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By Ken Lizotte CMC
Beyond the usual blah-blah marketing advice of putting up a website, printing out a stack of business cards and designing a lavish 4-color brochure lives a set of four marketing techniques that are so little-used they can for all practical purposes be labeled “secret.” Yet those who regularly practice them consistently reap such benefits that they soon wonder how marketing could be conducted any other way.
Here are the four “secrets” which when practiced over a period of time will catapult your business to new levels:
- Stay connected. When one’s aim at a professional gathering is to merely pass out as many business cards as possible, then go home and forget about it, such time spent will be wasted. Instead, seek qualitative new connections, enjoy the interactions, then devise ways to stay connected. First, send a “nice-to-meet-you” email to your new contacts the very next day, telling them you’re putting them on your e-list, and inviting them to do the same. Over time, staying connected allows a new connection to fall into such productive categories as an ally, a partner, a referral source or—gasp!—a new client!
- Use emails strategically. As you plug your new connections onto your e-list, find ways to stay connected so as to remind them what you’re all about and that you’re still around! Try sending an e-newsletter, or alert them of a new service, or let them know when you win an award or when you publish an article. If you don’t take such initiatives, your connections will easily forget you. Keep thinking up news about you to report to them so this will not happen.
- Publish articles! One powerful marketing tool and excuse to stay connected is to write and publish articles, making them available for free to those on your e-list. Published articles affords three big benefits: a) they help you flesh out and organize your ideas; b) they promote to the reader some core expertise or knowledge or message that displays why you are worth hiring; c) they elevate your professional credibility since a third-party entity has judged your ideas worthy of publication.
- Speak to targeted groups. The impact of public speaking brings us full circle in that communicating your ideas to an audience of targeted individuals inevitably causes at least a few of them to want to know more about you and your ideas. Always tell your audience you would like to have their business cards so you can stay in touch. Something much appreciated by an audience is an offer to email them notes of your talk so that they can later review a full outline of what you have to say. Of course, you can then send everyone a “nice-to-meet-you” email the next day (see secret #1) and thus keep the whole loop humming.
If you heed these four secrets, you will mine marketing gold that will surely make a difference in advancing your sales and bottom line. Using this method, I sometimes field calls from prospects that had been on my e-list for years, admitting that not until recently did they have any need for my services. Because I had stayed connected with them, I was the only logical service provider for them to call. The selling process is then much easier since such a pre-qualified prospect has typically come to know you, already sold on both your value proposition and your capacity to deliver it. The only question they may have in mind then is can they afford you?
Try this method for the next few months and your business development efforts will never be the same again!