How to create your offer

There are two things to consider when creating an offer. Who do you want to offer to and what do you have to offer. This is marketing 101. So for some of you I am going to take you back to basics.

What the follows is the process I have followed and I have focussed on one of our clients – a fulfilment company as to how they may find an offer. This is exactly what I did and it caused to me revalidate what I was doing across the board.

This was a great exercise to do and I validated what we were doing. I also found that there was a whole bunch of things we had forgotten about. We were doing only half of what I had hoped we were doing and we were simply not following through on some of our initial ideas.

I guess we had become a little relaxed… I have since changed all that and there has been a dramatic up turn in business. – Twitter has played a big part of that! Perfect timing.

Before we get too involved in this article, here are some quick, generic offers that could be made. If you have a physical establishment you could offer an open day, if not a free assessment, free price quote, free webinar, teleseminar or a newsletter.

If you are just not sure of what to be saying, record a sales conversation and see how your sales staff pitch your service – listen in to what your client wants. From a prospects perspective, all suppliers are equal, the prices are similar or the service is indifferent, all they have to go on is your personality, your openness, your willingness to listen and get involved.

In my case I was and am looking for large clients – who isn’t, but when it comes to it, I quickly realised I can help everyone and as everyone is connected it could well lead to large clients. It did, we have more of both now. It became clear that by making ‘free’ offers that we could build our list much faster. Having a list would be the fastest measurement of success and would allow us to test our offers. Customers have come from the list. The rest as they say is history.

Now when I started on this mission, this is exactly what I did.

The number one thing I did was to visit Amazon and searched to create a list of appropriate books. When I figured I had enough I could see some themes had developed and I made these my key words. I then ordered about £100 worth and took delivery. I have probably invested around £1000 on this about a year later. It is true to say that I have spent about a £100 a month with Amazon as a result.

I have read many and I have many more to bulging from shelves at home and in the office. The staff loves them, I think it provides some confidence that we know what we are doing. Strangely they have become a conversation piece and one person said I was showing off by having so many…

Anyway, there are some exercises that you can do right now without spending a dime. First do what I did on Amazon and create a book list to die for. Then pick the ones that are favourite and select the option – look inside – where it exists and you will see what the authors have decided is likely to be of most interest to punters… They may well be right.

So, what we are doing here is looking to find ideas. Here are some more ways.
Search for the Keyword tool in Google, enter your keyword. I went to adwords.google.com and searched for Twitter. Click on Global Search Volume and you will see the most popular related search – Ignore the word Twitter, the next was ‘Twitter Search’ followed by ‘how to twitter’ and ‘twitter follow’… These are the very things that I now own URLs for – where did that idea come from – originally? hmm – massive investment – £12 plus £1 a month for hosting. Big time!

Next lets look at trends, lets see what are people thinking. http://www.google.com/trends?q=how+to+twitter&geo=gbr&sa=N
A search volume index of around 10. I selected United Kingdom first. Well, as we can see there are more people in Northern Ireland interested than in England. We do have a few people from Northern Ireland as clients… So we are on trend here. Well done! Now for Twitter follow – similar results although dropping down to an index of 7. With the UK trending up to 10.

So now we know there is an interest and we seem to be at the top of the curve. We are not focussing on dead ducks here. You should do the same for you keywords. If your business is a fulfilment store than a mispelling – fullfillment shows that mailing service is a big term.

‘fulfilment’ shows a popularity index of 1 – 2. mailing service comes in at about 0.5 a declining trend since 2004 down from 1.5. it shows that the US market has a similar demand to the UK with India and Canada coming in 3rd and 4th. So perhaps some focus on international clients or destinations would be useful.

If nothing else, this could be the basis of an opinion post, based on this evidence and anecdotal experience.

Ok, now we know the relative popularity – out of maybe a few hundred options, we know the most popular terms are fulfillment service and mailing service. So now lets search on Google for ideas…

Lets search for mailing service news, mailing service secrets, mailing service forums, mailing service groups, mailing service associations. Then do the same on linkedin and facebook. I found that the word ‘fulfilment’ worked better than ‘mailing’ as many of resulting pages were focussed on ‘emailing’.

You can modify your search with your keyword followed by ‘news’ and you will soon find some news. The search for fulfilment service secrets gave us a slide at slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/newScale/21-secrets-of-selfservice-it-request-fulfillment-1874843

Not immediately in the same market, but close. Out of 21, could we not find 5, or 10, or maybe modify each of the 21 to suit the fulfilment business example. I found a forum for a competitor – cubecart and I found content from some one who was expressing the pain that they face that your fulfilment business could overcome.

Think about your business and its market location.
Think about your clients and their industries/ application areas – go deep.
Think about your services and products and how people might use them.

You should be able to create a multi way grid from this.

The more you look, the more ‘offers’ you will discover, you should move from a position of what do we offer to how do we offer it. When you have mastered that you will move to the position of how do we handle the leads. We can help you manage all three levels of the process.

Let me know what you discover.