When you have established a powerful presence in your market and you have a packaged product or service, the key to profit is your success in promoting your offer.
Promotion involves three key phases:
- Attracting interest from the whole marketplace
- Converting people who are already interested in you into subscribers and customers
- Retaining existing customers by building long-term relationships
Getting the balance right
Each of these stages is important and the balance between them can depend on what stage you are at with your business.
If you don’t have many customers, for example, you may need to put more effort into the first phase.
But don’t put all the emphasis on numbers. Even with a small number of customers, your best option is probably to focus on existing customers and contacts first.
Many businesses make the mistake of putting all their efforts into attracting new prospects. As a general guide, you should typically allocate your time approximately as follows:
- 60% on existing customers, building depth into the relationships you already have with them
- 30% on prospects, seeking to convert them into customers
- 10% on everybody else, aiming to turn them into prospects.
Choosing the right media
Though you need to target the different groups, you want to make sure your message remains consistent and that where possible, you can use the same messages for different audiences.
The key is to use as many of the following tools as possible to get your message across.
Email marketing
When you are building a list of email addresses of customers and prospects, an email marketing program should be a key part of your strategy.
Collecting the address is not enough on its own.
You need to keep in touch with them – providing regular valuable information – if you want to build a relationship.
This may be through a regular newsletter or by using stand-alone mailings, depending on circumstances.
But you need to continue delivering valuable information that cuts through the overload of other emails people receive.
Pay-per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising such as Google AdWords – which runs ads at the top and side of search pages – is one of the fastest ways to generate traffic to your website.
You can create a PPC advertising campaign and be generating traffic within minutes.
However it can be a very expensive tool if not handled carefully and it’s important to build the right expertise or get very good advice to avoid wasting a lot of money.
Offline marketing
In all the enthusiasm for online marketing methods, it’s important to remember that many of the best approaches are still offline.
Advertising, for example, is one of the easiest ways to communicate quickly with a large group as you remain in control of the message. However, it can be expensive, particularly if not carefully targeted.
Direct mail may be more effective as it can be tested on a smaller scale and is often easier to measure.
Postcards are a highly effective and often overlooked form of direct mail.
Publicity
Publicity is a great way to reach a lot of people with a limited budget.
The key is to have a message that is newsworthy. You need something fresh – something that people would want to know about.
This approach includes tactics such as press releases, event marketing, sponsorship, community involvement and media kits.
Videos and podcasts
Podcasting, which is a way of distributing your audio recordings via the Internet, and online video are still in their early days of development.
Since the advent of ‘YouTube’, a high proportion of Internet activity is video-related. Despite the huge increase in interest, the business potential is still largely untapped and, for those in at the start, it can be a very effective way of building your reputation.
Joint ventures and affiliates
In many cases, building relationships with businesses and websites that already have access to the customers you want is a fast way of building your own prospect and customer base.
Getting other people with existing customer lists to sell your product in exchange for a commission payment is a great way of building your sales quickly.
You can also expand your services and boost your income by offering other people’s products to your own customers as an affiliate.
Personal Branding
As we mentioned in the post on preeminent presence, you benefit greatly from getting your name and reputation better known.
You can use techniques such as speaking, writing articles, publishing special reports and networking.
In addition, the way you participate in your community and at events, and the way you present yourself to other people has a big impact on the way they perceive your expertise.
The way you talk, dress and present yourself will determine how much people respect your expertise.
These activities sometimes fall into the category of building presence but they also play an important role in promotion too.
Search Engine Optimization
In the past, many websites have relied for traffic on high placings for searches with keywords in Google and other search engines. While this is still important – especially for local businesses and those in clearly defined niches – it is a fast changing field where it can be hard to stay at the forefront.
Teleseminars and Webinars
Running teleseminars and webinars is a great way to give people a taste of how you can help them. They are cheap and easy to organize and can reach a large audience quickly. You can also be a guest at other people’s events, where you usually have the opportunity to promote yourself.
Teleseminars and webinars are a quick way to create products. If you record the event, it becomes a product you can sell.
Deciding which media to choose
That’s nine different marketing methods you could use for promoting your expertise.
The problem for many business owners is they either…
- Choose too few methods and don’t get maximum benefit
- Or they choose too many and don’t use any of them effectively
The key is normally to start by choosing four or five and getting good results from these before you add more.
In fact, the best results will often come from focusing on one at a time and adding more as you start to get results.
A good option is to choose one of these methods to focus on each month, and to make sure it is working effectively, before you move on to the next one.
So choose four or five of these that you want to use right now.
Take into account the tactics you’re using as part of your building your presence too.
Then decide which one you want to focus on initially, adding more as you discover what works and get good results.
In the final part of this series, we’ll look at the psychology you need for success.
Links in this post may be affiliate links. See our links policy.
PDF 
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }