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 our 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 can 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!
Sandra Martini, the
Automatic Business Coach, and award-winning author teaches small business
owners how to implement processes and systems designed to take them out of the
day-to-day running of their business. For more information and to receive her FREE e-course/audio series, "5
Quick & Easy Ways To Put Your Marketing on Autopilot", visit http://www.SandraMartini.com