Why you need a strategy for your marketing – part two

Recently I wrote a blog about why you need a strategy for your marketing and I explained two out of four possible strategies you can use. Click here to read the first blog about the first two strategies.

Here are the other two strategies you can consider.

3.       Selling Existing Services to New Clients

The third strategy you can consider looks at selling your existing services – the ones that you know work and are loved by your existing clients – to new clients with whom you’ve not worked before.

Your existing services have a proven track record. Hopefully you’ve got some great testimonials from your clients and case studies that show why clients came to you and how you helped them. These recommendations are what new clients will want to hear, before they work with you. Your existing clients know that you’re really good at what you do; your potential clients need to see, hear and read the proof. This strategy is about getting some help from your current clients, to help you sell your services to some new clients.

How can you sell your existing services and products to new clients?

4.       Selling New Services to New Clients

The final strategy is usually hardest – and can be the most expensive to carry out successfully. While it usually involves the most risk, strategy four can also bring you the biggest returns.

Why is it so risky and expensive? Because it’s about selling brand new products and services that have no track record, to potential clients who don’t know you, let alone trust you. You have no proof that your new products and services can do what you say they’ll do, because no one has bought them yet, or used them long enough to be able to see the results. This means that you can rely on existing clients to tell people how great you are.

In addition, this strategy is about finding new clients, with whom you have no reputation. They’ve not worked with you before – they might not even have heard of you – so selling them your expertise is going to be harder and require some really targeted marketing. If you’re up for a challenge and have already done everything you can or want to do with the first three strategies, then this one is for you!

Do you want to be brave and develop new products and services to sell to brand new clients?

How many strategies are you going to use to promote your business? Have you worked out which ones to use? Whichever ones you’re going to use, start at the top of the list and work your way down. Strategy one is the easiest and most cost effective, while strategy four is usually the most expensive and risky – even though it can provide the biggest returns. Even if you’re going to use a combination of strategies, start at the top of the list and work your way down it for the best overall results.

How not to do newsletters

Chantal

There are three secrets to publishing a great newsletter, that gets read and that will bring you business.

1. Planning – don’t do any. Just make it up as you go along, because otherwise you’ll waste lots of time. Write when you feel like it and publish whenever you want to. There’s no best time to publish, so just go with the flow.

2. Writing – the most important thing to put into your newsletter is news. Tell people about your new clients, your new products and services, your new clients and your new furniture. People will want to read about you and all your news.

3. Sending – send your newsletter to everyone you can think of. Send it to everyone you meet at networking meetings; buy lists of addresses; borrow lists from other people and create the biggest list you can.

I told people these secrets at a workshop a little while ago. They all wrote frantically as I went through the rules. And then I told them to tear up their notes! Why? Because you do need to plan your newsletter before you send it. You need to write content that focuses on your readers, not you. And you need to be really selective about who you send your newsletter to.

There’s a lot more to know about email newsletters, so I’ve crammed all my knowledge into a 40+ ebook that you can now buy. It’s full of advice, ideas and tips and will help you publish a really great newsletter that gets read and will help you grow your reputation and your business. It costs just £9.99 +VAT and is selling from my website like hot cakes. Click here to buy it yourself.

Taking the customer services journey

Chantal

The October issue of my email newsletter, Scribbles, was about sales and marketing, and which is more important. (Click here to read it.) I received some really interesting feedback to that question. One issue that came up a few times was that marketing will bring in the leads, sales will convert them and then the third element – great customer services – will help you keep the new clients.

So how do you develop and maintain great customer service? I’ve been doing some work with Joolz Lewis, otherwise known as the Corporate Hippy. We looked at the four stages of the customer journey – prospecting, selling, delivering and servicing.

In the prospecting we looked at who our prospective clients are. We’ve got a really clear of the types of people and businesses that we like to work with (coaches, consultants and trainers!) and explaining this to someone else confirmed the clarity. Do you have a clear picture of who your ideal clients are?

Selling is about turning your prospects into clients. We use a sales process that we developed last year with a sales consultant, Trese Rowe at Amplia. It uses consultative selling, which is all about asking questions and shaping one of your offerings to provide the solution to your prospective client’s problem. Along the way, the process helps you find out exactly if the prospect will be ideal to work with and helps you qualify which ones that will never work out. By the end of the process, if it all goes smoothly, you have a brand new client! Do you have a sales process that works that well?

The next stage is about actually delivering what you promise. It’s about starting work with your new client and this is the stage that we’ve been working on improving the most. Setting up a new website, blog or newsletter can take up to four weeks, if it’s done thoroughly, with great design and top quality copywriting. It’s a very detailed process where things can get missed or forgotten if you’re not careful. Not anymore! For every set up process we have – websites, blogs, newsletters and all the rest – we now have a set of emails that we send to our clients. Each one explains exactly what we’re sending them and what need from them. No more assumptions. No more letting things slip, everything confirmed in writing. A process like this means less time, more accuracy and clients who feel safe and supported. Do you have clearly outlined processes that fill your clients with confidence?

The final stage of the journey is all about looking after your clients in the long term, because winning them and delivering the first bit of work is easy compared to developing a long term relationship. This is about keeping in touch with your clients and always looking at how else you can help them. For us, this is about having regular meetings with clients, and at the end of each meeting setting the date of the next one. Right now we’re busy arranging meetings with clients who we’ve not seen for a while and it’s amazing how well the offer of meeting up for lunch goes down! When did you last take your clients out for lunch?

Our customer journey – and all the improvements we’re making – are on the wall of our office, on colourful flipchart sheets, so we can see how we’re doing. If you need help with improving your customers’ journey, get in touch with Joolz. If you need a really successful sales process, contact Trese. And if you want to meet up for lunch to talk about anything marketing related, let me know!

How to encourage newsletter signups from your website

Alice

This scenario arose from one of our new clients, which I would like to share with you. They migrated from their previous newsletter system to JAC, Appletree’s version, and consequently were issued with new code (website background instructions) for their new newsletter’s sign-up form to be placed on their website.

One of the main reasons for a sign-up form is to gain, what we call in the trade, ‘organic’ membership through your website. These are people who arrive on your website, like what they see, and want to find out more about this company through a regular newsletter. They offer their information willingly, and in some cases confirm their permission, to receive more information. (‘Inorganic’ membership is derived from purchased mailing lists, details from your email and filing system and from business cards obtained through networking, and is generally not considered permission based.)

These sign-up forms are a very common sight on websites, but it is the positioning of these forms to maximise the best reaction from your potential subscribers that counts.

Originally these clients had their newsletter sign-up form on a separate page, accessed by a link from their front page. This is usual for very large, complicated forms with many fields for the subscriber to fill in (totally unnecessary, all that is really required is the name and email address). This arrangement means the form is hidden away, all neat and tidy, but is not in a position to prompt a psychological reaction from your website’s visitor to sign up to your newsletter.

To encourage reactional sign ups, even whimsical ones, the form needs to be placed very prominently at the top of the first page (and all the other pages) of your website. If it is small and requires the minimum of information (see above), there is no reason why this cannot be possible. There is much debate about whether it should be positioned on the left or the right, depending on how the eye travels across the page and how the information should spring out to attract the reader, but the most important factor is that it should be ‘above the fold’ of the page, the area that is always seen and doesn’t need to be scrolled down to reach.

And of course, more subscriptions can be induced through an incentive, such as offering freebies: a free report, a free e-book, ten top tips that provide extremely valuable information the recipient cannot live without – think of something that would greatly appeal to your customer, and let their natural greed to obtain it take over by exchanging their contact details with you (so the information is not actually free after all, it just appears to be because no money has changed hands.)

Why we love working with positive people

Chantal

Earlier this week we spent a whole day with a new client, getting to know their team, what they’re good at and how they do it, so we can help them promote their business.

What makes their business really special is their enthusiasm for what they do and the passion they have for helping their clients. From 10am until 4.30pm we talked to different members of the team and every one of them came bouncing into the room, eager to tell us about their jobs and their clients. We made copious notes and learnt a huge amount about their business. By the end of the day we should have been exhausted; their energy kept us going and left us buzzing with ideas on the train journey home.

Can you bring that level of enthusiasm to what you do and your clients? Can you stay positive and energetic no matter what your clients ask of you and whatever they throw at you? If you love what you do, it will come across in your work and it will draw people towards you, asking to work with you.