How Easy Can Marketing Be?
I often speak to groups of self-employed professionals and creatives about what works and what doesn’t to get clients. We talk about the effectiveness of active, relationship-oriented strategies like networking online and in person, building referral partnerships, speaking to groups of potential clients, and following up persistently with interested prospects.
Hate to Sell? You Can Fix This
Do you love your business but hate the selling part? Whether it’s calling prospective clients on the phone or writing persuasive emails and web copy, most self-employed professionals say that selling is the element of their business they dislike the most.
If it was possible to sell without having that feeling of discomfort in your gut, or those sweaty palms and increased heart rate, would you be willing to make a change?
Video: Being a Business Owner During Uncertain Times
If you’re a business owner right now, chances are you’re dealing with uncertainty. Whether it’s a lot or a little, uncertainty can be disconcerting!
While doing business during uncertain times is a bit like chasing an ever-changing landscape, there are things you can do to make things easier.
Does It Feel Too Hard to Market Your Business Right Now?
A year of pandemic life has taken its toll on all of us. At February’s Pandemic Office Hours, our virtual room full of self-employed professionals described feeling stressed, or even immobilized, about marketing their businesses. Since then, I’ve been noticing reports everywhere about how much this past year of stress, uncertainty, and grief has sapped our collective focus and motivation.
Your Market Niche: an Essential Key to Success
How important is it that you have a clearly defined market niche for your professional services? Can’t you simply make yourself available to work for anyone who might need you? Doesn’t having a niche limit you to serving only a small portion of possible clients? Why would you want to rule out any possible sources of business? Discovering the answers to these questions can have a powerful impact on the success or failure of your business.
When you have a market niche, it defines either your target market — who you wish to target as prospective clients -– or your professional specialty –- the services you specialize in providing within the broader scope of your profession. The most effective niches define both these elements.
Three Ways Persistence Helps Your Marketing
Never say die!
This familiar battle cry speaks to what’s required if you are in business for any length of time. Having a business requires persistence: persistence in showing up to do your work every day, persistence in delivering the value your company offers, and persistence in your marketing.
How persistent are you, marketing-wise?
Seven Ways to Build Marketing Relationships
“Relationship marketing.” “Get business by word of mouth.” “People like to do business with people they know, like, and trust.” You’ve heard these adages many times before. But what does it really mean to build relationships with people in order to sell them something?
Does it work to make personal connections with a hidden agenda? How do you go about creating relationships for marketing purposes without feeling sleazy? Here are seven tips for building marketing relationships you can feel good about.
1. Start with the best audience. When you choose the right target market for your business, relationship-building becomes an enjoyable process. Your ideal clients and referral sources are people you already enjoy spending time with.
Is Procrastination Holding Back Your Marketing?
When you look at your marketing to-do list, do many of the items on it look all too familiar? Have entries like “call Dolores Sanchez” and “follow up with Wallingford Corp.” been copied from a previous week? Putting off unappealing tasks may be human nature, but for a self-employed professional, procrastination can be deadly.
Delays in contacting a prospect can lose the business to the competition. Failing to get the word out about an upcoming event may forfeit dozens of opportunities. When prospects don’t hear from you for a while, they forget you exist. Wasted marketing time can never be recovered. By the time you realize you might not make your sales goals for the month, quarter, or year, it may already be too late.
Watch Out for Time-Wasting Prospects
You’ve got a likely prospect taking your calls and asking you questions. It seems like you’re home free, and a sale should be imminent. But hold the phone. The calls, emails, and questions continue. Maybe a meeting or two as well. Time passes, and the sale seems no closer than before. Welcome to the world of time-wasting prospects.
Here are four kinds of prospects to be on the lookout for, and six ideas about what to do when you find them.
1. Looky-Loos
Looky-loo prospects are the ones who are “just looking,” although they often don’t reveal that important fact. They have no real intent to buy, at least not now. They will browse your website and call or email with a dozen questions, just out of curiosity. If you do business in a public office, hold open houses, or give free demonstrations, they will stop in and take up your time.
Making Time for Marketing and Selling
“I don’t have time to market my business.” It’s a common complaint from self-employed professionals. When you are the only one who can serve your clients, manage the business, keep up in your field, and perform all the sales and marketing functions, time becomes the most precious commodity you have. How can you find time for marketing with so many other important priorities?
You have many time management techniques at your disposal, of course. You can defer some tasks or delegate them to an assistant, chunk down big projects into smaller steps, and set aside blocks of time on your calendar for making calls, writing emails, or updating your social media channels. But perhaps you have already tried all those approaches and discovered that time is still scarce.
