Orange County Advertiser is pleased to welcome back guest blogger, Norm Van Wieren, Chief Executive Officer of SocialMediaMerchant.com. Socialmediamerchant.com is a full service social media management and online business advisory firm located in Laguna Hills, California. They focus on implementing and managing a proven social media marketing and optimized online presence for your business.

When you are selling consulting services, coaching services, golf instruction services or legal services, what you’re selling isn’t the service, you’re selling something invisible. It’s called “Expertise”.

Expertise is your product. How you brand it, deliver it and communicate it is everything.

Selling a service also commands your ability to demonstrate social proof of your expertise. How do you do that? Easy. Think visual.

Here’s an example: I once owned a successful college planning & mortgage business a few years ago. When you walked into my office lobby you immediately were greeted by a receptionist and our “Wall of Fame”. The Wall of Fame was on one side of our office lobby wall that was plastered with forty two 8×10 framed and photographed testimonials of me and my clients together each with a written testimonial outcome of the service I provided to each client.

That’s demonstration of compelling social proof of expertise. This is what your after. Whether it’s your office lobby, auto repair shop, golf instruction studio, legal office or your company website, you want to be able to show prospective customers you can deliver. Remember, NOBODY SPEAKS ABOUT HOW GREAT YOU ARE BETTER THAN SOMEONE ELSE. You can tell me all day how great your service is but when someone else says it for you with a visual component of credibility (photo or video) then the landscape of closing the sale easily changes in your favor.

Moral to the story: Get started on gathering photographed testimonials with you and your clients together and have them write a three to four sentence “outcome statement” about your service. Have them sign it with their full name, city and occupation.

Gather these testimonials and neatly place them in a binder and leave the binder open in your client conference room or frame them on your wall so customers see them when they walk in your business. Either way you can easily eliminate the price / tire kicker shopper with this strategy and it can establish the correct platform to increase your rates and fees. This is called positioning.

Understand that when you’re selling a service, your product is your expertise. Your ability to demonstrate social proof of that expertise can make the difference between a customer buying your service over someone else’s. It’s smart business.

Norm Van Wieren, Socialmediamerchant.com 949-230-5119

Todays guest post comes to us from Young Company – Young Company’s services include advertising, branding, direct mail, market research, marketing consultation, public relations and website design. Southern California’s oldest independent ad agency has a new home in Orange County and is taking a leadership role in harnessing the power of internet marketing.

Jay Chiat, arguably the most famous adman to hail from Los Angeles, was once quoted saying the secret to great advertising is “Big Budgets“. Although Jay’s response may have appeared to be flip or insincere, I believe he was dead serious. And apparently, so did some of his clients.

Apple Computer became a Chiat/Day client in the early 1980’s, and since the beginning, the company seemed to spend more on advertising than their larger rivals. In 1984, Apple broke the mold for Super Bowl advertising with a commercial titled “1984” that cost a small fortune to produce and place, but has been played hundreds of times and still stands as the most famous commercial of all time. The writer of the spot was none other than Steve Hayden, formerly creative director at Speer, Young & Hollander (predecessor to Young Company).

Since those early days at Apple, Steve Jobs and his company have embraced advertising with big budgets and meticulous attention to detail. Working closely with his agency, Jobs would spend a day each month with the agency reviewing all of the proposed ads serving as editor in chief on the account.

In October 2010, Apple’s 10-K form revealed that it had significantly ramped up to $691 million which represented a 190 million jump and 38% increase over 2009. Previous years have been $15 – 20 million increases. And while this is a pretty incredible increase, Apple continues to lower the percentage of revenue they spend on advertising. While the spend was $691 million this year, total revenues were over $65 billion, so Apple only spent about 1% of their revenue on this. Last year, that percentage was 1.37%. In 2001, it was about 5%. So even though Apple is ramping up ad spending, they’re bringing in money much quicker, so the overall percentage of money they’re spending keeps getting less and less.

So what has all the advertising done for Apple? Well, in early January, Apple’s market capitalization broke the $300 billion mark, ending the day at $302.32 billion. That makes Apple the second largest company in the world, when measured by market capitalization. The leader is Exxon Mobile. But this milestone puts Apple ahead of Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Google.

So how does a small company compete in a world dominated by giants with huge budgets? It ultimately comes down to priorities and focus. If you prioritize and narrow your audiences you can focus your attention on those that will produce the best ROI. This means that you need to do enough to be important to an audience.

In the early days Apple targeted the education market. An Apple on every desk was a sound marketing strategy. Not only because is a well defined niche with specific needs, but it also had the most potential to grow as students grew to become adults. Young Company has run campaigns targeted to as few as several hundred decision makers. So the secret is not how much you spend, but how much effort you put towards each prospect and how that compares with your competitors.

If you’d like make your brand more important to your audiences, we should talk. You can connect with our Young Company team at 949-376-8404 or email Bart Young directly at byoung@youngcompany.com. And be sure to follow us for the latest industry news and tips.

Orange County Advertiser is pleased to welcome guest blogger, Norm Van Wieren, Chief Executive Officer Social Media Merchant.com

Ask customers why they remain loyal to a product or service, and they will give you one critical answer more than all of the others combined. Do they mention excellence, quality, skill set or service? Nope. The answer is “comforting piece of mind…..comfort.”

Why do top college football recruits join one college over another or why one company gets the consulting contract over the other?

Nine times out of ten it has to do with how “comfortable” the client or person feels about that product or service. Comfort!

Today we are barraged with multiple choices and messages with trust declining splitting communities and connections. That’s why social media when correctly applied is so powerful. It brings the right people with the right connections to the right community. Peer to peer is comforting.

With multiple choices involving products and services and often no ability to touch or see the product or service offered, the customer is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Customers essentially want to feel comfortable. Comfortable with the brand, the solution the product or service can offer.

Perceived expertise is a feature that can be comforting too. Companies that look and sound expert-that look and dress the part professionally or get published or have strong social proof of that expertise- is comforting.

Basic business communication like returning phone calls, timely customer service and integrity is also comforting.

Integrity correlates with predictability.

Customers associate integrity with the fact that you will do what you say you will do. In the customers eyes that feeling is rare- and because it is rare – it is valuable.

Being personally connected to your customer is also very comforting. Expressing interest in a person’s well being and being helpful gives customers comfort that you will protect their interests as well as yours. Expressing interest in others also demonstrates trust- the underlining of comfort.

Enthusiasm and passion is also comforting. When you can communicate why you love what you do it increases the chances of delivering your product on time and performed well. That’s comforting.

Comfort is what keeps your clients coming back. Make them comfortable and you can keep a customer for a lifetime.

Posted by Norm Van Wieren, Socialmediamerchant.com