Marketing is a topic that pops up in a lot of conversations I have with salon/clinic owners. And for good reason. You can compare the marketing system of your business to breathing. It doesn’t matter if your body is in the best condition it has ever been, without oxygen it will be dead in minutes.
Without an effective marketing system that generate clients, your business will be dead in no time.
Those of you who are so kind to open my emails from time to time noticed that my view on marketing and sales has changed quite a bit over the past two years. It is the consequence of reaching a point of such frustration that I have decided it is time to experiment with some unpopular and very little known marketing concepts. I realized that I have nothing to lose.
So far I have learned some basic lessons that I’d like to share with you:
- As far as money and marketing: 99% of common knowledge is wrong. If you do not have someone to teach you how to do something the right way. The best you can do is to look around you, and whatever everybody is doing, is the opposite of what you have to do to achieve success.
- Pick your illusion and stick with it. It doesn’t matter what you believe about any subject. As long as you believe it and do it for long enough it will deliver the results you believe you will get. There are many reasons for this phenomenon. People do not achieve success, because they stop to early in the process and jump to a new belief system.
- It will go lame. One success strategy is very dangerous, because you will reach a point when it will no longer work as it used to. Always work on a backup, and a backup for the backup.
- A sales letter is only too long when it is boring. We are told all the time by the internet gurus that long-form is dead and people have no attention spans any more. I found this not true. People only ignore topics they have no interest in.
- I am still learning and will share some more lessons …
In 2018, I’ve spent thousands of Euros on online marketing. Facebook, Google, Linked-In … And I was only left with disappointment. Apart from the actual spend on marketing. I’ve spent a fortune on courses and consultations with gurus. Then in October 2018 I killed all my social media. Raymond and the LaserCollege disappeared from Facebook and Linked-In.
I’ve converted to email marketing only (I’m currently educating myself on some alternatives, because it will go lame at some point). The LaserCollege went into a growth phase that is still continuing. The bounce rate of the LaserCollege website went from 92% to 0.87% (yes you’re reading correctly). The bounce rate is the percentage of people who will land on a page of your website and then close the page again immediately. This means I have paid 92% of my marketing spend on people who had no interest in what I had to offer.
I am not telling you to stop what you’re doing and switch to email marketing. What I am saying is; stop what you’re doing if you are not for 100% sure that you’re getting the results you need to run a successful business.
The reason email works for me is that it allows me to have a marketing system where I can communicate with people who are interested in what I have to say. It is not the only system, or even the best system. The thing is, it is a system.
About two months ago a though occurred to me while I was watching TV. It was during an ad for a well-known online marketplace, Bol.com (it is the Dutch version of Amazon). The though was: I never saw any online marketing for Bol.com. I saw countless TV ads and I received physical marketing material in my postbox from them. How can it be that the giants of online (that ‘owns’ the internet) market offline to get their clients?
I’ve been looking at marketing material from well-known internet businesses very consciously the past two months. And to no surprise. Bol is not the only big internet fish that needs to get its clients offline.
