Part 4– How To Leverage Your Marketing Dollars For Exponential Results

You know what I find simply frustrating? It’s watching perfectly viable businesses go down the tubes. Or worse, struggle for years because they don’t know how to effectively market their goods and services.

Maybe it’s just me, but I hate to see this happen. In my business coaching I’m driven by my passion to optimize every resource you have as a small business owner has. I love to see profits maximized. Equally important to that benefit, is that a better life can be created for every person who is served by, works for, and has ownership in that company.

And that’s exactly what this series on small business marketing success is designed to help you do — help you start boosting your net profits and create a better quality of life for you and your team. If you aren’t satisfied with your net profits, the number of new clients coming into your business or if you’d just like more of a systems-oriented business, this 10-part article series is for you.

Today in Part 4 we’ll look at how you can optimize and leverage every marketing dollar you will ever invest from here on out, as long as you own your business.

Principle 4. How to leverage your current assets for maximum efficiency and profits.

Leverage is a very broad topic that deserves at least a 6-week coaching program and can’t possibly be covered in great detail in this short series. But I will give you a solid introduction that will ignite your passion for to unleash the hidden profits you have lurking in your business.

In the simplest financial terms, leverage means to multiply the productivity of a resource, any resource.

Some examples of leverage applied in business

I recently worked with one of my clients in the financial services arena to train his sales team on how to encourage customers to increase their average purchase amount by 15%. With no additional cost or effort, he just leveraged his sales staff. He increased his team’s productivity and the company profits by 15%.

Let’s take another example. Another client with a chain of retail stores recently changed her copy in an ad and the new ad out-performed her previous ad by 9%. That’s 9% more profit in her pocket for exactly the same cost and effort. Multiply that over her four stores and you have some serious leverage going on!

Finding resources to leverage in your business

The number of resources you can leverage significantly may surprise you. You can leverage ads, headlines, prices, publicity, in-store sales, field sales, average purchase amounts, repeat sales, referrals, new customer leads, lead conversions, and on and on.

All that and we’re not even mentioning your employees, management team, or your business systems. That’s an entirely different arena of exponential leverage that we’ll take a look at in future article series.

If you apply the principle of leverage I assure you that it’ll have an exponential, compounding impact on your business and profits in areas you never thought possible.

If you increase the response to your ads, AND boost your average sales amount, AND increase the number of times each customer buys from you annually - the leveraged affect is exponential. The compounded impact from these results can quite easily double or triple your annual net profits!

Principle 5. Headlines

All ads, sales letters, brochures, flyers, news releases, and commercials need a headline. Period. This isn’t for reasons of style or preference. Test after test has proven that a promotional piece with a headline – any headline – will out-perform a promotional piece without a headline. And if you can craft a headline centered on the major benefit you bring to your customers, the difference in response can be astounding.

Just recently I made some changes in one of our headlines that pulled nearly twice as much as an ad with a weaker headline. The copy and graphics were exactly the same. The offer was exactly the same. And the sales letter reached precisely the same audience. The only change was a different headline. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take improvements like that any day, year round. And you can have them too, with great headlines! (In an upcoming installment of this series we’ll look at the critical nature of testing and how it relates directly to headlines.)

In the next installment of this series you’ll learn two more fundamentals for maximum profit marketing that you can immediately put to use for increased profits and a surging cash flow.

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

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