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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?

In Marketing, an Action Step Is Worth a Thousand Words

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

We self-employed professionals spend a great deal of our marketing effort on searching for the right words. We read books, take classes, and hire consultants to help us write copy for our marketing materials. Composing web pages, writing sales emails, and drafting ad copy consumes hours or days of precious marketing time.

It appears, though, that many professionals have mistaken all this wordsmithing for productive action.

Don’t get me wrong; the words you use to market yourself are important and deserve your attention. But crafting the message, and effectively delivering the message, are not at all the same thing.

Why You Need to Include Outreach Strategies in Your Marketing Mix

by C.J. Hayden | Filling the Pipeline

I’m a big fan of using attraction strategies to fill your marketing pipeline as a self-employed professional. Attraction-based tactics like blogging or publishing articles, posting on social media, and generating media publicity can all be effective ways to bring prospective clients into your sphere. Under the right circumstances, promotional events and advertising can work also.

And… attraction strategies alone are rarely enough to build a thriving business.

To Get More Clients, Rely on Your Strengths

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

It’s the time of year when we self-employed professionals often begin to look back at what we’ve accomplished in our business over the last twelve months, and judge our progress and results against what we intended back in January. What frequently results from a process like this is a catalog of everything you haven’t done, or have done wrong. But I believe it’s even more important to consider what you’ve done right this year.

My new client “Rhoda” had looked over her past year’s results and was feeling discouraged when we had our first coaching session. She’d hoped to get 10 new graphic design clients this year.

Hate to Sell? You Can Fix This

by C.J. Hayden | Sales Conversations

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?

Why You Shouldn’t Do What the Gurus Do

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

It’s only natural to emulate successful people. You’d like to copy their success, so it seems it would make sense to copy their approach to sales and marketing. But modeling your marketing after the gurus in your field may not get you where they are.

Simply put, the present situation of these highly successful people may be entirely different from your own. Gurus typically have plenty of money to spend, staff to help, a large in-house mailing list, many followers on social media, widespread name recognition, a suite of products and services to offer, and many years of completed work to draw from. If you don’t have all this in your business, trying to copy their marketing and sales approach may be a recipe for failure rather than success.

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:

Asking for Help Is Not Cheating

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Mindset

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

Stop Reacting and Start Pro-Acting to Market Your Business

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Mindset

If you’re answering calls, replying to emails and notes, responding to invitations, and receiving referrals and leads, it probably feels like you’re taking a lot of action to market your business. But it may be that a good deal of what you’re engaged in is actually RE-action.

Waiting to hear from the right prospects is nowhere near as productive as proactively taking steps to seek them out. And a stream of incoming communications can take up time and energy, but doesn’t always lead to closed sales.

Consider these suggestions for getting out of reaction mode and becoming more proactive in your marketing.

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.

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