One key aspect that separates the most prosperous businesses from the rest is that they develop the skill of widget making.
Widget making could be the number one skill
you’ll ever learn as a business owner.
Once you've got it, you use it over and over again every day in your business. Widget making is where you take some of the products or services that you offer and present them to your prospective market in a way that makes it easy for them to buy.
On a real simple level, if we look at a pizza business as an example, their widget of the week may be “two pizzas with double cheese for a special price”.
They are not just saying, “Come and buy a pizza from us.” They're holding up a specific thing and saying, “Here's our thing to buy.”
On a different level, one of the best examples comes from Las Vegas in the hotel and casino business – where pretty much everybody offers the same thing.
Some years ago an entrepreneur took over one of the least successful hotels on the strip and had to find a different way to get people to come and stay in his hotel and gamble in his casino.
The widget that he developed was, “Give me $396 and I'll give you two nights, three days in my hotel in one of the deluxe suites. There will be a bottle of champagne waiting for you when you arrive. You can have unlimited drinks the entire time you are here and I'm going to give you $600 of my dollars to gamble with in my casino.”
So his offer includes the room. It includes the drinks. It includes several extras plus the $600 to gamble with.
That widget turned that struggling little hotel into one of the largest and most successful on the strip in Las Vegas.
The same approach is used in many other businesses.
There are really three reasons to use widgets and to base your marketing on them.
- One is to attract new customers by offering a free or low-cost widget to give them a chance to try out your services easily.
- A second reason is to sell more frequently to past and present customers by continually coming up with new and different widgets.
- The third reason is to move from the vague to the specific so that you can have something everybody can understand and grab onto that you promote.
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This is an excerpt from my book, “9 Rules For Business Prosperity in the New Economy”. The book may be purchased in both printed and Kindle editions at: http://arizonamarketingassociation.org/9-rules-business-prosperity/