Happy new week, Friends!
This past Friday, after my usual political meetings in my Ibadan home with some of my constituents, I had a quick meeting with one of my business mentees.
He was telling me about his project — a new business he’s launching in the health space.
I thought the business idea was solid and that’s why I was happy to give my time to discuss it.
Great niche, great plan, amazing products, and all that good stuff…but there was a problem.
A very common problem — or should I say mistake — that a lot of business owners get themselves into.
Yes, it’s a great thing when you have an array of products or services you offer in your business. The mistake however is prioritizing them all when it comes to marketing your business.
Being in a wide industry (such as health) with thousands of problems (ailments), it’s just natural to have several products and services for several problems.
But if you’re not careful, you might find yourself stuck and not successfully growing such business, despite those great products.
My advice to him was simple: start by focusing on just one product.
No, I wasn’t saying he shouldn’t launch all those other products. Don’t get me wrong. The keyword in my advice is “focus.”
Let me explain better…
Let’s say you have 7 products you want to launch your business with. Great, having multiple products on your website makes you reach a wider range of customers.
But when it comes to marketing and growing your business, pushing all those products would only mean spreading yourself too thin and not having any impact.
There’s a system for running and growing a business with multiple products and/or services.
You want to look at your products or services well and choose the one that solves a big problem for a large number of people.
Something people actually want and not necessarily need. (By now you know wants sell better than needs — I’ve preached this all my career!)
Basically something that can get you a large number of customers consistently.
If you run an existing business then this might even be easier for you. Your own question is: what is your current bestseller?
As a fashion designer, for example, from all the clothing's and styles you’ve put out there, which one(s) do people buy the most?
As a beautician or copywriter or dermatologist or dentist or marketing agency owner or whatever service provider you are, which of your services do people buy the most?
Once you get your answer, that is the product or service you want to put at the forefront of your business.
This becomes the moneymaker for your business!
The formula is simple: use your bestseller to attract people en masse to your business, and then sell them other products at the back end — whether as immediate upsells, cross-sells or downsells, or later down the line with email campaigns.
This is very important, especially when you’re spending money on marketing your business or plan to (like running ads or using influencers).
I reiterate: You simply use your bestseller to make enough money to fund your business.
In fact, some businesses are happy to lose money at that front-end just to convert passerbys into customers, then make profits at the backend through selling more of the same product or their other products.
It works. You should try it.
Whatever you do, just make sure you put more of your marketing efforts and budget on the product or service that will bring you the most customers and money.
Even musicians do it.
They release a hit single song, and then a few more over time, and after those singles hit back to back, an album release follows. Of course that/those hit(s) will be in the album and help the entire album get some success — even if more than half of the remaining songs don’t do well.
And this is the concept of a sales funnel: Put your bestseller upfront to attract clients and customers and use other products to make more money at the back end.
You organize your products and services in their bestselling order. Your top bestsellers at the forefront, followed by your *next* but related bestseller, and then the third best-selling product or service, and on and on like that till you get to the highest value you can offer.
If you have multiple top bestsellers, then you can have multiple sales funnels for each, with your less popular products being profit maximizers.
Luckily for my mentee, out of all the products he listed, we were able to identify his moneymaker. And if he truly focuses on it and pushes it hard as we discussed, even the sky wouldn’t limit him.
But there was one more problem we had to solve. And I’ll discuss that in my next newsletter.
Till then, have a beautiful week ahead................
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Akin Alabi
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