I just posted a new blog post on IMgenomeProject that I know you will find helpful. I’d like to hear your comments on it.

The simple truth is this: As much as we, as marketers, wish it was different, prospects do not become buyers unless they are in the buying mindset.

No matter what you do, no one buys unless and until they are in the buyers mindset.

As I explain in the free Mindset Matching Method video, the buyers mindset requires three things…

I explain all three requirements in the post on IMgenomeProject.com.

Enjoy!

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If you are on Twitter, I’m sure there are some tweeters you pay more attention to than others. What is the secret sauce that causes you to give your attention to someone on Twitter?

That’s the question I asked on the Feed140 blog today.  I’m starting an informal research project to dig in to the Twitter timeline of  ‘attention worthy’ tweeters and see if I can extract some consistent factors that shed some light on the mystery of what makes us pay attention so some people and not notice others.

Want to help? Share with me 3 of the people you follow on Twitter who capture your attention.

Please visit this post on my Twitter marketing blog to share your response…  Thanks!

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It’s Saturday and I’m just sitting down to do a total re-write of the VisiOlo sales page and sales offer because the current one just is not doing it’s job.

Through testing, I know that the majority of visitors who see the page are not getting to the part of the sales letter that actually talks about features and benefits — they are not scrolling past the very top of the sales letter. I know this because I’m testing a future feature of VisiOlo that very simply measures how deep visitors go into my sales page.

This new testing feature still needs some work before it delivers rock solid measurements, so I’m not going to give you hard numbers, but I have seen enough data to reinforce my intuitive feel that the message and structure of the copy is just not right.

I’m not really that surprised. In fact, in my experience, it takes several months of active selling and focused effort to ‘tune’ a sales message and offer. 

First, you have ‘gross tuning’ in which you decide what the key messages are and how to structure the delivery of those messages.  Sometimes, gross tuning is completed before you start selling the product. But, more often than not, it has to take place in the real world in real sales conditions.  This principle, by the way, is as true for products that are sold face-to-face with a sales force as it is for info products sold online.

Then, you have ‘fine tuning’ which is more about testing headlines, layout, color combinations, small changes in price, etc. This tends to be an ongoing process where improvements are small, but over time, result in steadily increasing conversions.

The VisiOlo sales message is definitely in the gross tuning phase, which means there are people visiting the sales page for whom VisiOlo could be a transformational tool, but they are not even aware of it because what they need to know is buried too deep in the sales letter, or not there at all.  This is not good for me, nor is it good for for my potential customers, so I’m starting over with a blank piece of paper.

I’ve learned several things over the last thirty days that will influence the next version of the sales message, but one thing is for sure. The current introductiory price of $9.99 has got to go.

So, if you are considering a VisiOlo membership, now is the time, before I update the offer and increase the price.

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What is marketing?

Ask the question of 10 business owners and you’ll get 10 different answers.

To some it is an activity…

To some it is a department where brochures are made…

To some it is ‘advertising’…

To some it is ‘sales’…

To some it’s more about the brand…

To some it’s about shelf space…

To some it’s about location…

and to some, it’s about getting out to shake hands.

The answer, of course, is that marketing is all of those things. But how does one make sense of all of those ‘things’ that marketing is?

In business school, I learned that marketing can be more or less equally divided into five Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

The way you work with these five Ps is called your ‘marketing mix’ which, if you get it just right, will make you rich.  You must have the right product, and the right price, delivered in the right way (place), to a warm audience (promotion).  If you are The Coca-Cola Company or General Motors, then this model of marketing might work for you. If not, it provides no real value in helping people understand what marketing is.

Right about now, the astute reader will have noticed that I only listed four of the five Ps.  I “forgot” the fifth P on purpose because it was added later. While engaged in marketing conversations in academic circles, those that remembered to include the new P were immediately understood to be astute marketers who were on the cutting edge of academic thought.  The new P, of course, was People. Makes you wonder how much research was required to justify the radical addition of this new P.

Also, later, a bunch of academics who apparently either didn’t like alliteration or maybe got tired of explaining that Place really isn’t a place but more of a word to describe a distribution channel, decided that Place should be changed to Channel. So now, instead of the 5 Ps of marketing, we have four Ps and a C, just doesn’t quite work as well. I personally, wish those fancy pants professors would have left well enough alone and let the 5 Ps drift off into obscurity.

I think the 5 Ps are, and have always been, a horrible way to describe what marketing is.

Marketing is more like a layer cake.

OK, it doesn’t look like a layer cake, but this is an old graphic and I didn’t want to try to actually make it look like a cake.  It’s the layer part that is important.  Marketing happens in layers — each has a different flavor and texture, but it all goes together in one fully-baked combination of different marketing ingredients.

It starts with a strong business foundation — the basics of doing business.  For Infopreneurs, it’s a computer, web hosting, some basic desktop software, a legal business entity, telephone, bank account, payment processor, etc.  Without the basic foundational elements of a business, marketing can only be in-effective.  But, fortunately, in the Infopreneur business model, it is not difficult to build a strong business foundation.  In fact, it’s probably the simplest business model you can find when it comes to business foundation.

On top of the business foundation, you have the Marketing Foundation — it’s made up of four blocks: Market, Product, Channel, and Brand.

These are the true foundations of marketing for any business.  You need a market — an audience of prospects who have needs that you can fill.  You need a product that matches the needs of your market.  You need to be able to reach that audience through a sales and distribution channel. And, finally, if you don’t stand for something, you will stand for nothing. Your brand communicates who you are and it is equally as important as the other blocks.

On top of the Marketing Foundation, you build a Promotional Structure. This is the series of steps your prospects go through on their way to becoming customers, repeat customers, and evangelists.  For the Infopreneur, the promotional structure is really a combination of copy, design, and technology.  Our customers follow a clear, one-way, path from sales letter to download page… to problem solved.  And, if we are doing it right, we have other solutions to offer to those same customers.

Your promotional structure is, essentially, your customer-making factory.  And we are fortunate. Just think how complex the promotional structure is for a business that has 50 or 60 field sales reps, 5 customer service reps, and 4 inside sales reps.  As Infopreneurs, the basic building blocks of our ‘factory’ are simple and measurable, something you won’t find in many other business models.

And finally, you drive Traffic into your promotional structure.  Traffic is the juice that runs the machine and, if you build your Marketing Foundation and Promotional Structure correctly, you won’t have much trouble generating all the traffic you want.

Now doesn’t that make more sense?

Sure, it takes a little explaining, and the words don’t alliterate nor do they rhyme, but I’m going to go out on an ego limb here and say that I think the Four Layers of Marketing makes a whole lot more sense than the Four Ps and a C.

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“The Mirror Neuron was discovered in Parma Italy in 1989. It was originally called the “monkey see, monkey do” neuron. It is basically the reason why sometimes we can feel what other people feel — discomfort for instance. Let me ask you to do something, John, and your listeners as well. Just close your eyes and imagine that you are back in grade school and you are sitting in your desk looking at the large blackboard at the front of the room. Now imagine your teacher reaching up, and instead of writing on the board, she takes her long fingernails and scratches all four nails firmly against the board, slowly from top to bottom.

Now, did you feel uncomfortable?

What’s amazing about it is you didn’t even hear the sound but I was activating your Mirror Neurons, you still had that feeling. This is the concept of Mirror Neurons. Now, through research, this is being used in the world of marketing.”

From “Why We Really Buy” on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Martin Lindstrom

I’m not sure the great direct response copywriters out there have any idea that there exists something called a “Mirror Neuron” but, once again, in application the direct marketers are way ahead of academics and the corporate world.  Any copywriter worth his salt knows that evoking a high emotional or physical response is good marketing.

I enjoyed this interview, but you can just sense the chasm between academics and the world of direct marketing when you listen to this one.  Still, I learned a lot about ‘Buyology.’

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Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, reclines on his desk in his office soon after the release of Windows 1.0. 1985 Bellevue, Washington, USA. Vía: Flickr (Esparta)

At VisiOlo, our Ideal Prospect is an “Executive Infopreneur” — which is a description that I really like. If you asked me who our ideal prospect was a year ago, I might have described the same type of person, but it would have taken several sentences versus the two powerful words found in the phrase we use now.

When I picture an Infopreneur, I picture an entrepreneur who sells digital information products online. But when I picture an Executive Infopreneur, I understand something of the persons mindset as well. Because when you wear your executive hat, you have a much different perspective than when you wear a more tactical hat in your business.

Michael Gerber, in his outstanding book The E-myth Revisited says “The technician goes to work IN his business and the entrepreneur goes to work ON his business”

Most Infopreneurs approach their sales systems with a technician mindset.  This is an important and valuable mindset – even a critical mindset. But it is not the only mindset you should be using.  In fact, this mindset should be used as little as possible and the entrepreneur mindset should be used as much as possible.

Still, there are reasons why you should have a technician mindset as an Infopreneur… exactly two of them.

1)  Adopt a technician’s mindset for important tasks that are new to you and your team.

• It is your job to make sure things run well and efficiently in your business and sometimes this means that you need to actually do a process first, so that you can understand it, and then create a written procedure so that someone on your team can continue to execute and refine.  In other words: Do -> Document -> Delegate -> Refine. The Do and Document phases require a technician mindset.

2) Adopt a technician’s mindset if you are just getting started, have no money to invest, and have no money to pay for delegation.

• If you can’t leverage someone else’s time and expertise, then you must be the technician, or the task is not going to get done. But this is only a temporary state.

In both cases, you are meant to only spend limited time in your business using a ‘technicians’ mindset. In other words, for the most successful Infopreneurs, the technician role is an occasional role – something to be assumed temporarily either by design or necessity.

A technician is concerned with ‘how it works’ but an executive is more concerned with what it does.

I’m here to tell you… when it comes to increasing profit in your business, the Executive Mindset is way more valuable than the Technician Mindset.

What do you think?

Do you spend enough time working on your business versus working in your business?

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Businesses don’t buy products — people do. Even if your business sells to other businesses, the real value exchange happens between people, a point that becomes very important when it comes to creating and implementing your iMOS.

It is super critical that you get clear on who you are targeting with your marketing message. I’ve found that the best way to do this is to create a profile of your ideal prospect.

This profile will paint a picture of the perfect customer for your product. It will, of course, be a fictitious ideal, but it is very useful in understanding what is important to the people who will ultimately buy your product. And when you understand what is important to you your Prospects, you have solved 75% of the marketing puzzle.

You may have already spent some time defining your target audience, or niche. This helps you define a group to which you will market, and it is very important. But the Ideal Prospect Profile brings it home by helping you learn about the individuals in your audience.

Your profile should include demographic information (age, sex, location, marital status, etc.), personal traits (decision making style, personal challenges, goals, aspirations, desires etc.), and if relevant, information about the job your prospect holds. The key is to get personal, create a crystal clear image of a single fictitious person who you see as the ideal user of your product. Most importantly, your profile should include the top 3 needs or wants of your Prospect.

The Ideal Prospect Profile is very valuable when you create marketing materials. You will be able to use the information in the Ideal Prospect Profile to create a compelling and relevant advertising message that really gets the attention of the people you want to attract.

Additionally, you will find that your Ideal Prospect Profile helps you create better products, refine and focus your brand, and uncover possible joint venture alliances. Can you target more than one Ideal Prospect? Sure, but you will want to create specific materials and promotional campaigns directed to each Ideal Prospect, so start with one, get things working smoothly and profitably, and then add from there.

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Tip 1: Break expectations. Your audience will walk in with certain assumptions about your message. If you believe those assumptions are mistaken, you’ve got to confront them directly. Effective teachers do this well. Imagine an eighth-grade science class: “The earth feels pretty solid, right? But it turns out that the surface of the earth rides on large moving plates, and if we understand how they move, we can understand the shape of the continents on the globe and we can understand how mountains and volcanoes are formed.”

Tip 2: Create a “proverb.” We tend to look down on soundbites, thinking that “shortness” must mean oversimplification. But use proverbs as your inspiration. Proverbs are short phrases that carry profound meaning — think of the wisdom that is packed into a short sentence such as, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.”

Tip 3: Be concrete. Being concrete helps people make decisions and take action. The Saddleback Church in California has defined a fictional couple, Saddleback Sam and Samantha, who embody the prototypical traits of the kind of community member that the church wants to reach. It’s easier for the members to plan outreach activities when they have “Sam and Samantha” in mind, as compared to a more abstract description, such as a “dual-income, upper middle-class, professional couple.”

Tip 4: Use stories. People will remember your stories, not your pontifications. Aesop’s Fables have endured for centuries, but Aesop’s Thesis Sentences wouldn’t have made it 10 minutes. Choose your stories carefully, so that after the fact, your audience can reconstruct your core meaning, just like we can do with “The Fox and the Grapes.”

Tip 5: Use an analogy. You can get across complex ideas quickly by making use of what people already know. That’s what analogies do — they create links between new ideas and ideas that people have already learned. Movies in Hollywood, for example, are pitched in terms of analogies to other movies. The movie that became Alien was pitched as “Jaws on a spaceship.” That pitch conveys a tremendous amount of information in four words.

Tip 6: Allow people to test for themselves. People love to try before they buy. The same is also true with your ideas. Give people a “test” that allows them to confirm, for themselves, whether your idea is credible. For instance, the Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” campaign depended on the customer’s ability to see that Wendy’s meat patties were larger than those of the competition.

Tip 7: Create a curiosity gap. Research says that we feel curious when there’s a gap between what we know and what we want to know. You should tease your audience with what they don’t know. For instance, think of how your local evening news programs promote themselves: “There’s a drug sweeping thru high schools — and it may be in your medicine cabinet!”

Tip 8: Focus on individuals, not the “big picture.” Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Many charities attract our support by focusing on specific human beings — “For $20 a month, you can sponsor Rokia, a 7-year-old girl, in Kenya” — rather than huge abstract causes, such as African poverty. This phenomenon works just as well in business contexts. Don’t talk about “improving customer service,” talk about how specific people should behave differently.

Tip 9: Use human-scale statistics. It is hard to make numbers stick, but when you must use statistics to boost your argument, make sure to frame them in a way that they can be understood. For instance, it’s hard to picture the scale of a $300 million government program. But it’s easier to picture the scale when you describe it as a program that spends about a dollar annually on every man, woman, and child in the United States.

Tip 10: Say 1 thing, not 5 things. A famous trial lawyer said, “If you say five things, you say nothing.” It’s vital that we strip down our idea to its core. A famous example of useful simplicity was the theme of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, written by James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Copyright © 2009 Chip and Dan Heath co-authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Author Bios Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California.

Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a Consultant to the Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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“It is true that what you measure, gets managed. But it’s also true that you should only measure the things that matter. And Google Analytics can often send people down rat holes and many different decision trees — spending time on many things that won’t necessarily have a huge impact”

Tim Ferris – From Tim’s Blog

This is a hugely valuable video for bloggers, but the ‘fact based’ mindset of Tim Ferris is it’s most valuable lesson.

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An assumption is a proposition that is taken for granted, as if it were true based upon presupposition without preponderance of the facts. (From WikiPedia)

I used to base almost all of my decisions on assumption — business and personal. And I still base most of my decisions on assumptions because assumptions are necessary if we expect to get through the day.  I don’t need a “preponderance of facts” to decide where to stop to get coffee in the morning or to decide what podcast to listen to first because these are not high-value decisions. On the other hand, critical decisions (like what to prioritize in my marketing activities) should never be based on assumption.

You don’t have to base every decision on “a preponderance of the facts,” but important decisions should not be based on assumption.

Here’s the problem with assumptions — they are often wrong.

Of course, right? If you make a decision based on little or no facts, your decision stands a good chance of being “wrong” (or as I prefer to think of it, ‘not optimal’ because a decision can often be OK, but sometimes OK is the result when the result could have been ‘fantastic’ given a slightly different decision).

Assumptions are basically gambles where you hope for winning hand even though you can’t really see the all the cards.

Now making the ‘wrong’ decision about where to pick up a latte in the morning isn’t a big problem — so what if the line is a little longer than you expected or they are out of cinnamon chip scones?

But if you are talking about planning your marketing activities, then it pays to see as many of the cards as you can.

Think about it… in the absence of facts the only way to know if you are on track or not is to wait and see what happens.  The problem is, with some decisions it may be months or years before you know you’ve made the wrong decision.

Take, for instance, the big decision of which niche to target.  If you make your niche decision based on assumption, you might spend 6-24 months working at building a presence in that market, building a list, creating products, developing JV relationships, etc. before you know if that niche is profitable. But with just a few facts (niche size, competitive analysis, etc.) you can greatly increase your chances of making the right decision about what niche to target.  The wrong decision can, in this case, put you out of business.

For every one fact you acquire relative to any decision, your chances of making a serious error decline dramatically.

Like in a card game, a single fact goes a long way. If you are seeking a four-of-a-kind in Kings, and you see another player pick up a King from the discard pile, that one fact will tell you that your strategy is not likely to work out.

If you are trying to decide where to focus your traffic generation efforts, knowing which of your current traffic sources is the most profitable will help you dramatically.

Lately, I’ve gotten much better at forcing myself to make fact-based decisions; especially when it comes to anything that requires my time.  Time is my most precious asset and where to spend my time is among the most critical of decisions for me.

Facts are not always statistics, sometimes they are simply true statements.

For instance, I mostly use ‘true statement’ type facts when deciding what VisiOlo projects to spend my time on.

Here are the key statements that I want to be ‘true’ in order for me to spend my time on a project.

• This project serves the needs of my core audience.
• This project will result in increased profit for my business.
• This project is something that my team is technically capable of doing without excessive effort.
• I have/have not proven the core assumptions of this project through testing.
• This is project is more critical than any other project on my ‘open project’ list.

Now, these statements are usually ‘relatively’ true for my projects — which means they are tru-ER for my top priority projects than they are for my lowest priority projects.  For instance, I may not know (for sure) how much increase in profit I will see for a given project — no one has a crystal ball — but I can know that relative to my other projects, my highest priority project appears to have the highest probability of generating profit.

OK, that is getting a bit too technical, what I mean is when I say “this project will result in increased profit for my business,” what I really mean is “based on what I know today, this project looks like it will generate more profit than other projects I could work on.”

I haven’t really formalized the process, but these are generally the statements that guide my project choices.  When I do get around to formalizing this ‘project vetting’ process, I’ll add a quantitative scale to each statement.  I’ll have something like a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being false and 5 being true.

Hmmm. That would be a nice feature for VisiOlo too, because the more I think about it, I think the VisiOlo’s true role is to help Infopreneurs make the right decisions about where to spend their ‘project’ time.  We do a decent job of providing data about sales systems, but I’m also interested in helping with the decision making and prioritization process because facts without implementation are useless.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seier/ / CC BY 2.0

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