Success Ingredients & Tools Archives

Do You Know Who Your Ideal Client Is?

by Kristine Carey | Success Ingredients & Tools

When I started my business, “everyone” told me I needed to know who my ideal client was. The pressure of figuring out the answer was intimidating; in those early days, my ideal client was anyone who had a pulse and would pay me. Needless to say, that turned out not to be a great answer.

Do you know who your ideal client is-that perfect person or entity you enjoy doing business with? Below are some questions to help you sort out who that is, and why it matters. Knowing the answer to these questions will help your business be more successful and help you sleep better at night, both desirable goals. Let’s dive in.

Laying Your Marketing Foundation

by Kristine Carey | Success Ingredients & Tools

Some marketing elements are foundational to your business. They function as the building blocks on which everything else is constructed. If you were building a house, this would be like pouring the concrete to make a solid foundation which you build everything else on top of.

These elements are things like having business cards, a good answer for what you do for a living, a website, a free giveaway, or a go-to speech. As a business owner, you’ll want to figure out what’s foundational for your business, and how to get those things done.

Figuring Out What’s Foundational to Your Marketing

What foundational items you choose is completely dependent on the type of business you have. In my case, most of the people I work with have a service based business, which lends itself to foundational items such as:

Are You Marketing the Right Stuff?

by C.J. Hayden | Success Ingredients & Tools

Jan is a graphic designer who was always struggling to find good clients. “I could find plenty of people who needed my services,” she recalls, “but they thought my rates were too high. I either ended up agreeing to work for less, or they found someone else. And then when I did get the job, they took forever to pay me.”

Like many graphic designers, Jan’s marketing emphasized her business identity work — creating a company’s logo, business cards, and other collateral, with matching design elements. Her primary audience was new businesses who were just getting started. But then Jan had a brainstorm.

“I realized that the clients I was marketing to were people who didn’t have enough money to pay me,” says Jan. “They were startups with tight budgets. And since they hadn’t been in business long, they didn’t place much value on working with an experienced, high-quality designer. They were just looking for the lowest price.”

Is Your Marketing Stuck for Words?

by C.J. Hayden | Success Ingredients & Tools

Many aspects of business are driven by numbers, but marketing often seems to be all about words. Whether it’s naming your business or brand, coming up with a tag line, or writing copy for your website, you probably spend a big chunk of your marketing time trying to find just the right words to use.

While you’re busy hunting for the perfect words, your business cards don’t get printed, your web copy doesn’t get posted, and your marketing emails don’t get sent. When you don’t have adequate marketing tools in place, you don’t market. No marketing; no clients. And all for the want of a few good words!

For major projects like a website, brochure, or postal direct mail campaign, hiring a copywriter may be a wise investment. But there are also steps you can take to improve your own ability to communicate about your business in writing. Here are four strategies you can use to break your marketing writer’s block without breaking the bank:

Why Your Marketing Recipes Need the Right Ingredients

by C.J. Hayden | Success Ingredients & Tools

I use a cookbook metaphor in my Get Clients Now! system to illustrate how to go about creating an effective marketing plan for a self-employed professional. An essential element of that plan is what I call Success Ingredients — the missing ingredients your marketing and sales activities need in order to be successful.

Why is this important? Let’s say you decide you’re going to market your business by attending live networking events in your area. You’re not sure where to begin, but you’ve just received an email invitation for a Chamber of Commerce mixer, so you decide to go.

Arriving at the mixer, you discover that everyone you meet is either a salesperson for a local corporation, or a solo professional who is looking for business from those companies. But you are (for example) an acupuncturist.

Your Market Niche: an Essential Key to Success

by C.J. Hayden | Success Ingredients & Tools

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.

Next Entries »

Do You Know Who Your Ideal Client Is?

Laying Your Marketing Foundation

Are You Marketing the Right Stuff?

Is Your Marketing Stuck for Words?

Why Your Marketing Recipes Need the Right Ingredients

Your Market Niche: an Essential Key to Success

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