The More Clients Blog

The Best Marketing Strategy?

By Robert Middleton - Action Plan Marketing

What is the most powerful and effective marketing strategy?

It's one you probably know about but seldom use. However, this is something you should pay close attention to and work on implementing as soon as you can.

This marketing strategy is so powerful because you use it to borrow the credibility and trust of another to promote yourself.

People call it different things: endorsement marketing, fusion marketing, affiliate marketing or joint venture marketing. Let me explain in the simplest terms how it works and how you can apply it in your business.

1. You first need to have a solid, proven service that produces consistent results for your clients. And you have to have this service well packaged (outcomes, benefits, structure, price, etc), ideally on your web site.

So, for instance, "coaching services" or "consulting services" usually won't cut it. Instead, you need a "One-Year Marketing Mastery Program" or a "Six-Month Management Intensive." You've taken the intangible and made it tangible.

2. Next you need to find others who have a client base who could benefit from this service. You might be in the same industry, however your service can't be competitive, but complimentary.

Start networking, search online, subscribe to eZines, and keep asking the question, "Who do you know that I could partner with in my business who could promote me or visa versa?"

3. You work together to create a marketing campaign with the endorsement of your partner to his or her list (which could include your email list, your customer or client list, etc.)

Targeted emails, online sales letters, introductory events, teleclasses and complimentary sessions are all tactics that work for joint venture promotions.

4. Finally you develop and implement a conversion process whereby those who respond to the promotion are converted from prospects into paying clients.

Ultimately, you'll turn joint venture marketing into a system that can be repeated over and over to consistently win more clients.

And of course, you can do this process in reverse. If you have a good list, you look for those who have a complimentary program or service that you can offer to those on your list.

You should be doing both. And if you're not, you are missing out on a lot of business. Every single month I earn from $2K to $5K on various joint ventures and affiliate programs and I don't even put much time and effort into it.

A joint venture needs to be a triple win.

You win because you get more business. Your partner wins because they share in your profits as they offer additional value to their clients and associates and of course, the clients win because they get the benefits of the service you offer.

This past weekend I attended an "Internet Networking Summit" with Christian Mickelsen and about fifteen other online information marketers. We got to know each other, discussed our offerings and brainstormed ways we could help each other.

It was great to meet others who had complimentary services I could offer to my More Clients subscribers as well as those who could promote my programs.

The first one I want to make you aware of is a virtual conference called "Bridging Heart and Marketing." It's billed as the "First-Ever Soft Sell Internet Marketing Conference."

Jim and Judith, the couple putting this together, are therapists who are now involved in the world of online marketing for Independent Professionals. We have almost identical philosophies about marketing and I endorse them and this virtual conference without reservation.

You can find out more about it at this link:

tinyurl.com/heart-marketing

You'll be hearing more about Joint Venture marketing in the More Clients eZine, and I'm excited to introduce you to some great people and services that can help you attract more clients.

The question you should keep asking yourself this year is: "Who could I Joint Venture with?" If you put some serious focus on this, I predict it could be your most powerful overall marketing strategy.

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The More Clients Bottom Line: Joint Ventures offer a triple win that can benefit everyone involved. But the key is to develop real relationships with those you work with, people with high integrity and excellent business skills. This isn't about pitching dubious fly-by-night money-making schemes. That will only hurt you.

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What joint ventures are you thinking of doing this year? Please share on the More Clients Blog. Just click on the Comments link below.

Building Trust with Marketing Strategies

By Robert Middleton - Action Plan Marketing

Last week I outlined the three main marketing activities to attract new clients:

1. Marketing Message
2. Marketing Strategies
3. Selling Process

As I think I may have done marketing messages to death in this eZine, I'll be focusing on Marketing Strategies in several upcoming More Clients.

A Marketing Strategy is an activity that gets the favorable attention of an ideal client for your service and builds enough trust that they will want to explore doing business with you.

Remember, a Marketing Strategy doesn't sell. Only the Sales Process can do that, but it can prepare the ground by building that trust.

One of the biggest areas of confusion in marketing is which marketing strategy to use and in what order. This is solved by this chart on Building Trust Through Marketing Strategies:

There are four primary ways to build trust that are represented in the first column: Visibility, Credibility, Intimacy and Reliability.

And then for each of these categories, certain marketing strategies are employed. You want to implement one or more marketing strategies for each of these categories. This is not what is usually called the "marketing mix," which is only a random implementation of various strategies.

It's really a system designed to build trust step-by-step. Let's look at these categories one at a time.

Visibility - The primary marketing vehicle here is written (and graphic) materials. This forms the foundation of your marketing as it simply gets your name and message in front of your ideal clients on a consistent basis.

This includes your web site, blog, ezine, articles, and social media such as Twitter. It also includes things written about you (P.R) and even advertising.

Most professional services businesses should do a little of all of these. The hub is your web site which is connected to your blog. More active outreach is your eZine, Twitter and articles posted online.

Often this is as far as Independent Professionals go. Visibility starts to build trust, but not completely. Just think, do you buy a product or service after seeing an advertisement or someone's Twitter tweets only a few times? Of course not.

And the solution isn't to do more and more of this. The solution is to move to the next stage of building trust, by increasing Credibility and that's through presentations.

Crediblity - A presentation is any opportunity you have to communicate your ideas or the value of your service to a group, in an audio and/or visual format. Talks, intro workshops, keynotes, teleclasses, webinars, podcasts, CDs and video all build your credibility.

But it's also hard to do this if you don't have the feeder mechanism of an eZine, blog or social media.

The combination of Visibility through written materials and Credibility through presentations is often enough to get an ideal client into a selling conversation. But it often takes an additional step that is more personal.

Intimacy - This is the big "X Factor" in building trust. When you meet and connect with someone in person, you convey things that can't be communicated through the written word or through presentations.

You've seen this happen hundreds of times. You meet someone and they tell you about their services. Their enthusiasm, knowledge and commitment build almost immediate trust.

This is why all Independent Professionals should also take advantage of opportunities to network, meet with prospects face-to-face, follow-up with teleclass participants by phone, attend conferences, brainstorm and mastermind, etc.

When you implement all three marketing strategies you create Marketing Synergy. The result of marketing synergy is Knowing/Liking/Trusting. When you are at that point, it is relatively easy to set up selling conversations with ideal clients.

There is one last step that may be the most important of all. It's actually the one that the majority of Independent Professionals rely on more than any other. This is Reliability, which is conveyed only by working directly with a client.

Your efforts to provide quality, consistent work, to keep your word, to follow up as promised and to communicate clearly and confidently can also be seen as marketing strategies.

After all, it's Reliability more than anything else that is responsible for clients referring new business to you. No matter how well you do with the first three, you can undermine all of those efforts if your degree of performance falls short.

In the next few weeks, I'll discuss specific marketing strategies in all four of these categories.

Thanks to Mark Slatin of www.truecolorsconsulting.com for his trust model and for being the inspiration for today's eZine.

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The More Clients Bottom Line: When you think of marketing strategies, you need to remember that their ultimate purpose is to build trust. These marketing strategies can be broken down into four distinct categories that build this trust step-by-step.

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Which category of marketing strategies do you need to work at implementing next? Please share on the More Clients Blog. Just click on the Comments link below.

Basic Marketing Machinery

By Robert Middleton - Action Plan Marketing

For quite a long time I've been focusing on the interior aspects of marketing your services, from making a contribution to marketing mindset to "big mind marketing."

As important as these topics are, with this issue of More Clients, I'm returning to the "Basic Machinery of Marketing."

Like any machine, marketing has many moving parts. And if you want to attract clients consistently, you need to understand how those parts work and interconnect.

Every Marketing Machine has three main parts:

1. Marketing Message

2. Marketing Strategies

3. Selling Process

Marketing Message

If a business was a person, this would be your name, your personality, your body type, your thoughts and feelings, in short this would be who you are.

Your Marketing Message includes the kind of clients you work with, the issues those clients deal with, and the solutions you offer to them.

In addition, this would include all your verbal and written marketing communications that conveyed all of the above. The job of these communications is to say, in essence, "This is my business, this is who I work with and how I help."

In order to attract clients, your Marketing Message needs to be crystal clear, cut through the noise and offer clear advantages and benefits of working with you.

So your Marketing Message is not a trivial thing.

It's the very heart and soul of your marketing. Think of it this way: If you don't know what your business is all about and are unable to express your message clearly, do you think your prospects will ever understand what you can do for them?

Marketing Strategies

Without Marketing Strategies, your business just sits there, hoping someone notices. Even if you have a great Marketing Message, you won't get much attention because you aren't putting this message out into the marketplace.

Most Independent Professionals use tactics more than strategies. That is, they do marketing activities in a haphazard, random way. A little networking here, a little social media there. This rarely gets the results you wish for.

If you want consistent results, your Marketing Strategies need to be designed and implemented as step-by-step action plans. The purpose of these plans is to systematically build relationships with prospective clients until they feel comfortable exploring working with you.

Marketing Strategies don't convert people into clients, they build a foundation of knowing, liking and trusting. And then you can move to the final stage of marketing, the Selling Process.

Selling Process

When a prospect is ready to explore working with you, the Selling Process starts. Essentially this is a conversation to see if the needs of the prospect match your abilities to fulfill those needs.

Selling isn't about manipulation, persuasion and closing. It's more about discovering if you can work together successfully or not. This is particularly true of professional services where selling is a process of discovery and building agreement.

About three quarters of the Selling Process is asking questions and learning about the prospect's situation, goals, and challenges. The other quarter is explaining how your services work and how you can help the client.

What most Independent Professionals miss in the Selling Process is the process part. There are many parts to this process, and if you want to succeed at it, you need to master each of these parts.

What's missing in your marketing?

These days, many Independent Professionals tend to worry about the pieces of the puzzle (twitter, blogs, ezine, teleclasses, etc) while missing the big picture of marketing success.

Do you need to work on your Marketing Message, your Marketing Strategies, your Selling Process or all three?

In the coming weeks I'll explore these three parts in more depth.

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The More Clients Bottom Line: Nothing is more important to attracting clients to your business than understanding and implementing "basic marketing machinery." And the more you work on its three main parts, the easier marketing will become for you.

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What part of your marketing machine needs tuning up? Please share on the More Clients Blog. Just click on the Comments link below.

The Perfect Marketing Strategy

By Robert Middleton - Action Plan Marketing

If someone was to ask me what the most important thing to do in marketing a professional service these days, I might suggest a number of marketing strategies.

But what I'd emphasize, above all else, would be taking action on something, anything and not worrying if it was perfect enough.

Last last year I had an imperfect idea to launch some kind of membership service to provide marketing information and support to my More Clients subscribers.

Then I designed an imperfect Club and launched it.

I sent imperfect emails to announce it. I put on imperfect teleclasses to promote it. I did imperfect interviews with marketing experts. I led imperfect coaching calls with members. I tried several imperfect introductory pricing strategies. And the Club members are getting imperfect results.

I now have about 650 members, and that's perfect!

I will continue in my imperfect ways.

I just designed imperfect Mastermind Groups for the Club. And no doubt I will manage those imperfectly as well. (Club members, take a look and let me know.)

If you are waiting to do things perfectly before you get started, you may just be a perfect idiot! Perfection is something you strive for, realizing it is never reached.

And since this is Labor Day and I want to take off a little early today, I'm making today's eZine imperfectly short.

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The More Clients Bottom Line: Got a marketing idea? Jump in and do it imperfectly. Your imperfect idea with the imperfect plan and the imperfect implementation may just attract all the clients you need.

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What do you do imperfectly and get great results anyway? Please share on the More Clients Blog. Just click on the Comments link below.