Summary of Rapid Results Course
Introduction
- There is a plethora of online and offline marketing strategies
- Many are free or low-priced and easy to implement
- Trying to learn and implement everything means you get overwhelmed and produce nothing
- We’re taught that multitasking is a virtue
- The ability to handle a variety of tasks at once is a valuable quality
- The truth is that multitasking kills productivity
- Multitasking kills productivity because:
- It’s stressful and difficult to spread focus
- Priorities get confused
- Decisions take longer to make
- Time is wasted switching between projects
- It’s easy to lose focus
- Work quality suffers
- Trying to implement too many projects or strategies at once will increase:
- Stress
- Burn-out
- Wasted resources
- Lack of goal progress
- Limited results
- Demoralization
- Health problems
- In this course you’ll learn how to use the DISSC model to commit to once approach at a time
- You’ll achieve dramatically faster results
- DISSC stands for:
- Define the foundation
- Identify your #1 goal
- Select your #1 strategy
- Specify your action plan
- Communicate the strategy throughout your team
- Learning objectives include:
- Recognize the importance of prioritization and the pitfalls of multitasking
- Identify key steps in creating a plan to break through overwhelm
- Define the essentials that form the foundation for your success
- Identify your top-priority marketing goals for your business
- Select a single marketing strategy to focus on
- Specify the critical elements necessary for strategy implementation
- Communicate the tops goal to members of your team
Define Your Foundation
- The first step of the DISSC process is to Define
- Define the essentials that will guide all of your marketing decisions
- Develop a clear foundation that will keep you from distractions and on track
- These essentials may change over time as your business grows
- When changes call for it, you should return to this step
- Re-define your goals since it’s the foundation for everything else
What Are Your Core Values?
- Core values are principles or beliefs that are at the center of your organization
- No matter what changes may occur, these core values remain the same
- They clarify who you are and guide you in decision making
- Core values are usually expressed as adjectives that describe some quality such as:
- Dependability
- Innovation
- Original
- Traditional
- Worldwide
How to Define Your Core Values
- It’s about discovering the values that are already there leading your decisions
- Look for the values that truly lie behind your organization and what it does
- Some questions to help you discover yours include:
- What have been our greatest achievements?
- What are common rules my organization follows?
- What am I most proud of?
- What makes you as a business owner most satisfied?
- What do you want people to know about your organization?
- What is most important to you?
- The answers to these questions may be full sentences or scenarios
- Pare them down to the simplest word or phrase
Redefining Your Core Values
- A time may come when you have to redefine your core values
- It might be useful to review them occasionally and see if they need an update
- You may need to adjust to external or internal conditions
- The process is best done as a group
- Gather team members and ask for their feedback
- Find out if original values are still relevant
Look at Your Products
- Another way to define essentials is to look at your most products and services
- Start with the range of products you offer
- Look at which services are the most profitable to see where you should focus your future efforts
Identify Your Best Customers
- Identify who your ‘best’ customers are and focus your business on them
- Remember value isn’t determined solely by profit
- Other things that could be considerations include:
- Repeat, loyal customers
- Customers who are easy or fun to work with
- The satisfaction you get from helping them
- Customers who are valuable to other organization members
- Customers who promise future value or benefits
- Good connections in your industry
- Think about it as these are the customers you want to spend time and effort on
- They make the hard work worthwhile
Why Do Your Customers Buy from You?
- Ask yourself “Why do my customers buy from me and not a competitor?”
- The specific reason is summarized in your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
- The UVP helps businesses in all areas
- Your UVP is one single phrase that sums up these unique values and benefits to customers
- Your UVP is not a slogan or positioning statement
- It’s purpose is to:
- Explain how products or services solve problems
- Tell customers what benefits to expect
- Describe what sets you apart from competitors
- It should do all of this while also being short and concise
- It should be clear to understand within seconds
- Be as specific as possible
- Write in a tone that your customers use and understand
- This will also set the tone for marketing materials and communications
Identify Your #1 Marketing Goal
- It’s likely your business has a number of goals
- You’re going to narrow it down to the most important
- This is the highest priority and the one that’s going to bring the greatest benefit
- There’s no need to focus on only one goal indefinitely
- We’re going to focus on one as the clear guiding objective
- One you’ve achieved it, you’re ready for the next
How to Choose Your Top Goal
- Consider the biggest marketing challenge you’re facing right now
- This is the most pressing problem for you
- There are three main areas you can look at
- Sales
- Many marketing challenged are related directly to sales
- Examples include:
- Current customers are not aware of offerings
- You’re not seeing as many repeat customers as you’d like
- Prospects are not converting to customers at a desirable rate
- Lead Generation
- Challenges may revolve around lead generation and nurturing leads
- Examples include:
- You don’t have a steady flow of leads
- Your income is unpredictable
- You’re relying too much on one source for leads
- Brand Awareness
- The main challenge may by related to simply getting the word out
- Examples include:
- There isn’t enough traffic to your site
- Your social media following is small
- Your brand has little name recognition in your market
- Start by brainstorming a list of marketing goals, then narrow it down
- Put the most important one at the top
- There may be a chronological aspect to your goals
Refining Your Marketing Goal
- You need to make your goal specific, actionable and measureable
- Use the SMART goal setting technique
- Specific
- Measureable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-Based
- A good goal is well-defined and focused
- You can only measure the success of your efforts if your goal is specifically defined
- It needs to be realistic and achievable within a three-month period
Select Your #1 Marketing Strategy
- There are many marketing strategies that are easy to implement at low cost
- As a result, many small businesses try to do them all at once
- Their efforts are spread out and they’re bogged down with distractions
- Choose just one single marketing strategy that will get you to your goal
- Focusing on one makes it easier, more efficient, and more successful
- This is just for three months, so it won’t be the only one you ever do
Choosing Your Marketing Strategy
- The first step is to consider costs
- Consider your current earnings and decide on a percentage to spend on marketing
- Make it a flat amount that you can afford to lose
- Start by asking yourself questions such as:
- What’s the easiest strategy you can implement right now that doesn’t require a great deal of extra resources, training, funding, or people?
- What has worked best in the past to achieve the same or a similar goal?
- Is there anything that you already know you need to do more of to achieve your goal?
- What’s on your “most wanted” list of strategies?
- What is the next step or next level of whatever you’re doing now that’s currently successful?
- One key factor is the size of your audience
- The right marketing strategy would be different for new and for established businesses
If you’re just starting out with few customers:
- Reach out to others in your market who have a similar audience
- Attend networking events and meetups to make contacts
- Approach blogs whose readership might be interested
- Create social media profiles and spend time interacting
- Create a high-value piece of content and related lead magnet
If you already have a customer base
- Facebook Ads
- An email campaign for current customers with info about new products
- Automated post purchase follow-ups
- Coupons or special offers for customers
- Surveys to gather feedback
- Live product or service creation broadcast
- Creation or streamlining of the customer onboarding process
If you already have an active social media or blog following
- Blog 3 or 4 times a week and add content upgrades with related offers
- Conduct a giveaway event
- Run challenges that implement your products
- Set up a newsfeed or alert to notify you of related trends
- Pre-schedule posts and add time-sensitive news
If you already have a landing page or website that’s getting a great deal of traffic
- Run a split test to optimize conversions
- Identify main sources of traffic and look for ways to increase it
- Add visuals and make other improvements to Calls to Action
- Retarget traffic with related offers
If you have an email list (even a small one)
- Run a re-engagement campaign
- Send out a survey to find out subscribers needs
- Review email campaign metrics
- Segment your list for each product/service/category to make content more targeted
- Create exclusive offers for different segments
- Send coupons to loyal customers to say thanks
- Create additional content with tips and high-value offers
- Create or optimize your customer onboarding
If you already have a tactic that’s working well
- Look for ways to expand or add to that tactic
- Find ways to better optimize the results
- Figure out ways to diversify
- With your goal in mind, choose one strategy that you will use for the next three months
- You can make it a big strategy that’ broken down into something smaller
- Devise some way of measuring results
- Brainstorm a number of options and narrow them down until you’ve found the best one
- Before you start implementing it, review your foundations
Specify Your Action Plan
- Refer to the Rapid Results Cheat Sheet
- Confirm again the one marketing strategy you will focus on for the next three months
Track Your Progress
- There are probably too many metrics available
- This can lead to overwhelm and waste time
- Instead, narrow it down to a small handful that will tell you if your strategy is working or not
- Examples of metrics to track include:
- Conversion of traffic to leads
- Conversion of leads to customers
- Revenue from new sales to current customers
- Cost per conversion
- Percentage increase in repeat buyers
- Email open rates and link clicks in emails
- Traffic from social media
- Downloads of lead magnet and new email list subscribes
- Engagement with email subscribers or social media followers
- Brainstorm a list of metrics and narrow it down
- Prioritize the list with the most relevant and important at the top
- Choose only the top three
- Create a plan to analyse metrics on a regular basis
- Track metrics at least once a week
- Choose a frequency that works for you
Specify the Resources You Need
- Before you get started it’s important to identify the resources you’ll need to implement your strategy and measure results
- Key resource areas include:
- People
- What staff do you need to carry out your plan?
- Money
- What expenses will you face along the way?
- Tools
- Will you need programs, physical tools, computers, etc?
- Training
- Are there new skills team members will need to learn?
- Coaching
- Will you need someone to advise you?
- People
- Brainstorm everything you might need along the way
- Padding the number a little helps when estimating costs
- After considering all of the above, figure out what you’re currently lacking
Outline Your Top Five Tasks
- Refer to your cheat sheet to now create your high-level action plan
- These are the key phases and specifics to get it done
- Sometimes it helps to create action steps backwards
- Envision the goal and ask yourself what needs to happen to reach it
- Once you’ve finished the Rapid Results Marketing Cheat sheet, you’ll need a more detailed plan
- The detailed task
- A deadline for each
- Who is responsible for completing it
- Any additional resources you’ll need
- Include team members or others who are involved in implementing your strategy in the detailed project planning
- This requires a great deal of work and consideration
- With everything planned and in-place, you’ll see how much more smoothly it goes
Communicate Team-Wide
- Now everything is in place, you’ll need to ensure everyone is on the same page
- They need to be setting the right priorities
- They need to be on target with the number one goal, strategy and action plans
Create Guidelines
- Aside from holding meetings you should also create documents
- Explain everything clearly
- They can refer to these whenever necessary
- Guidelines should include:
- The main goal you’re going to be working toward
- The marketing strategy in detail
- All of the action steps involved
- All resources needed
- How progress will be marked
- Key responsibilities of each team member
- You can give team members printed documents or digital files
- Make it part of your project management software and collaborative
- Ask for feedback from your team about what’s unclear, or for suggestions
Best Practices for Keeping Your Team Focused
- Involve your team in its creation and implementation
- If team members have a hand in creating and implementing action steps they’ll be more engaged and in tune
- Try to be as concise as possible
- Give team members all the details, but pare it down to absolute necessities
- Maintain two-way communication
- In addition to asking for feedback, keep in contact with them
- Create and maintain strong relationships with your team members and between your team members.
- People that know each other well work together well
- Make sure you’ve delegated the right tasks to the right team member
- If someone is bogged down by the wrong task they won’t stay focused
- Standardize practices with solid protocols
- Create business protocols for getting work done that are routine and consistent
- Make sure you’re focused yourself
- You set an example to your team so make sure you’re clear and focused on your goals and strategies
- Organize your team with to-do lists
- Offer a focused, prioritized list of specific actions that need to be done
- Keep things efficient
- Look for ways you can save time and work for team members
- Create a schedule and rhythm
- Create a work flow that is similar each day so team members know what to expect
- Motivate your team
- Give them regular reminders of the goals you’re working toward
- Deal with conflicts immediately as they arise
- Defuse and resolve conflicts in a way that all parties are satisfied
- Let your team members blow off steam
- Give team members plenty of opportunities to relax and unwind
Best Practices for Eliminating Distractions for Your Team
- You’ll also keep your team focused if you eliminate distractions as much as possible
- Some guidelines for doing that include:
-
- Keep lines of communication work-focused
- Make sure communications remain focused on the work at hand
- Create an environment conducive to concentration
- Remove anything that could be potentially distracting
- Incentivize correctly
- Use incentive programs to motivate, but don’t let them distract
- Offer tips to team members on managing personal technology
- Recommend social media apps are turned off while working
- Make sure priorities are clear
- Help them schedule work so they never have to do two things at once
- Keep lines of communication work-focused
Conclusion
- You’re ready to implement your first three-month strategy using your Rapid Results Marketing Cheat Sheet and action plan
- You’ve learned:
- The importance of prioritizing and why it’s not a good idea to multitask
- Key steps involved in creating a Rapid Results Marketing Plan
- How to define the foundation for your project
- How to identify the first and foremost priority for your business right now
- The best way to choose the one marketing strategy that will overcome challenges
- How to discover all of the critical elements you need to have in place to implement your strategy
- Key tips and best practices for communicating to your team