CONGRATULATIONS. If you’ve followed the plan laid out in this book, you now have your marketing system up and running. I hope that you’ve been motivated as a result of what we’ve covered and that a lot of the uncertainty around marketing has disappeared.
However, there are a lot of people who like to read a book all the way through before they dig in and get started. If that’s you, I hope you’re excited about beginning. Without meaning to state the obvious, reading about marketing is a bit like reading about swimming. It doesn’t really do you any good until you actually jump into the pool.
Which brings me to a couple of important points.
The first is what I alluded to a moment ago. One of the biggest obstacles you’ll face is actually implementing the system I’ve been discussing. It’s terribly easy to put down this book, saying to yourself, “Those were some good ideas.” While I’m glad you found the ideas interesting, I doubt that’s the reason you invested in this book in the first place. My guess is that you did so because you were tired of being one of the “best-kept secrets” in your particular field. You probably have also grown tired of continually chasing after clients. Both of those frustrations are very real and quite common—especially for those who don’t have a marketing system.
Perhaps you tried to implement a marketing program in the past and gave up. Again, this is common and usually occurs when one focuses on activities rather than a holistic system. Hopefully by now, you see how the components of attracting new prospects and converting them into actual paying clients fit together. I also hope you see that it doesn’t have to be complicated, take a lot of time, or cost a lot of money.
But while realizing all these things is important, actually doing something is crucial. Getting started simply requires that you go back to Day One and begin to work on the tasks that I’ve given you. And if it takes you more than a day—so what? The important thing is that you’ve started. You’re taking action.
One other thing I want to share with you.
If you make the decision to implement a marketing system, you need to also make the commitment to have marketing be a part of your life for as long as you run or own your business. This is especially true in the early stages for the first-time marketer. There will be an enormous temptation to quit. Even though new prospects are signing up for your free offer, none may have turned into paying clients.
You need to resist that temptation to quit.
If you are serious about implementing a marketing system, you need to make a commitment to keep at it for a minimum of six months. That will enable you to attract enough prospects so that the law of large numbers starts to work in your favor. If you only have three prospects, you’re putting enormous pressure on your marketing system to convert that small number. What never works is when someone tries this program for 30 days and then shuts it down because they didn’t get immediate results.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen far too many entrepreneurs, consultants, and small business owners get discouraged and quit at precisely the time when I just knew they were about to turn the corner and achieve real success.
If you’re not attracting consistent streams of new prospects after six months, then it means you’ve either got the wrong offer or perhaps you’re marketing to the wrong niche. If that’s the case, I’d recommend changing one or both of those variables. The system that I’ve described in this book is a tried-and-true marketing method that’s been working for businesses since the Direct Marketing Association was formed way back in 1917.
The beauty of this marketing system is that you can build your business to whatever size you want. Not only that, but also for me and for many of my clients, the greatest benefit is being able to pick and choose who we decide to work with. As anyone who has ever had a jerk as a client knows, this is huge. I think that one of the things I most cherish about having a marketing system is that I approach every potential client with the mindset of “I’m interested in their business, I might even want their business, but I don’t need their business.”
Remember, how people behave during the sales process is a free preview of how they will behave as a client. If they’re jerks during the “getting to know you” sales stage, there’s no reason to think they’ll be different if they become clients. Once you have your marketing system in place, every day new people enter your system, so the pressure to work with anyone who just has money goes away.
There’s a desperation that shows up when you have only one customer in your pipeline and you need the business. People pick up on that, and often either they use it to negotiate a lower price or, sensing desperation, they don’t hire you at all.
I remember sitting next to a partner of a very large international consulting firm who said, “The one bad thing about the consulting business is that I don’t particularly like my clients.” That’s sad.
I would have to say that I genuinely like all my clients. That’s not to say they aren’t frustrating at times, but I thoroughly enjoy working with them. As I alluded to earlier, I turn down way more business than I accept, and it’s all because I have this marketing system working behind the scenes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
From purely a financial perspective, it’s possible to use the One Week Marketing Plan and take your income from $100,000 to $200,000, or from $200,000 to $500,000 or even more. For most of us, however, there’s a plateau effect when it comes to money. Once you’re able to afford a certain lifestyle, working with interesting and fun clients becomes increasingly important. But whether you’re primarily interested in more money or better clients, or even more free time, the One Week Marketing Plan will get you there.
As long as you implement it.
Your Marketing Focus for the Coming Year
If you are returning to this book after implementing the marketing system for the past year, it’s safe to say that your business is in better shape than it has ever been. I imagine that you’ve probably never had such a steady flow of prospects and clients.
However, every successful milestone offers new challenges. Two come to mind that are worth thinking about.
One is to think about how personally involved you want to be in your business. How much do you want your business to depend on you to deliver its services?
Some people want to take themselves entirely or mostly out of their business equation so they can make money with very little personal involvement. If that’s the case, ask yourself, “How do I create this business without me having to show up?”
The truth is, sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t.
I have a friend who is a speaker, who became frustrated that he only makes money when he speaks. Although he loves many of the aspects of the speaking lifestyle, the question increasingly became, “How can I add on a service or reconfigure what I’m doing now so it doesn’t have to be just the ‘me’ show?”
His solution was to go from just speaking about customer service to developing a customer service training program that companies could license from him and implement on their own. Now he’s able to speak less and make more money from these new ancillary services.
The second area that’s worth thinking about is how do you take your One Week Marketing Plan to the next level? Marketing is continually evolving and changing, which for those of us who are “marketing nerds” provides an endless source of stimulation.
Technology evolves in wonderful and unexpected ways, offering methods for reaching our niche markets that were unimaginable a few years earlier. When I started my company in the 1990s, who could have imagined the power of today’s social media platforms as tools for engaging with our customers and clients? Conversely, changes in the law can sometimes eliminate highly effective methods. I remember when broadcast fax was an amazingly powerful tool for lead generation. It cost only pennies to send a fax, people actually read them, and the response rates were incredible.
Then, one day, it became illegal.
Thus, in your goal to take your marketing plan to the next level, it’s extremely helpful to become a student of marketing. Many of my clients who initially embarked on implementing a marketing system simply to grow their business discovered that the process by which they attract new clients was endlessly fascinating. Hopefully you will become a student of marketing as well.
On a more tangible level, growing your marketing program is often simply a matter of tracking what is proving to yield the greatest results. There’s an old joke that marketing is simply “Try a lot of stuff, see what works, and do more of that.”
There’s actually a lot of truth to that, which is one of the reasons why you want to always be promoting your free offer so you can “see what works.”
You might also take the One Week Marketing Plan and adapt it to another niche. For example, if you’ve focused on certified financial planners for the past year, you could now start with insurance sales people. The model is the same regardless of the niche you are focusing on. In fact, what my clients typically discover is that setting up the first One Week Marketing Plan is the most challenging. (That’s usually the case with anything new.) However, as they expand into different niche markets, the process becomes almost second nature to them.
It’s also important to remember that you don’t need to do all the work yourself. We’ve talked about outsourcing, so that you only take on the tasks that you really enjoy doing and have others do the rest. Outsourcing also makes a lot of sense for the repetitive (albeit important) tasks such as posting on social media sites, tweeting, or sending out press releases. The important point is that with a little thought about how much you personally want to do, you’ll be in a position to work as much or as little as you want.
Our Marketing Regimen at Gentle Rain
Many people ask, “To what extent do you actually use this system at Gentle Rain Marketing?” I’ve always found it a bit ironic that most marketing firms rarely do much marketing themselves. Ask them where they get new clients and you’ll often hear, “Word of mouth and referrals.” Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with referrals and word of mouth, but it seems to me that if you’re a marketing firm, you ought to . . . market. I’m a big believer in drinking our own Kool-Aid, and there isn’t anything I’ve recommended in this book that we haven’t done ourselves.
Our approach will sound familiar. The overall strategy is to drive people to our main site (GentleRainMarketing.com) or to our blog. They can opt in for various free information at either location.
In order to attract lots of prospects, I try to be as visible as possible where my niche audiences may be:
• We run ads on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn to drive people to our main landing page at GentleRainMarketing.com.
• At least twice a week I write a new blog, which gets added to the site. About 20% of these are videos, which enables me to create a different type of bond with my visitors than I could with just a text post. I’ll admit that there are days when I struggle with finding something to write about. However, there’s usually an article or a post in the news that I can reference and it serves as a “jumping off” point for some commentary. This is where setting up Google alerts pays huge dividends. You can get automatic emails with the current news around any topic by setting up your own alerts at google.com/alerts.
• For the blog post I’ll create some sort of hooky headline, which is posted to more than 150 LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn limits you to 50 groups per person, so I enlist the support of team members to post to groups they’ve joined. People who are in the groups read the headline and click on the link, which takes them to the post on my blog. If they like what they read, it’s likely they’ll sign up for a free report or one of the other offers. This is one of our most effective methods for attracting new prospects.
• We also post the hooky headline and a link to the blog post on Facebook and Google+ and tweet about them multiple times per day on Twitter.
• Twice a week people who’ve signed up for our mailing list get broadcasts about new blogs on the site. Staying connected with people is of huge importance for us.
Which leads to the next question: “Okay, all this staying in touch is great, but how do you make any money from this?”
Fundamentally, we make our money by developing and implementing One Week Marketing Plan–style campaigns for clients. While I’m a passionate believer that anyone can set up a highly effective marketing system, there will always be a percentage of people who would prefer to outsource the process. So most of the daily activities of our team are creating websites and free reports, developing drip-marketing campaigns, writing blog posts, creating ads, and implementing social media marketing campaigns. (You can learn more about the specifics at GentleRainDone4You.com.)
In terms of how we convert prospects into actual paying clients, I’ll admit that we take a fairly passive approach. When I first started my business, I would follow up personally with everyone who requested the free report. Over time, as my list of prospects grew, I increasingly relied on the drip-marketing email system to motivate prospects who were interested in my services to initiate contact.
For many years, that was how my client attraction and conversion process worked. Then I discovered something interesting. The “free” consultation turned out to be a bit of mixed blessing. On the plus side, it enabled me to talk with prospects without forcing myself on them. I enjoyed the consultative nature of the calls.
However, there were a lot of people who signed up for the free session who would never become clients. In some cases it was purely a financial issue. They couldn’t afford to pay for services. Others just wanted free advice. Unfortunately, I discovered that I was spending a growing percentage of my time talking with those who I’ll politely refer to as “Time Vampires.” I started to track the percentage of people I spoke with who became clients and was dismayed to learn that it was only 1 out of 15. Pretty miserable statistics, and clearly something needed to change.
After much thought, I decided to eliminate the free consultation.
In its place I offered a paid consultation. At the end of the consultation, which is currently available via GentleRainCoaching.com, one of three things happens:
1. The client loves the ideas but decides to implement them on their own.
2. The client loves the ideas and hires me to implement them. In that case, the consulting fee is applied to whatever project they decide to have us implement.
3. In the unlikely and unprecedented event that they feel like I’ve wasted their time, I refund their consultation fee immediately. No questions asked.
The result of this change was that the number of people who requested consultations dropped dramatically. However, two out of three of the consultations turn into clients. Obviously this is quite an improvement over my earlier results.
This system works well for me because I have a lot of people in my funnel. In the beginning, when I didn’t have as many prospects, it wouldn’t have worked. All of which underscores the fact that any marketing system, or any business, is a continually evolving entity. You will change. Your business will change. Your marketing will change.
Personally, I think that’s what keeps this stimulating and interesting.
So with that I will bid you adieu and offer my sincere thanks for taking the time to read this book. The One Week Marketing Plan has worked extremely well for me and for my clients. I believe that it will work well for you, too. Something that gives me enormous satisfaction is hearing about the success others achieve by implementing this system. I hope, as you move forward, you’ll drop me an email about your successes or even any speed bumps you hit along the way. I can be reached at [email protected].
I wish you much continued success.
MARK SATTERFIELD
Alpharetta, GA