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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.

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 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.

Are You Testing Your Marketing Strategies?

by Kristine Carey | Marketing Plans & Strategies

As a business owner, it’s natural to have lots of ideas about getting the word out about your offerings and to want to test out new ways. You’ve tried different marketing techniques, some of which you liked more, some that worked better, and some you’re convinced will work eventually. The question is, what’s really working, and how long should you test something to know?

Testing requires two things: curiosity and measuring. Curiosity to try something new, and measuring so you’ll know how well it’s working and whether it’s worth continuing to do. Here are several things to keep in mind when you’re testing different marketing strategies:

What Does Being an Introvert Have to Do with Your Marketing?

by Kristine Carey | Marketing Mindset

I was talking with a client recently about putting herself out there more, marketing-wise, and she mentioned how that made her uncomfortable and that she’s shy and introverted. That got me thinking about how often the traits of “shy” and “introverted” (vs. “outgoing” and “extroverted”) are perceived to be the same thing, when in fact, they’re not. You can be shy, yet outgoing, or vice versa. I know an extrovert who has a hard time initiating a conversation, and I’m an introvert who easily talks to strangers. How you approach marketing can be influenced by this perception, so it makes sense to take a closer look at how you operate.

Introvert vs. extrovert
The distinction between introverts and extroverts is how they recharge their energy.

Am I Doing Something Wrong?

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

My clients often ask me to help figure out what’s wrong with their marketing. The first question I ask is how much marketing they’ve been doing, since many failures have more to do with quantity than quality. But assuming you’ve been sufficiently active at promoting yourself, here are some other ways in which your marketing might need fixing.

There are three areas you should examine — the package of services you are offering, your marketing strategies, and your sales methods. In order to market and sell effectively, your package of services should meet the following requirements:

How to Show Off What You Can Do without Bragging

by C.J. Hayden | Success Ingredients & Tools

One of my coaching clients complained, “I’m really good at what I do. I shouldn’t have to market myself.” In fact, he is quite good at his profession, but the problem is that not enough prospective clients know about him. Like many professionals, he is reluctant to talk about his capabilities and accomplishments. “It feels like bragging,” he says. “Doesn’t it make me seem unprofessional?”

If thoughts like these often cross your mind, ask yourself this — who are the biggest names in your profession? In your line of work, who might be considered unquestioned experts, those with maximum credibility? Now, how did you get to know about those people’s work?

How to Make Prospective Clients Aware of Your Work

by C.J. Hayden | Filling the Pipeline

I’ll bet you do great work with your clients. But if your clients are the only ones who know what you can do, you won’t stay in business. We all hope that satisfied clients will refer us to their friends and colleagues, but clients aren’t always your best source of referrals. So, we need to let more people know how terrific our work is.

There are many ways to let prospective clients know about your work, But for most self-employed professionals, there are only four categories that make sense: networking, speaking, writing, and media. These are the best avenues for people to become familiar with not only you, but with how your work creates tangible benefits.

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