Internet Marketing Consulting

I spotted a book by this title and realized how this perfectly describes the marketing strategy of most small and medium businesses I’ve dealt with.

When I ask business owners or those in charge of growing the business and ask them what their plan is to get more leads, to generate more business, they often begin to stammer. They have no plan.

When I ask them how they get their customers, they hesitate for a moment as they think back through their latest customers and say things like, well I was at a restaurant and a person overheard me talking about my business to my wife, a friend of mine at church asked me what I did and he became a client, one of our installers was talking to his cousin. It is usually an amazing collection of haphazard circumstances that lead customers to their business.

If you have not read the book The Emyth or The Emyth Revisited, you should stop what you are doing, go down to the local bookstore and not go to sleep until you have read through the book, twice.

It isn’t that the book is about marketing it is about systemetizing your business so it can do things better and better.

Then think about how you can systematically improve your lead generation.

Don’t take the approach that a prospect has to virtually threaten you at gunpoint in order for you to do business with them.

Hope isn’t going to cut it.

Here are some ideas:

• Advertise - both on the Internet and off the Internet
• Network - hang out at networking meetings or other places where prospective customers might hang out
• Give speeches - I’ve landed hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting contracts from giving free speeches
• Write articles - one of the best ways to attract customers is to have them read useful and interesting articles about your products or services, just don’t make them advertisements
• Use press releases - let editors know you have a new product and the problem it solves, you have a new special report which gives people new insight into issues they are dealing with
• Ask for referrals - your existing satisfied customers are likely to know others who would be interested in your products and services
• Use direct mail - with all of the marketers going online, the mailbox has become more effective. Find a list of prospects and send them a letter describing a problem that can be solved by your product or service.
• Resell or cross sell your customers - it is five times easier and cheaper to sell more things to your existing customers than it is to get a new customer…yet we often neglect them.

I can hear you now:

• We’ve tried that before and it doesn’t work
• I don’t know how to write
• I’m afraid of giving speeches
• I’m no good at sales
• I’m not sure what to say

If you want to listen to your excuses and take counsel in your fears, then you can go back to relying on ‘hope’ to get new customers.

If you want to grow your business and get out of the just breaking even mode, they you will have to make some changes.

If you personally can’t do any of these, then find someone who can and pay them to do it.

These strategies don’t cost an arm and a leg.

Not doing these things can cost you everything. You can lose it all if you don’t systematically work on getting new business.

Pick one or two strategies you think would work best for you and then either learn how to do it well or pay someone that knows how to do it well.

Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant said, “The haphazard is too important to be left to chance.”

Don’t leave the future of your business to chance, systematically find and close new customers.

You’ll be happy you did.

One of the biggest marketing opportunities is to create a continuous parade of marketing messages for your prospects and clients.

So often we make the mistake of sending out our best well crafted message one time and assume that is all we can do.

Think about how wrong that thinking is in your own experience.

How many times have you purchased something based on upon seeing the ad only once?

How many times did it take seeing the message over and over again before you bought?

That same experience is true of your target market as well.

Steady Stream of Messages

I attended a marketing seminar a number of years ago. There were 750 marketers attending this seminar. Each person had paid $5,000. The seminar organizer asked everyone to stand.

Then he asked everyone to sit down who had responded to his first email. A few people sat down. Then he asked those to sit down you who had responded to his second email. This went on until he had said 8th email.

He said, now take a look around the room and see how many people would not have come to this seminar had I not kept sending messages. Over half of the people were still standing.

It was a great marketing principle dramatically demonstrated. He would have made less than $1.75 million instead of making over $3.5 million had he stopped.

The Explanation Is Simple

When a person receives an email, gets a phone call or receives direct mail on any specific day, they may be interested but have something they consider more important going on in their life that day. So compared to their doctor’s visit, or their most important client’s presentation, or their vacation that starts the next day…they don’t take any action.

So if you only sent the message once, you would have lost.

But with a steady parade of messages, you’ll end up catching them when “life” is not in the way, or maybe the way you worded it that day, really hits home for them. Or it could be their boss just asked them to “take care of the problem” your product or service solves for them.

Like Fishing

Imagine wanting to become a great fisher. So you buy a brand new fishing boat. In addition you buy the latest fishing rod, best tackle, most sophisticated fish finder, identify the best fishing lake and hire the most successful fishing guide on the lake.

You get up at 4:00am, put the boat in the water and go to the hottest fishing hole on the lake. You cast out your lure, gently real it back to the boat making all the right movements, get it completely reeled in, then quit for the day.

Can you see how silly of an idea it is to not continue to cast?

Can you see how dumb it would be not to try a different lure?

Can you imagine not trying and trying and trying over and over again?

So why do we do that in our marketing program but wouldn’t even consider that when we are fishing?

Things to Consider When Sending Out a Continuous Parade

• Vary the message - at a minimum, change the headline or subject line
• Appeal to the different motivators that draw people to your product
• Vary the media - all of your contacts don’t have to be via email, or direct mail, or phone call
• Get help - knowing what to do doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to do it. A well professionally written message can improve responses by up to 1,600% giving you a lot more return for your marketing expense.
• Begin now - don’t wait until the “perfect time” there will always be a new version, a new product coming soon, a new breakthrough to announce. But if you wait till then to begin, you may not be able to afford those new breakthroughs. Sell what you have today.

If you would like help in planning and implementing your continuous parade call us today at 972-675-1413.

It surprises me how poorly we treat our most valuable company asset.
We wouldn’t dare buy an expensive piece of equipment for our business and then ignore it. If the machine required regular attention, we would put it on our calendar to regularly check it for oil levels and other maintenance requirements.

Yet there is an asset that each business consistently ignores.

What is this ignored asset?

Your customer list.

Businesses seem to focus so much on landing new customers they ignore their previous customers.

A good example of this is a client I had a few years ago. He was in the supplements business and was struggling. The company had been losing $12,000 per month for the last 18 months. They’d hired a high powered marketing consultant who didn’t know anything about small businesses.
When they would run short on funds the founder would hit up the investors for another round of funding.

I was brought in to help them raise more money. I’ve found over the years that money is rarely the real problem. That was the case here as well.
I asked them how many clients they’d had over the years. They had 160 active clients and 2,500 inactive clients. I asked when was the last time the inactive clients had been contacted…no one could remember.

I had two of the people in the company each call 20 former customers each day. Within 30 days they were more than breaking even and didn’t need emergency funding to keep the doors open.

In is important to regularly keep in touch with all of your current and former clients. It will pay big dividends. You should try to touch base with your current customers every 2 to 4 weeks and your previous customers every 4 to 8 weeks.

Each industry is different, but it is a good rule of thumb that 70% of your business should come from existing clients. If it is much less than that, you are leaving a lot of money on the table and under serving your customer base.

How do you nurture your customer list?

Regularly touch base with them. Do not try to sell them, but find out how they are doing.

• Call to find out what has been happening with them
• Send them a article that can help their business
• Call them about a helpful seminar you heard about
• Mail them a book or a whitepaper that would be of interest to them
• Send them an email about a helpful hint for their business
• Put them on your newsletter list either physical or electronic

One of my clients triples their daily sales every time they send out a newsletter to their list. The newsletter is not a sales pitch it is an informative article about the concerns the clients have.

For nearly 28 years, whenever I needed more consulting work, I would call up my list of former clients and ask them how they were doing. I would not ask if they needed help or try to promote my services. Instead after talking about their situation, they would say, I would like you to come over to see if you can help us out with a specific problem we are having. For every 10 phone calls I made, I end up with 2 or 3 appointments and land at least one new contract.
 

I think the single biggest weakness of most businesses is not having a systematic lead generation system.

The second biggest weakness is only have one lead generation system.

The most common lead generation system is word of mouth marketing. They rely on their friends or relatives to send them leads. While this is a very cost effective form of generating leads it is very haphazard and never seems to produce when you need it the most.

What are some lead generation techniques?

• Word of mouth marketing
• Networking
• Door to door
• Cold calling
• Referrals
• Classified advertising
• Pay per click ads
• Banner ads
• Endorsed mailing
• Endorsed emailing
• Newsletter sponsorship

The list goes on.

How do you start a lead generation system?

1. Pick one of the ideas from the list above or one of the dozens of other techniques. Let’s pick Google Adwords (pay per click)
2. Create a plan. Let’s pick the right keywords (find at least 200), create a landing page or more than one (a landing page is more likely to convert a new visitor than sending them to the home page), capture their name and email address, automatically send them weekly responses, every 5th issue urge them to contact you for one offer or another.
3. Test and track the performance. Once you’ve begun the implementation, track how well it is working. How much money do you have to spend per person that joins your list? Which ethical bribe converts more than the others? What percentage of your list contacts you or gives you more contact information like their phone number? How many of those does it take to close a sale? Test each element of the process, track the results and continually look for ways to improve each step of the way.
4. Add more lead generation systems.

If you think of your marketing program as a roof supported by Roman columns. Your roof is much stronger if you have more than one column. Your lead generation capabilities will be much stronger if you have more than one lead generation system working at the same time. That way if one of them slows down, your business will continue to operate.