If you’ve read my book Get Clients Now!, you’ve seen my personal definition of marketing: telling people what you do, over and over. The book also spills the beans about the secret to successful marketing: choosing a set of simple, effective things to do, and doing them consistently. Following these two pieces of advice will make your marketing both simpler and easier. You design a marketing plan, refine it, and then repeat it. Voila — clients! But there’s a problem.
Humans, especially entrepreneurial humans, get bored with saying and doing the same things over and over. We are always wanting to try something new, even when what we’re already doing is working for us. This is why we are so often tempted by shiny objects like untried marketing ideas: “Ooh, running Facebook ads! That sounds promising,” or “Hmm, getting a booth at the Chamber Expo… I should try that.”
It’s often much easier to keep your audience interested in your marketing than it is to keep yourself interested. Your audience doesn’t think about your business 24/7 like you do. When your marketing messages or outreach attempts show up on the radar of potential clients, they either respond or don’t. Either way, prospects promptly forget what you said or did.
You, on the other hand, remembering all your marketing, may find yourself feeling as if you’ve called, emailed to, posted for, advertised at, or networked with the same people too many times. Even when your own experience and every expert you trust tells you that this is exactly what you need to do in order to land clients.
How do you resist this creeping dissatisfaction with tried-and-true marketing so you can keep doing what works? Try one of these five stick-to-the-plan strategies.
1. Find companions for your journey. When you have pleasant company, any activity becomes easier. Having a business buddy or being part of a success team will offer you camaraderie and benevolent peer pressure. Working with a business coach gives you access to informed perspective and skilled support. Any of these options will provide accountability to help you carry out your intentions.
2. Notice tactics that work, then change their elements. Let’s say you’ve been following up with prospects by placing phone calls, and while this seems to produce results, it feels repetitious to keep asking people if they’re ready to become clients yet. What if you keep making the calls, but change up what you say? Check out some of these 44 ways to follow up.
Or, if you’ve been meeting prospects at networking events, devise an awesome new self-introduction. Maybe social media has been a useful stay-in-touch tool. If so, develop some compelling new content to share. Any marketing tactic can be reinvented in this way, without changing the tactic itself.
3. Reclaim your inspiration for doing business. It’s awfully hard to persuade folks to become your client if you aren’t enthusiastic about making the request. Maybe you’re not excited about marketing, but what about your business? What was your inspiration when you first started out? Write down your vision of the business you want, or if you’ve written it down before, re-read it. Do this often. Allow your own words to re-inspire you.
4. Offer yourself rewards. Some parts of marketing are tedious by nature. Like combing through contact lists to identify prospects for a new offer. Or writing multiple tweets to promote blog posts. When you have dull tasks to accomplish that you feel can’t be delegated, devise special rewards for getting them done. Grant yourself a night at the movies, breakfast at a neighborhood café, or another simple pleasure you rarely indulge in.
5. Discover what interests you most and do more of it. Of all the different ways you’ve tried to market yourself, which one did you find most interesting? Was that approach at all effective? If so, consider dropping a tactic you’re using that doesn’t interest you — even if that tactic is working — so you can focus on an approach you’d enjoy more. Intentionally choosing to do what feels good will reduce the appeal of unexplored new ideas.
Once you have a plan that seems to be working for you, find ways to keep your interest level in your own marketing high. If you let yourself become bored or dissatisfied, the salespeople waving shiny objects like ad campaigns and trade show booths will close in. Let the folks without a plan be the ones who get misled by these offers. You, reader, are smarter than that.
