Understanding Promotion: How to Get More Leads and Sales
Understanding Promotion
How to Get More Leads and Sales
Could your business be doing better?
We’ve all been there. You’ve got a great product or service and you’re ready to deliver but you just aren’t getting enough business in the door. You send some emails, make some calls, post a few social shares, have a few meetings but you’re just not experiencing that rocket ride growth you know you deserve.
If you could understand how and why promotion actually works and really see how to start out on the road to real expansion and prosperity…
Wouldn’t that be worth a few minutes of your time?
Let’s get to it then.
Just jump!
The water’s warm
Deep Dive Warning
Before we get into this I need to warn you…
This isn’t going to be some clichéd listicle. This isn’t 10 ways to increase your bleehblah paraphrased from 20 other similar articles listed on the same google search.
We’re going to go deeper, into some very basic understandings that can be used in any area of life, not just business. We’re going to do this by taking a very unique, and very fundamental approach. So please take a big breath right now, and jump in.
Don’t worry I’m still going to make it super easy for you to understand. I’ve written this to make it useful for real people, not university professors.
“Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise”– Michael Jordan
The Underlying Foundations to any Communication
All promotion and marketing efforts rely on effective communication. To communicate with others effectively we use certain natural laws to get our message across and to receive the messages of others. This is just as true for an individual as it is for a business or any organization.
Some of these laws are simple, obvious and understood (even if we often need to be reminded of them) like:
- using enough volume to be heard clearly,
- making sure your audience’s attention is on your message so they can fully receive it,
- being interested enough in your audience’s response to make sure you really understand it.
- Quotes like the Ancient Greek proverb, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” start coming to mind right?
But what if we could look at these laws in terms of a business communicating with it’s potential customers? And bring about a new understanding of how you can literally create space for your business to grow into using communication alone.
Sound interesting? Keep reading.
All promotion and marketing efforts rely on effective communication
To understand communication
we need to understand how to create space
Space, a Useful Definition
To begin let’s work out a useful definition of space in the human experience.
We’re quite used to thinking of space as this big emptiness that’s out there in every direction that you can move into and make other things move into, and you wouldn’t be wrong. However, there’s a much more useful way of thinking of space for our purposes.
Space from a human perspective is how we perceive the distance between things. Without some kind of reference point to look across we don’t have any real experience of space.
Examples:
- Focused on the screen right in front of you, unless your mind is on something else somewhere else, your experience of space is going to be the distance between your eyeballs and that screen.
- Driving in a car you’re going to have more of an experience of space because you need to see a bit further away from you to keep the car safely controlled.
- What about on top of a mountain peak or a high building or cliff. What kind of experience of space do you get as you look out into the distance then? Quite a lot bigger right?
- Ok, what about when you gaze intently at the moon or the stars above. How does your experience of space change in that case?
See how this works? It’s all good and well to say the nearest star to the sun is 41 320 000 000 000km away but it’s kind of just a bunch of numbers on a page unless we can somehow really experience it. I think if you accelerated on a space ship going hundreds of thousands of km/hour and decades later reached the nearest star you may have a little bit more of a real understanding of just how much space was really there.
If you’re wondering what the hell this has to do with business expansion, hold on. We’re just laying the groundwork here…
Space from a human perspective is how we perceive the distance between things
Communication Creates Space
Armed with an understanding of space we can actually use let’s go into the role communication plays in creating this very real experience of space for us and also for our business or organization.
Communication could be thought of as the exchange of objects or ideas right? You could have it going in a one-way direction only, but if there was absolutely no message coming back how would you know if you’d even communicated?
Example:
- SMS “Hey what time is the movie?”, “5:30PM”, “Cool, see you there.”
- Throw ball to other player, see that they’ve caught it, or maybe they throw it back to you and you then catch it.
- Send an email asking a question, get an email answer the next day.
- Sending out a promotional campaign, getting leads and then sales back.
Ok what about shouting across a crowd to get the attention of a person on the other side of the hall? Think you’d have more of an experience of that space once you’d got your message across that distance?
Let’s put this into a very practical example in a business or organization. Let’s say you have a product or service but feel like your business is kind of stuck in terms of growth. It literally feels like the business is kind of squashed and boxed-in around you sometimes right? Like it doesn’t have space to move. You don’t have money to spend so can’t start new projects easily.
Well, here’s how to create that space, put out communications. Send out promotional materials, emails, videos, content. Send out as much communication as you can. I can bet you one thing, after you’ve done a real avalanche of sent out communication, even before you hear anything back, you will actually feel like you have more space. This is simply because communication creates space.
Another simple example: remember a time you were on your own and stuck into your own thoughts and then picked up the phone and called someone and engaged in some real communication? That conversation got you to experience more space: the distance between you and the caller that you were talking to. The result of this was that after the call you actually felt less stuck in your own world and started feeling like you had more space right? You even may have actually started moving around more in the space of the room or area around you afterwards. You were experiencing more space.
We can think about this idea of the experience of space as the potential your business has for expanding.
Keep going. It’ll all come together. I promise.
Communication creates space
Occupying that Space to Enable Expansion
We’ve gone over how we can make space, but then what? Well now we’ll go into some basic physics. Don’t be scared. Physics just means the laws of how objects and energy move and change and interact in space and time.
Let’s think about energy simply as particles in motion (particles here mean any type of objects, from SMS’s to emails to flyers to videos to phone calls, even products, anything that can be put in motion). We can see then that when we’re communicating, we’re producing energy. The more a person or business communicates, the more energy they produce.
Ok what do we know about matter? Matter is the solid stuff that we can touch that this world is made up of.
Well, some more basic physics: matter is made up of energy that has been condensed (squashed tightly together).
Let’s make a real-life example of this…
Let’s say you boil a kettle. The steam coming out is made of little tiny drops of water in motion. If you take a frying pan lid and hold it upside down above the steam, you’ll start to see that energy condense and become matter. I know this is a very simplified example. It’s really not necessary to understand it more than I’ve just explained here for our purposes. If you really want to go full nerd on this, read this article about Eisenstein’s famous equation.
(If you do this experiment yourself please be aware that steam is hot! Rocket Expansion takes no responsibility for any burns you may incur in the name of science.)
Matter is simply condensed energy
Applying this Principle to Promotion
So let’s take this principle of energy being poured into a space and solidifying as it get’s too cramped (like our steam into liquid example).
How can we use this basic law in business?
Your business communicates by calls, emails, brochures, social posts, blog posts, etc. etc. You send these out to your prospective customers. As we’ve gone over this creates space.
Now as you keep pouring out these particles (emails, calls, social posts, ads etc.) the space they’re being poured into get’s more and more filled with your business’s presence.
Communication is the energy that gives your business presence
At this point an amazing thing starts to happen if you are sending out these particles frequently enough. All these particles start to condense into matter. When I’m talking about matter I mean actual physical things, like sales, income, products in the hands of customers, new customers.
Keep doing this and keep backing up your promotional activities (creating energy by sending out these promotional particles) by efficiently produced and delivered, quality products and something else starts happening…
Those products or services you’re now sending out are really just bigger, higher value particles in motion. Another kind of energy right? So you keep sending out promotional energy, followed by product/services energy and all the while receiving income/credibility/reputation energy. As the energy coming back to your business is pumped back into your business and condenses guess what happens…
Expansion.
Your business starts to have so much energy flowing into it that this energy can be directed into hiring new staff, buying new equipment, having bigger reserves, moving into bigger premises etc. It’s the same idea of energy condensing to form matter.
It’s obviously important to direct this energy coming into your business in the smartest possible way to expand the quickest but that is beyond the scope of this article.
“It’s not only about what you know. It’s also about who knows you.”– Me right now
Your contacts =
your expansion multiplier
Expansion Multiplier: The More Contacts to Communicate to, the More Space can be Created
This one is quite simple. If communication creates space, the more communications being made, the more space is being created.
Now, add a higher number of different individuals that are being communicated to, and the overall space made becomes multiplied.
In our kettle example above it’s easy to see that if we only had one kettle with steam coming out, the energy of the steam sent out could only make so much water on the lid above. If we had ten kettles boiling, we’d obviously be able to make ten times more water from the steam. Each kettle is like another contact or potential customer. Every time we increase the number of people we reach, we increase our potential for expansion.
In a simple sense, if you woke up one morning and called and really communicated with as many people from as many parts of the world as you could for the whole day, I bet you’d feel pretty huge.
Same thing at a party, if you made an effort to really talk to and get to know all 50 people at that party how would your experience of that space then be? That space the party was held in would probably feel like a whole world of interesting possibility and opportunity right there right?
Take every possible opportunity to promote in every way you can
The Frequency of Particles sent out makes all the difference
All frequency means is how often something is done in a set amount of time,
Something done:
- once a year=low frequency
- once a month=higher frequency
- once a second=much higher frequency
You may have noticed something in our steam example if you actually did it… (If the example didn’t make any sense to you I’d really suggest going and doing it to see it for yourself.)
If you just held the frying pan lid above the steam for a very short time there would hardly be any water on it. It might be too little to even notice. Too little of the steam particles reached the pan to come together enough to form any water. Now, hold the pan there for quite some time or boil a huge kettle of water. You’ll notice that there are so many steam particles hitting the pan and being squashed together that water forms in the pan fast. Before much time has passed you’ll even see water dripping down off the pan.
The exact same principle applies to the way your business sends out energy to create it’s own expansion. Your promotional material (energy) needs to be sent out as fast as possible to have enough particles in a space to start to form matter (products, sales, customers, new employees, big cash reserves, new assets etc.)
It is vitally important, if you want to be successful, that the speed your business moves at is as absolutely fast as possible.
The frequency with which you communicate determines the energy output of your business
From this we can actually create a simple formula that will determine how successful your business will be:
- The frequency of the promotions sent out and products delivered,
- multiplied by the number of people it’s sent out to,
- multiplied by value and profit of each promotion or product,
- equals the rate of expansion of your business.
In other words, how often you communicate (send out emails, calls, deliver products), multiplied by how many people you communicate to, multiplied by the value to others of each communication you send out will determine how fast your business will grow.
You can apply this to anything your business does. How valuable to others is that action or product? Get it done more often or increase the value of that action or product and your whole business will improve and expand to that degree. It’s kind of magical.
A huge misunderstanding in the world of promotion is that each communication (email sent, product delivered, call made) needs to be perfect before it’s sent or delivered. Concentrate first on quantity and work to improve quality. There are too many examples to count in the world of business, of entrepreneurs, who haven’t had the best products, completely dominating a certain market by simply communicating about them much more often than anyone else around.
Another huge advantage of really pushing for speed of promotion and production actions is that as a business you have certain monthly overheads. There are generally a lot of them that are fixed or much the same from month to month. Getting much more done in a shorter space of time means that cost to you as a business owner for each action becomes that much cheaper and therefore more of your income goes to profits and investing in growth instead of just back into feeding the beast.
Our wish for your business is rocket expansion
Rocket Expansion
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To Summarize
- We create an experience of space by communicating across a distance to someone, like a potential customer.
- By sending out more communications into that customer’s space often enough, that energy we’re sending starts to condense and form matter (products sold, income made etc.).
- The higher the number of individual customers we communicate to, the more our potential for expansion is multiplied.
- Speed is vital. The more often we send out communications (email, phone calls, products delivered etc.) the quicker our business grows.
- Increase the value of each communication sent out, without decreasing the speed, and the speed of expansion increases even more.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this rather unique perspective on applying physics to promotion and marketing. If you’ve had any realizations or anything you’d like to share after reading this, I’d love to hear about it below.
If you need any kind of impactful, high value promotional materials: digital, print or website design work or any other kind of help with your marketing strategy or promotion, please email us or give us a call.
Rocket expansion is our wish for your business or organization.
Go ahead, leave a comment. You know you want to!
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