Reason why: when you have a great offer, you need to justify why you’re doing this. People are so used to being shortchanged that when someone makes a strong, value-filled offer, they become skeptical and look for the catch.

By far the biggest leverage point in any business is marketing. If you get 10% better at marketing, this can have an exponential or multiplying effect on your bottom line.

A side benefit of this is social proof. Being accessible, responding to criticism or praise and engaging with your customers builds social proof and makes prospects and customers feel like they are dealing with humans rather than a faceless corporation. Remember, people buy from people.

Good marketing takes the prospect through a journey that covers the problem, the solution and, finally, the proof. Your elevator pitch should be no different.

Good marketing, especially direct response marketing, is always customer and problem/solution focused, and that’s exactly how we want our elevator pitch to be. We want to be remembered for what problem we solve rather than for some impressive but incomprehensible title or line of business.

a good product or service is a customer-retention tool. If we give our customers a great product or service experience, they’ll buy more from us, they’ll refer other people to us and they’ll build up the brand through positive word of mouth. However, before customer retention, we need to think about customer acquisition (AKA marketing). The most su

the majority of your success comes from the top 4% of your actions. Or put yet another way, 96% of the stuff you do is a waste of time (comparatively).

What Is Marketing? Some people think marketing is advertising or branding or some other vague concept. While all these are associated with marketing, they are not one and the same. Here’s the simplest, most jargon-free definition of marketing you’re ever likely to come across: If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Comi

There’s really only one opinion you should be worrying about—that of your customers and prospects. Frankly, no one else’s opinion, including yours, should figure in what you put in your sales copy. Testing and measuring response is the only true way of judging the effectiveness of your copy.