We’re Marketers First, Technicians Second
We’re not just copywriters. We’re not just web designers. We’re not just transition marketing experts or Google Adwords pros. And that’s where our strength lies. Because if you employ someone from just one particular field, what service do you think they are going to recommend? You guessed it … their own service (whether that’s what you really need, or not).
Similarly, if you engage a high end web design company to build or revamp an existing website, the consultant will most likely make you feel that your business will be “left behind” if you don’t sign up. Then your work will be off-loaded in separate bundles to a roomful of 20-something year old IT geeks. And if there’s one thing worse for your business than one clueless youth (who has never actually sold anything in their entire life), it’s a whole bunch of them all working “cooperatively”.
Did you hear that? That’s the sound of your profit going down the gurgler. BECAUSE: Just like you’re not going to win Bathurst driving a Toyota Prius — you’re not going to have a profitable online business presence, working with a 20-something year old IT graduate from that slick marketing company with a glitzy website. Now, while they’ll tell you you’ll be working with “the best” you’ll more than likely end up working with … somebody who has never been in business, does not understand business, and has never had to sell their wares to pay the bills. Someone who will be receiving instructions handed on down the line about “what sort of look they’re after” and what “branding” they want, a pretty colour scheme, and lots of flashy graphics … yadda, yadda.
Make no mistake, marketing is what drives sales in business. It’s the Paretos 80/20 rule. 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. If you are not marketing for response (sales), you are marketing for recognition (warm fuzzies). And the last time we checked, you couldn’t take ‘warm fuzzies’ to the bank.
As award winning direct response marketers, it is our job to ensure that your marketing targets your ideal clients and customers, grabs their attention with compelling advertising messages that push their emotional ‘hot buttons’, and includes an irresistably powerful ‘call to action’ which drives them into your business, to spend their money with you.
We encourage ‘steady growth’ not ‘huge outlay’
Your website or marketing plan need not require a massive outlay. In fact, you can start building a basic presence for your business online for as little as $500. Then, if you’re happy you can continue to build up to the next stage. This method is practical. It’s simple. And it works for you. You’re not locked in to a scary multi-thousand dollar contract from the beginning. Phew! And by building your online presence this way, you can test and measure and change things as you go. Given that everything in marketing is a test, being able to change things as you go is essential.
No Hidden Agendas
We don’t have major rent, staff or infrastructure costs, so we don’t have to charge you an arm and a leg just to run our business. We’re not tied to any particular supplier or company, so we don’t have any particular barrow to push. There’s just two of us.
We work well together and we work alone. Why do business this way? Simply because there are some things too important to outsource. So much of the cost of having someone else design a website is tied up in communication procedures (forms, consults, emails) and delays/blockages between departments.
We offer a boutique style of service, and we take responsibility for every aspect of the work we do (let’s face it, there is no-one else to pass the buck to!). We prefer to work with small numbers of selected clients at a time, and after an initial FREE consultation, we are better placed to decide whether our services will be beneficial to you. This way, we can focus all of our energy on your project.
We can guarantee meticulous attention to detail. We can work with you to define your USP (Unique Selling Proposition),and identify your most profitable niches. Then we tailor laser focused marketing messages to the people in your niche, using direct response marketing strategies and emotional copy writing to appeal to the people who are literally “on heat” to buy. Our job is to ensure that the people in your market choose to buy from you, and not your competition. In short, our aim is for you to dominate the space you are in, and make your business the natural and obvious choice for your potential customers and clients.
Choose from 100s of Templates
You can choose from a huge range of professionally designed sites (just like this one), without paying huge custom design fees, or spending your valuable time liaising with a web master or graphic artist to create a look that you may well want to change 12 months down the track. You see, your website has to be as accessible to you as the rest of your business is. And you need to be able to make changes, big or small, with as little expense and palaver as possible.
That is why loading ‘themes’ (such as this ‘Simplicity’ theme) over the top of a simple WordPress blog is a cost effective way to get a professional looking site up and running simply and quickly. WordPress is a stable and universal platform, and you definitely don’t need a high level of technical expertise to set one up. When you install a ‘theme’ over the top of your site, you have access to hundreds of modern styles with the latest features and upgrades. Needless to say, they are simple to use.
Your Marketing ‘Concierges’
Writing copy, designing an ad, or taking photos is (for most people) about as much fun as public speaking. “I stare at the blank screen and start to panic. I just don’t know what to say” or “I just don’t have time to try and write stuff down” is something we hear over and over again. And that is completely understandable. Because like all skill sets, fast, accurate and effective copy writing is developed after tens of thousands of words, and many years of daily practice.
As you can imagine, as deadline-driven newspaper publishers, we mastered the art of every writing style, from the news story, press releases, feature articles, advertorials, display ad copy, headlines, e-books and email series. Always on the run, to meet a tight print deadline, for fifty weeks a year, over ten years. That’s a LOT of words and photos.
Whether it is an article or advertorial to promote your enterprise for print media, a press release about something new and innovative happening in your business, an email marketing series, or information rich, benefit dense content for your website, we can get your writing done on time. We’ll do it in a fraction of the time of doing it yourself, better than anyone else. And you’ll be free to work on other areas of your business where your time is best spent. Let us know below if you would like more information about this service. See our Marketing Concierges Case Study.
In-the-trenches Experience
This is particularly important. Because when it comes to small business, we have been there and done that. We have owned and operated a multimillion dollar newspaper and custom publishing business, which was built largely by using the direct response marketing strategies we teach our clients.
Over 15 years, we have worked with hundreds of small business owners to develop intelligent and strategic marketing campaigns, designed to drive sales. Whilst we owned and operated our newspaper, we were recipients of various industry awards from the Queensland Country Press Association for Best Newspaper, Best Story, and Best Photo Journalism. After we sold our paper to the Australian Media company (APN Australian Publishing) we won a number of international marketing and sales awards in the most competitive industry online.
We are experienced website and sales funnel builders, having built custom sales funnels for dozens of clients in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, South Africa and the UK. As we developed that service, we collaborated with copy writing master, John Fancher, and Internet traffic guru, Jim Yaghi. We’ve written two books on Internet marketing. The point is…we don’t simply spruik theory. We speak from the “in-the-trenches” experience of having to run a successful business or go broke. Helping small business owners to grow their business successfully through marketing is our passion.
Transition Marketing Experts
What exactly do we mean by “Transition Marketing Experts”? Almost sounds like a term we have made up, right? Truthfully, it IS a term we have made up. But it describes what we do quite nicely.
And that is the process of smoothly and seamlessly ‘transitioning’ a prospective client or customer through your marketing system. From the headline of your ad, article or landing page, to the information rich, benefit driven body copy, to your offer, or ‘call to action’, the reader should never be in any doubt about what you are saying to them, and what is in it for them if they act on your offer. Transitioning is the “dark art of conversion”. The point is … website visitors are no good to you if they don’t eventually inquire about your product or service, or buy from you.
Co-ordinate Your Marketing With an In Depth Audit
During the course of our 80+ question marketing audits with small business owners, we find that they have usually tried lots of different advertising media, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. But what tends to happen is that it is difficult for them to keep track of what they have done, and what works, or more importantly, what doesn’t. And this is purely because they are too busy running their business to get bogged down in it all.
It is all too easy to say “yes” to every advertising salesperson that comes along, but often this is without a central strategy around what message you are trying to communicate to the people in your market, especially if you do not sell commodities, but rather more complex, expensive or obscure products or services. And this is where you can end up with a half dozen or more advertising methods on the go, with little (if any) co-ordination between them.
This is confusing and potentially extremely costly to your business. We prefer to use a “cook a chicken and serve it four ways” approach to marketing. What does this mean? Simply, that it is most cost effective and logical to start small and test your message to market. Figure out which aspects of your marketing fly like a bird, and conversely, which flop like a dead fish. Then take your successful marketing messages and content, and use them across a number of different media.
For example, you might tweak and submit a high response generating long copy ad or advertorial to a relevant local newspaper or magazine as an information article. You could take the same piece of content, tag it with the appropriate keywords and post it to the blog roll on your website. The same punchy piece of copy could be used as part of a free report, or in an email marketing series. If the headline is particularly powerful, it could form the basis of a Yellow Pages ad or a classified ad.
The point is, to start small, test for feedback, use the data you get back from the market to develop your message, and when you hit upon a winning formula, ramp up your efforts and use it as much as you can, for maximum reach and leverage. You may be thinking that this all sounds like an awful lot of work. We won’t lie, it does take a reasonable amount of planning and co-ordination to pull it all together. But that’s where we come into the picture. What’s more, having been small business owners ourselves, we know that there is probably no ‘money tree’ to fund extravagant marketing that is not designed to bring more customers and sales into your business. We understand that “just getting your logo out there” is a meaningless exercise in throwing money down the drain.
