An effective way I’ve found to learn new strategies to market your business is through online newsletters and ezines. By subscribing to information from experts in the field, you can find new ways to market your business. One such expert is Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. Mr. Middleton explains how to get your story out to prospective clients below:
“When you start marketing, every prospect is a Stranger.
Your first marketing task is to create Affiliations with Strangers through groups and associations. Your next job is to get their Attention through a focused marketing message. Then you need to develop Familiarity with your prospects so they feel comfortable with you. And the next-to-last step is providing Information that educates your prospects about what you do and how you can help them.
The purpose of all these marketing activities is to get prospects up to “Second Base,” where they are ready to meet with you and explore doing business with you. Often just getting them to Familiarity or Information is enough. But not always.
Giving prospects more of an Experience or taste of what you do and what it means to them, is often necessary. With this Experience, a prospect is often ready to take the next step and engage in the selling process.It’s important to realize that a prospect doesn’t usually get very interested, let alone excited, about using your services, until they have a deeper sense of who you are and what you can do for them. Giving them an Experience accomplishes this. What kind of Experience am I talking about?A live presentation, an executive briefing, a telephone consultation, a teleclass, a video, or an audio recording are all effective mediums for providing this Experience.
The Experience step provides that last missing piece between Information and Second Base. And one reason is because it gives more of an emotional connection between you and your prospect. Note that most of these Experience-oriented marketing activities are interactive, not static. They are deeper and less superficial; they are dynamic, not one-dimensional. When a prospect has an authentic Experience of you, they are drawn towards you. They are more willing to take the next step.
The mistake I see all too often is that we get prospects up to Information, put them on an eZine or newsletter list and then wait for them to call us. Great if they do, but by adding that Experience step, you can convert a larger percentage of prospects into clients much faster.Are you stopping your marketing before you get to the Experience step? Big mistake. Build the Experience step into all your marketing and I predict you will attract more clients with a lot less effort.”
By Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. Please visit Robert’s web site at www.actionplan.com for additional marketing articles and resources on marketing for professional service businesses.
Robert’s ezines have greatly enriched my life and helped me to develop a marketing plan. You can do the same just by finding experts who have the same interests as you and subscribing to their blogs, newsletters or ezines. Most are willing to share with you their “secrets of the trade” and you’ll be on your way to new clients.
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