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InvisibleToastedTubby
hiring writers


Registered: 02/11/11
Posts: 204
Marketing Consulting - Creative, flexible, well paid and, rewarding work.
    #14333594 - 04/22/11 02:03 PM (12 years, 9 months ago)

Hello Shroomerites,

I'm going to share with you ways to get started in this career known as marketing consulting... it's actually quite simple to get your foot in the door these days, and worth it if you're a dedicated, creative, and hardworking person who knows they can be earning more then what they would if someone else employed them. At first you will be working with yourself but as your business expands you can certainly afford, as well as save your time, and expand your capabilities by hiring some staff to work with you.

Essentially marketing consulting is all about providing value to local business owners that will, once you properly explain what you can provide them, beg you to save their asses in this economic downfall. And what you can charge these successful business owners for your services is easily enough to live on. I find that numbers motivate people so I will share the high points of my earnings, from only a one year investment in studying and taking action in this field.

It all depends on what each business needs from you, and how you go about figuring that out is through extensive evaluation with the client. Depending on how much I'm going to do for the business, I may walk out of a meeting with a set-up fees check as high as $10,000 or as low as $2,500, as well as recurring payments each month for continuing the projects we've agreed to. These monthly recurring payments are anywhere from $5,000 to $500. Remember that is just one client, and the attention they require to provide value worth what they are paying you is surprisingly low. So imagine if you will, having ten clients? Thus it's very lucrative if you can handle the work and are a smart individual capable of adapting to change, having the patience to test things, and the balls to take risks.

Marketing consulting can be helpful to every single business owner. You're getting them customers remember. However a lot of small businesses are not worth your time because of the low marketing budgets they have. Who do you want to target? People wasting money on yellow pages and, newspaper advertising. These terrible medias easily eat up 90% of their marketing budgets, with no real way of determining if they are even working. Business owners usually do these things because they think they have to, because everyone else is doing it, social pressure, etc.

Unfortunately they're wasting vast amounts of money on it each year. It's a fact that hardly anyone is reading the paper anymore but yet I can look in my paper everyday and see 50+ businesses wasting money on a expensive colored advertisement that cost them thousands to place there. The yellow pages is a book that sits closed in a cupboard 99.9% percent of the time. Not to mention their competitors are advertising RIGHT BESIDE them in the yellow pages, so there is a 50% chance that a prospect will look over the ad and choose the competitor. What are they paying for this? I'm not even joking, $10,000+ for a small ad is common. That could be your entire yearly salary as a marketing consultant if the business owner hired you instead, hired you to deploy local guerrilla style marketing tactics that get in the faces of customers, that actually make a goddamn impact in the community! That bring the needed life to their marketing.

It's essential to have the right mindset, the mindset that these businesses need you more then you need them. Because it's the truth. Sure they can do this marketing themselves, they can study it like you will. They can try new things, fail, and try again. But these are busy people, and they may get discouraged easily from a lack of faith in themselves. They are so caught up in their business they can't even imagine how they appear to their customer. They're so invested in their business that sometimes they need a fresh and creative set of eyes to help them, and that's you, and they'll be grateful for it.

Another thing that's great about this is the lack of startup capital needed. You provide the plans, ideas, and steps of the process from sheer knowledge gained from research. Then they give you the check to fund the campaigns if you've convinced them how much value you can provide by having confidence in yourself and the ideas you plan on implementing.

I'm not going to go into detail right now about how to market, how to sell yourself to the business owners, how to write agreements with them. Because this is all easily researchable information that I had to find myself when I was starting out and the lack of spoon feeding I received in that aspect is what made me successful, you need to figure out what to offer these businesses, how to approach them, the process, on your own, which will strengthen the way you are perceived by them if you're using methods you've come up with and will be comfortable implementing.

I will however provide you some example of how easy it is to start increasing profits for businesses. As well as an invaluable questionnaire that you should be using to interview the business owner so that you can better understand his business, how to help him increase profits, and justify hiring you.


Increasing Profits

Here are examples of what I might do for the average business:

* Stop all spray and pray marketing - benefit is money is already being saved and marketing budget is only used on trackable return of investment marketing campaigns.

* Find out when is the last time he raised his prices due to inflation - benefit is finding out if he has ever raised his prices to keep profits up.

* Figure out the life time value for his customers - benefit allows us to forecast future marketing campaigns.

* Find out when their yellow pages contract expires - when it does either discuss canceling it or improving the message

* Find companies break even numbers - know how much money they need to make every hour, day, month to break even so you can figure out where money is being wasted in relation to time and use these numbers to help build an effective price point for his products or services.

* Look at their current services and products and see what they charge compared to what they offer and see if there is room to bump the price up a bit (10- 15%)

* Find out what their current close rate is for prospects to customers and see if we can enhance that through better training, scripts and helpful products/services for the staff.

* Develop several different service options and packages to allow for quick and easy up sells - benefit is earning more money from every customer.

* Train employees on how to sell the newly created packages and how to push the up sells to customers, an example of this is Mcdonalds "would you like fries with that?"

* Train employees to ask how the customer heard about them to better find out what marketing methods are working so you can concentrate more on those tactics.

* Implement a thank you card campaign that mails a thank you note after completion of services. Thank you note will also contain referral coupons they are encouraged to give to their friends expanding your customer base.

* Organize customer data. Have staff sort customers into the following groups: current customers, customers who haven't had service performed in 1 year, customers who haven't had service performed in 2 years or more - benefit is that it lets us know who our sales are coming from, and shows us who to try and reactivate into a paying customer first. We work newest to oldest.

* Isolate a list of the companies golden 20% - customers who spend the most money with his company. Benefit is we can now give these people special treatment and turn them into devoted referral machines for us.

* Set up an ongoing 3 pieces of direct mail delivered as time passes to the customers who haven't purchased in awhile offering them incentives to return.

* Joint ventures with other businesses to help them bring business to each other, example is people who get regular facials would probably be interested in getting their teeth whitened and vice versa. Offer a commission to the business.

* Online marketing is powerful - build website, rank them into Google for local search terms and run surprisingly cheap advertisements locally on things like online newspapers and Facebook. 

* Create customer opinion surveys to place on the counter and train salespeople to ask people to fill it out if they're interested while they are waiting or give them a discount for doing so - benefit to them filling out this questionnaire is finding what they like and dislike, as well as possibly getting their phone number and email address for future marketing.


PHEW.... Just choosing five or ten of these examples is enough to justify hiring you as it will benefit the business greatly, and this is by no means all you can offer them, it's not even scratching the surface of all the valuable marketing you can provide.



Business Questionnaire

This questionnaire is amazing for understanding the business, my friend who gave it to me paid four figures for it, great investment and worth more then what he paid. It is penetrating. You'll understand everything you need to know about the business and the owner. This thing may take up 1.5 to 3 hours to complete! My longest questionnaire went 5 hours. Guess what?

Initially the owner was crossing his arms, giving mixed signals etc. Then about thirty minutes into it he stopped me from proceeding. He said "I need to tell you something before we go any further." I thought "uh oh!" Then he went on to say how my questions were so thought provoking that he truly started to understand why his company was so messed up. He said "I'm literally hanging onto your every word and absorbing everything, my head is spinning."

You can download it here for free.


I will answer any questions I deem well thought out enough for me to put my effort into answering. So don't hesitate to ask a stimulating question you think everyone will benefit from hearing the answer.

If you're eager to start learning more then I have some recommendations of where you should start... The marketing legends, torrent all their stuff and dig in. E-books, audio or video, stuff from these guys will improve your marketing ideas and get your creative juices flowing, here are some of them: Dan Kennedy, Frank Kern, Jay Abraham, Seth Godin, just to name a few.

Peace.


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OfflineRyouge
Stranger

Registered: 12/03/10
Posts: 5
Last seen: 8 years, 2 months
Re: Marketing Consulting - Creative, flexible, well paid and, rewarding work. [Re: ToastedTubby]
    #14422948 - 05/09/11 01:58 AM (12 years, 8 months ago)

Thank you.


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Invisiblememes
Blessed


Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 01/11/05
Posts: 27,785
Loc: In a Tree
Re: Marketing Consulting - Creative, flexible, well paid and, rewarding work. [Re: Ryouge]
    #14423182 - 05/09/11 05:23 AM (12 years, 8 months ago)

Very interesting!  I've thought about this before but always assumed business owners would need to be able to google you and assess your company before tehy'd dump thousands of their small-business dollars into a 'marketing guru' who promises more clientele.

In reality, it makes perfect sense what you're saying.  Just show results - people listen to results.


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InvisibleLucid_Euphoria
Sojourner


Registered: 03/23/05
Posts: 1,045
Loc: Flip Side
Re: Marketing Consulting - Creative, flexible, well paid and, rewarding work. [Re: memes]
    #14453240 - 05/14/11 07:59 PM (12 years, 8 months ago)

FUCK MARKETING!

DO US ALL A FAVOR AND GO KILL YOURSELVES, SERIOUSLY...


LONG LIVE BILL HICKS.


--------------------
PAN CYAN & AZURE FOR TRADE

"If ignorance is bliss, THEN KNOCK THE SMILE OFF MY FACE!" - Zach de la Rocha

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather!" -Bill Hicks-


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