This is the first of a two-part article on overfilling your
marketing funnel and client pipeline.
In order to insure that your pipeline doesn’t dry up as
existing clients take vacations or move on, you want to
overfill your marketing funnel in order to create a
waiting list of people who want to work with you.
Before we discuss which strategies should have a
prominent place in your marketing action plan, you’ll
want to have a few items in your marketing toolkit:
1. Write out your USP.
Your Unique Selling Proposition tells prospects what
makes you different. Why should they hire you as
opposed to Joe? What can you bring to the
relationship that is different than what Mary brings?
YOU need to know what your USP is in order to
successfully market your business — it’s a
cornerstone of your brand.
Dominos pizza guarantees delivery in 30 minutes or
it’s free. McDonald’s food is fast (you don’t go there
for "good". . .you go for "fast"). What do you do?
2. Write and memorize your elevator
speech.
Whether you work from home or in an office, you want
to have an effective elevator speech ready.
Remember that you only have a few seconds to
capture my attention, what do you need me to know?
What results do you provide your clients? Chances
are, it’s not your company name and title!
3. Create an attractive website.
Your website needs to be "attractive" — not pretty in the
usual sense, but attractive to the prospects that you
want to attract. Your home page must touch on a
problem that your target audience has and how you
can resolve that problem.
I don’t care how long you’ve been in business if you
can solve my problem — whatever my problem may
be. Your prospects feel the same.
4. Have attractive business cards.
If you attend networking events of any type, you need to
have a business card. See number 3 above — your
business card needs to be attractive to the person you
want to hand it to. You should write your USP on the
card,
list your tagline, or otherwise "speak" to your
prospects via your card so when they are flipping
through the cards a month after the event, they’ll
remember you.
Cards have a back side, use it to offer a no-cost report
(this is the best option if you have a newsletter) or list
a client testimonial. I use Overnight
Prints for all my business and postcard needs
and love them!
5. Come from a "full practice" mentality.
This last one is perhaps the most important. You
want to insure that you do not come across
as "lacking" or "needy" to your prospective clients.
The Law of Attraction shows us that we attract that
which we think about most. What are you thinking
about?
I keep my marketing funnel full by insuring that I
perform at least one marketing-related activity every
single day. Next week, I’ll share a list of the top
strategies for filling your funnel AND your pipeline — no
matter your business!
For the past 5 years, Sandra Martini has been showing
self-employed business owners how to get more clients consistently by
implementing processes and systems to put their marketing on autopilot.
Visit Sandra at www.SandraMartini.com
for details, compelling client testimonials and her free audio series “5 Simple
and Easy Steps to Put Your Marketing on Autopilot”.