Marketing Plans & Strategies Archives - Page 4 of 10

What Are the Most Effective Marketing Strategies for Self-Employed Professionals?

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

I recently ran across a 2017 study by FreshBooks Cloud Accounting asking 1,700 self-employed professionals, independent professionals, and small business owners what they found to be the most effective marketing strategies. All the participants had fewer than 10 employees, and 77% of them were solopreneurs, making this group a close match to the readers of this blog.

I was pleased to see how closely their answers aligned with the list of Effective Marketing Strategies in Get Clients Now! and the advice Kris Carey and I give our clients, students, and readers. Here’s what these self-employed professionals named as “highly effective” marketing strategies:

10 Questions to Kick Off Your Marketing Year

by Kristine Carey | Marketing Plans & Strategies

What dreams and goals do you have for your business at the beginning of this new year? As you ease into January, take time to set the stage for a great year to come: great marketing, great sales, and great clients. Ask yourself the questions below to help you reflect and plan, and get ready for good things to happen!

– How much business do you really want? What would be new and different for you if you had that level of business?
– What worked best to bring you clients last year? How can you do more of that in the year to come?

Are You Marketing More or Less Than You Think?

by Kristine Carey | Marketing Plans & Strategies

Unless you’re literally hiding under a rock, if you’re in business and have any clients at all, you’re doing something that qualifies as marketing. People tend to fall into two camps: those who are doing more marketing than they realize, and those who are doing less than they think.

Which camp do you fall into?

As an aside, for our purposes we’re defining marketing as getting the word out about your business, it’s services and benefits, to potential customers so that you can have a sales conversation with them and hopefully close the sale. Marketing creates opportunities to have sales conversations.

Is Your Marketing Approach Incomplete?

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

Trying to implement a marketing approach that has critical elements missing is like trying to make a pie without the ingredients to form the crust. Or in some cases, without an oven to bake it in!

There are four essential elements every successful marketing approach must have:

Strategy – What are you trying to do, and why?
Tactic(s) – How will you do it?
Tool(s) – What will you need to do it well?
Medium or Venue – Where will you do it?

If any one of these ingredients is missing, your approach will be less effective than it could be, and in many cases, will fail completely. Here are four examples to show you where an incomplete marketing plan can go wrong.

Four Consequences of Using the Wrong Marketing Strategy

by Kristine Carey | Marketing Plans & Strategies

Perhaps these questions sound familiar:
What happens if I use the wrong marketing strategy?
Is there such a thing as a wrong marketing strategy?

These questions are common if you’re a service-based business looking to market your services; it’s easy to think you’re doing marketing all wrong.

And maybe you are.

While there is no real right or wrong way when it comes to marketing your business, there is such a thing as choosing a marketing strategy that isn’t the right fit for you and your ideal customers – strategies that can make marketing feel harder – and this can have negative consequences.

Marketing or Selling: Which Is More Important?

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

A question I often get from clients and students goes something like this: “I’ve been collecting marketing ideas… and I have a drawer full! I also have a stack of promising leads I’ve accumulated. And I know it’s important to stay visible, so I keep marketing, but then I just end up with more names in the stack. How do I prioritize all this?”

If you’ve ever wondered something similar, you may have lost sight of a very important truth — the way to win the business game is not to collect the most leads; it’s to make the most sales.

How to Build Trust with Potential Clients

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

“But how do I get them to trust me if they don’t know me?” my client asked.

“Exactly,” I replied. “They have to get to know you in order to trust you. Either that, or they need to be referred to you by someone they know and trust already.”

Client: “So, you’re telling me that making cold calls and running ads are a waste of time and money?”

Me: “Yes. Unless you use those tactics to open the door to your prospective clients getting to know and trust you. If you expect to move from a call or an ad to a quick sale, you’ll be disappointed.”

Marketing: The Bottom Line Your Business Needs You to Pay Attention To

by Kristine Carey | Marketing Plans & Strategies

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?

How to Figure Out What Marketing Strategies to Use

by Kristine Carey | Marketing Plans & Strategies

Maybe you’ve been there: you’re talking to someone in your industry at a mixer and they ask you if you’re using [insert name of the latest trend here] to market your business. Or you’re talking to a seasoned business owner and they say that “everybody” in your industry uses [a certain marketing strategy], making it sound mandatory. You stand there frozen: a) not knowing if those strategies are right for you; or b) wondering what you did wrong, because you tried those strategies and they didn’t work. You’re left wondering, how do you figure out what marketing strategies are the right ones for you?

Marketing along the Path of Least Resistance

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

Do you find sales and marketing to often be a struggle? It doesn’t have to be that way. The most successful professionals make it look easy because they have found a way to market themselves that is effortless. Perhaps you have tried to copy what those successful people were doing, and it didn’t work for you. Here’s why.

Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. You have to find your own unique path, the one that works best for you and your business. To make marketing and selling easy, that path needs to be the one where you will encounter the least resistance — both from the marketplace and from inside yourself.

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