4 Principles of Marketing Strategy

Hi everyone its felicia here checking in with you on day two of the total business mastery seminar did you know that there are four principles of marketing strategy i didn’t either watch this brand new footage where Brian explains exactly what they are and how you will become more successful once you start using them ourselves oh yes sometimes I ask my business clients I say who sets your prices sometimes have a whole room full of business owners who sets your prices by the way and who determines your market share and who determines your profit levels and who determines how fast you grow and who determines the future of your ism I do I do we do know you don’t your competitors do your competition determines everything your competition determines your level of sales the prices you charge and how much money you make

I’ve done a lot of work on military strategy and one of the great principles I learned in military strategy is that no strategy can be made independent of the enemy in other words you can’t sit there and plan military strategy ignoring who your enemy is and where they are and how big they are and what their plans and intentions are so no strategy and business can be made without thinking about your competition and who are they and what do they do and why do people buy from them and how can I get them to buy from me and how will they react if I get their customers there’s there’s volumes of books in the libraries on this and I’ve got them all there’s one book called competitive analysis it’s this big by Michael Porter so a six eight hundred pages and it’s all on things that you have to think about to position against competition big stuff you can get PhDs in marketing focused on competitive analysis so the four principles of marketing strategy are these number one is your decisions in these four areas whoops these that your decisions in these four areas determine the success or failure of your business

the first is specialization specialization is determining where you are going to specialize which we’ll talk about in your product or service and I’ll talk about this I’ll define it a little bit better the second is differentiation differentiation was really the key to business they say that all business strategy is differentiation strategy competitive advantage is how it is that you are different and better than your competitors because human beings in the marketplace customers always want to know why should I buy from you rather than from someone else and you’d better give me a better reason than your competitor does or I’ll buy from your competitor and it’s not personal it’s just I want to get the very best deal as a customer I want to get the highest quality for the lowest price you tell me why I should buy from you why you are giving me the highest quality the lowest price and if your answer is better than that of your competitors I’ll buy from you and if it’s not I won’t and it’s not personal no emotion involved we get emotionally involved because it’s our business so differentiation is the key is how and why and where are you different segmentation means looking at your market and saying who are the specific customers in the market who value my area of differentiation and who will pay more for my area of specialization than anybody else

so in other words in every market place and they say that all marketing out all marketing today is segmentation is segmenting and identifying those customers who are most likely to buy from you the fastest and finally there’s concentration once you have determined your very best market segment for what you do really well what you do is you focus all your energies on them so let’s look at the specialization says this is the product service customer market or area of technology where you focus all your efforts we also say in specialization it can be a product or service it can be a particular that you want to serve or it can be a particular market area that you want to work in I’ll give you an example McDonald’s McDonald’s customer is people who want to eat quickly and they want cleanliness efficiency value price and pleasant surroundings and so what they will do is they will offer every product that they possibly can for people who want to eat quickly whether it’s a salad or whether it’s a shake or whether it’s a type of coffee or whether

it’s in other words they’re constantly looking for other products that they can offer to that customer who wants who’s in that market segment which wants to eat quickly and efficiently and they trust they test continuing very clear about that so the next one is look at that okay and so and so differentiation is your competitive advantage which you’ve heard me talk about but you’ll never hear me talk about too much because if you can identify and/or create a competitive advantage and convey it to your customers the dam will break you can make more sales and more money in a year with a clear competitive advantage to your customers then you might make in a lifetime if your competitive advantage is unclear so number two it’s your area of excellence or superiority it’s something that you do better than anybody else and I sometimes joke why is your product or service better and they say quality service quality service all in service we give quality service and people don’t understand that that is only an answer

if your competitors offer zero quality and zero service in other words other than that it’s not an answer if your person says well you should buy from us because of our quality and service they’re saying I do not have the slightest idea why anybody should buy from me I am a complete idiot and I’m a danger to my company and probably to my whole society so it’s interesting when Steve Jobs looked at the BlackBerry looked at all the cell phones that were out there and he sent out with his engineers and he said I want a phone that you can activate with one button I said it’s impossible all these other phones have all these other buttons to turn off and on if I want a phone that you can activate with one button and he kept sending them back and saying in the back so they finally came with the one button you activate it put in your code and bam you have all your apps and you’re ready to go the game is on one button it’s never been done before in history can’t be done can’t be done can’t be done can’t be done

I want it done and there’s the phone I said phones cell phones so they should not be so darn complicated to start up use get around and so on I had a blackberry and to get app on a blackberry which has far fewer than Apple it’s almost like it you need an act of Congress to get a damn app I mean you know what I’m talking about they’re so hard and you go to blackberry and I go to go to Apple which my my family and my staff got me into within half an hour I have 30 apps loaded I mean it’s unbelievable or in the one at a time at whoa and now you can float the whole world and stuff the stuff that’s on there for apps just the free apps blow your mind much less the paid apps and now your four hundred and eighty six thousand apps think about that but they make it easy so Apple says you come to us and it’s easy you can access everybody anything anywhere and then they come up with the Apple too and they put that vision video bot model on it whereas you can act and hold it up and you can talk my video to anybody in anywhere in the world has an apple with the same facility it’s the most it’s the most amazing thing I mean you look at it’s almost like a kid how can this be so what is yours and if you don’t have it you can’t compete but if you do have it yourself 50 million sets and become the highest valued company in the world in five years if you can be really clear about an area of excellence that people want and we’ll pay for your unique selling proposition what is it what is it bit and this is called your USP your USP is the one thing that you offer that no other competitor offers in the whole world it’s unique

what do we know about the word unique is it cannot be modified it’s the only adjective that cannot be modified you can have more and you can have greater and you can have greatest but you cannot have more unique or unique er or less unique or unique guest you have only one word unique each person here is unique you are not unique er you are not the unique guest you are unique because the only one of you in the entire world so therefore what is your unique selling proposition I’ve worked with people has spent hours to identify this and when they finally identified it their business went up five hundred percent in the next twelve months they could not believe it they went from struggling to living in a big home driving a Cadillac or a Mercedes because they finally found it and then all of your advertising all of your promotion all of your work is focused and conveying that USP to your customers getting it to them so that they are clear what it is and if it’s what customers want and value and will pay for they will line up around the street

remember when they brought out the iPad at because of the iPhone nobody really knew it was in the iPad except it’s going to be like a whole broad screen it’s gonna have everything that a computer that they line up around the streets by the hundreds to beautify to lay five hundred dollars now five hundred dollars I don’t know about you but I think five hundred dollars so long money wouldn’t you say five hundred dollars these are poor people with flip-flops and sandals and tractor caps well then they have to put their five hundred dollars down to get this because they didn’t they didn’t know what what it was but it’s going to be like that it’s going to be like an iPod iPhone with a bigger screen plus all kinds of other capabilities Wow and they know what they did they sold 25 million of them in in less than a year 25 million and they totally changed the book retailing industry the book retailing industry like a ship that turnover went from basically hardcover books in bookstores it flipped now 51 to 55 percent of all books are being purchased on as ebooks and the reason is because of the iPad because iPad owners are readers and they buy an average of two to three hundred books

in the first year and the whole market flipped and borders one of the biggest and oldest bookstores in america went bankrupt all in less than a year when the ipad was introduced can you imagine I mean we’re living in pretty turbulent times would you imagine a company that spent decades building this bankrupt nationwide within a year with the advent of one new technology so what is your unique selling proposition there’s this convenience you can get everything get everything fast everything convenient more convenient than anyone else everybody tries to compete with the iPhone or the iPad can’t do it the Nook can’t do it the hewlett-packard got into it with their tablet and just quit let’s just can’t do it now who is it not Samsung but the the Korean company is trying to compete and so on but they have a unique selling proposition so my question is what is yours and I’m going to ask you to answer that what is yours what is it that you offer that nobody else offers now here’s is an insight if you’re offering something that everybody else sells let’s say you’re a real estate agent what’s your unique selling proposition as a real estate agent if every other real estate agent with 100 miles has same unlimited access to the yeah the MLS what’s what is your what is your USP or can be what could it be what should it be come on cheese

well the answer is yourself because you the product is all the same you don’t even control the product you even control the marketing everybody else can have it so what makes top realtors I work with top Realtors the average realtor makes about 25,000 a year I work with entire roomful of Realtors average incomes $833,000 a year on straight Commission selling and they all started off with nothing and they’re now at the top of the field and some of them make several million selling homes what’s the difference personality personality preparation punctuality friendliness warmth follow-up notes phone calls contact in other words they make a supreme effort to build a really high-quality relationship with a home buyer or home seller so that that person will never think of going anywhere else I know because I worked with some of these people in buying and selling my homes and I would never buy or sell buyer through anybody else but these people because they have they are so good at what they do and every one of them started off on the street knocking on doors and diving for dollars and made a decision that their unique selling proposition was going to be themselves and and you as an independent business owner can make that decision as well make the decision that I’m going to take such good care of my customers my customers would never go anywhere else I don’t have to give them blandishments or discounts

I’m going to take such good care of them that they will eagerly come back to me so number four is where are you or could you be the best where are you or could you be the best and this is the great question because everybody here has the ability to be the best at something everybody here has the ability to be the best at something that people will eagerly pay for and tell their friends about and your job is to figure out what it is your job is to figure out what it is and then do continuous and never-ending improvement until finally people say you know you’re the best you are really good at what you do you are really good look at Lady Gaga I was saw her at the Grammy Awards as well I don’t know anything about Lady Gaga I’ve never listened to a lady Gaga song she came absolutely from our you know which is 25 years old she’s one of the top ten tweeted people in the history of the world and she made last year 660 million dollars and where was she singing nightclubs or or bars five years ago and she’s an incredible entertainer and there ain’t nobody like Lady Gaga you know is unbelievable why she knew what she had and she goes to the extreme with her dress and her appearance and everything else and she wraps it around a good voice and just literally has taken over the world of pop music so segmentation is who are those customers who most appreciate your area of superiority who are your very best customers you see your best customers are really easy to sell to they’ll buy and buy again they’re happy they like you they come back they bring their friends they give you recommendations and testimonials whereas your worst customers your customers from hell you have to literally break your back to sell them anything they complain all the time they don’t pay when the do pay their checks bounce and you stand back and bounce it to you like a basketball

so who are they what are their demographics why are their psychographics the demographics are things that you can observe from the outside age income education family formation psychographics are what motivates them and this is where the future is in your business and every pitch that has psychographics and they have a key psychographic I’ll tell you this in a second how would you describe your perfect customer I do this by the way I said imagine that you were at a social or business gathering and you’re networking and someone came up to you and said look I know a lot of people in this community how would you describe your perfect customer don’t tell me what your product or service is I don’t here just tell me who would your perfect customer be in terms of their wants needs a check a shin income position and so you would have to describe your perfect customer without mentioning your product or service a tall person would not even know what you sold you describe the customer this is what this person is is where they are

give you an example IBM at one time at 80% of the world computing market 80% then they made some mistakes and now they have much less but they had 80% they had so much that the federal government tried to break them up for about 24 13 years they right antitrust suits against IBM just like they tried to break up Microsoft they finally Reagan came into power they started in 1970 in 1983 the bot was brought to Reagan’s attention they said the federal government has been pursuing IBM in 50 million hundred million dollar lawsuits for 13 years and what did they come up with people buy IBM because they really like IBM and IBM treats him really well they said well if they can’t come up with something on IBM they have to drop the lawsuit and I said we can’t come up with anything they the custom did antitrust is supposed to be in favor of protecting customers IBM’s customers loved him worldwide and dropped the suit they dropped the suit after 13 years they did the same thing with Microsoft they harassed them and harassed them and harassing because they weren’t giving enough political contributions that was the major reason they weren’t giving enough political contributions

finally after years I had to say why do people buy Microsoft because they like the product the product is good and it’s cheap and it’s flexible and everything so so so here’s so how would you describe your perfect customer this point I was making with IBM his IBM realized that when they first started selling the 360 mainframe in 1964 the customer was really the president of the company making a major strategic decision are we going to put everything in our company on computers because everything was paper at that time you know and so they would have to make their presentations to the senior executives of the company and work out all the numbers and so on but as computers became more and more popular and they start to have pcs and desktops and so on the whole decision-making shifted to the purchasing manager of the large companies and so they had to focus and change all of their marketing so it focused it on purchasing managers and they learned more about how purchasing managers think and walk and talk and eat and breathe and communicate and where they’re educated and the size of their family and their income and their psychographics and demographics and they focused all of their effort on purchasing managers and became the biggest selling company in the world 80% of the world market because they knew their customer

I hope I’m making a point here many people you say describe your customer to me without mention your product or service they go home well somebody wants it the alright so demographics here that here are the key demographics by the way if you don’t know these find out what we do you know we find out do surveys ask your customers offer them a prize if they’re fill-in-the-blanks age gender that’s important income how much do they earn education how well educated are they occupation what sort of work do they do location where do they live and so on and family status those are the main demographic features and you’ve got to be very clear because if you change the demographics of your customer you change your total marketing approach your selling approach your packaging your product your service your people and everything else now your psychographics are even more important and this is really neat is what are their goals and ambitions because remember people are motivated to buy because you offer to help them achieve a goal that they have or what are their wants and needs and motivations that want to buy because they have a need for what you’re selling and what are their hopes and dreams and aspirations what do they want to be in the future and can your product or service help them get there and for what are their fears or doubts or worries

here’s one of the great breakthrough discoveries for me in the last few years it’s as always one reason why people will buy from you there’s one major reason and you have to find out what it is and convince the prospect that you can give them that benefit there’s always one major fear that will hold them back there’s always one major doubt that holds them back from buying and you must find out what that is and alleviate it you’ve got to do both in every sale what’s the major reason how does Brendan relieve e8 the fear of making a mistake of going to his program how does he do that yes not only that not only n is the entire the entire fees refundable he’ll pay your airfare and your hotel and he does by the way he’ll pay your airfare and hotel for coming just to not waste your time because he’s so confident in the value of his program so in other words he’s making it a risk-free thing for you to do what is the biggest risk that you have with Brendan’s terms and conditions that you’ll really like it and we’ll watch your money back and you’ll be out the money that you at faith because you really enjoyed it because you’ve got your money’s worth that’s a real tough

downside number five is what is the problem to be solved is pp we call this PT BS PT BS PT BS problem to be solved problem to be solved problems to be solved people buy your product or service because they’ve got a problem to be solved like a parent problem to be solved problem to be solved problem to be solved and a goal and achieve is a problem unsolved and need unsatisfied is a problem unsolved the pain not taken away is a problem unsolved this is the focus of your business what is the problem that you solve for your customers when they use your product or service and you must know that with crystalline clarity you know like that in the movie with Tom but was it was it another perfect gentleman you’re the movie I’m talking with with Tom Cruise and yeah not risky business did you move my with a head Jack heart Jack yeah what does he say when he says do you understand what I’m saying and he looks into the camera he says crystal by that is my is what I’m saying crystal clear he says it’s crystal well you must be Krystal when you’re clear when you’re thinking about what it is you do for your customer and all your advertisers all your promotion all your business is based around conveying that crystal to your customer so they understand crystal you know how a cafe advertises on the side of the freeway or the highway you’re going down the road you see a great big it doesn’t say mom and pops best selling meatloaf and family cook food and and come and visit us sometime it says the big sign is hungry question mark and the next one says turn at the next exit for the best food on the highway in other words they first of all get your attention because

if you’re hungry what happens hungry you’ll see that reciprocal the reticular activating system will see that see that word hungry now it’s got your attention the next time is turn here our food want food turn now real simple so concentration is the fourth part concentration is where you folk your time money and resources remember the old saying 50% of my advertising is wasted but I don’t know which 50% it is well maybe 80% 90% of advertising and promotional dollars are wasted and if you can just increase the efficiency of your advertising by focusing your message with greater clarity on your best customers you can get 5 and 10 times the response per dollar of advertising that you were getting before so what are the best possible ways to contact your ideal customer and this is moving very quickly today it’s shifting all the time second of all what are the best possible media for you to use most of you use the internet exhaustively but the Internet is only one method of communication and it’s still small relative to all the other forms of advertising and promotion I have a friend who does 35 million dollars a year with radio ads 60 60 120 minute radio ads to get people to phone a number where then they are interviewed and then sold into another telephone call where they are introduced to a product which takes into another telephone call just 35 million a year and with radio ads so there’s all kinds of ways imagine if you could run an ad 60 seconds and how do you test an ad we’re working with one of the top companies in the country they develop an ad they narrate the ad they are happy with the ad and then they run the ad in a tiny market a small town they pay $5,000 get 50 spots and see what kind of response rate they get they will run the ads 5 days a week they’ll run one ad on

Monday one hour Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and 5 different ads and they see which one causes the phones to ring and then they’ll take that and they run it in New York and what works in podunk is called podunk is going to work in New York at a hundred times the scale in other words they debug the system got a nice ad and what if you can have an ad that would cause qualified people to phone you all day long phone you and call you and say please please PLEASE sell me your product or service I’ve got my credit card handy is that possible say yes it’s been done all that’s been done all the time you ever listen to radio those people are not advertising for fun they’re advertising because they’re making a lot of doing it hi everyone thanks for tuning in to your virtual backstage pass you just watch Brian explain the four keys of marketing strategy which ones will you be implementing we want you to share what you’ve learned with us so make sure you leave us a comment below this concludes our backstage pass for day 2 at the total business mastery event but if you want to see what happened over the past two days and get live streaming access to day three click the get virtual access Now button below we’ve got great new segments to share with you on the third and final day of your total business mastery backstage pass so please make sure you stick around we’ll see you then.