How to Eat a Marketing Elephant!

By Wendy Burge

A big challenge for small businesses is often having the time to stay on top of their marketing; the planning, prep time, and implementation. Marketing can be the white elephant in a business that needs to be addressed because it has the largest impact on the growth of the business. However, like the old saying goes, to eat an elephant you take one bite at a time. So, how do you eat a “marketing elephant”? By breaking it down into bite-size pieces to allow for more efficient and effective marketing strategies without overwhelm. The following steps will help you capture, tame, and maintain the marketing elephant in your business.
 
Bite 1. Commit to the end goal

What kind of growth do you want to achieve over a calendar year within your business?
Your objective will directly impact how and why you are developing a marketing plan. If you are in a start-up phase it may be as simple as acquiring a certain number of new clients, addition of client resources and services, and a specific dollar figure that gets you up and running. If you have been in business for a while, your goals may focus on higher profit -margins, positioning yourself as an expert within your industry, and leveraging your time more effectively. Understanding your goals also allows you to track and monitor how effective your marketing is in helping you reach them. Knowing what you want and, more importantly, why you want it, will increase your personal investment into making it happen.

Bite 2. Break it into quarters

How do you want to achieve your goals for each 90-day period? Once you know what you want, it’s just a matter of working backwards at making it happen. Take a 12 month wall calendar and break it into quarters; within each quarter work on a specific goal. If you want to increase your client volume early in the year, then over a 90-day period all your marketing focus can be on targeting this goal with special incentives, offers, and referral programs. Maybe you want an infusion of cash in your business at specific times of a year because your work is seasonal. Determining which quarter to focus your marketing to do this is, now, defined and, again, all efforts are then focused on making profits grow during a specific period of time. Working this way also allows you to be flexible and able to insert special announcements or last minute sales to increase your quarterly profits. As well, extending the launch time of a special marketing campaign can grow the anticipation and excitement of your customers about the upcoming promotion or special sale item which planning like this can create. Whatever your goal, you now have more power in making it happen when you take each quarter to develop, launch, and track your marketing efforts.

Bite 3. Map out notable events, holidays, and specials

Mapping out when to schedule events and sales promotions proves to be more effective when you plan ahead of time what you will need to create a ‘rolling’ campaign for an annual or semi-annual event. Furthermore, every quarter is filled with all kinds of marketing opportunities which you can take advantage of. The most obvious are seasonal holidays where marketing can be easily tied into the collective consciousness of the season. However, what if there are special events or days that are relevant to your industry? You can now build them into your marketing campaigns to help support your overall objective. Let’s say you have a chiropractic office and you know that in September the profession celebrates it’s ‘birthday’. This can create a great educational opportunity, as well as, a profitable one if leveraged as a special birthday savings to patients which schedule appointments on that day. Great days to honour for your business would be business opening anniversaries, owner or employee birthdays, special days important to your industry, and current or annual events that happen in your community. Have fun and get creative when it comes to making your marketing map!

Bite 4. Build in multiple contact channels

Knowing what kind of marketing campaign you are going to host and when it will occur over a quarter, now maximizes your marketing prep time. Instead of rushing last minute to pull something together, you can plan out a series of email, direct mailers, and phone or social network announcements ahead of time. This is where saving time and money becomes possible because you now have time working on your side. Direct mail pieces can be put together for the quarter by having them printed, labelled, and stamped ahead of time. As well, email marketing can be programmed ahead of time to automatically go out on specific times and dates which can co-ordinate with the direct-mail marketing pieces. If your marketing plan includes social network marketing there are applications that can now be used to schedule posting on your selected sites ahead of time, too. Leveraging time like this allows you to create more ways to get your message across effectively– instead of a one-time hit at the last minute. Furthermore, the more ways you can reach people and stand out in their busy lives the more success you will have with your campaigns.

 © 2009 Wendy Burge – Radiant Edge Consulting.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Radiant Business & Marketing Coach Wendy Burge publishes the On the Edge! weekly ezine–Where business, marketing, and lifestyle meet. If you’re ready to have radiant marketing, make more money, and have more freedom in your small business, get your FREE tips now at www.RadiantEdgeConsulting.com

Keep the Conversation On-going with a ‘Warm Prospect’ Marketing Campaign

by Wendy Burge

If you are like most solo-entrepreneurs, you attend anywhere from one to three events a month. That is a lot of networking with a lot of new business cards at the end of the month! However, while getting out meeting people is essential to growing your business, how many of those business cards end up in a pile on your desk without any follow up? I would wager that the percentage is high.
 
Why is this?
 
First, there are no established follow up marketing systems in place which promote continuing the dialogue with the warm prospects.  Second, there is lack of clarity in how your service might help the warm prospect right now.  And, third, time slips away and a few days or weeks have passed since the meeting, so now, it feels like a sales pitch if you call -and not wanting to sound pushy you don’t call.
 
While many people may stick to the hot leads for immediate business, they are leaving money on their desks by not continuing the conversation with the rest of the people they have met.  Implementing a follow up marketing strategy is a sure fire way to turn those new contacts into warmer prospects, clients, and referral generators. 
 
It is a known fact that it takes seven contacts before a person will purchase – so, consistency is the key. Often the reason people struggle maintaining on-going marketing systems is due to this point.  With a few simple steps, create your ‘warm prospect’ marketing campaign today and watch it work for you again and again-easily and effortlessly. As the old business adage states, “The fortune is in the follow-up!” 

Develop a Warm Prospect Marketing Campaign
 
Create a system to cater just to that new contact who thought you and your business were “interesting” – like the ones you meet at events, seminars, workshops, or the hundreds of other locations you have that dialogue “What do you do?” With a relationship foundation bound by their interest in you-well, enough to keep them speaking with you and in turn, offering you their business card build on this initial meeting and conversation by showing them you are the best person to call if ever they should need your services or products.  Incorporate into the system the three contact points they have on their business cards: physical mailing address, direct phone number, and their email address. Each of these can offer you three unique approaches to re-establishing your conversation with them.

Care to share then leverage with an offer

No one likes to be sold to unless they are ready to buy. But, sometime people do not know they “should buy” as a matter of being “ready”. Offer tips, articles of interest, and timely pieces that provide information for new leads to become better consumers when it comes to using your product or service in their life.  Develop short information pieces for direct mail and email using this simple formula: 

Create a Catchy Title
 ”7 Tips for Prepping Your Lawn In-Time for Spring”
“Stop Money from Slipping Through the Cracks – 5 Ways to Energy -proof Your Home”
“How to Save Time in Your Business Without Hiring Employees”
“Where to Find Lasting Love Just by Looking at the Stars”
 
Tell why they should know this information
“Pump-up the appeal of your home value and aesthetics with early planting and seeding.”
“Save up to 35% on your energy bills just by caulking the drafts around your doors and window.”
“Increase your productivity and profits by outsourcing to a virtual team.”
“Discover your long term love compatibility by assessing star charts and astrological signs.”
 
Show what they can do about it
This is where you would explain the steps, process, and or action they should take to make this a benefit for them. Keep this section brief and simple. Use short paragraphs and bullet points that are easy to read.

Leverage how to make it happen
In closing, your expertise can be offered if they should need help implementing any of the information you shared. Leverage this with a free consultation, free trial offer, free information package, free assessment, and or coupon. Furthermore, invite them to follow you on social network sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Linked-In to establish more trust by getting to know you better.
 
Automate your conversation

The gold within business cards is the amount of contact information they contain. Use this information to reach out and keep your conversation going by putting it on auto-pilot.  Thanks to the internet, there are numerous tools to help automate your follow up messages after initial set up.

Email
Auto-responders allow you to develop a series of emails that can be scheduled ahead of time for specific mailings dates. A series can last as long as you want – often up to a year out. (Talk about convenience.) Just add the new contact’s name and email address and it initiates the email series. Many programs also allow for particular information to be extracted about the email receiver so the email looks and reads more personal -like using first names.  Auto-responder programs such as Getresponse.com, Aweber.com, and Constantcontact.com allow you to create continuous email communication easily and with a “set & go” philosophy.
 
Direct Mail
In spite of the cost of traditional direct mail used to market, businesses should still blend-in some postal mailings as a component of their marketing puzzle. People do not like junk mail but will appreciate follow up cards, postcards, and letters. Sendoutcards.com is a great way to automate the direct mail process allowing you to upload your own hand-writing sample that can be imprinted with a message; you create, on any one of their thousands of templates for greeting or post cards. Once the warm prospect’s name and mailing address is uploaded in your account database, you can create a series of greeting cards for a more personal touch -again they can be scheduled up to a year out. Thank you cards, well wishes, invitations to special events, workshops, or seminars now have a personal touch. Best of all, card services print and send the cards out for you saving on time, as well.
 
Voice Broadcast
Reach more warm prospects with the ease of voice broadcasting. Create follow up specials, invitations, and announcements that can be generated to your warm prospect list over the phone. Voice broadcasting simply allows you to record your own message and have it distributed to your phone list on a scheduled date.  Create your account, set up your message, and broadcast it out to warm prospects.  Review your current phone systems. It may have a broadcasting option. There are numerous, resource companies online which also are able to meet your specific volume needs, as well, and many offer optional payment systems like IfbyPhone.com .

Now decide who is “hot” and who “is not” without losing all the great leads you have created while out networking. Just a little bit of front end effort can open the door for sales down the road by having established yourself as the expert to turn too when it’s time for that warm prospect to need your service or product.
 

 © 2009 Wendy Burge – Radiant Edge Consulting.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Conscious Business & Marketing Coach Wendy Burge publishes the On the Edge! weekly ezine–Where business, marketing, and lifestyle meet. If you’re ready to have radiant marketing, make more money, and have more freedom in your small business, get your FREE tips now at www.RadiantEdgeConsulting.com