#172: Discovering the Keys to Offer Strength
As a business owner, you know that making a great offer to your customers is essential for success. Whether it’s a limited-time promotion, a special product bundle, or a referral program, having an attractive offer to present to your customers can be the difference between a successful sale and a missed opportunity.
However, crafting the perfect offer for your business can be a challenge. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the key elements of the perfect offer, how to create it, and how to make sure it’s successful.
The Key Elements of a Perfect Offer
The key elements of a perfect offer will depend on the type of business you run, but there are some general guidelines you should follow.
First, your offer should be tailored to your target market. Consider the needs of your customers and design your offer to meet those needs. Additionally, your offer should be unique and provide value to your customers. If your offer is similar to what other businesses are offering, customers won’t be motivated to make a purchase.
Finally, your offer should include an expiration date. This will encourage customers to act quickly, as they know they won’t have the opportunity to take advantage of the offer forever.
Creating Your Offer
Once you’ve identified the key elements of your offer, you can start creating it. The first step is to decide the type of offer you’d like to make. Will it be a limited-time promotion, a product bundle, or something else? After you’ve chosen the type of offer, determine the specifics. For example, if you’re offering a product bundle, decide which products will be included.
Next, you need to decide on the terms of the offer. This includes the length of the offer, the amount of the discount, and any other terms you wish to include. Make sure that the terms are clearly defined and communicated to your customers.
Finally, you need to promote your offer. This includes creating content about it, sharing it on social media, and using email marketing to spread the word.
Measuring Success
Once your offer has been created and promoted, you need to measure its success. This can be done by tracking the number of people who take advantage of the offer and how much money it generates. Additionally, you should look at customer feedback to get an idea of how your offer was received.
Creating the perfect offer for your business takes time and effort, but it’s essential for success. By following the tips outlined in this blog post, you can create an attractive and successful offer for your customers. Good luck!
Listen to the Show:
Laura 00:00
If your sales aren't where you want them to be, the question is why? And you might be assuming, well, my marketing agency is sending me bad leads. Or maybe it's just that we're not following up enough, or I've had a lot of front desk turnover. Those are all good reasons why sales might not be where you want them to be. But what if it's as simple as the offer? A lot of times, that's what we find is the actual offer is the reason why sales isn't where the business owner wants it to be. And if you've been kind of plateauing, you've explored some of those other options, like, maybe it's my lead flow, maybe it's my paid traffic campaign, maybe I'm not doing enough outreach, maybe I don't have enough partners, those are all really good marketing activities to have in place. But in my experience, the offer is usually that point of leverage for a lot of business owners that they're not thinking about, that can make a massive difference. So, in this podcast, and video, I'm going to be sharing with you some of the elements that I see with a really powerful offer, and how you can incorporate that into your business today.
Laura 01:17
Welcome to the AI-Driven marketing podcast. This is a place where we deliver quick and insightful weekly tips about 10 minutes or less on what's new and groundbreaking in the world of marketing AI. I'm your host, Laura Meyer, a 20 plus year entrepreneur and marketing expert. If you are excited about staying ahead of the curve and harnessing the potential of AI in your marketing strategies, you're in the right place, let's go.
Laura 01:48
So, you've probably been hearing a lot about value- value stack, value proposition. And what I'm going to share with you today is probably a different way of looking at offers where it's not relative to value, I'm going to introduce the idea of an offer as a way to get into a conversation. The offer itself isn't always designed to get you bookings, and sales. Even though that sounds really funny. An offer should be designed to get you into a conversation with your ideal lead or prospect. And a lot of people really struggle with this, when they think about it from a sales perspective. They think, oh, this isn't a good lead, or I don't know if this person is going to book or I don't know, if they're going to become a member, that's okay. But there is tremendous benefit to your brand, to getting into conversation with as many people as possible. I don't know if this has ever happened to you. But back when I had my brick and mortar and I was in the photography space, sometimes I would have a lead come to me and say I really want to work with you. I really think I've heard amazing things about your photography, I know that you work with XYZ celebrity. Hi, you are my person, how much does it cost? And I would tell them, and they'd be like, I can't do that.
Laura 03:13
And then I would be really kind to them, I would say well, you know what I completely understand, you know, you may find some people in the beginning stages of building their career where they're not charging quite as much yet. That's definitely where I was years ago, you know, let me give you a couple of suggestions and tell me more about your wedding or tell me more about what you're looking for. And I can connect you with them. These are some people that I know. And the way in which I treated that lead the way in which I engage with them as a person as a human, not just somebody that I'm writing off that can afford it came back to me so many times over, because I didn't put up all this friction in the beginning that would prevent us from having a conversation. So many times their cousin or their sister or their friend with a different budget would come back and say I heard you're the one. Where do I sign I don't even need a meeting, send me a contract. And this would happen frequently when I was in business. And this is this was pretty high ticket.
Laura 04:19
This was a long time ago 10, 15 even maybe 20 years ago. And it was what we were charging was a lot of money back that is a lot of money today was very premium priced at that time. And what was really interesting is I never put up my pricing even as a premium photographer. I never put up pricing on the website. I never tried to throw up all these roadblocks to the conversation, because those conversations benefited my business so many times over and over and over again that I didn't want to prevent them. And this was one of the secret ingredients in growing my business where at the time there was no Facebook, there was really no paid traffic, everything was organic and everything was word of mouth. So my question to you is my challenge to you if you're listening and hopefully your wheels are spinning a little bit, where are you putting up so much friction, that it's hard for you to build your brand and your sales process. And I'm going to propose that for those of you who have a recurring revenue membership model or a local business, it might be in your intro offer. That's where the friction might be, and have a funny story to share about this exact idea. So I live in a beautiful area of Southeast Pennsylvania. And recently I was driving down the byway, it's a country byway, it's the scenic route. It's beautiful, coming from Delaware into Pennsylvania, where we live. And it is extremely popular people bike it, people drive it just for the scenery. And I saw a lemonade stand on the side of the road I was with my family. And on the lemonade stand, it said lemonade $5. And there was three kids sitting there. And my kids were like $5, that is so much money for lemonade. And I said, Listen, location, location, location, right? Like they have a premium location, they probably hiked down to the main road from their neighborhood, they decided that the better position was going to command a premium price like good for them. Great lesson kids, save it for when you're older. And then the next day, we saw the same lemonade stand with the same kids sitting there and no, no price on the table.
Laura 06:47
And I was thinking these kids are brilliant. Oh my gosh, I wish I could stop and congratulate them. But you know, I have my kids with me and we have a place to go. But that was brilliant. Because what they did is they removed the friction of the price point. They didn't change their premium position. If we went there, it still be probably $5. But what they decide is that $5 sign was deterring people from coming up to the lemonade stand to find out what a cost because only then and only then can you explain well, this is premium lemonade, I squeezed the juice myself, this isn't necessarily the kind of lemonade that would, you know, come from a powdered can. This is premium lemonade friends. And they could actually sell me because who's the easiest person to sell to- the one in front of you. Right? So I loved that they removed this friction. I thought that was brilliant. And it reminded me of what I wanted to share with you about an outbound offer. So I want to share with you that when it comes to creating an offer, I want you to make it as easy as possible for people to come into your business, don't throw up all of this friction, all of these requirements, multi-location, multi appointments required having a high price point. So you can filter leads, unless you have so many leads banging down your door, that you have to use price as a way to deter them because your sales team just can't even handle the volume. But that's rarely what's happening. When people put up too much friction. When people are putting up too much friction. It's because they you know, think of that one or two or three people that didn't buy and they're trying to prevent themselves from the pain of those people coming back in, which is understandable, but not the right way to go about building your business.
Laura 08:41
I personally like a free offer or a free conversation or a free consultation. Now the way you message it, the way you message free has a lot to do with who you get in the door. If it's like hey, free, free, then of course people freebie seekers are going to be coming in but if you say complimentary fitness strategy session, or complimentary personalized fitness review, or complimentary intro class or intro stretch like we're doing with a brand right now it's upscale in the way that it's presented. But it doesn't detract from people being able to come in. And that's the sweet spot of an outbound offer. So again, complimentary or intro offers generally have a free have so much higher of an opt in rate, that you always make more money on the back end. And it also creates that snowball effect that I had mentioned previously, where you get into more conversations, you're able to talk more about your brand with more people and that overall grows your business so much more than never talking to those people in the first place. And it's so much better to just sort through this tire kickers like do that hard work. They're in every business. But it's so much better to commit to sorting through the freebie seekers and the look loos and the tire kickers, or whatever you want to call them, versus making it hard for people to try you out. And here's something I have found with premium buyers, they tend to not want to fill out the forms, they tend not to want to jump through hoops, they tend to not want to create their own account and fill out and whole new form and create a new password. They tend not to do that, because premium buyers tend to be high earners and high earners value
their time, more than anybody else. So that's why I like to make it as frictionless as possible when you're creating that intro offer. So how do you craft this perfect offer, you know that you want to remove any obstacles or barriers to getting in touch with you. But you also want to make sure that you've got the right people coming in the door. So here's some factors to consider.
Laura 11:01
First is the overall value of the offer, maybe you make it a little tasting, maybe you make it a small version. So, there's not so much of a burden on the operation side of your business. But again, it makes it easy for people to get a sense of what it would be like if they were to experience the full version of what you offer, and also makes for a natural sales conversation. That's why I like assessments, strategy sessions, intro classes, personalized custom reviews, because when we're doing an any type of assessment in the beginning of a sales process, it naturally goes into a sales conversation, because people are usually volunteering what their goals are or why they're not where they want to be. And that just becomes great information to share to mirror back to them during the sales process. That's what I really like about an intro offer. And it's also important to learn through trial and error. So this is why we like to test different factors, we like to test different outbound messages, different wording, because again, we're looking for lead quality here. The goal with an outbound offer is not to make people work so hard to do business with you that it's discouraging, the goal of an outbound offer is to get the right person into a sales conversation.
Laura 12:29
And that's why you want to be able to experiment a little bit and be willing to do that with your outbound offer. And then again, the whole entire process is just so much more human, when people can come in my goal with any type of AI booking system, or any type of outbound message is just let's get them into a conversation. Let's start to develop that relationship. Versus again, having it be all automated or so formal, that people are discouraged. So that's why I think crafting that perfect offer from a language and messaging standpoint, is so much more important than making a higher end offer. That's hard for people to say yes to, because they don't trust you yet, right. They don't know you yet. So the more difficult you make it for them to come in, the less likely they are to say yes. And then finally, when it comes to free or complimentary offers or very inexpensive intro offers, there's a lot of intangible benefits beyond sales. There's that idea of building your brand reputation, like the example that I shared from when I was a wedding photographer, my brand grew so fast, I got on all of the premium lists when I was a photographer, because not only was I good at serving my clients, but I was also really good at serving my audience. And I think a lot of business owners sometimes forget about the importance of the audience.
Laura 14:07
Yes, you want to have customers and a customer base is important. But it's also really important to have an audience and the people that come in to your free offer, or they come in and they utilize your system or your services. And they decide not to do business with you in that moment. As long as they have an unbelievably pleasant experience and positive experience. They may say to their neighbor, their friend, their colleague, you know what I went in. And what I found is that for my issue, it wasn't the perfect solution. But you know what? You should try them because it sounds like it would be great for you. People love to talk. They love to be the expert. They love to share their positive experiences with their friends and family. It's just part of our human nature. We want to let people know when we think that we have something that they would benefit from So it's not just again, you know, that sunk cost of somebody coming in, and oh my gosh, I lost $20 in labor. But it's that flywheel effect that takes place when you have lots of positive chatter happening in your community, about your brand. And so here's the homework that I have for you.
Laura 15:25
There is always a sweet spot when it comes to offers and the value of the offers that you are putting out into the marketplace between revenue and operations, there's always the sweet spot. And if you don't have as many people coming into your business as you would like, it may be that we're swaying a little too far into operations. And we're moving a little too far away from sales. And we need to be thinking about sales as not only the opportunity to make money today, but the opportunity to make money from great word of mouth down the road. So it's all about keeping an eye on those KPIs. And then also creating a system that gives you both that gives you the revenue that you desire, and gives you enough sales opportunities to create that revenue, but then also balances it with the operational efficiencies that make a business sustainable in the long run. And this is custom for every single business that we work with, there isn't a perfect balance that I can say is right for everybody. But the big thing is just to keep in mind this idea of value, and are you offering enough value to get into enough sales conversations so that if you had to because operations was just you know, needing a break, you could put in friction, but you're not starting with friction, you're starting with flow. So you know, I never said this was easy. It's a very much an art and a science. But if you are just challenging yourself a little bit in your mind on is my offer strong enough to get into enough sales conversations, then I think listening to this podcast, or watching this video was well worth it. And if you want to learn more about how to do this really well using AI, I would encourage you to visit my free training video where I show you exactly how this works called remorseless withai.com. It's get more sales with ai.com. And I really appreciate you being here today. Feel free to share this episode with a friend or a colleague or another local business owner that you know could really benefit and I am so grateful to you for tuning in today.
Laura 17:50
I'll see you next time. Thank you for tuning in to the AI driven marketing podcast. Before we wrap up, I just want to remind you that you can learn more about how to make more sales with AI by going to makemoresaleswithai.com. This is where I dive deeper into the AI revolution in marketing with our free training. And if you've enjoyed today's episode, please share it with others who might find it valuable. And if you can also just take a moment to leave us a review I would greatly appreciate it. Your support helps us continue to bring you the top insights in the field of AI driven marketing. Until next time, remember AI is here and it's transforming the marketing landscape. Stay Ahead, stay informed, and most importantly, stay excited. I'll see you soon.
Welcome to the AI-Driven Marketing Podcast! Join host Laura Meyer, a 20+ year veteran entrepreneur and marketing expert, as she unveils the future of marketing that's already at your fingertips. Each episode offers quick, valuable insights, news, and practical tips about how AI is revolutionizing the marketing landscape, shaping how businesses engage with customers, and enhancing marketing strategies. Tune in to stay ahead, informed, and excited about the remarkable opportunities that AI brings to the world of marketing.