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Break Through to Marketing Success

Let’s face it, many self-employed professionals treat self-promotion as a necessary evil. They know they have to do it, but they just don’t like it. Professionals often say, “I love my work, but I wish I didn’t have to keep finding clients.” They describe the process of marketing as distasteful, frustrating, intimidating, and just plain scary.

Take a look at your own beliefs about self-promotion. How do you feel about it? Is it something you accomplish without too much effort, or do you put it off at every opportunity? When you tell someone what you do and ask for that person’s business, is it easy for you, or do you find it difficult and unpleasant?

Seven Ways to Build Marketing Relationships

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

“Relationship marketing.” “Get business by word of mouth.” “People like to do business with people they know, like, and trust.” You’ve heard these adages many times before. But what does it really mean to build relationships with people in order to sell them something?

Does it work to make personal connections with a hidden agenda? How do you go about creating relationships for marketing purposes without feeling sleazy? Here are seven tips for building marketing relationships you can feel good about.

1. Start with the best audience. When you choose the right target market for your business, relationship-building becomes an enjoyable process. Your ideal clients and referral sources are people you already enjoy spending time with.

In Marketing, One Size Does Not Fit All

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

Imagine that you went shopping to buy yourself a new shirt, and the salesperson offered you a garment three sizes too big, saying, “This is one of our most popular colors.” Or showed you a shirt in a child’s size, telling you, “This style is new this season.” You’d probably think the salesperson was crazy, right? And you certainly wouldn’t trust his or her judgement about what shirt might be right for you.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing goes on with marketing all the time. Without asking you a single question about your situation, an acquaintance describes the latest marketing idea they heard about, and urges you to try it. Or a workshop leader who knows nothing about your business explains the best way to market your services and recommends you adopt it. Or a consultant advises you to use a specific marketing approach with almost no understanding of your business.

You Already Know How to Market… So Why Don’t You Have All the Clients You Need?

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

For the past twenty-plus years, I’ve been asking self-employed professionals to tell me the most effective ways they know to get clients. No matter where and when I ask this question, their answers are always the same: “networking,” “referrals,” “word of mouth.” These are the right answers. The professionals I ask know this to be true.

But then I ask a follow-up question: “What are you doing right now to market yourself?” And what I hear back is surprising, given the answers to my first question. More than half the people I ask tell me their primary focus is on something other than those answers. They’ll tell me they are building a new website, or mailing out postcards, or running pay-per-click ads, or cold calling strangers, or launching a Facebook page, or exhibiting at an expo, or posting promos on Twitter.

Want Results from Networking? Follow Up!

by Kristine Carey | Following Up

No one works for themselves without hearing about follow-up. However, in the context of networking, do you know what it means to follow up, whether or not it really matters, and why?

Here are the short answers to these questions:

What does it mean to follow up? It means you contact people you’ve met.
Does it matter? Yes.
Why? Because in many cases, if you don’t follow up, the other person won’t either, and you’ll have lost a potential avenue for business, a referral partner, or the opportunity to serve the world with your business services. You’ll have also lost a chance to truly connect with someone.

It’s easy to think you’ll go to a networking event, talk with a few people, hand out your card, and they’ll call you when they’re ready to do business. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t work that way.

Come in from the Cold: Warm Up Your Marketing

by C.J. Hayden | Sales Conversations

Do you feel uncomfortable trying to market your business to strangers? Most of us do. Making cold calls, knocking on doors, or attending networking mixers where you don’t know a soul can be challenging or even painful. Happily, cold approaches like these are not all there is to marketing. In fact, you may never need to use them at all.

Perhaps you already know this, and have been marketing your business in other ways. For example, launching a website, exhibiting at trade shows, running pay-per-click ads, distributing flyers, sending emails and letters to people who don’t know you, or posting promos on social media. But all of those approaches are “cold” as well, and many of them can be expensive.

Whenever you are trying to start a marketing conversation with a stranger — with no introduction, referral, or shared connection to help you — it’s a cold approach, whether you make it on the phone, in a room, by mail, or online. And cold approaches, across the board, are less effective than warm ones.

Are You Offering a Commodity or a Unique Solution?

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

As a self-employed professional, the last thing you want is for clients to perceive you as a commodity. Commodities are products or services that are considered to be basically the same no matter who provides them. When your target audience thinks of you as just another financial planner, graphic designer, life coach, personal trainer, or psychotherapist, you must work far too hard simply to get them to remember you until they need you.

Here are five ways you can position the solution that you offer as distinctive enough to attract and hold your prospective clients’ attention, AND convince them that your solution is the one they need.

Seven Ways to Get Clients to See You as an Expert

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

As a self-employed professional, the view that prospective clients hold of you is crucial. What you want is for clients to see you as an expert. How clients perceive your level of expertise will influence not only whether or not they hire you, but also how much they’re willing to pay, how easy it is for you to close the sale, and whether clients award you big projects or small ones.

It may feel like you, the person to be hired, don’t have much power over clients’ perceptions. You may believe that clients will make their own decisions about how — or whether — to work with you, regardless of what you do. But that’s not true. There is much you can do to influence how potential clients view you before you ever have your first conversation with them. Here are seven ways you can influence clients to perceive you as an expert.

The Write Way to Make Clients Believe in You

by Kristine Carey | Writing & Publicity

People need to believe in you in order to do business with you. They must believe that you know what you’re doing, that your services are on the up-and-up, that working with you will benefit them, and that investing in you is worth their time and money. Just how do you do that, though — build your believability?

One of my favorite ways to do this is through writing.

Writing is a vulnerable act; it requires you to put yourself out there and share your expertise in public. Even if your articles “only” appear in the church bulletin, you’re still going to unmask yourself, which is actually a good thing for your business.

Your Marketing: One-to-One or One-to-Many?

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

It seems like there’s a new way to market your business appearing every five minutes here in the 21st century. How can self-employed professionals know which marketing methods will make the most sense for them?

When evaluating possible ways to market your business, it can help significantly to apply a quick test — is the marketing method you’re considering “one-to-one” or “one-to many?” Here’s how they’re different.

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