Benita's Blog

Benita Dreesen is the Managing Director of Creative Strategies. In her blog, she shares her insights into the industry other topics.

Moving the free line

Written by Benita Dreesen | 28 September 2010

How to make a lot of money using style? How to do mass control? How do you build that energy that makes people ask to buy from you?

That is the free line concept.

The internet has changed. Years ago businesses thought that visitors to their website only came once, so you’d better had to sell something because they were gone forever after that. Everyone had a very aggressive sales approach.

Today people will rarely buy after a first look on the website – so why waste all you energy for these very few ones. Instead why not get people interested and give some Free-things away and drip-feed them without being pushy?

Mass control is build around that free line philosophy. Giving away cool stuff, being nice to people and gaining their trust. It is a process but suddenly, there is that tipping point. Connection and trust is installed and at that moment, you can turn it around in repeated business. Not only one time, no. Once the trust is made and you maintain it, it will always be there.

Companies who don’t change will be in bad shape. If you don’t have the trust, you don’t have the business. The big nameless and faceless companies need to develop an intimate relationship with their clients – they must see their customers as their friends.

Business today is a small, transparent bunch of people who act normal, as friends. The corporate style is gone.

What is marketing today: give the best that you can, help people out and by doing so, they will come back and buy. If you give a value, people will ask for more.

How to Optimize your Marketing and Communication

Written by Benita Dreesen | 28 September 2010

All businesses are about marketing and innovation. In today’s society where things are so competitive, very often a business with a better product does not necessarily mean that the company has better revenues. Or the person that is the best in a job, is going to keep that job. We live in a society were downsizing is going on, where companies are going out of business and where doing the best job, does not guarantee a sense of certainty about the future. Many people feel that the things they were trained for are disappearing.

How you can market your business more effectively? How to optimize the assets you are sitting on? How to increase the efficiency of your sales, marketing and communication activities? By adapting new principles that require from you a new way of thinking. By paying attention to new distinctions. And by thinking pro-actively.

To turn one-shot sales into continuous streams of income, to gain distinction and advantage over other competitors in your industry: the main pillars are marketing and innovations.

Work on your branding, define your USP, change the headlines (in an ad it’s the opening statement, in a press release it’s the headline and the first paragraph, in a sales process it’s the first 3 minutes)… the first group of words are very powerful. Most people think people are buying a product; that’s not true. They are buying a result, a benefit, an outcome that is self-serving to the end-user. People couldn’t care if you have a good business, they couldn’t care if you have a big company… The only reason why they deal with you and they let you deal with them is, that to some extent, they see an advantage in it for themselves.

The clearer, the greater, the more powerful you are by expressing, articulating, demonstrating, illustrating, comparing how you render that advantage better than anyone else they deal with, the more business you get. Always think: what does that mean for me, the customer?

The Power of Anticipation

Written by Benita Dreesen | 28 September 2010

It doesn’t take a genius to see we are living in turbulent times. The power of anticipation is a skill that all of us have, but only a very few of us supply. However if you are looking for the top in life, for something that helps you win your business, helps you to go to the next level, to grow, to expand, to have a competitive advantage in business, you need to adopt this new lifestyle.

Why?

The power to anticipate is the power to shape the direction of your life and your company. Anticipation could be the ultimate advantage. Because it comes down to the ability of solving problems. And of how quickly and elegant you can do it. Most often we are in reaction to a problem; we try to solve it, we feel stressed. Today the leaders in industry, the leaders in politics are…: the people who anticipate a problem before it even shows up. And they solve it before it even happens.

What do you do when you anticipate? You utilize the capacity to step beyond the present moment and utilize the future as your leverage. The people in our society that were able to anticipate certain trends, are the people that are the best in the world in what they do, and they are incredibly successful. History is full of examples of people who developed empires by anticipating.

Trends and environments change constantly. If you want to be sure that the value of your company goes up, add value to it by anticipating. The thing that values most is anticipating your clients’ needs. If you don’t add more value, don’t be surprised that you are out of business at a certain moment.

A time ago, an article in Forbes magazine wrote about a discussion between some employees of a Fortune 500 company who lost their job, and their CEO. One man said “how comes that I was one of your best sales people yesterday and you let me go today?” The CEO answered “it is not that you are not worthwhile but you must know that, what you are doing today is no longer competitive. We can’t live on yesterday’s standards and expect to be the winner today. We have to anticipate what will be the standards of tomorrow and how we create for ourselves those standards right now. That’s how we will win the game on competition.

If we meet people’s needs, they are going to be fulfilled, they are going to strengthen our relationships with them, we are going to add more value and we are going to succeed. This is one of the simplest secrets of business and we have to apply them daily. Anticipation is not just intuition; it is a skill, a process.