If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. People buy when they are ready, not when you want to make a sale.
And your job is to be there when they are.
Given this, when marketing yourself you have to do two things:
- Get your name and initial message in front of your target audience.
- Keep it there through a constant drip feed of valuable information.
Above all, realise one shot marketing tactics are a complete waste of time and money. Follow up is the key.
Here are some facts which may surprise you.
Direct mail still works. Which includes direct email, FAX and physical mail.
Conventional wisdom would say most direct mail gets around a 1% to 3% open rate.
But last week we achieved a 25.1% open rate for a client to a cold list. i.e. One that had never heard of him or his service. And out of these he’s had 2 serious responses from senior decision makers, with another 8 expressing a level of interest.
And this was just on the first day. Over the next few weeks we’ll automatically send out follow up emails and faxes to those who haven’t responded yet. And a different series of messages to those who have.
So what did we do to achieve this and what lessons could you learn?
- Have a product or service people actually want to buy
In this case the product allows Principals in High Schools to gather student feedback regarding the performance of their teaching staff.There is a major push in the education system for this to occur, however accomplishing it easily while still providing comprehensive results is difficult. Our client’s product solves this issue.
- Create a marketing message which explains the pain and your solution to it in ways your audience resonates with.I wrote a comprehensive sales letter which explains the issue and the solution in great detail. It covers:
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- Why you should consider it
- What the product does
- How it works in practice
- And the results people have got.For a recap on these components click https://revealedresources.com/practical-tips/1040-the-secret-ingredient.
- Create a targeted list of decision makers.
We bought a list of High School Principals in our target areas from a reputable broker. The list contained individual names, email, FAX and physical addresses for each school Principal.A key ingredient in successful marketing is to get your message into the right hands. In this case, a list was the most direct option. In other cases more general advertising might be more appropriate. - Have a mechanism to get your message to decision makers in your market.
This is where I see so many people fiddling around the edges. If you are going to send hundreds or even thousands of mailings, outlook or Gmail won’t cut it – period!You must have a professional marketing CRM system which not only sends your material, but keeps track of responses, automatically follows up, makes smart/automatic decisions depending on what a prospect responds to, where he goes on your website and finally alerts you with tasks should a physical follow up be necessary.
The schematic diagram on the right shows how we accomplish this.
You’ll notice no matter where the leads come from, they ALL end up in the CRM which then allows you to monitor where a prospect is in the sales funnel, and steadily help move them closer to becoming buyers.
- Keep following them up.
Once again. This is a key component to any successful marketing effort.Most people don’t buy something the first time they come across it. Especially if it’s a high value item. In sales land we knew it took between 5 and 9+ touches before someone bought.
And those touches were all physical – i.e. phone calls, physical visits, manually remembering to send material etc.
Today using our CRM technology we’ve AUTOMATED the vast majority of this. Prospects automatically received material that’s of interest to them in a timed sequence.
And we even have the ability to see where an individual has been on your website and trigger automatic follow ups if they hit particular pages.
Our CRM technology allows prospects to move through the sales funnel automatically at a rate that suits them.
Essentially they qualify themselves in or out without your involvement.
The net result? You get to spend more quality time with quality prospects who are interested in what you have to sell rather than tyre kickers who just waste your time.
Our technology solution coupled with our advanced marketing implementation will have you make more money while spending less time on selling.
Interested in knowing more about how we can design and IMPLEMENT such a marketing system in your business?
Call us on (02) 9499-7958 for a confidential discussion.
