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If you haven’t figured me out by now, I have a passion for sports. I love watching as well as playing. This week I had the opportunity to attend my sons first soccer game of the year. It was an exciting game and they almost won. I have to say the plan was penetration, defense and passing. This was the coach’s strategy and they almost won. The other team was clearly better and it came down to the best out of 5 shots at the end of the game. Both coachess had a strategy and it served them well.

Having a strategy in business is just like having a strategy in soccer. Maybe not the exact components but clearly running a business needs a strategy. What’s your strategy for marketing? Do you have one? Do you need one? I believe you do? So here are my 5 tips for having a market strategy in your business.

The first one is to have some kind of social media strategy. Make it part of your daily routine. Currently I’m on Facebook and Twitter. Linkedin is also a great way to connect with people. I also have a website. It is very important that you are using social media for your marketing. This is a way of reaching a huge market for free! It’s also important to have some kind of objectives around these social media sites describing how often you are going to post. Hopefully you are using social media to drive traffic to your website. Maybe it’s the connection piece that ‘s important to you for these sites, the by all means connect. Maybe email campaigns are important, or blogs and ezines. My point is to connect with real people and talk with them and form a strategy around doing this?

The second one is to have some kind of offline strategy! This is the hardest for me. This is where you stop hiding behind your computer and get out there in a big way. Some things that I am doing is attending networking events like Business Networking International. Networking works, do you belong to some kind of networking group? A week ago I was interviewed on local television station about my business. This is a big way to get known for what you do. Radio is another way and it’s not as scary as television. Another offline strategy I use is participating at Trade Shows. Trade shows are fun and you meet a number of potential clients.

Thirdly, have some kind of strategy into building a relationship with potential clients so you gain their confidence! Remember most people will do business with who they know, like and trust. What does this look like? Give them something for free. On my website which is connected to my blog, I offer a free PDF to read on 5 Tip of balancing life and work for success. So give your prospects something for free. This will give the potential client a way of discerning if you are the right fit for them in a non-threatening way! In the long run this should translate into more clients for you!

My fourth one you can do everyday. Have some kind of strategy that creates awareness! What are you doing to create the buzz about you! This can be done both online and offline. I’ll talk about offline right now. What I’ve been doing is telling everyone I know about my business, and it has been stirring up interest. Some examples for me have been on print, such as giving business cards. Another is giving out flyers of your upcoming events.

Lastly, have some kind of strategy to your warm market. When I introduced my new coaching business. I wrote a warm letter telling my friends and family what I was doing. Have you done this yet? Like in soccer, strategy has one purpose to score enough goals to win. And to do this you must have a strategy in place. The same with business, the goal is to have a successful business with revenue so you can live the life that you always wanted. My favorite commercial is the Nike slogan “Just do it!” So what are you waiting for! JUST DO IT!

For many years there has been a misconception hanging around that we only use 10% of our brain at any one time to process conscious thought. This statistic is wholly misunderstood. 10% of our brain is made up from neurons whilst the other 90% is glial cells. The real question should be what percentage of behaviour is occurring at the level of the subconscious. Our conscious awareness is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Traditionally marketing research looks at the conscious mind, asking customers or potential customers about adverts and their purchasing experience in general. Although vital, this research limits insight in to what actually satisfies and makes purchasers tick. Neuromarketing researches more deeply than this, learning how to effectively market to the deeper levels of our mind that motivate real decision making. Why is this so commonly overlooked? In marketing effectiveness is king and there is nothing sinister about that if your product or service adds positive value. Marketing needs every chance it can to connect with the people you can satisfy.

Neuromarketing comes in to its own by creating a fundamental connection with your audience and consumer base.The research does this by testing with EEGs and fMRIs while they are engaged with marketing and services and products. Through this type of testing scientists and neuromarketers are able to identify what areas of the brain have been stimulated from priming, engagement, emotion and through to decision taking. This level of science can ascertain what is going on in the mind as people are moved through the product or communication experience.

So much of our mind operates below our awareness and although there is much fear mongering about, this is not necessarily something to be looked at negatively. Imagine if it didn’t. What a burden it would be to have to think about every breath you take or had to remember how to write every time you picked up a pen.It is truly a gift that we can run on autopilot. As a result of our auto-piloting skills we also experience irrational reactions to things because during our evolution they posed significant threats to us.

Strategic neuromarketing incorporates neuroscientific knowledge in to business strategy and marketing. It ensures marketing appeals directly to the behaviour that operates below our awareness as well as the conscious mind. Both parts of ourselves need to be in coherence if motivation is to transcend in to action. Big headlines may grab the attention but in particular environments may be less effective than an attractive face with dilated pupils staring back at you. Language, and therefore words, operate in the mind as an abstract representation whilst vision is a more direct communication in the brain requiring less translating. Our human brains are hardwired as the social animals we are and recognise faces instantly and clearly, A memory is only as good as its initial imprint and so the clarity is a key component of effective marketing.Dilated pupils and an attractive face engages the brains mirror neuron system (mns) and our sexual attention, because this is how our brains have evolved.

Strategic neuromarketing takes advantage of the fact that men can be more focused, while females are better at multitasking. It looks at how the whole mind works to inform how you can engage your core market more effectively. It appeals to our social programming ans uses causation between senses and memory to form associations. Smell, music and feeling associate with memories to create evocative and pleasant experiences that promote action and a place in your customers mind. Neuromarketing places simple ads in a sea of complicated design to silence the amygdala and not frustrate your customers natural instinctive need to makes sense of a situation. Neuromarketing is a framework to use your current marketing techniques more effectively.

Definition trans•for•ma•tion [trans-fer-mey-shuh n]: In a running a business context, a process of profound and radical change that orients a running a business in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness. Unlike ‘turnaround’ (which implies incremental progress on the same plane) transformation implies a basic change of character and little or no resemblance with the past configuration or structure.

Recently I attended a summit in Boulder, Colorado. It was exciting and exhilarating as the room was full with successful women entrepreneurs looking for help in running a business or to start a business. These female entrepreneurs were poised to make big transformations. We all learned a lot of new skills and tools, but even more importantly, every person in the room learned something at very deep levels about themselves.

Most of the people spoke about, in one way or another, an intention they had set for their time at the summit. They came with a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve, learn or transform by showing up and investing their time. When they spoke about the intention, it included a big outcome; a major shift in their life and in running a business.

By identifying their intention, they actually focused their concentration and their subconscious so that when they could quickly identify the information that they needed in order to make the leap that they did. Without setting an intention, the mind can overlook or miss something as it hasn’t been given an instruction.

Intention is purposeful. Setting an intention for a transformation is preparing the way for a quantum leap. Small changes just won’t do. It’s quite the contrary. Quantum leaps demand that we must be willing to be bold and daring for women owned businesses.

The next step that emerged was how the people left themselves open to not only receive the information, but for the intended transformation. They took the guard off that we all so often use to screen out information that doesn’t fit with our internal beliefs. This guard causes us to automatically overlook, ignore or scrap life-changing information.

This is part of everyone’s paradigm or conditioning. We are taught things that we believe, holding as absolute truth and will defend to the end by creating everything we see in our world so that it fits to those beliefs that we are holding. The stronger the desire for a transformation from the point that one stands right now to a quantum leap demands breaking away from a limiting belief. You cannot keep doing what you’ve always done and expect a different result.

This leads to the next step which is declaration. Once each person saw what was holding them back or stuck where they were; they were no longer willing to play it small. Now, armed with their new belief, they staked their claim and declared their desired outcome. It’s this decision that will start drawing whatever they will need to them to move towards the outcome.

Declaration is particularly important when you need to get others involved to transform the way you are running a business. People need to know where you as the business owner are taking them.

It’s quite possible that you will not know what step you should take at that point, but by declaring the new intention to make a quantum leap, busting out of the trap of doing things the way you’ve always done them and looking for new and better ways of is enough to start moving on. Start getting other people’s buy-in to your new vision. Ask empowering questions to gain support and build on each other’s ideas.

Your enthusiasm for making the shift and going after the intended outcome must come across powerfully and strongly. Whenever we go to make changes, people’s fears come up and they will want to stay in their comfort zones. Your desired outcome and commitment to it has to be huge so that people will be moved past their fears and do it anyway.