Port Macquarie Online Marketing is a boutique digital marketing agency which helps startups and small business owners to double their number of leads, double their number of sales and double their profits in half the time they are currently spending working in their business. We do this by utilising our tried and proven Alpha Business System, which really is A-B-C-D simple.
Although we are based on the east coast of Australia, roughly halfway between Sydney and Brisbane, we are happy to consider working with clients from all over the world. If you have a worthwhile project we are always more than happy to talk to you and consider the project.
What Business Strategies Do You Recommend?
Our Alpha Business System really is A-B-C-D simple, it consists of:
– A – Attract Your Dream Clients, and Build a List
– B – Be Present With The Right Offer At The Right Time (Right Time for the Client, that is)
– C – Convert Leads to Clients, and Clients to Raving Fans.
– D – Deliver the product/service, and try to over-deliver!
The first step in any successful business is to identify your target market, then your Perfect Customer, and concentrate on them. Your aim is to attract them through social media content, get them interested enough in your product or service for them to come to your website, then get them onto an email newsletter list, so that you can keep in touch with them until they are ready to buy your product or service.
Step two is to be present, and top of their mind, so that when they are ready to buy the product that you sell, you are the first and only seller that they think of, not your competition. This is where your email newsletter comes into the picture. By contacting them every week with helpful tips, tricks and advice, you will stay top of mind for them, so you will be the only one that they consider when they are ready to purchase.
Step three is the fun part, you need to sell your product to them, and collect the cash, which should be easy enough if you have done the groundwork in steps one and two. Then delight them, and get them raving about your product to their friends, in real life, on social media, and on your website.
Finally, step four is to deliver the product or service, but don’t just deliver it and move on to the next customer, try to delight them by over-delivering. Can you add in a small but useful gift with the product, or a sample of another one of your products? Give them more than they were expecting and you will surprise and delight them, and they will remember you.
How Did You Get Started?
The founder, Terry Chadban, has always been an entrepreneur. Even way back when he was about ten years old, he needed some spare cash to buy electronics equipment (he has always been an electronics geek and computer nerd), so he got a job as a paper boy. At the time, paper boys were given a number of newspapers to sell, for a commission, and allocated a street corner to sell them on by the news agency owner. But it didn’t take Terry long to realize that the corner he had been allocated wasn’t very good, because there was very little foot traffic. However, up on the next corner there was a hotel opposite a railway station, with plenty of men getting off the train and heading into the hotel for a beer after work. And nobody was standing on the corner selling newspapers. He figured “go where the customers are”, so he moved up to the next corner and started selling papers there. The tactic worked, but worked too well, because after a couple of weeks of great sales, the news agency owner got suspicious how the new kid was doing so well on a terrible corner, followed him and realized that he had changed corners. Instead of rewarding the initiative, Terry was fired for leaving his post! However he had developed a taste for the entrepreneurial spirit rather than working the 9 to 5 life.
He went on to create an online software and hardware retail store called NOVO Computer Hardware, which imported and exported both software and hardware, primarily for the Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and Amiga range, but also for the then new IBM compatible computers. Within a couple of years the business was the biggest online store in Australia, and regularly turning over more than $1,000 PER DAY, all by utilising free online marketing methods. Since then he has studied and refined his online marketing skills, and even today very rarely pays for marketing.
When he turned 65, he retired, and moved up to the Mid North Coast area, having big plans of spending the days sitting on the beach with a fishing rod in one hand, and a can of beer in the other. But some of his new friends found out that he knew about this ‘internet thing’, and how to build business websites that made money, rather than costing money, so before he knew it, he was back in business with Port Macquarie Online Marketing. The goal now is to reverse the appalling failure rate of new business startups, and help 1000 new businesses to survive, grow, and thrive. And to train enough managers to enable him to get back to the beach and the fishing rod and beers!
What Challenges Are The Small Business Market Facing in 2023?
The biggest challenges that all new startups face are lack of funds, and lack of time. Most startups go broke in the first couple of years, not because they are producing crappy products or services, but because they are either trying to sell a product that nobody wants, like the Pet Rock a few years back, or because they are trying to sell the right product to the wrong people! This leads to a lack of turnover, which leads to the business failing.
The other major challenge for startups is a lack of time. Because they can’t afford to hire staff at the beginning, they need to do everything themselves, and there just aren’t enough hours in a day to do all of the manual work that goes along with running a successful business. Besides the inevitable red tape which goes with every business in every country, there is the marketing and sales, the administration, product delivery, collecting payments, etc. It all takes time.
What started out as a vision to try and help the world soon becomes a nightmare of administration, and the business owner finds themselves spending all day on the administration side, and very little on the creative side, the reason that they started the business in the first place!
The solution is to start the business with a solid business plan in place right from Day One, with systems and automations set up so that the business almost runs itself, and the owner can concentrate on doing what they started the business to do. That’s where we come in. We can help them by building a smart business website which includes automated lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead conversions built in. Then we teach them to use our Alpha Business System to run their business more efficiently and in less time.
What Opportunities Are The Small Business Market Facing?
The startup and small business sector is looking at some of the biggest opportunities in the history of business right now, with two huge advantages never seen before, firstly remote working, and secondly, the vast improvements in AI (Artificial Intelligence) recently.
The recent COVID pandemic has proven to us that what we have been telling small business owners about remote working, and using VA’s (Virtual Assistants) and freelancers to do most of the donkey work in a business, really is the future. If a business owner’s time is worth $50 or $100 an hour, why should they waste hours doing bookkeeping, basic marketing or social media content when they can outsource the work for $15 to $20, and spend more of their time making money and doing what they love?
And AI is going to make life so much easier when it comes to brainstorming and creating ideas for content for social media marketing, sales pages, and just about everything else related to marketing a business. We already have AI programs that can create original art and images, so designing an appropriate logo that fits your business is a piece of cake, creating ideas for social media content can be done in minutes, rather than hours or days, and it will keep getting better as AI is improved.
One of the loudest complaints that we hear is that AI is going to put everybody out of a job, that is nonsense for a number of reasons, but what it will do is to make our lives easier. Corporations like Google, Microsoft and CNN are already embracing the technology, but it is now affordable enough for small business owners to use it, and it will only get better over time.
One trap that we are already seeing with AI content is that people are taking everything that the Chatbots say as fact, when a lot of it is well presented nonsense, because of the way that AI programs are written, so it is vital that you fact-check everything that a ChatBot writes. But using them for brainstorming and idea creation, then fact-checking the results will still save us hours or days a week. So get on board now. One that we can recommend is a combination of search engine and chatbot called YouChat. This is free to use, and a very good introduction to AI.
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What Advice Would You Give To Startups And Small Business Owners?
The best advice that we can give to business owners is to treat the business as a business from Day One! Way too many people wake up one morning and decide that they can make a business out of selling their hobby crafts, or the products that they make, or the service that they provide that every one of their friends love. So they start a new business with a product, a vision, and a passion, but nothing else. They have no business knowledge, no marketing knowledge, no administration knowledge, etc.
What they need to do is to stop and think about what they will need for the business to succeed, and to start from Day One with a proven business plan, so that when the bad times roll around, or even the good times, they will have a plan for dealing with them and moving on. All successful businesses hope for the best, but plan for the worst. You need to too.
What Lessons Have You Learned From Running Port Macquarie Online Marketing?
One of the biggest lessons that we have learned is that no matter how much you try, it is impossible to please everybody all of the time! So what we recommend to clients now is to identify your target market for your product or service, the broad group of people who want or need your product, then drill down and identify your Perfect Customer, the ones who love your product, and can’t wait to buy again, and to tell all of their friends about your product.
Then target all of your marketing directly to your Perfect Customer, make it all about them, and their needs and wants. Talk to them directly, as if you were sitting in a coffee shop together and speak to them the way you would to a close friend.
Apply this principle to all of your marketing, and you will attract more and more of your Perfect Customers, and at the same time you will find that you will be driving away the customers that you don’t want to deal with anyway, the ones that aren’t a great fit for your business. You will still have your target market, the ones who need or want your product, but aren’t a perfect fit, and they will give you more than enough income to live on, but your Perfect Customers are the ones that you need to concentrate on. They are the cherry on top of the cake.
Concentrate your business on attracting your Perfect Customers, be present when they are ready to buy, convert them from leads to customers, then to raving fans, then deliver the product and over-deliver. That, in one sentence, is the key to success in small business!
If you would like more information, or if you have any questions or enquiries about your startup or small business, you are more than welcome to get in touch with us and fill in one of our contact forms on our website. We have a dedicated form for answering marketing or business questions as well, called ‘Pick Our Brains’ if that is any help to you, as well as plenty of free resources on our ‘Resources’ page. Good luck with your business, the world needs more successful entrepreneurs!
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