 |
| |
|
Marketing Tips of the Month At ISPCON, Brock Henderson gave three breakout sessions about Marketing for ISPs. To paraphrase: "There is no silver bullet. What works for one ISP may not work for another." He also said not to rely on one medium. But the message is most important and it must be tested and measured. You can get more details from Brock himself. On
April 21,
we held our monthly Marketing conference call. The guest was Dino Eliadis, a business
management consultant. It was an open forum of Q&A with Dino
covering Marketing 101.
The fundamentals of Marketing are: know your target audience (Who);
have
one single message across all media (What); discuss benefits (Why), not
features;
have a call to action; measure and test the message and the media. USP
is often mentioned. Unique Selling Proposition. The Elevator Speech.
The Dramatic
Difference. The Overt Benefit. The WHY buy from you as opposed to RR or
RBOC.net.
Everyone in your organization should be able to answer that question.
And
with the same message. (If your employees don't know Why, how will your
Prospects
know Why you and not RBOC.net?) Another
important item: Spend as much time keeping your present customers as
you do trying to
get new ones. Customer Acquisition costs are huge. For a fraction of
that, keep your present customers happy. WOW them every once in a
while. Stay in front of them. Cross sell or upsell them during contact
with them - whether that is a support call, a billing inquiry, or while
they are on hold (on-hold messaging to a 'captive' audience pays off).
"Your Customer Service people should have a checklist of things to ask
or say to each caller before hanging up," says Jim Shumante, a
business coach. And I
know what
some of you are thinking:
There isn't a magic bullet... no single advertising event that will make your phone ring off the hook. Depending on where you are located, your ILEC may be flooding the market with advertising - print, radio, direct mail, etc. What can you as an independent do? Well,
maybe spend your advertising budget a better way. Spend
it on
increasing your Referral Program. Instead of giving credits on a
customer's bill, send them a check. It's tangible. It's rewarding. Put
the check in a Thank You card. Spend
it on
a party for your customers. Have a networking party for your business
customers. Get
Creative. Nothing
will generate sales, but sales efforts. If you
sell on price, you aren't selling - you are taking orders. (And one of
those orders is your own coffin because lower price means lower
profit.) Want an easy
sale? Work for the USPS. Everyone that comes in wants to buy stamps.
You
can make sales all day. In
every other
business, you have to reach for every sale. The low-hanging fruit is
gone.
Time to put on the boots and get the tool belt out, because now the
heavy
lifting begins. The real selling begins when the prospect asks the
price
of the service. BTW, if
you think that you are going to convert your residential dial-up
customer base to DSL, you better make sure that you really know what
your true and full costs are to offer DSL (because in my experience
most ISPs do not know
what that cost is. Call me and I will help you figure it out). The
price keeps dropping on Broadband and with BPL coming out it may drop
faster. You need to sell more than a dumb pipe. You need to be selling VALUE.
Value is the difference between Price and Cost. Not features, but overt Benefits intriguing the prospect; the Dramatic Difference telling him why he should buy from you. That's all for this month! An
ISP-Marketing thread about Marketing Basics in today's economy.  813.963.5884 |