Top 10 Most Helpful Branding & Marketing Tips For You

Branding your business is almost always a challenge for startups, especially the bootstrapped ones. In the beginning, the entrepreneurs seem to have a lot ideas and dreams but hold themselves back due to unavailability of funds. Even if they start with their own little money, almost nothing seems to be moving.

With time, the entrepreneurs get busy paying the bills and stop doing whatever little they had started to brand the business. Result, they end up being in a commodity business and are never able to charge premium for their products or services. No matter what business are you into – you must be crystal clear on below points:

Question 1) What do you do? – It’s not about what you want to do or what you used to do but what actually you do in the present. Be clear on your business. I am not using complex words like get to know your business model etc but let’s understand the very basic and essence of your business.

Question 2) Why do you do it? – Is it your passion or you are pushed into it by some obligation? Ah, let me tell you making lots of money is not the right answer. You need to go deeper and reach to the core of why you do whatever you do. In the language of leadership you can call it finding your purpose.

Question 3) What do you believe in about your business? – Diving deeper into the response of this question will give you your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Once you find your real USP, you need to start shouting on that and let the world know about that.

Ah, maybe you can take a pause here and spend some time in finding better and deeper responses to these questions. Remember, you need to go to the real core – spend time with yourself and come up with the answers which can convince you.

Great! If you have done this homework and are clear about things. Let’s move to the next part.

Tell me what are your favorite brands?

Is it Apple or Google or Amazon or Nike or you love Pepsi as a brand?

When you think about a car which brand comes to your mind?

When you think about taxi which brand comes to your mind?

When you think about buying clothes which brand comes to your mind?

You can add more questions and make a list of all the names that come to your mind.

Awesome! Let’s move to the next question:

How these brands which are best in their field made that spot in your heart? This is a million dollar question. Let me share my understanding of what these brands did to rule the heads and hearts of so many consumers in the world.

1) AWESOME PRODUCT/SEVICE QUALITY – NO COMPROMISE HERE. They understand the best source of their marketing is word of mouth or word of mouse from their existing customers. It has been proved in research after research that the buyers trust their friends and family’s recommendation or some other authority’s review way higher than anything else. IF YOU WANT TO BUILD YOUR BRAND. START HERE. Make your business clutter free. Remove the things which don’t match with what you do, why you do and what are your beliefs. But whatever you choose to do, BE THE BEST. World loves the best and rewards them the most. Products are made in the factories but the experience is shaped during your moments of truth. Here are the things which you can do to improve the customer experience, so called service.

a. Be friendly with your customers. Don’t consider yourself as a salesperson instead be a friend first. Personalize your communication (spoken or written) as much as possible.

b. Ask them what exactly do they want – be specific and find out their exact requirement. At times salespeople or the marketers go wrong here in this first step itself and can never correct this later.

FOCUS ON THE PRODUCT AND THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BOTH.

2) Build your personal brand. People buy people first. Invest time and money in your own training & learning. If you can become an influencer, you can become a sales magnet. Take baby steps to make a personal brand with your behavior and commitment. I have seen that entrepreneurs start finding influencers to endorse their products and brands instead invest that effort in making yourself an influencer. Building personal brand is possible with genuine intent and consistent effort. The best part here is you are gaining the people to your side and you can’t really walk away from your business like any other influencer can. This point can’t really be over emphasized. Make your own strategy and start it today. Three easy ways to start building your brand are:

a.  Fulfill your time commitment. Be it your personal presence or your product delivery, BE ON TIME. PERIOD.

b. Handle money well – pay the vendors & employees on time. Ah yes, get your money from the market on time as well. If I put this in two words CONTROL CREDITS.

c. Be nice to people, have no ego whatsoever. You are here to do business and not to win arguments. In case anything goes wrong, say sorry and move on.

3) Show glimpse of the hard work which you and your team does behind the curtains. Maybe you can post pictures or videos of how the machines run or just click pictures of various steps in manufacturing something and show to the world. It’s a secret.. people are always interested to know the things which happen behind the curtains. This will establish the fact that you know things and do those yourself instead of just being an intermediate between the consumer and the manufacturer.

4) Give back to the world or serve the community. I have recently found out the power of this highly powerful tool. People who have a concern for the needy, the world has a concern for them. I have never understood the mathematics in this equation but this is true. If you serve the society not only people get to know about you and your business but you also may spot some real good business opportunities and meet with other great people. What do you care the most – is it cleanliness or making the world plastic free or food for the hungry or the education for the underprivileged. Find the cause you care the most and start caring. Trust me, it’s truly the investment of time in yourself and your business.

5) Get on social media and tell what you do personally and as a business. Step ONE of getting buyers for your product is to make them aware that you exist and do something like that. Understand AIDA Model of Marketing, you can read more about this in my other blog article here.

6) Use signage & other merchandise to spread the word. Use your logo on the stuff you make, get it printed/engraved or put a sticker. But don’t ignore this small yet impactful step. Your business maybe global and you may think that signage is helping only the locals. NO. ONE – Everything starts small, who knows you may go on to start many franchisees and we see signage of your company at so many places. TWO – do it for yourself and your employees. Let them feel connected.

7) Use packaging to communicate, make your customers happy and look + feel like a brand. Remember, if you really want to do things you will find ways. Everything doesn’t need to be expensive. Start with whatever you can and grow consistently.

8) Start gathering data of your customers and seek permission to connect with them occasionally. Don’t bombard them with emails and WhatsApp messages but set a weekly frequency to send an email and/or a mobile message. Tell them about your successes or the way you helped customers to solve a problem, to find a solution and be happy. Maybe many of the other recipients would also have similar challenges and can immediately connect with you. Bingo … that will be sales. But even if you don’t get an order it anyways builds your brand. So this actually has no flipside.

9) An order from an order, a client from a client. Ultimately the objective of all branding and marketing is to generate more leads which lead to more sales. What if you can cut short the path to more sales, what if you can get more sales with less efforts and you get people talking about your products and services themselves without you being there and without paying a paisa! Ah, this seems a dream too good to be true. However, let me tell you can achieve this. Research a bit, discuss a bit, think a bit, plan a bit and execute a good referral program for your business. Maybe you can offer some gifts or discounts to your existing clients on their future purchase if they refer you to some other prospective client or help you close some order.  

10) Write a book and be a published author, maybe Amazon’s #1 Best Selling author if you can. If your book can stay Amazon’s #1 Best Seller even if for a day, it becomes your asset for long. I have tasted the fruit with my first book MOVE MOUNTAINS – One StoryAt A Time and it’s Hindi translation पाने की हो चाह तो पर्वत भी देंगे राह, it really works. Once you have a good book on your name you can give that to your existing and prospective clients as a gift and of course this has your introduction (including your primary business)s at the back cover. Writing and publishing a book may sound a daunting task but if you find a great publisher it can be a relatively easier task. This ideas is only for the people who may not have lots of money but are truly committed to find a breakthrough and be different. Remember, there maybe less or no money in the book but it is around the book. It helps you to establish instant credibility. In case you want to get your book out you can connect with Dinesh. My books were published by Dinesh’s team and they did an amazing job both the times. I am working on my third book, ‘HEARTFUL LEADERSHIP – True Stories To Inspire Greatness In You’.

 My friend, when it comes to brand building and making businesses successful - Ideas – matter, Funds & other resources – definitely matter. However don’t underestimate the power of creativity and the best branding initiatives. Experiment with many, remove most and keep the few which work. Finances maybe the blood of your business but remember the finances will come from sales and sales will come from marketing/branding. Consider marketing/branding initiatives as steps to keep your heart healthy so that the body of business have excellent supply of the blood.  Sooner you make branding & marketing your priority better it is for your business overall. May you build the next billion dollar brand!

Wishing you a brand which rules the hearts of the people around the world. Go succeed faster, in case you need my help feel free to connect at care@muskurado.com

For Better Growth, Focus On Customer Retention Than Acquisition in Marketing

Every business survives on sales. Sales comes from customers – new & old. Getting new customers for the business is called customer acquisition whereas retaining the old ones is called customer retention.

We can’t really run a successful business without adding more and more customers, this is particularly true for startups and growing businesses. Getting customers is the most important activity, period. Many startups set a goal and get to the work for getting new customers. They get too focused on getting new customers and devote all the resources for the same – this is where a BIG mistake happens. To keep getting new customers and not able to take care of the old ones will be like a leaky bucket where you keep pouring water from the top and it keeps emptying from the leakage at the bottom. Result – your net growth suffers.

Retaining customers means stopping the leakage at the bottom of the bucket so that the customers once acquired stay longer with you. If they stay longer they will buy more of your products and services, thus making more contribution to the revenue and profits of the company.

What is more important to you acquiring new customers or retaining the old ones? Well do we really have a choice here? I don’t think that we have a choice. Of course, we need to go for both. Consistently hunt for new customers at the same time work on retaining and milking more from the existing customers. But all organizations have limited resources and they must optimize the use of the human bandwidth as well as finance available to them. No company can afford spending unlimited funds on acquiring new customers or even on retaining the old ones blindly. But since both are important – appropriate allocation of resources to both is the right thing to do.

In case you need to make a trade-off between the two. Let me give you a perspective on a brief comparison in both:

  >> Getting a new customer costs five to seven times more than keeping an existing one. This single statistic alone is good enough to convince you that one must be focusing more on retention.  

 >> Depending on industry, businesses can have 25 to 125% increased profits if they just improve retention by 5%.

 >> When you have some new product, probability of selling that to an old customer is 60-70% whereas it’s just 5-20% if you are trying to sell to a new prospect.

Huh! These are some astounding figures. Yet it is shocking to see that so many companies do not have a program in place and are leaving lot of money on the table.

Now, when you know that retaining the customers can really be that transform your company’s future – it’s imperative to discuss few tips and tactics to do that.

Why do the customers leave?

Well, in my opinion there can be just 4 reasons behind the customers leaving you:

  >>They feel that the service is poor. As per a research 68% of the customers abandon companies because of poor services. Let me warn you of you are into product industry…. Service does matter there as well. At times service may also mean the way you treat your customer. Let me share another number here – a satisfied customer approaches and tells to around 9 people about your awesome service whereas the unhappy customers tells about your poor service to more than 20 customers. Today when it’s not enough to give good service/product – we must focus on excellent customer experience. In case you have a dream to do really well in the market with due course of time, customer experience must take the center stage. Every moment of truth must be managed well. No compromises here.

  >>They feel your product or service is overpriced as compared to the competition. India is highly price sensitive market, make sure that the price you charge is appropriate. You don’t really need to or can’t make losses but make reasonable margins. Instead of making lot of money from few customers believe in making little money from lots of customers. There is no hard and fast rule here for pricing but match the product + service with the amount of money you charge from the customer. If you are charging higher than the market make sure you provide frills like free delivery, fast delivery, good packaging, better quality product and assurance like free replacement or repair etc. In all, the perceived value of the product must be higher or least equal to the price paid. 

  >>They move away, die or no longer need your products. E.g. when the kids grow up the parents may stop buying diapers. We can’t really do much here, if the customers churn because of these reasons, they won’t harm your business by spreading negative word of mouth.

As I said in the beginning, you must focus on customer acquisition and retention both. The business needs new customers as well as it needs the customers to stay for long so that the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) can be maximized. Yet, the action here is – if you don’t have a proper formulated customer retention strategy which:

  >>Rewards the loyal customers,

  >>Converts their already good experience to further awesome one so that they become your ambassadors

  >>Inspires them to spread positive word-of-mouth, which will make your new customer acquisition a cake-walk.

It is very clear that customer retention should be a top priority of startups and growing businesses yet it's shocking to know that as per Harvard Business Review 91% of the startups don't have any customer retention strategy on place. It’s the high time that you think and act on this. Let the speed of new customer acquisition slow down if it does, but begin on the customer retention strategy as soon as you can, preferably today and now.

Do you have any more views/ideas on Customer Acquisition or Retention Costs and benefits or some really innovative ways to go for these… feel free to put the same in the comments here. 

The Most Ultimate Inspirational Marketing Quotes For You

Here you go with the list of ‘The Most Ultimate Inspirational Quotes For You’ to get a kick from within for sky rocketing results. These are my all time favorites and I hope you would not only love reading these but these will give you power. The list has 22 quotes as of now and more can be added in the times ahead. If you have any other favorite marketing quote, please write that in the comments below:  

1. “Content is king but engagement is queen, and the lady rules the house!” - Mari Smith

2. “Marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content Marketing is showing the world you are one.” - Robert Rose

3. “Less is more. Keeping it simple takes time and effort.” - Jeff Bullas

4. “Our jobs as marketers are to understand how the customer wants to buy and help them to do so.” - Bryan Eisenberg

5. "Personally, I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms." - Dale Carnegie

6. “The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.” - Seth Godin

7. “Don’t be afraid to get creative and experiment with your marketing.” - Mike Volpe

8. “Marketing is really just about sharing your passion.” - Michael Hyatt

9. “Make your marketing so useful people would pay you for it.” – Jay Baer

10. “Sell-sell-sell sales methods simply do not work on social media.” - Kim Garst“

11. When people feel insecure about something, they look around for validation. Show them that other people trust you.“ - Francisco Rosales

12. “Word of mouth can be as important, if not more important, for neighborhood businesses as traditional advertising.” - Ekaterina Walter

13. “Most of us have experienced wow moments. We just haven’t taken time to think deeply about them.” - Michael Hyatt

14. “Find your spirit, and no challenge will keep you from achieving your goals.” - Christopher Penn

15. “Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.” – Joe Chernov

16. “Clients don’t care about the labor pains; they want to see the baby.” – Tim Williams

17. “Never let ads write checks your website can’t cash.” – Avinash Kaushik

18. “Master the topic, the message, and the delivery.” - Steve Jobs, Founder - Apple

19. “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” - Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon

20. “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” - David Packard

21. “Make your customer the hero of your stories.” - Ann Handley

22. “Good marketing is a lot about feeling grateful and letting the people know about that. Send thank you cards, make thank you calls, record thank you videos and dispatch thank you gifts. You will see the magic. – Mukesh Kulothia

Looking forward to increase the list with your favorite quotes, write those in the comments below. 

What is Customer Lifetime Value in Marketing?

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is total worth of a customer to the business over the entire lifecycle (full duration of the relationship) of the customer with the company. Putting it a little differently, Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total value (revenue) a customer contributes to your business over his/her lifetime – which starts with a new customer’s first purchase or and ends with the last purchase i.e. moment of churn.

CLV is one of the key stats in marketing and helps businesses budget/allocate funds for customer acquisition and retention programs. For example, a customer spends Rs 20,000 per year and average life of all the customers in your business is 5 years, the CLV here would be Rs 100,000 minus the money you spent in acquiring the customer. Say, you spent Rs 10,000 in acquiring a customer. Your CLV in this case would be Rs 90,000.

If I put this in form of a formula, it will be:

CLV = average value of a purchase X number of times the customer buys each year X average length of the customer loyalty (in years)

OR

Annual revenue per year x number of years the customers stays with you – the customer acquisition cost.

If your net margin is 25% of the sales price, it would be Rs 25,000 minus the customer acquisition cost (which is Rs 10,000 in this case) i.e. you make Rs 15000 from each customer from the entire life-cycle of the customer.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a very important parameter in sales & marketing and we should always look for a healthy ratio of CLV:CAC. If the CLV is less the CAC must be capped but if the CLV is high you can afford to spend more in CAC.

CLV can be historic or predictive depending on the data used to calculate:

Historic CLV is sum total of the revenue from all the past purchases in a specific period. Say one year or more. This method uses past transaction data for the calculation.

Predictive CLV is the total projected revenue a customer will generate for your business over the time period he/she is going to stay as a customer. This uses past transaction data and buying behavior of the customer.  

Now there are two ways of increasing the CLV here:

  A)   Increase the number of customers for which you will have to spend money in customer acquisition. Customer acquisition in the above case is Rs 10,000. However this can backfire in case your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is more than the Customer Lifetime Value.

  B)   Increase the average duration for which the customer stays with you i.e. increase the Lifetime. The duration in the above case is 5 years, if you can take this to 6 years your revenue from the same customer becomes Rs 120,000. i.e. the CLV goes up from Rs 90,000 to Rs 110,000.

When you know your customer lifetime value you can improve it. Of course, only working on retention may not be the best strategy instead the successful businesses balance their focus on new customer acquisition and old customer retention both. Calculating CLV will be easier if your business model runs on membership or subscription model as compared to customer’s need based approach. In subscription you can lock the customer with you but in random purchase like we buy from a mall shop or an ecommerce website it will highly vary.

In all the surveys and research it has been established as fact that the new customer acquisition cost is always higher than retaining an old one. Hence it’s imperative that we get to know about some tactics to retain our customers for longer time with us. But it all starts with knowing CLV. In fact, knowing CLV in your Business can help you in many ways, including the below:

            a) Reduce customer acquisition cost by investing adequate budgets on right sales & marketing activities.

          b) Improve customer retention by walking all the needed extra miles to please your customers.  

       c) Encourage existing customers to spend more on your products

       d)   Knowing your most important customers who help you make more money. This can also help you in knowing your least preferred customers and you can even decide to fire a few. Yes, it sound bizarre but it makes complete sense when your service cost to some customers is way higher than the amount you make from him/her through all purchases.  

Here are 6 easy ways to increase the CLV:

    1)   Stay in touch with the customer through emails, SMSes & calls. Keep them reminding that you exist and offer a variety of services. Your goal here is to be on top of the mind of your customer so that whenever she or her contact sphere needs anything you sell – they must contact you.

    2)   Be grateful and show it. Gratitude goes a long way. Send thank you emails just after the customer buys something from you. Be specific and let the customer know you appreciate the patronage. Did I tell you that people love free gifts. Offer something physical or at least a coupon code for their next purchase.

   3)   Build new products that complement the existing products. Say you sell shoes, how about selling socks, shoe polish and polish brush as well and letting the customers know about these. And always upsell e.g. in Domino’s, the man on the cash counter always asks for a cold drinks and cup cake with the pizza and not only he/she asks to if you would like to order some cold drink or cup cake but they also tell you about the offers available on buying those extra things and most of the time end up selling more.  

   4)   Offer a loyalty program to all the customers i.e. give incentives/discounts on repeat purchases.

   

   5)   Fire the bottom customers with whom you make the least profits, say bottom 10 to 20% customers and try to acquire only high CLV clients. If the CLV is high you can afford personalized attention to all the customers thus improving retention i.e. longevity of the customer.

    6)   Reduce the Customer Acquisition Cost: Remember a penny saved is a penny earned. CLV is total revenue from the customer minus the Customer Acquisition Cost. If the CAC reduces, CLV will increase. And yes, reducing CAC is possible provided you use some smart marketing and sales ways.

4 Easy & Inexpensive Ways for Startup Branding

Startups – Bootstrapped or Funded! Nearly none has enough funds they need to grow to the level of entrepreneurs' dreams. The branding activities may come last in the train of tasks to be done. I know what you are thinking! Yes, this article is written for you.

Brand building or a bit of (read it as massive if your dreams are big) marketing is must for any kind of start up. No matter how awesome the product or service is – it will not reach to enough number of people and the sales numbers will be poor which ultimately impacts your top and bottom lines both.

In a Nielsen Survey 59% of the customers prefer to buy new product from a brand familiar to them. In a start up you can’t really compete against big brands with huge marketing budgets.

Oh yes, brand building is expensive & tough – that is the reason there is just one Nike or one McDonald’s or Pepsi & Coca-Cola just two drinks, Toastmasters – just one platform in the world if you want to be a better public speaker, BNI – just one networking organization if you are looking for a support group of entrepreneurs. How many LED Bulb brands can you recall – maybe 2 or 3. Oh you know a lot - maximum five LED Bulb brands! Let me say – there are many thousands of them out there. And we can’t really recall about them because they never invested in brand building. You may not have a dream of being world’s biggest brand in your field. But you must cut across the clutter and start doing a bit of branding to increase the probability of getting in front of the eyes of prospective buyer or influencer.

But when paying the bills is struggle who can afford to spend so much on branding? Well, the mantra is:

• Start wherever you are
• Do whatever you can
• But start now & don’t stop

If you are there with a long term vision, don’t ignore marketing. Here is a list of 12 things which you can do to make your product or service known in the world around you at literally no or very low cost:

  1)   Get on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube and start posting. Let the world (no matter how small is your world there) know that you exist and kicking. It’s FREE. You don’t need to hire a marketing agency for this. Just get started yourself or seek help from someone in your friends, family, office or office. The world is there, the internet literally has unlimited potential.

  

  2)   Attend networking events. Maybe you can join some associations, forums or visit few as a guest. Trust me, the best and biggest of the business deals are made through interactions with people. Go to trade exhibitions and meet with people. First you will have to be visible in the world before you ask for a sale. For startups – this one is the best advice and gets highest ROI if you are looking for some good clients and to serve with a long term relationship mindset.  

  3)   Use marketing collaterals and logo merchandise. Get a cool looking visiting card, wear your logo printed Tshirt or a head cap, have a name badge with company or product logo, what about diary & pen with your business branding printed or engraved on those. Do you have your company logo printed mugs in your office and at the homes of your customers? Have got a one way vision board for the rear windshield of your car? Outdoor media is super expensive but that space of your own car has always been free and available – utilize it. I know of an entrepreneur – wherever he went for a sales meeting, he left a logo and company name printed ball pen at the main gate of the premises and then another at the reception. People just love getting freebies – use this absolute universal truth. If you are a B2B player or a manufacturer who has large clients, think about giving them desktop gift items. Just imagine – putting your logo printed good quality desktop item on the desk of your client is just like putting hoarding of your business there which the client will not remove for many months – ah this you don’t pay any rent for this hoarding of course. Once we got wall clocks made with our company logo and details on what we do and gave those free in salons. Lots of salon owners asked for their other branches as well and those are still there after 2 years. Just imagine how many customers have viewed these so far! Unimaginable. I can go on and on for this particular point of branding through novelty items.   

  4)   Make a google page, create your company location pin, upload some photos of your product or the factory and yes start asking people to rate and review your product/service. Google reviews can boost the credibility of your business without spending any money. Ah yes, google reviews are super helpful in SEO ranking – but that’s too technical as of now. Even if we discount talking about the impact of google reviews on SEO ranking – these still offer a lot to the businesses. If you are selling on e-commerce websites like Amazon – you must make an attempt to get genuine reviews about your product there. Potential buyers rely on these reviews to make up their mind for any purchase. Yet another and a good benefit of google reviews is – you get FREE customer feedback which you can use in improving your product or service.

Last but not the least, please understand brand building doesn’t happen over-night. It takes years of consistent communication and excellent service to build a brand. But once you get started the universe will help you. If your product or service is good people will spread word of mouth and word of mouse too.

Of course, you would end up spending money, time and energy in doing all this and even more to build your brand. Trust me, this can be awesome investment – you will start getting – more projects, more word of mouth referrals, increased sales and customer loyalty for your products and services.   

Remember, ‘Your brand can be your biggest asset’ in long run.