There are two things that are important in developing products and services for the affluent. Number one is the kind of products and services you offer. Number two is HOW you position them.

Remember, the affluent are time crunched. They want services and products that offer a level of convenience to their hectic lives.

Here are some types of offerings ideal for affluent clients:

• Flat Fee Service – This agreement includes one set fee for services rendered rather than an hourly rate.
• Retainer Based Programs – A contract between two people or companies where one pays to reserve the other’s time.
• Continuity/Membership Programs – This is the model around which membership sites and associations are built. Members pay a monthly subscription fee for access to your content and other members in the group.
• Information Products – The consuming world buys products and services in packages. When you package your expertise in a way that people are willing to pay for it, you’ve got a valuable product that will generate multiple streams of income.
• Done for You Services - Some clients want something, but they don’t want to take the time to learn it themselves. They want it done for them. This is very common with the affluent.
• Exclusive Coaching Programs – Think about providing guidance and information to another individual and potentially helping them plan an appropriate course of action.

Whenever I work with a small business, I always check in on their top business goals and their exit strategy. Do they want to be a famous author and speaker?  Do they want to eventually have the company run without them and build the brand based on a proprietary system?  Do they plan to offer a variety of different products that have little or nothing to do with one another?  Do they plan to build the business to sell?

All of the answers to these questions help me to guide them in their brand strategy.  There are three basic types of brand strategies, you can choose to use them all, or just select one; it really is based on the goals of your business.

1. The Celebrity Brand or Personal Brand

A personal brand allows you to stand out among the crowd, you are considered the expert…especially important with affluent clients.

2. Business Brand

The business brand puts more focus on the business than it does its owner. Branding your business is a great strategy if you plan on selling it or hiring in new management at some point so you can retire.

3. Product, Program or System Brand

The benefit of using this strategy is that in your marketing, your client’s success doesn’t really rely on you – it relies on the proven system you’ve developed, the program you’ve developed or the products you’ve developed.

Which one or ones are right for you?

Now is the time to embrace our diversity and recognize that to create efficient and effective marketing you must leverage messages and media that appeal specifically to the narrow target audience ideal for your services.  Do not waste your precious time or money on broad mass marketing methods that do little to advance you to your goals.

Here are the four reasons why mass marketing is no longer effective… especially for small businesses:

1. Mass marketing is not targeted to the people most likely to buy what small businesses sell. Marketing messages are most effective when in a contextual environment.  Relevancy is important because consumers are ready and willing to receive the messages sellers are offering when and where they are expected.  For example, have you ever tuned into TV to learn more about a life coach?  Or turned on the radio to find a business consultant?  These messages are out of sync and irrelevant in a mass marketing setting and as such, have little or NO impact.
2. Mass marketing rarely creates quick sales. When was the last time you picked up a phone after watching a commercial on the TV or an ad in a magazine?  Generally speaking, mass marketing is more effective at creating general awareness for a brand or changing people’s perception.  Most methods are limited in generating immediate and urgent action.
3. Mass marketing can be expensive and suck up your resources. Mass marketing is designed to reach A LOT of people (hence the name) and as such its price is based on the cost per thousand it reaches.  Why would you pay good money to reach thousands when only a small fraction is truly a potential customer? It’s a complete waste.
4. Mass marketing is difficult to design to appeal to a target market. A narrow or niche target market has specific words and visuals that are going to appeal to it based on its wants and needs.  While these triggers will strongly impact the appropriate target, they will have little or no affect on a much broader group.  For example, consider someone seeking a personal chef.  The ideal audience will react positively to phrases like, “convenience for an executive” or “world renowned cuisine in your home”.  To the middle class consumer who cannot afford such a luxury, these words and the images they summon fall flat.

The concept of marketing calls for an understanding of customers and the intent to satisfy their needs better than the competition. But different customers have different needs, and rarely is it possible to satisfy all customers by treating them alike. Two types of marketing approaches exist from which you must choose in determining how to best support your business:  mass marketing and target marketing.  By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses between the two types of marketing methods, we can better understand the value of each:

Mass marketing refers to treatment of the market as a homogeneous group and offering the same marketing mix to all customers. Mass marketing allows economies of scale to be realized through mass production, mass distribution, and mass communication. The drawback of mass marketing is that customer needs and preferences differ, and the same offering is unlikely to be viewed as optimal by all customers. If firms ignore their differing customer needs, another firm will likely enter the market with a product that serves a specific group, and the incumbent firms will lose those customers.

Target marketing on the other hand, recognizes the diversity of customers and does not try to please all of them with the same offering. In marketing to the affluent, we use a target marketing approach. The first step in target marketing is to identify different market segments and their needs.

“Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common.” – Anonymous

You and your neighbor probably do not drive the same car, which means you do not have the same needs in auto mechanics. You and your husband / or wife do not have the exact same preference in cereal. You and your co-worker do not have the same requirements of an interior designer or even pet care.  If personal desires and preferences are so different from person to person, why do so many marketers continue to leverage the broad approach of mass marketing?  Here’s my advice. They shouldn’t!  Because of its ineffectiveness and high cost, I say Mass Marketing is a dying art form for small business.

In this economy, many entrepreneurs seem genuinely surprised that the traditional mass marketing efforts they’ve employed in the past are not working now. With hundreds of messages being pummeled at us every day from every which way we turn, it is no wonder that we have all become sophisticated enough to tune them out (either through technology or just turning a blind eye) and shield ourselves from the noise.

Let’s examine a number of defenses you can use to establish yourself as the TRUE Market Leader in Pricing – the company with the wherewithal to LEAD with your price and watch the competition scramble to find their place in the leftover space….

The first is COMMITMENT. People are much more committed to applying and doing what’s necessary to achieve a result if they’ve invested significantly. So you’re always going to get a much better result if your clients invest at the top end of the pricing scale.

Second, COMMUNICATION. One of the most demanding requirements of any business, and a true value of their clients’ satisfaction levels is the money that they’ve invested in communication. If you perfect the art of the post-sale followup you will have raving fans, no matter what they paid. If your follow up after the sale isn’t consistent with their buying experience, your satisfaction level will suffer. Charge fees that allow you to invest the BEST in follow up systems.

Finally, CONTINUITY. Who wants to invest and begin a program that isn’t available for as long as you want to be a part of it? Or one who isn’t able to consistently innovate and remain at the cutting edge. You OWE it to your clients to continue to offer products that allow them to grow along with you…

If you’re ready to begin charging 200% – 1,000% more than your currently billing AND having more satisfied clients, implement the above strategies and watch your profits grow accordingly.

What are some of the immediate advantages to pricing your services at a premium? Doesn’t the market really want to be served at the lowest possible cost? NOT AT ALL! What they want is to be continuously educated as to WHY they are paying the premium and the specific benefit that they receive for choosing to pay additional fees for your service.

If you plan to be in business for the long haul (and you’d BETTER be or you’ll be devoured by hungrier competition), you owe it to yourself to raise your fees to the highest level possible! Then EARN those fees. Build your fees based on the cost of your clients NOT doing business with you, not from the efforts you put into the process. The net difference in those two numbers is your Value Leverage.

One of the greatest quotes I have ever seen is by Donald Trump.  He says:  “I like thinking big. I always have,” says Trump. “If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”

Trump considers his ability to think in larger than life terms one of his greatest strengths and a major reason for his significant success. “Most people think small because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning,” he says. “And that gives people like me a great advantage.” Trump is not afraid to go after what he wants, nor is he afraid of the consequences of his decisions.

He is not the only leader who believes this.  If you read any book on success or achievement, the leaders credit their ability to think big, make decisions quickly and take strategic action as the primary reason for their success.

Thinking That Big Takes Courage

The reason it is so scary to people is because it is about risking your ‘identity’ – your sense of who you are and who those around you think you are. Being prepared to change the received ‘definition’ of who you are and what you are capable of, overcoming the fear of “what if I fall on my face.” You need courage in a very real sense to take such a leap.

And where do you get courage to carry you through?

Well, it’s like everything else in life. You practice.

Successful People Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
Eleanor Roosevelt had this to say about it: We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face… we must do that which we think we cannot. (Emphasis added)

And that brave lady (she’s the one who also said: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent) stands in a long line which stretches all the way back to the Greek philosophers. Aristotle himself said: Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. (Emphasis added)

I have personally faced this challenge.  But this year, I had a good friend of mine say to me…”How much longer are you going to play small?”  And when she said that, my stomach landed in my throat.   Now for many of you out there who have followed my career, you might be thinking “Kelly doesn’t play small”.  Well, it is all relative.

And she reminded me of the famous quote by Marianne Williamson

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

I had a profound shift of consciousness in that moment because I realized something.  With the world in the state that it is in and our economy in the place that it is in…”Who am I to deny people my light?”

My playing small doesn’t just affect my life and my bank account, my playing small affects every entrepreneur out there and every one of their families.  Because I have a gift to share and if I don’t do everything in my power to share that gift, I am not being of service in the way it was intended.

It no longer mattered how afraid I was.  It no longer mattered what the little gremlins in my head said “Who do you think you are?  What if you fail?  What if you embarrass yourself?  What will your family think?’

I made a decision at that point that the only thing worse than stepping out in a big way and risking failing was not attempting to step out at all.

Do you have a gift to share?  Are you playing smaller that you could be?

Now is your time to shine your light on the world.

Thanks and let us know your thoughts. I encourage you to leave your comments or questions below.

Be Sure to sign up for the Marketing to Millionaires Retreat this October, to learn more on Marketing to the Affluent

Article by Kelly K. O’Neil, Million Dollar Marketing to the Affluent Coach and Creator of the Marketing to Millionaires™ Programs

We have all heard the saying, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?”  If you are sharing your expertise and no one hears it or reads it, does it make a difference?

The affluent want to work with experts because it validates their choices and provides them with the bragging rights they desire.  You can build your reputation just by writing about what you know best in a regularly published eZine.

Newsletters and electronic newsletters (eZines) are one of the most profitable ways to build your credibility to establish yourself as an expert. They let you offer helpful advice, market to a global audience, communicate easily with thousands of people as often as you wish, and promote what you’re selling. In order to keep readership high, you must provide a valuable level of useful content as well as sales materials.  Consider adding another stream of revenue by letting other non-competing sellers advertise in your mailer as well.

Your industry will dictate whether an eZine or traditional print newsletter is better for you readers.  The benefit of an eZine is that they are less expensive to produce and distribute.

Have you heard America is in a recession?  I have a question for you….Are you having a personal recession?  That may sound like a silly question, but think about it for a minute.   No matter your situation, it’s up to you if your “Personal Economy” has a recession.

Invest in Innovation & Ways to Improve

An innovative business is one that continually adapts and evolves to meet changing market conditions.  Given that everyone else is cutting back, for every dollar invested in innovation, you get a larger return than you would have in the past. Regardless, the economy will rebound. Innovation is more like a marathon than a sprint. If you are not prepared, when market conditions improve, you will be behind the curve.

You should be constantly re-evaluating not just your marketing plan, but all of your business strategies including policies, pricing, and employee performance. The idea is to eventually be as efficient and effective as possible so your company runs smoothly and profitably. Look closely at your competitors. Talk to business leaders you respect and your coaches.  Read business management books and attend seminars. Experiment. Solicit feedback from your team members, mastermind group and customers. By doing several of these things you will accumulate a wealth of knowledge and experience crucial to the survival of your business.