How to Create a Marketing Plan to Double Your Profits

by Dr Greg Chapman

Tactical marketing used by most businesses, often a simple advertising campaign with Adwords, perhaps some SEO for the website plus some social media just produces incremental results. That is a number of largely unconnected campaigns generate enquiries, some of which turn into sales adding to the bottomline but leaving the business back at square one, once completed.

To achieve dramatic long lasting results, a strategic approach is required. Sophisticated businesses use leveraged marketing, where the results are multiplicative rather than additive.

Why Most Businesses Stay Small and What YOU can Do about YOURS

by Dr Greg Chapman

This is the Preface from my award winning best seller, “The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success”

While many business advisers seem to preach doom and gloom for small business survival, based on my research they do not have to be so pessimistic. While there is a high attrition rate in the first few years of a business’ life, most do survive this period. A far bigger issue for most small business is not that they fail, but that they stay small. They stay micro-businesses, or Micro-Stayers.

BREAKING: Top 10 Australian Small Business Blogs 2019

by Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog has been voted as one of the Top 10 of Australian Small Business Blogs for 2019 by Small Business Loans Australia lender review site.


Thanks guys for the recognition.

Dr Greg Chapman

Ad of the Month - Schadenfreude

by Dr Greg Chapman

Schadenfreude is a great German word meaning joy on hearing of an opponent’s misfortune. Can this be used in advertising? This following, rather cheeky, print ad was distributed to attendees at the Lord’s test match a few weeks back advertising Marmite as part of its promotion campaign for the ‘MarmyArmy’.

They handed out sandpaper with the headline “Love it or hate it, we won’t be tampering with it’ rubbing salt into the wounds of the Australian cricket team whose reputation is still suffering after the suspension of key plays after a ball tampering scandal.

Selling Smarter not Selling Harder

by Dr Greg Chapman

Are you and your staff people who could sell ice to Eskimos? Not everyone is a natural salesperson, but in business, nothing happens until a sale is made. So what do you do if selling is unnatural for you, or you can’t find staff to sell for you?

You can create a marketing strategy that does not rely on strong sales skills. Imagine someone just comes into your business and when you ask:

“How can I help you?”, they say: “I want to buy that and here is my money.”
Does that sound too good to be true? Well it happens all the time.

Become Reassuringly Expensive

by Dr Greg Chapman

When someone is enquiring about your services for the first time, they may ask “How much do you charge?” But if you tell them, the focus is just on price.

A buying decision is generally an evaluation of the Value/Price ratio, often expressed as Return on Investment. However, for many services, the return is an intangible.

How much more beautiful will a beauty product make you look? And what is that worth?

If you start with value and ensure that the buyer fully understands the benefit they will receive, even if it is intangible, that is where their focus will be even after you reveal the price.

Calculating the Risks for Small Business Success

by Dr Greg Chapman

Business is all about confidence. Confidence that the risks you must take will have a high chance of success. The reason this is essential is that you must provide all the resources (time and money) to make the strategy succeed. Too often, businesses are timid with their actions, and are looking for a 2-way bet.

More tightrope walkers fall while using a net than those that don’t.

Discount Price Wars

by Dr Greg Chapman

When competition is stiff or times are tough, and businesses experience a slump in sales, the natural response of business owners is to reduce their prices. In response to this, they find their competition starts to do the same, and before you know it, you are in a price war.

Price wars are like trench warfare. You may gain a few meters in territory here, whilst the other side gains a few meters from you around your flank. And both sides incur large losses. In this type of battle, it is a war of attrition, and the last person standing wins while bleeding red ink. They also inherit a decimated market landscape with their buyers educated to expect discounts.

A number of negative impacts occur to your business when you discount. The most obvious one is the loss in margin, which you hope to make up with increased sales. In most cases, this does not happen.

Ad of the Month – Over the Top

by Dr Greg Chapman

We often hear that less is more, but done correctly, more can be even MORE! There is no subtlety in this ad, with a well known star, Sean Bean, better known for storming the ramparts, who has somehow been seconded to the human resources department to train new recruits.

The theme here is that this company’s commitment to doing things the right way WILL NOT BE COMPROMISED.

Increase Your Prices by Packaging Value

by Dr Greg Chapman

In any buying decision, this is question that must be answered by the buyer: “Is the product or service worth it?” Or more generally, is the offer made by the seller is equal to the dollars that they are asking for it.

Let’s take a simple example, water. If you wanted a drink of water, and you went to a pub, and they served you water from a tap, what would you expect to pay? It would probably be free. If you went to a kiosk, you could buy bottled ‘mineral water’ in a basic plastic bottle, and it might be $2-3.

If you were at a boutique restaurant, you might be able to get water from the Greenland icecap, presented in a special designer bottle with a stunning label, a bottle that you would like to take home as a souvenir. It might cost you $87.

Let Others Tell Your Small Business Story

by Dr Greg Chapman

We’ve all heard the saying “A picture tells a thousand words”. Well, a simple twist on that could be “A third party testimonial tells more about you than you could ever say about yourself – and with more credibility!”

Testimonials from satisfied clients must be an integral part of your sales kit. They present an independent view from a third party, and in many cases, can be the difference between getting the business or not.

If you currently have a conversion rate of two sales for every ten presentations, and a testimonial increases that to three sales for every ten presentations, then you’ve just increased your business by 50% – and yet most sales presentations don’t have this simple, yet powerful, tool included.

Get High-Quality Niche Edit Links from Domains Highway

by Dr Greg Chapman

If you're looking to boost your website's search engine rankings and drive more targeted traffic, niche edit links are a powerful SEO strategy you don't want to overlook. Domains Highway offers a premium niche edit links service that can take your link building efforts to the next level.

What Are Niche Edit Links?

Niche edit links are contextual links added to existing content on authoritative, niche-relevant websites. Unlike traditional link building methods, niche edits allow you to acquire links from aged, trusted domains with high editorial standards – a major ranking factor for Google.

Ad of the Month – Annoyances

by Dr Greg Chapman

There are stereotypes in every sector that really annoy people in their marketplace. For tradies, it’s not turning up on time, for telco’s it’s their call centre ‘customer service’ and for used car dealers it’s high pressure salespeople. Some of these stereotypes may be unfair to the majority of businesses in the sector, but it also creates an opportunity.

One ‘popular’ sector everyone likes to bash is the banks. Even though this is a US ad, it seems the proliferation of fees with banks is universal.

BREAKING: Top 100 Small Business Blog Global Awards 2019

by Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog has been voted once again as one of the Global Top 100 Small Business Blogs, for 2019 by Feedspot, the international blog aggregator.

Thanks guys for the recognition.

Dr Greg Chapman

A Million Dollars of Marketing Advice for Nothing

by Dr Greg Chapman

For most businesses there is a giant in their industry. A business who is a household name. They dominate your sector, although they are not pursuing your customers because they are the big end of town.

They don’t even know you exist. And you ignore them because their clients are not yours.

Lets say you have a motor mechanics business with half a dozen staff. You don’t see yourself in competition with the BMW service department in the next suburb. Your competition is a guy about the same size as you a few blocks away. So what you do, is check out what he is doing.

But, if you were able to get a million dollars of marketing advice, do you think you could blow him away? You can’t afford the fees? What if you could get that advice for nothing?

Advertising Fail

by Dr Greg Chapman

One of the great things about online advertising today is the ability to finely target your ads so that they appear on sites which contain keywords relevant to your business and which attract people who fit the profile of your best buyers.

An example of this is that websites with articles on Formula One racing might be targeted by Porsche and Ferrari. Another example is a website with articles on exotic travel destinations would attract airline advertising. The companies in question choose keywords that might appear in website content that their potential customers choose to read.

So what was this advertising fail?

Ad of the Month - Seize the Moment -- Updated

by Dr Greg Chapman

If advertising is to work, you must first grab the attention of your buyers. There is so much noise, that people just tune out, but every so often, there comes along an event that provides a wave upon which you can launch your product or brand.

The May election provided one such opportunity, when Clive Palmer spent around $60m and didn’t secure a single seat.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Small Business

by Dr Greg Chapman

While running a successful business is not easy, there are rules that you can follow that will almost certainly increase your success. And there are also sins that will guarantee your failure.

Here are the Seven Deadly Sins of Business.

1. Ambiguity

If you are not explicit in what you want to achieve for your business, you are highly unlikely to be successful. Setting out clear goals for your business allows you to develop strategies to achieve your goals and to create plans which will ultimately drive your business to success. Without goals, strategies and plans, you are just depending on luck- and how has that worked for you so far?

How to Avoid Your Business becoming a Microstayer?

by Dr Greg Chapman

The biggest risk for most businesses is not whether they will fail. Most won’t. The biggest risk is that they will stay small. Whether by design or not. Recent ABS data show that 98% of micro-businesses stay that way. That is, they are Micro-Stayers.

There are a number of reasons that businesses become Micro-Stayers. It could be a lifestyle choice. Work-Life balance is becoming more and more important to many people. It may be because they don’t have the knowledge to take their business to the next level, and become frustrated Micro-Stayers. Or they may have progressed from frustrated to resigned Micro-Stayers and have adjusted lifestyle and ambition in recognition of this.

Businesses that involuntarily stay small, the Micro-Stayers, do so for five key reasons.

Small Business False Economies

by Dr Greg Chapman

I was recently discussing with a business owner the future of his business which has an innovative product but low sales. He had invested over a million dollars in the business developing this product, but had spent nothing on marketing. The owner told me how he believed that their product was superior to others on the market, but because of their size, other businesses were not taking them seriously.