Three Elements You Need for a Successful Marketing Foundation
To lay a good foundation for your marketing and your business, you need essential tools and skills. In the Get Clients Now! program, we call these elements Success Ingredients. These are fundamentals that will make your marketing easier, and ensure your business is around for the long run.
Below are three different types of Success Ingredients. Having these elements in place will make your marketing activities more effective, leading to more clients and more overall business success.
4 Ways to Market in Your Sleep
As a self-employed professional, the demands of marketing your business have the potential to give you many sleepless nights. It often seems that the list of things to do is endless, and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to market your business, serve your clients, run your office, and keep up in your field.
To Get Clients from Writing and Speaking, People Must Know What You Do
A few months after I started my business 25-plus years ago, I was delivering a workshop one evening on an ideal topic to attract likely clients. And sure enough, the room was full of self-employed professionals who were excellent prospects to hire me as a business coach. I presented what I thought was a value-packed program, and my audience seemed to be learning useful material from me. “I’m sure to land some clients from this,” I thought.
After the workshop, a woman came up to me hesitantly. “This class was very helpful,” she said. “But I’m wondering… would it be possible for me to hire you to work with me personally? I don’t know if you do that.”
Not Feeling the Marketing Love?
Ever have one of those days when you’re just not feelin’ it? You can’t seem to get yourself to do any marketing. The marketing you’re doing doesn’t feel inspiring. You’re not sure where to start to make things different. The thoughts swirling around in your head are making you suspect you might be a business fraud. Sounds like you’re not feeling the marketing love.
The good news is you can do something about it.
To minimize the days where you’re feeling out of sorts, marketing-wise, allow the following to serve as inspiration to help you feel the love again.
Asking for Help Is Not Cheating
A desperate self-employed professional contacted me recently. “I need to get clients immediately,” she said. “I’ve been trying for months with no success, and I’m almost out of money.” When I asked her how she had been marketing herself all this time, she gave me the following list of what she had been doing:
- Attending networking events where she met people, introduced herself, and exchanged business cards
- Launched a brochure-style website describing her services
- Started a Facebook page and began posting promos for her business and links to content she found interesting
- Printed some flyers and posted them on bulletin boards around town
Not an Extrovert? You Can Still Market Your Business
It seems that a considerable amount of marketing and sales advice to self-employed professionals is aimed at extroverts. “Go to networking events and meet new people,” the authorities say. “Speak in front of groups.” “Call people up and chat with them.”
If you are an introvert, these experts might as well be telling you to fly to the moon. What if you don’t enjoy public gatherings, dislike being the center of attention, and hate to call strangers on the phone? Can you still do well at personal marketing?
Can Planning Your Marketing Be Simple?
Planning your marketing can be as easy as sitting down with a pen and paper (or your keyboard) for an hour. What’s that you say — sounds too good to be true? What if this were the truth: your marketing is easy and simple, and creating a plan for it is simple, too. What could be possible for your business from that viewpoint?
When you have a marketing plan, things become easier. Easier because you know what you’re going to do, you have a plan, and you just follow it. You don’t need to think about it. Thinking is often the thing that gets in your way the most. As much as your human brain is an asset, it can also be a hindrance when it comes to getting things done.
Marketing: The Bottom Line Your Business Needs You to Pay Attention To
Your business has multiple aspects to it, things that need attention. Some are more important than others, some more fun than others. There’s one bottom line that needs consistent attention no matter what though, and that’s marketing.
Marketing can have vague connotations: does that mean posting fliers, or hiring a consultant? Does it mean going to mixers, or investing in social media? It could mean any or all of these marketing strategies; while it’s important to find the right marketing strategies for you and your business (you can read more about that here), what’s most important is that you do some kind of marketing on a regular basis. If not, your business will soon be in trouble. The question is, what’s the best way to do that?
Want Results from Networking? Follow Up!
No one works for themselves without hearing about follow-up. However, in the context of networking, do you know what it means to follow up, whether or not it really matters, and why?
Here are the short answers to these questions:
- What does it mean to follow up? It means you contact people you’ve met.
- Does it matter? Yes.
- Why? Because in many cases, if you don’t follow up, the other person won’t either, and you’ll have lost a potential avenue for business, a referral partner, or the opportunity to serve the world with your business services. You’ll have also lost a chance to truly connect with someone.
It’s easy to think you’ll go to a networking event, talk with a few people, hand out your card, and they’ll call you when they’re ready to do business. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t work that way.
The Secret to Taking Care of Clients is Tracking the Numbers
Taking good care of your clients means taking care of your business, and one of the simplest paths to taking care of both your clients *and* your business is by tracking the numbers.
