Welcome back and thanks for tuning in. We're talking about some of the
challenges that business owners face. This is part 2 and that's staying
ahead of your competition. Please make sure to check out part 1. And part 1, I
like to call people management. Super important. We talked about hiring,
onboarding and training and retaining your employees. So please... Please check
that out. Really helpful. We're talking about part 2 today and staying ahead
of your competition. You know and some of the things that I've done this day ahead
of my competition because we are in one heck of a competitive world today.
Alright, so part 2 is competition and staying ahead of the competition. One of
the biggest questions I get asked all the time is marketing. "How can i market
better? How can I attract more leads and sales into my company?" Marketing is a non
going never-ending process in any business. There's not a blanket and
answer that I can give you on this one because there's so many different
industries out there. And different things work for different industries.
Things change quickly today. So, if you find something that works in marketing,
you had a double down on that and spend as much money as you can and utilize
that tool its fullest until either your competition catches on or it just
doesn't work anymore. So, finding things that work really, really are important.
Some great... A little tip of advice for local businesses. There's something
called Every Door Direct Mail. You should check it out with the post office and a
local mail house where you can send out postcards for absolutely nothing. But we,
I've helped a local local restaurant that was new to town that just got
rocking. And for a very inexpensive price for I think maybe like ten cents a
postcard, they were able to to send it out to every single local house
with is in the X amount of radius, you know, in there wherever the restaurant
was located. That was really helpful to kind of spread the word. Obviously to the
things that you can do today on Facebook and social media. You can really super
target your audience. So you really have to understand this stuff. Know at this
point, we have a marketing team in our company and and that marketing team is
doing anything and everything that's out there for marketing. From Direct Mail, to
social media, to Google pay-per-click, to display ads. Everything. And we're
measuring and testing. So, it's super important that if you're marketing,
you're measuring and you're testing the results. Otherwise, it could
be an endless pit of money. With marketing, it's really... It's really
important that if you don't have someone in your company that
understands it or has experience with it that you work with someone who's got a
proven track record and a proven history. And at the end of this video I can share
somewhere where you can go to get help on the marketing side. If you're going to
utilize Google pay-per-click, you got to make sure that you go
after the right keywords. And again, working with an expert can really help
you with this. Again, I'll share that at the end of the video. So, you got to find
the right keywords for your business that makes sense. And then you got to a
be test your landing pages. So you have to have basically 2 landing pages. But
then one landing page you changed something a little bit different and see
what works the best. Whichever one performs the best, you
stick with that one. And then you do another test where you change and update
something. And if that one performs better then you stick
with that one. So, the a/b testing is super important. But you have to measure
your results and any marking you're doing but especially on Google
pay-per-click because you are paying per click. Super important. Another thing that
you need to check out and you must be doing is social media marketing. It's
similar to Google pay-per-click marketing but the great thing about it
is you're able to target your audience. So, what we're doing is we're putting up
a number of different ads on all the social media platforms and we're able to
target the audience that we go after which is awesome. So, we have separate
landing pages for those ads and everything is being tracked and measured.
Again, super important to track and measure results and we're also doing a/b
testing on those landing pages as well too. Really, really important. If you're not a
be testing then you're absolutely going to be missing out on and wasting money.
Another thing that we do is direct mail and radio. Yes, I know that sounds
like the dinosaur ages but yes some of that stuff still works. So, we send out
hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail per month still and we advertise in a
number of different radio stations. Find a local mail house. Find a company that
will help you with satellite or local radio spots. Every business is different.
Some of these may or may not work for you. We do some of the different direct
mail things and some radio ads. We measure those results. If it's radio, it
goes to a specific phone number. We track those leads if it's Direct Mail, either
you get a code or you're pointed to a specific landing page and we're able to
track that. So really important. Again, I guess I repeated this a million times
but make sure that you're tracking and measuring results. Otherwise you have no
clue what you're doing and you can't really measure your ROI.
Which is really important for anything that you going to be doing in marketing.
It's all about staying ahead of your competition. And the competition is
relentless. So, if you're not doing thi,s someone else absolutely is.
One of the biggest things in any competitive landscape in any competitive
industry which now because the internet every industry is competitive. So yes,
whatever you're doing is most likely competitive. Most important thing is
value. Values a pretty... a pretty bold and wide statement but some of the things
that we've done to provide value to our customers has really helped us win over
the competition. The most important thing is never sacrifice your integrity for
anything, whatsoever. Always do right by the customer. And
that is one of our core values here with our company. Going above and beyond for
all of our customers. But a few of things that we've done is we've simplified the
application process. A few of the things that we've done in our small
business financing... A few of the things that we've done to provide value to our
customers... Our customers come to us for financing for their businesses. some of
the things that we've done to provide that for those customers is we've
chopped the application process down from hours to minutes. We've cut the
approval process down from weeks to days. If not, same day. We're constantly
bringing new lenders on to our platform to make sure that our customers getting
the best financing program for their businesses that are available today. You
always have to be innovating and changing with the times in your business
and doing anything you can to bring more values to your customers and that's
exactly what we're doing. And we're always trying to add anything that we
can convenience wise or a service that can better help our small business
customers. It's super important to us. So what can you do in your business that
provides more value than your competition? What are some of the things
that you can do to provide more value to your customers? Don't overthink this and
don't undertake it either. I mentioned earlier that I provide a link at the
bottom for some marketing services. A part of our business and providing value
to our customers and owned businesses is not just financing. But it's a number of
different business services and one of those is marketing. So please check out
this link below if you think that you need help with marketing and staying
ahead of the competition. Thanks for tuning in, I look forward to seeing you
soon.