Abundance is in how you view the world
Hanan Kattan
10% of profits from all Enlightenment companies are donated to charities focused on women and children via The Sarif-Kattan Foundation
http://www.Sarif-KattanFoundation.com
Smashwords Edition
First edition published worldwide by Enlightenment Press, London, UK, 2012
Copyright © 2012, Hanan Kattan. All rights reserved
ISBN Number: 978-0-9570752-0-7
Acknowledgments:
It is a blessing to have amazing friends be part of the wonderful journey of life. I have been fortunate and blessed to share my life with so many enlightened and inspiring people who have touched my life. They are a very rich and diverse group and I am grateful to have known them.
I will start with the lovely women who helped shape my life:
My dearest and oldest friends:
Katherine Priestley, Lisa Tchenguiz, Kristi Tethong, Susan Coll, Sandra Watfa, Alma Fakhre, Lea Porter, Hadia Debs, Shehkar Jah, Antoinette Claessens, Dina Masri, Jessica Barkley, Rania Atalla, Filwa Mayassi and Carla Moussa.
My very dear and creative ladies of film and music:
Leonie Casanova, Leena Yadav, Joan Chen, Lisa Ray, Sheetal Sheth, Teri Schwartz, Melody Korenbrot, Stefani Deoul, Donna Deitch, Antonia Frering and Maria Furtwangler Burda
My brilliant and lovely ladies of finance:
Mick Lee, Karen Frank, Jennifer Hill, Michelle Bonn, Ellie Patsalos and Kelly Moss
My dear and more recent friends:
Conchita Morley, Basma Ali Reza, Dounia Nadar, Simonetta Coronelli, Deborah and Gabriella DiMaggio, Megan and Christine Bense, Kelly Gonda, Jennifer Fox, Shaz Van Zanten, Muna Kattan (Bethlehem), Dalia Fadila, Lakshmi Pratury, Steffi Czerny and Sue James
My TEDx HolyLand ladies:
My amazing TEDxHolyLand partner Liat Aaronson and my “Palestinian Angel” who made our event a reality.
My lovely TED women:
Miriam Twaalfhoven, Sarah Caddick, Marina Kleinwort and Joanne Priestley
Leslie Fennern who is very much missed and will always live in my heart.
And for the wonderful men in my life:
The three amazing godfathers of our boys:
David Pitblado (our wonderful friend who is deeply missed and whose life was such an inspiration) and our dear friends Losel Tethong and Charles Nasser.
And all the other wonderful men:
My dear Jamaican Palestinian cousin Joey Issa, my enlightened friend Aseem Bajaj, and the lovely Mazen Masri, Alaa Khashoggi, Sharif Nadar and Tareq Abu Zayad. Samir Dajani for his unwavering belief and support and I am eternally grateful to Minhaz Manji as without him I would not have met my wife.
Special Thank Yous:
To Laura Posey, Adrian Ulsh, Madelein Otto and Naresh Shahani for their help and support with our learning process.
To my family - the loves of my life:
Ethan and Luca, my brilliant and beautiful two sons, the men of my world, my rocks, my life.
Shamim, my best friend, my talented and brilliant Renaissance wife; without you I would not be who I am today and this book could not have happened.
A lifetime entrepreneur of Palestinian background, Hanan Kattan co-founded Enlightenment Business Solutions as an online marketing company that gives small businesses the tools for outstanding growth. It is the latest addition to her Enlightenment group of companies, which includes film production, film sales, a record label and a publishing arm.
Her aim with Enlightenment Business Solutions was to address the crucial ‘third step’ in online marketing - converting the extra traffic from higher rankings into actual sales and profits.
Her previous businesses included creating her own hair care brand, Te Tao, which launched an entirely new category of ‘premium mass’ holistic hair products which Marie Claire magazine called ‘beauty with a conscience.’
She is also the producer of two feature films, The World Unseen and I Can’t Think Straight, which have won over 30 awards between them. Her third feature, The House of Tomorrow, was inspired by the TEDxHolyLand conference that Hanan curated with her Israeli partner under her foundation, the Sarif-Kattan Foundation. The film has just completed and she served as producer and co-director alongside her partner Shamim Sarif, an award-winning novelist and director.
She lives in London with Shamim and their two children.
To my grandfather, Tewfic Kattan, who made everything a possibility
And to the loves of my life, Shamim, Ethan and Luca who make everything worthwhile
Table of Contents
Section 1 - Your Sales Process
Understand Your Ideal Clients’ Decision-Making Process
Section 2 - Internet Marketing
Step 1:
15 Steps to Creating a Good Site
How To Ensure Your Site Creates Leads & Money
Your Site and Persuasion Marketing
Step 2:
Sending Traffic to Your Website
Section 3 - Social Media Marketing
INTRODUCTION
In life, we all need inspiration and motivation; someone who sets a bar for achievement and gives you a sense of the possibilities that life has. The kind of person we refer to as a role model. If that role model also believes in you, they can help you generate tremendous power from within.
For me, that person was my grandfather, Tewfic Kattan.
From a very young age, as I grew up in Jordan, I spent large amounts of time with him at his home, which was always overflowing with hospitality for family, friends and neighbors. We also made many traditional visits to friends during the special holidays that are such a large part of life in the Middle East.
But the memories that have stayed with me the most through all these years are the times I spent at my grandfather’s offices in downtown Amman, joining him on visits to his factories and to his various businesses. During the 1920s, my great-grandfather had a small business in Jordan and, when the manager of that business resigned, my grandfather Tewfic was sent to hire someone new and then return to Bethlehem, where his family was from, and to continue working for the family business in Palestine.
It did not take long for the untried expanses of Jordan to captivate my grandfather’s imagination, and he decided to stay in Amman and put his entrepreneurial passion and drive into building a huge range of businesses, ranging from industry and manufacturing to service industries and even to opening the first cinema in Jordan.
As his business empire expanded, he experienced the ups and downs that any of us who have tried to build a business from scratch are more than familiar with. Throughout, his generosity and philanthropy was unprecedented and he gave the same level of respect to a janitor as he would to the wealthiest individuals and to monarchs. He embodied a sense of integrity, humility and honor in all his dealings; fundamentals that created for me a paradigm that meaningful success in business should always be built on these principles. His generosity in handing out gifts, loans (that he rarely requested back) and opportunities to others became the fabric of stories that people still tell me on the occasions that I go back to Amman or to Palestine.
His contribution to the industrial and commercial private sectors of Jordan’s economy led King Abdulla I to award him the title of “Pasha” and he became known everywhere he went as “El Basha”
When I was only eight, he would have me sit at the head of the boardroom table to write letters in his office, which stood near the colorful sights and scents of the souk market in Amman, and he would pay me for each letter I wrote. He would also pay me to take documents up and down his office building to the various departments and he would have me sit in on meetings and encourage me to help out during the summer holidays from a very young age. I loved every minute. As I grew older my father objected that women should focus on marriage and children, but my grandfather always spoke of me going into business as a natural occurrence.
He passed away when I was 14 and at my first year in boarding school in Europe, but his spirit remains in the many businesses and families he helped to start and grow.
That concept of growing something from an idea to a flourishing business, while keeping an ethic of service and outstanding value was intriguing and inspiring to me.
Early on, I began to see business as a very creative endeavor that would allow me to express ideas and, ideally, provide something of value for the people who encountered my company. But I was still very young and unsure of how to begin for myself.
Having completed my undergraduate university degree at Baylor University in Texas, my father decided that I should take over the new addition to his company which was a toiletries, hair care, cosmetics and perfume division representing L’Oreal in Jordan. He took me to L’Oreal’s offices in Paris for a meeting shortly before I graduated and arranged for me to have a 3 month internship working across all their divisions and products.
So at the age of 21 I found myself living in Paris (quite a change from Waco, Texas), and given the opportunity of a remarkable internship. I was lucky to be fluent in French and the internship gave me exposure to L’Oreal’s entire range from their top flight brands all the way to their mass market lines. My universe soon revolved around learning about brands, and how to focus sales and marketing within the various distribution channels. I found a natural affinity to the subject of branding, perhaps because I was fortunate to have grown up in my grandfather’s businesses, understanding something about the international brands he represented, from foods to electronics.
I learned that a brand should have its own voice and story, and a vision that is unique. A brand should add extraordinary value to its users through the products and services it offers. And every company, however small, can start to build a brand identity as a base for marketing and growth.
I was put in charge of the cosmetics and toiletries division, as it was considered the small division of the company and none of the managers at my father’s company were keen to run it. We had regular visits from the L’Oreal team who were in charge of the region and they taught me further about the importance of market visits, building existing brands, introducing new products and my least favorite - but very essential - aspect; the importance of staying on top of spreadsheets and reports.
My division thrived and by the time I left the family business around 3 years later, I had taken the company from sales of $250,000 to just under $4 million dollars. For various personal reasons, I decided to leave the Middle East and to settle in the West. Friends and family thought it was a big mistake to leave an established family business but I chose the road less travelled - in this case the highways of California.
In San Diego I signed up for a masters degree and on the side, with three friends, I set up a property development company that built rental homes and apartments. For a while, everything looked rosy but California went through a property crash and we ended up losing our entire investment portfolio. Before the crash happened, I moved into one of the units myself one summer to help fill the other new units. Learning to deal with potential tenants and working at managing properties was another invaluable experience.
Once my degree course was complete, I lived in Texas for a summer while trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I suppose I have never been the type to sit quietly and ruminate so while I thought things through I started a variety of smaller businesses including selling Holy Land bibles and mail order clothing. Some of the businesses worked better than others but what they had in common was that they gave me a huge amount of hands-on experience in sales and marketing in a very short time.
I moved back to London some time later to explore banking as I was still not clear on what I wanted to do next. My father, who by this point was probably hoping I would just get married and stop thinking about work at all, was kind enough to use his contacts and arranged for me to have internships with three banks; the grande dame of private banks, Coutts & Co, Jordan International Bank and, what was in those days the Midland Bank. Those three months completely cured me of the notion of pursuing a career in banking.
It seemed clear that entrepreneurship was the one core love that bound together the work and experiences I had loved most. For the next twenty years or so, I focused on building a variety of businesses mainly focused on hair care, skin care and bath and body brands. I began by representing other people’s brands and selling them into new markets by finding and appointing distributors, and then I went on to develop my own brands. Along the way, I learned steep lessons about the challenges of building brands from scratch and growing them into a niche that can fit alongside the world-dominating majors.
For brands to be successful in getting their ethos and message across, they need to resonate emotionally with their ideal clients by telling a story they can connect with. As I went through the thrilling and sometimes difficult process of creating my own products, I realized more and more that it hardly matters whether you are long established or whether you are just starting out. Whatever your size, when the story of your brand and what it stands for is clearly communicated to your ideal customers, you engage at a deeper, more genuine level with your prospects.
Of course, you need to know what your brand is about. And as the years passed, I tried to spend a little more of my energy thinking about these concepts, rather than just handling the day to day issues. When you have your own business, there is always something more to do, another fire to fight, a new product to launch, problems to deal with. It never ends.
As a result, and understandably, few of us take time to step back and truly think about our vision for our businesses, and who we want to make a difference to, and why. We do not often spend time thinking about what we envision for ourselves once our businesses are the successes we desire them to be.
I learned to take time to set goals and review them, not just once a year, but as a regular part of my routine. It’s a habit that, once you have it, gives you time and focus to see the ultimate vision and idea or to craft it, if you are not yet sure of it. It applies just as much to the rest of our lives, from health to relationships too - because nobody wants a successful, cash flowing business without someone to share the benefits with, or with so much stress that the enjoyment and fulfillment of life pass us by.
It was with these ideas in my mind that I was casting around for what I wanted to do after a highly successful hair care brand I had created was sold. I had not been ready to sell, but my business partners had been, and so I was in a reflective state of mind, evaluating my future and my contribution. I had built another brand that had modest success but needed a bigger cash infusion to take it to the next level of growth and after almost 20 years in selling, marketing and creating brands, I was considering what the next chapter should be about. My life partner Shamim is a novelist, screenwriter and now a feature film director. Around this time, I was seeing first hand the frustrations she experienced in Hollywood when she optioned a story of unrequited love, only to get a call saying a budget of $15 million dollars was raised but that she had to add love scenes (which slightly ruined the ‘unrequited’ part). We discussed this and decided that she should walk away from the deal. There was an integrity to her story and her reasons for writing it that we both felt was more important than making a movie at any cost.
Soon after that, Shamim convinced me to produce her feature films. With no experience whatsoever in anything to do with movies, I was purely driven by my desire to have Shamim bring her creative vision to the screen with as little interference as possible. I agreed to at least try. Another amazing learning curve ensued but at the end of it we had produced two feature films back-to-back, The World Unseen and I Can’t Think Straight that ended up winning 23 awards and 11 awards respectively.
The journey of producing films led to the creation of a film sales and distribution company, which then led to the creation of a record label to produce the soundtrack album of I Can’t Think Straight and to sign on Leonie Casanova, a very talented singer/songwriter who had a part in one of our films and who created songs for both movies. In both cases, the large distribution companies offered poor terms or no terms for independent movies that didn’t have big name casts. I was inspired to see if there was a way for movies like ours to find an audience, without relinquishing all rights and control to the big companies in our market.
So, from movies and music to online marketing? A natural progression, of course!
And, as oblique as it might initially seem, the journey of the films and music led us to the creation of Enlightenment Business Solutions. While working on promoting and marketing our films and music, we ended up on You Tube alone with over 30 million hits from the various videos that were created by ourselves and our fans based on our two films. These were high figures for small independent films and people kept asking us how we had managed to create a big online following. On the social media side, there is no magic formula. But there are certain ‘musts’ which we’ll look at together later in this book. And by taking these certain steps any business can move to create the right conditions for viral marketing to take off.
We also learned a lot about online marketing in general. The core target audience for our movies tended to be younger and very internet aware. So when they searched for our movies and found an illegal upload or some other distribution channel that we didn’t control, we would take a hit financially. Search engine optimization and online marketing in general worked incredibly well for us. But, as with social media marketing, we found that the companies who offered instant solutions and quick fixes were often looking to make quick money rather than to build their brand - or any of their customers’ brands. Instead we worked hard for four years to find, build and join forces with a team of more than eighty experts in online marketing. Every member of the team has their own core specialty and they keep up with a world that moves incredibly fast to find and implement the latest and best solutions.
Overall, Enlightenment Business Solutions evolved from a wish to do things differently and to encourage and nurture entrepreneurs and the owners of small and medium-sized businesses and to help them make a mark in a world that often seems dominated by conglomerates. Because if you are reading this book, you know as well as I do from my own experiences and adventures in the business world that smaller enterprises have plenty to offer. They innovate quickly, they are directly in touch with their customer base and they can try ideas that larger businesses might not be willing to risk.
I’ve always loved being in business for myself. At heart, I am an entrepreneur, as many of you are who were drawn to this book. As human beings we are always in a state of flux. Being inert, in a rut or just going through the motions are not states that any of us associate with living life at the highest level. Sometimes it happens, but none of us are happy when we fall into that.
We are thinking and feeling beings who are either growing and moving forward, or imperceptibly regressing. It doesn’t matter how much success we may have achieved already in our finances, our personal relationships or anything else. Part of the excitement of being alive is that we are always becoming aware of the next level that we can go to. Reaching for the next possibilities gives us the drive to wake up energized every morning. Feeling that control over your destiny, having the freedom to make certain choices and guide the course of your own life somehow feels a lot more possible when you are running your own business rather than spending two thirds of your waking hours working for someone else.
Of course, entrepreneurship comes with its own challenges and plenty of moments when you wonder if you made the right choices, had the right idea, or have any chance at all of making your business work.
The purpose of this book is to let you know that your business can succeed where most others do not. But there are certain things you must do, and those items have changed quite radically in the past few years. We live in an internet world. We live in a globalized world where everyone is connected and where conglomerates have incredible reach. But it is also a world where smaller businesses can reach markets and niches that they could not have dreamed of just a few years ago. In a way, the playing field is more level than it has ever been. And my goal in the following chapters is to give you a clear and easy to follow marketing roadmap that, if you follow it, will drastically increase your chances of making your business a passion which fuels your excitement for your working life, and gives you the lifestyle and freedoms you envisioned when you first started out.
What I have tried to set out in the following pages are tools. I hope you feel inspired to use them as a base to brainstorm and decide processes for your own business, because without application, without taking action, nothing new can happen. When you do take action, from a place where you have considered the road you want to travel, magical changes can take place.
YOUR SALES PROCESS
Why are the majority of all new businesses gone within 5 years?
Of the minority that do make it, few will ever reach a turnover of $1 million or more.
The single biggest reason is that the majority of business owners do not take the time to come up with a strategic business growth roadmap for their business, or they do not know how to. Entrepreneurs often start with a vision of their business in response to a gap that they notice in the market, or a need that they can fill based on an area that they are passionate about.
Vision is always a good thing, but it is just a start.
By the time most businesses launch, they have their website, their business cards and a stack of other marketing material, ready, designed, created and printed. Few businesses will have taken the time to really think about the customers they want to serve and the benefits they are offering their ideal customers. This is a ‘spray and pray’ approach to sales and marketing which often results in very little positive return on marketing investment. In fact, marketing becomes a cost rather than an investment.
There are a lot of reasons business owners do not pay as much attention to marketing as they could. Even after a business has built up sufficient income to keep going, there are still plenty of pitfalls that could make it crash. High costs of goods or rent or other operating costs can eat up your margin and profit. Indifferent customer service can stymie repeat business. Or poor cash flow management can leave you scrambling.
The first hair care brand I created was called Te Tao and it brought Chinese herbal therapy benefits for hair to the premium mass market. Against the odds, it competed in the major drug stores and grocery chains against the established big brands. But that success in distribution nearly finished the company, because those retailers paid us sometimes 90 days after delivery, whereas we had to pay our manufacturers for stock after 30 days. In three years we were turning over just under $8 million, but we had a cash flow gap that got larger the faster we grew. There are ways, of course, to deal with every issue from cash flow to bad management. But you won’t get to face any of these challenges unless you get your sales and marketing working to flow revenue into your business first.
Sales and revenue are the first steps. One of the key lessons I have learned is the importance of understanding your ideal client’s wants and needs, the importance of then innovating your business by focusing on an area that you are passionate about, creating a niche market based on adding extraordinary value to your ideal client and then creating a strategic sales process as a roadmap to work from; and finally creating a marketing strategy that gives you a return on your investment. What that means in a simple to understand format is that:
Your business must be unique
Your business must offer extraordinary and exceptional value
Your marketing must communicate your uniqueness and value to your ideal clients
If you are wondering where the online marketing part of this book starts, the short answer is that the in-depth look at how to build a website that supports your business, how to execute excellent SEO, PPC and social media is all in the next section of this book.
The real answer to where the online marketing starts is that it begins right here, in this section. This section is about:
Generating more leads
Qualifying those leads to find your Ideal Clients
Converting your new found traffic to sales
I can’t emphasize enough how much the success of your online marketing depends on taking the time to understand the fundamental process that I will be outlining in this section.
When my partner Shamim and I started our group of businesses under the Enlightenment banner, we learned these basics over a period of years, mostly by trial and error. When we discovered the principles I will be sharing with you here, it changed everything. And it made us all the more determined to create a system by which we could teach and share these foundational building blocks of overall marketing and sales success with every business that worked with us on their online marketing.
Where Do You Start?
It is easy to point out the things we tend to do incorrectly as business owners but how do we negotiate through the choices we have, when we are usually overwhelmed and with few people to advise us when we are lacking time and resources?
Creating a clear and simple roadmap is the process I want to go through with you in this section. Before we begin, I will give you a quick overview. I have broken it into 7 steps that follow naturally on from each other, and if you can aim to set aside even just an hour or two a week to work on each step, you can make enormous strides and I can guarantee that your business, your activity and your revenue will never be the same again.
This process revolutionized the way I looked at marketing, and we immediately wanted to include it as part of our online marketing at Enlightenment Business Solutions. We did that by setting up a members only site which has this entire process in hundreds of hours of videos and resources, as well as hundreds of ready-to-use advertising and marketing templates, and also modules on time management and system implementation. In fact, we put into it everything we could think of that business owners need to make a success of their initial ideas. It works for offline marketing as much as online marketing, but it is so essential in my view that we include free membership to every one of our SEO clients. Those that use it have used it to help boost their conversions from the extra traffic SEO has brought them, and the difference has been incredible in terms of cash flow and revenue.
Here is the process we will cover in this section, which I have tried to simplify for a book format into 7 clear steps:
1. KNOW YOUR IDEAL CLIENT
This involves learning the demographics, and more importantly, the psychographics that drive your ideal client’s wants so you know how to market to them
2. UNDERSTAND THEIR DECISION - MAKING PROCESS
Knowing how your ideal clients decide to buy your products or services is key to evolving your offerings as a business and crafting your messaging
3. CHOOSE A NICHE MARKET
Decide what specific problems your ideal clients face that you solve for them and how that helps you specialize your business
4. INNOVATE YOUR BUSINESS
How to provide an outstanding solution to the niche market issues your ideal clients face, and to separate yourself from your competition in the process
5. REFINE YOUR MESSAGING (ELEVATOR PITCH)
How to create an elevator pitch/message that instantly compels your prospects to want to buy what you sell
6. CRAFT YOUR SALES PROCESS
How to understand where the sale itself takes place and how to get to that point easily and logically with a sales process map
7. PERSUASION MARKETING
How to create marketing that is irresistible
Having a sales and marketing process removes the guesswork and uncertainty out of running and growing a business. How often have you lain awake at night - or stayed up late working - wondering if you were making the right decisions in your business? With some thought and a step-by-step plan, growing your business can be a more productive and enjoyable experience that allows you to find the weakest links in your business and to then innovate those areas to become areas of strength.
Every business owner faces unique challenges, crises and issues every week and sometimes daily. It is part of the nature of building a business, striking out into new territory and keeping your products and services current in a fast-changing landscape. Following the roadmap in this section will not take away all your problems, but it will make clear the fundamentals you need for your marketing before you spend too much money on it - namely, who you are targeting and why and how you can reach them.
We offer this entire method and business process to our clients for free as part of the SEO packages that we do for them. It is our way of adding unique value to our clients and to their businesses by introducing them to the above concepts that I will go through now in more detail.
1. Know Your Ideal Client
Your ideal client profile is one of the most vital components you need to have in place when it comes to building a successful business. When you know it, you will be in the best position to build and grow a highly successful business.
The key to a business owner’s success is dependent on your ability to generate revenue. Sales and marketing are the only two options you have for doing that. Instead of looking at marketing as a fear-inducing mass of options, the process becomes simple when you focus, not on just attracting more clients but, on attracting your “ideal” clients. That is when your revenue skyrockets, and it can skyrocket by as much as 16 times if you do it well.
If you are already working extremely hard in your business, the idea is not to make you work 16 times harder, but actually to have you work smarter and in fact have more time than ever before to enjoy your family, friends and life.
So what is the definition of an ‘ideal client’? How will you know one when you see one? You probably already have some ideal clients in your business:
1. They want what you sell, they don’t just need it.
2. They are also passionate about what you sell and feel they couldn’t live without it.
3. You get fewer returns and complaints.
4. They will spend more money with you over their lifetime than the average client ever would.
5. They often demand additional products and services from you that they want to buy because they trust you.
6. They send you referrals and unsolicited testimonials.
7. They talk about you to friends and family and on social networking sites.
Take a moment to imagine your business filled with clients like these. Would it have a different level of income? Would your enjoyment of the business be higher? Would you wake up each day with a spring in your step? What would it do to your creativity? And your profits?
When you properly and specifically identify your ideal client you will find that you are working less and earning more.
Identifying your ideal clients also has a major impact on your business long term. Since your ideal clients trust you implicitly, it impacts:
. New product or service development, since you will have your ideal client in mind
. Customer service, since you focus on what matters to your ideal client
. Marketing and sales, since you want to consider their values and issues in your material
So it is not an exaggeration to say that the most productive activity any business owner can undertake early on is to find these ideal clients, give them exactly what they want, build into your business unprecedented and extraordinary value that makes those clients feel compelled to buy from you and then make sure that your business has the ability to communicate that value to your prospects in a targeted way.
Simply put, you can’t be all things to all people, and yet the majority of the websites we see reflect businesses that are trying to do exactly that and be everything to everyone. What happens is that they look exactly like their competitors, and since everyone looks the same, prospects automatically default to the business offering the lowest price.
Identifying your ideal client, then innovating your business to serve a niche that speaks to that client is the way to shift your whole business life from the competitive plane (where there is always someone coming up who is cheaper, faster or newer) to the creative plane, where you literally create your own market, which might be smaller and more focused but which will bring you much more revenue.
So how do you find these ideal clients?
We are all familiar with demographics. If you sell directly to consumers (B2C) then demographics are statistical elements that apply to your current clients such as their age, gender, education, marital status, income level, employment status, and so on. If you sell to other businesses (B2B) then the demographics include the size of the company, the turnover, the location and so on. Demographics define the physical characteristics of every human being or company who needs what you sell.
Think about everyone who may need what you sell. Are they mostly men or mostly women? Is there a certain age group or age range that needs your product or service, such as teenagers or retired couples? Are they most likely single, married, divorced or widowed? What is their approximate income level? What postal area do they live in?
This demographic information plays a big role in crafting the right marketing message because marketing to an 18 year old man takes an entirely different message than marketing to a 55 year old woman.
So it’s understandable that when developing a client profile, the demographic information is the category all businesses focus on and it is enough for most businesses to start printing leaflets and designing websites and other such marketing tactics based on their perceived demographic profile.
But it is also the single biggest contributor to why most businesses fail within their first couple of years. The demographics are not the keys to your business success; the psychographics are.
Demographics are important, because they help you to recognize your ideal client when you see them. Unfortunately, demographics only identify the available universe of prospects who need what you sell.
But in fact, we now know from our Ideal Client definition above that the prospects you are looking for are those who want what you sell. And that is defined not by demographics but by psychographics.
Demographics identify all available people who need what you sell. Identifying your demographics correctly makes up only around 10% of the success equation for your business. The remaining 90% of your success will be determined by how accurately you detail your ideal client’s psychographic profile, which simply identifies what it is that they want.
Demographics define the physical characteristics of your prospects.
Psychographics are the emotional components that get your prospects to buy what you sell. Prospects buy based on emotion and they justify their purchase with logic.
Prospects may or may not buy what they need but they will always buy what they want.
This ‘need’ versus ‘want’ scenario is a very powerful concept for a business owner to understand.
Virtually every decision we ever make as human beings can be traced back to our desire to avoid pain or to gain pleasure. And we are generally much more motivated by the avoidance of pain than the prospect of pleasure.
So when you supply your product or service to your prospects, it is important to think about how their current situation (before they get the benefit of your product) is affecting them personally. What are they finding problematic; what are they frustrated by or worried about? We refer to these issues, whatever they are, as ‘hot buttons.’
Think about buying a car. You want to buy a Mercedes. What you need to buy is a metal casing with an engine that will get you from A to B. Any car with a decent engine and reasonable comfort will do the job. But you end up buying a Mercedes, not because you needed it, but because you wanted it. Your decision is driven emotionally, and that holds true for any product or service you buy, even if you don’t always recognize the emotional driver upfront.
What we tend to do is make an emotionally driven purchase of something we want, and then justify that purchase with logic. ‘I need a Mercedes because I’m on the road so much, I need something safe and comfortable.’ Or ‘The quality of Mercedes means it lasts much longer than a cheaper car.’
Another example: what if your old computer is running fine, but you see a brand new Mac that’s slim, fast and looks stunning and that you really want? You can afford to buy it, but you don’t need it, since your current laptop is working just fine. What are the odds that you will buy it?
If you do buy it, it will be based on your emotions, and when your partner or friends ask you why you bought it, you will justify it with logic. You will say things like, ‘it has a faster processor’, ‘it never gets a virus’, ‘it’s easier for me to carry when I travel’ and so on.
Prospects buy what they want and not what they need and they buy based on emotions and justify their purchase with logic.
Wants are emotion-based
Needs are logic-based.
When creating compelling marketing, you need to tap into your prospects’ emotional hot buttons with your marketing messages.
If you focus only on your demographics, then you will be forced to compete on price and not value. Prospects buy value. When they cannot determine the business that offers them the most value, they then default to price. Focusing on your ideal client will help separate your business from everyone else in a similar field.
How Do I Identify My Ideal Client?
Step 1 - Identify your clients’ demographics
Start with a tentative list of traits of every human on the planet who may possibly need what you sell. Keep it broad and general for now. If you have clients, look at a typical range of 5 to 10 of your clients and note down demographic traits that are meaningful for your business. You can look at these main areas to start with:
Age Range - does your product or service cater to a specific age group like young kids, teenagers, baby boomers or retirees?
Gender - is your product or service used primarily by men, women or both genders?
Income Range - what income level do you currently serve? The idea is to find the widest group you could possibly serve right now, in income and all other demographic areas.
Location - is your target customer primarily urban or suburban or rural? Prospects in a big city have very different transport and locational needs than those in the suburbs. Also, which specific region can your business serve? Is it a two mile radius, or the whole world?
Employment Status/Education - does your product appeal to executives, or those with higher education? Does it need some degree of technical capability?
If you sell to other businesses, the demographics involve:
Turnover of the business
Business location(s)
Number of employees and so on
An example of a B2C business might be a construction company who do renovations and extensions on residential property. Their demographics could be:
Men and Women
Aged 25 to 60
Married or Single or Co-habiting
Homeowners
Household income of $70,000 to $1,000,000
Employed in executive positions or stay at home
It is a wide range, because the demographics cover anyone who could potentially have any building work done on their house.
For a B2B business example, I could give you Enlightenment Business Solutions, our online marketing company as an example. In providing everything for your online requirements from web design and development, as well as search engine optimization and pay per click management, apps creation and so on, our demographics could be almost any business small enough not to have an in house online team, even start ups, since every business needs a website and then every business needs to optimize their website and to have an online marketing strategy to grow their business:
Turnover of 0 to $10,000,000
1 -300 employees
1-20 locations
Any geographic location
Now since our own SEO company and the construction company from our example have good quality features and provide good service, they could start marketing to this very wide universe of prospects immediately.
Most businesses focus on telling their prospects about the features that their business offers, about their great prices, their wonderful service, their incredible range of products, the vast choice and selection that they offer prospects and other such features.
That is one of the biggest mistakes a business can focus on.
Your prospects want to know how the products or service that you offer will benefit them. They only want to know about the features of your products or service in so much as how your business relates to them and to their needs and wants.
By focusing on the features of the business rather than the benefits to its clients, most businesses finish up looking the same and offering the same or similar services to their competition in an already crowded and competitive marketplace.
This does not mean you can never draw attention to the features and achievements that your business has worked hard to create but later in this section, when we look at building messaging that really reaches your prospects, we will also look at how to change the focus from features to benefits.
Businesses that focus on features almost always compete with each other on price while businesses that focus on the benefits their product or service is offering to their ideal clients provide value that allows them to set their own prices because they stand out and differentiate themselves from the rest of the market place.
But how do you make your benefits meaningful? By looking at psychographics.
Psychographics:
Psychographics begin to define your ideal clients’ problems, issues, frustrations and fears (commonly called ‘hot buttons’) so that you know specifically what it is they really want from your product or service.
The psychographics help you determine what your ideal clients want and not what they need.
For example, at Enlightenment Business Solutions we found that all businesses need some online marketing help at some point. But some businesses just want help designing a website, while others want to know how they can get more leads and close those leads to sales.
These are the hot buttons, or deeper emotional triggers, that the psychographics help you define. And in each and every specific situation, your prospects have completely different hot buttons.
Your mandate is not to try and deal with all of them, but simply to choose just one of these areas to specialize in and to create your niche market. This way, you begin to separate your business from your competition, and if you select a niche you are interested in or passionate about, you end up enjoying your work a lot more as well.
Psychographics are important because they help you understand the emotions that your prospects experience and it is those emotions that compel them to buy what you sell.
If you have a knee injury that needs surgery, do you go to your general practitioner, or a doctor who does heart surgery? Or do you want a doctor who has done nothing but knee surgery for the past ten years?
Since you are emotionally invested in the pain and injury, you want the expert and the specialist. Today, that is what most prospects want, in every field.
The key to your success as a business owner is knowing the emotional “hot buttons” of your ideal clients. Hot buttons are the compelling problems, fears, frustrations or concerns that your prospects typically feel when they buy what you sell. They are typically descriptive of a painful feeling, like the dread of a root canal, or the fear that an estimate for building work will be higher than you anticipated. Those are hot buttons, and your business needs to identify the ones that it can deal with for clients.
Prospects want to feel special and that a business is catering to them specifically by focusing on their wants and needs.
So if you were running the construction company from our example, what might your prospects’ biggest fears and concerns be? Well, if you have ever had work done on your home you know that people typically have one or more of the following hot buttons:
1. They are worried about going over budget
2. They are fearful that the builder will start another job half way through yours and drag your work for weeks or months longer than agreed.
3. They are fearful that the construction will hide poor workmanship
So if you could set up your construction company with good systems so that you could guarantee that the price you quote is the price they will pay; or if you can guarantee your work for 5 years after completion; or if you promise to stick to your schedule or pay them $100 back for every day you go over - do you think prospects would be lining up to use your services? Do you think they would be willing to pay a little more for good workmanship backed by a guarantee rather than risking a rough ride with someone cheaper? The answer is yes, because you will be marketing to exactly those prospects who want these issues taken away.
As a small business owner, your job is to identify and define the most important hot buttons that top the list for your business - in other words, the top needs and wants that lead clients to your business. While this list varies from business to business, it tends to be quite consistent within the particular industry to which your business belongs.
So as a business owner, your next task is to list out these psychographic components - the ‘wants’ that your ideal prospects are looking for. This will start to impact your demographics and narrow them down somewhat.
Now, as a builder, you may want to target people who have previously had poor experiences, because they understand emotionally the pain of having had a bad builder who went over time and budget or who left them with a house full of headaches. If you can offer your guarantee to these people, they will be pre-disposed to want to work with you.
You can begin to see why 90% of the success of that profile involves accurately identifying the psychographics of your ideal client.
In some businesses, there is only one major hot button. In others, there may be ten. Some customers may want a low price, others may want great customer service or a cast iron guarantee. Some may be incompatible with each other when it comes to solving them - for instance, the lowest price might not be possible along with outstanding service - but they are all potentially issues for different sets of prospects.
If there are multiple hot buttons, then your task is to select the one that you have a true passion for serving, and make that hot button your niche market. That hot button relates to a particular group of prospects that is your ideal client. If you want a truly solid business that has the foundations to grow, you need to know and understand who your ideal client is.
When you know and understand their psychographics, you also start to understand how to appeal to their emotions. By targeting their hot buttons, your prospects will pay attention to your message, and want to buy what you sell because it solves a major problem, concern or frustration that they have in their lives.
Whatever size your business currently is, you probably do not have cash to waste. Every marketing dollar must generate a positive return on investment. An accurate psychographic profile is the key step in creating a marketing program that generates real financial results by providing the information you need to reach your prospects emotionally.
Once you master this process, you will be able to effectively market your business and to attract as many ideal clients as you want. As with any process, there is a step-by-step approach you need to follow in order to get the results you want, starting with developing your ideal client profile. Without it, you will be selling to anyone who happens to need your product or service. You need to put aside any fear that you might be missing out on selling to everybody, because there are plenty of clients who want what you sell without you attempting to be everything to everyone.
Create a list of hot button issues that you feel apply to your business. And remember that this list should focus on the problems or frustrations your prospects have, and that you can solve for them.
Using Enlightenment Business Solutions as an example, we can theoretically serve millions of small businesses based only on demographics. But if we specialize in helping businesses who have not had good results from their marketing spend before, we can target businesses who already know the value of doing search engine optimization and who want to be sure they will make money doing it.
We can leave out marketing to people who are skeptical about online marketing entirely, or those who prefer to do everything themselves.
Many times in businesses, 80% of your total revenue comes from 20% of your clients. It’s a rule that we will look at further into this section. For now, just be aware that those 20% are your ideal clients - they spend more, they love your product or service and they stay with you long term.
What this process aims to do is turn the 20% into the 80%.
2. Understand Your Ideal Clients’ Decision-Making Process
Why do your ideal clients buy from you? This is critical to understand as it will enable you to innovate your business and to vastly increase your profits.
Every decision, within and outside of the business world, happens in one of two ways. It is either:
1. an internal desire or
2. an external influence
If you wake up one morning with a terrible toothache, you reach for the computer and the phone and find a dentist who is close by and who will see you straightaway. That is an internal desire. An internal desire compels you to take immediate action.
On the other hand, if you wake up and your teeth are fine, it would never occur to you to call a dentist, even though you might know you have been due for a check up for a while.
Now, what if you are working away in your business, and your bookkeeping and your paperwork have become messy. Day after day, you intend to clear it up and make sense of it, but it isn’t a priority for you. Then you get a call from the IRS or your local tax authority to say they’re coming to audit your books in a week’s time. How quickly would you seek out accountants who are close by and know what they are doing? That call from the IRS is an external influence. It informed you of a situation and once informed, you were compelled to take action.
All decisions start in one of these two ways through an internal desire or an external influence. It tends to hold true in our personal lives too. To create a successful business, it is important to understand these influences on your ideal client’s decision-making process. Sometimes your product or service naturally serves one or the other. If you are an emergency plumber, most of your clients will come to you as a result of an external influence like a leaking pipe or a breakdown in their heating. If you are a construction company that does home renovations, your clients are generally motivated by an internal desire to improve their home surroundings. Once in a while, you may get a call from someone whose roof has caved in, and that would be an example of external influence.
There are a couple of ways to start uncovering your clients’ psychographics. One place to start is by doing surveys with your current ideal customers and prospects. This could be in the form of a friendly email, or ideally, an anonymous survey that you can send from a host of easy online survey companies like Zoomerang or Survey Monkey. Anonymity might make your clients more open to sharing any issues they currently have with your services. Here are some questions to ask:
.Why do you buy what I sell?
.What do you like most about my business?
.What do you like least?
.Is there any other product or service you would like to see me offer?
.What problems, concerns or frustrations do you have when buying what I sell?
.What one thing would you love to see us do differently?
.What one thing would you like to see us improve?
These are some of the questions you can begin to ask to give you a deeper insight into the wants of your ideal customers.
But if you don’t want to canvass your clients, or you are just starting out as a new business, just the process of imagining, discovering and then analyzing the hot buttons of your ideal prospects will give you a very good base from which to understand their decision-making process.
In fact, even if you do survey your current clients, there is immense value in stepping back and putting yourself in their shoes, and then using the flair and imagination of your entrepreneurial spirit to look at their perspective even more deeply than they do.
Steve Jobs was not a fan of customer focus groups when he came up with new products for Apple. He felt that the customer would often be the last person to know what they want, because they are limited in their experiences and imaginations by the choices they already have.
That doesn’t mean you have to come up with outlandish ideas and products. What Steve Jobs did exceptionally brilliantly was to understand his customers’ psychographics and then pre-empt their decision-making so well that as soon as they saw a new Apple product they knew that they wanted it; even if the day before they had no idea that such a product was even possible.
The questions you want to ask yourself are:
.What’s really going through my prospects’ minds?
.What are they experiencing emotionally?