Section 1: Developing Your Power Content
DISCOVERY QUESTIONS: The first thing we do is go on a fact-finding mission. We ask you the business owner and all of your key player’s specific questions about your business. This process usually takes about four hours or more. We tap into your knowledge base and excavate as much as we can about your company, the industry, and your perception of your position in the marketplace.
DECISION MATRIX AND VALUE HIERARCHY: In the same meeting, as the previous step, we also try and determine what is most important to your prospects. This is the first step in seeing the world through John Smith’s eyes. At this time we also determine what it is that makes you valuable to the marketplace specifically and rank it in importance from your prospects point of view.
DEFINING VALUE CONTENT: After determining your value to the marketplace, we define what the values mean – from an industry standpoint. For example – you may be able to say that you provide the best customer service. Well… we define what your version of customer service means in reality. If you really are good it would mean; you have a quick response time, you’re able to talk to people politely and professionally, your client’s claims are handled immediately… etc. We don’t talk about your business or other businesses at all. We merely define the premises you can claim.
CREDIBILITY GAP ANALYSIS: This step is vital if we are to truly understand the competition and your position in the marketplace. We need to know how good your competitors truly are so that we can effectively develop your position as to why someone should choose YOU over THEM. From this, we learn what we preemptively market, and what we market as a distinguishing factor.
CREDIBILITY GAP CONTENT: This is where we state how you meet the definitions of the claims we are able to make. This is where we really dive into the specifics, leaving nothing out. This is where we learn how your system of operations matches up and what really separates you from your competition and further develops your market position.
CUSTOMER AND PROSPECT SURVEYS: We take the things we put together in the discovery questions, decision matrix, customer value hierarchy, and Credibility Gap… then put it to the test. We compare what the surveys revealed to what our initial impressions of the marketplace were. This comparison allows us to track and identify whether or not we truly understood the prospect as we thought we did – or to make the necessary adjustments in order to give the prospects the value they are looking for.
Section 2: Write Powerful Headlines
John Caples, the author of “Tested Advertising Methods” said that he has seen the same ad run with two different headlines… and the effective one pulled 19½ times the result of the other.
We have seen that truth as well. That is why we spend so much time testing and tweaking and changing, retesting, re-tweaking, and re-changing headlines repeatedly. We panel headlines in front of your “John Smith.” It is proven that the headline… separate from everything else… can determine the fate of the growth of your sales when advertising.
We typically write over 200+ headlines for every campaign just so we can find the four or five headlines that are the key players in our advertising and marketing pieces. There are many ways to write headlines. Saying it in Plain English or telling it how it is, is one of the best. For example, John Caples wrote one the most successful and effective headlines of all time:
“They Laughed When I Sat Down At The Piano — But When I Started To Play…”
This headline for a company that had a self-teaching piano course not only drew in incredible accolades from his peers… but most importantly serious results. We modified the headline and used it for a carpeting company:
“My Husband Laughed When I Ordered Our Carpet Through The Mail — But When The Quality ‘Out-Matched’ Anything He Saw Locally And Saved Us 46% Over His Best Bid…”
Get the idea. Here we have taken the hidden meanings in each phrase and modify it to the clients company. With very profitable results, I might add.
Section 3: Lead Generation
RISK LOWERING STRATEGIES AND OFFERS: Simply put – we develop the tools and strategies that will work best using information gathered in the surveys and the Gap Analysis. We will know where to place advertisements, what kind of joint ventures we need, and what types of offers people will respond to. We can also begin planning for any innovation strategies we need to suggest and implement as well as customer retention and referral programs.
THE MASTER MARKETING DOCUMENT: The Master Marketing Document is the most important document you’ll ever write for your business — even if it’s never sent out to anyone! Why? Because it is the case outline, you’re building for your marketing and sales argument. It needs to be written BEFORE writing any of the other marketing or advertising pieces. It must contain all your Customer Value Points from most to least important; it must be specific and detailed; contain powerful headlines and sub-headlines; use all the writing guidelines previously given. The length of the Master Marketing Document is determined by the number of Customer Value Points you have. The Master Marketing Document should make an offer that asks for immediate action! Once written… you can easily pull pieces of your Master Marketing Document into other marketing pieces (Lead Generators, Drip System) as needed.
TESTIMONIALS: During the survey phase of building the argument, we speak with an average of 100-people. These people provide a great source of evidence in the form of testimonials, or better yet… endorsements. Understand… it’s one thing to have a B2B or B2C client give testimony as to how much they like your product or service; it’s quite another when they go into quantifiable detail as to how much money it saved them, how much better their skin felt, how much more gas mileage they had than before and how YOU are the only business they’d ever buy from again.
As an example of creating testimonials; while going through the interview process, a client may say something that strikes us as being incredibly useful in the future – we will ask them if we can quote them on it. If they tell us yes, we’ll write down their experiences and articulate it according to the principals we use in marketing so it’s powerfully stated. Then we mail it back to them for their proofing, to insure their actual meaning hasn’t changed. Lastly, they sign their “OK” to use it… and we do!
Once we’ve compiled about 15-20 testimonials, we pick the top 5-8 and use them in marketing pieces.
CREATING LEAD GENERATORS: This is rather self-explanatory I think. We pull together the Master Marketing Document, headlines, research and testimonials, etc… then create lead generators. Some of these lead generators look exactly alike aside from the headlines. Some are very different.
Once we have drafted these lead generators, we test them on a small market within the initial target we’re ultimately going to flood and verify which pieces are ultimately going to pull the most results. Let’s face it, if you plan on flooding a market, wouldn’t you want to use the most powerful tools in your arsenal to blast it with?
Once we know we are speaking “John Smith’s” language, the mock ads are ready for final development.
Section 4: Marketing Tools
Marketing and sales tools are also based on the arguments developed during Section 1. These tools help further facilitate the decision making process by providing more of the argument to your prospects that leads them to the original goal; that they would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone else but you… regardless of the price.
It so happens that these tools are also the offers that you give to people to learn more about your services. In our case, it’s a newsletter, an audio CD program, an online video, a DVD, or a seminar. In other instances, it could be a packet of information, an oversized brochure, a website, interactive CD, or an infomercial, etc.
The tools we create will be determined by the research/surveys. We will let your “John Smith” tell us what would be best and easiest for YOU to educate them on what you do.
Section 5: The Drip System
CREATE DRIP PIECES: Drip pieces are designed for those prospects we capture, but are not ready to buy right away. These pieces are used to make contact and provide more of your sales argument, one piece at a time until they are ready to buy. These typically can be in the form of emails, letters, postcards, or newsletters. There may be others but traditionally these are the main options.
DRIP SYSTEM SCHEDULE: Drip pieces go out every two to three weeks. It is also important to know that the drip system can actually revolve every 12-26 pieces depending on the average buying cycle of the prospect. If the average buying cycle were 2-months – we would probably set up the drip system to go out every 10-14 days and have 4-months worth of different, unique pieces each offering a section of the whole, which is your sales argument.
Section 6: Maximize and Optimize
Maximize and optimize is the section where we set up endorsements, referral programs, joint ventures and any other way that synergistically reduces the time, energy, and cost of advertising.
Even though this is section six of the system… we can immediately begin implementing phases of this system before we are even done developing your Power Content.
An example of that is endorsement letters from current clients to their friends and family; or implementing a referral system. This can be done immediately because they bring with them a high level of trust and evidence to their friends, etc… and that counters us not needing complete campaign development.
We hope you find great benefit in this material and that it gives you an equal understanding on what’s included in our program, and how to proceed in developing your campaign. Circle 3 understands that you did not get into your business with the intent to learn how to market yourselves, but to do what you do best, which is to RUN YOUR BUSINESS.
However, if you find yourself in need of developing a marketing system, but little to no time to accomplish your goal -or you are frustrated with the agency you did hire and you would like some help, feel free to contact our sales staff directly. Don’t forget to ask us about our Done-For-You Marketing Programs also.
Thanks A Million!
» Contact us about scheduling a FREE 45 minute marketing analysis interview for your company.
