really hard to reach your audience even if you post once a day. Imagine only 10% if your fans might see your post. Therefore, it is recommended we post several times a day. Do not re-share the same posts during the day, use different ones.

6. Share other site´s content, not only yours

If you want to catch the attention, use interesting, also relevant content or posts of other websites. Do not only promote yourself but show how open you´re to share other people´s content or even learn from them. This will show not only your openness but also willingness to share a valuable but not your own content that can be beneficial to your fans.