Self Employed Success

For your amusement…

Another email from another icky marketer; my “comments and edits” are in brackets [ ]

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Dear Sir [sigh--"Madam," if you please]

I would like to offer you a partnership with my seo company [funny -- I already offer SEO to my clients. I'm listening...maybe you've got an amazing offer that will sweep me off my feet??] .

As i [hey, capitalize "i" when refering to yourself] understand that your goal is to help business owner to increase their profits and expand the business exposure, we want to offer you a partnership deal [wait for it, wait for it].

If your clients are interested to order our internet promotion service, you can recommend us and we will provide them a quality service with an affordable price. We will share [with] you a very generous commission per sale [golly, so tempting, how can I refuse?]. We offer a wide variety of service such as website design, website promotion, online consulting, and many more. [That's funny...WE offer the same thing! We must be related. Mommy! He's copying meeee!]

Let me know if you are interested [ummm...no, thanks. And may I wish you the utmost success in your business ventures?]

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I have to laugh at these people. Do they really thing someone will respond to an email like this? Well, at least it cheered up my blah Friday.

I have ebooks and audios sitting on my hard drive that I’ve never consumed. I bet you do, too.

Free information is everywhere, and even if it’s excellent, it’s not always easy to digest it and create a strategy around it.

I think the next place of growth for service professionals and information marketers is to take all the free information you research and produce for your clients, synthesize it, and give it back to people in a practical, DO-able format.

Want to be unique? If you can get people to consume your information products, TEACH people how to consume it and use it, it will set you apart from the crowd.  The reason people spend money on my teleclasses and live training classes is that:

1.  They get to ask questions
2.  They’re given bite-sized homework assignments
3.  They can submit the homework to me for review/comments
4. They walk away with a do-able action plan

Even offering a free teleclass sets you apart from the crowd in your industry, because it allows people to receive a chunk of information, learn how to apply it, and ask questions to clarify points. If you’re not offering free teleclasses, now is a good time to start.

Information is everywhere. But smart people are now saying, “Make it work for me in the real world of busy schedules and conflicting priorities. Help me focus.”

If you want to be unique and stand out from the crowd, start helping your customers consume, digest and USE the information you’re giving them.

If you can simplify a complicated topic, if you can save your customers the time of having to do the research and analysis themselves, if you can cut through the noise and help your customers know what’s relevant and important, then you’ll always be valuable to them.

You MUST have a way to measure the results of all your marketing. Tracking the success or failure of a marketing techniques solves the age-old question of “Which marketing techniques should I use?”

For instance:

• When you joined Facebook, did it increase traffic to your website?
• When you sent out your last email broadcast, did it produce sales?
• When you wrote your last blog entry, did it produce comments or link backs?
• When you did SEO on your website, did it increase your rankings in the search engine results?
• When you made your free offer, did people subscribe to your mailing list?

Never, never start a new marketing technique without having a clear idea of what result you want from that technique, and a way to measure those results.

And at the end of each month take a look at those results and compare them to the results you wanted. Just because something produced poor results doesn’t mean you should give it the heave-ho. The first thing you should do it see if there are tweaks you could make that would produce better marketing results. Only after repeated failure should you get rid of a technique that is not producing for you.

I’ll be adding to this series each Thursday, and you can check out all the past posts in the Why Marketing Fails series here.

One thing I know for sure: your customers are busy people. They see and hear your marketing message, and they may think, “Hey, that’s a great product!” Then a child (or the boss) starts to scream, or an ice storm knocks out power, or they run out of gas on the highway, and POOF! – Instant Distraction.

Placing just one advertising message and expecting miracle sales is a recipe for marketing disaster.  Marketing is a marathon not a sprint. It requires repetition to gain their attention. It requires repetition to RE-gain their attention. It requires repetition to gain their trust and respect. It requires repetition to get them to take action.

There is strength in repetition. Think about doing sit-ups. You don’t do just one…you do them over and over again, because the repetition of the exercise sends messages to your body to build specific muscles.

When planning your marketing campaign, common marketing wisdom tells us you need to get your message out to the customer at least seven times before they’ll really pay attention and act on it. If you have a mailing list of responsive clients, maybe two or three repetitions is enough.

Yes, there is such a thing as annoying people with too much marketing. Daily repetition of the exact same marketing message will cause people to exit quicker than a skunk in a movie theater. But a balanced pacing of marketing messages (say once a week or once every 10 days), plus a focus on what the benefit is to the customer, will reap rewards every time.

Whether you use email marketing, printed postcards, or Google Adwords, repetition of your marketing message is one of the key factors in getting people to really see and hear it. It ensures that, should they become distracted and forget about your message, that you give them another reminder. Plan your marketing campaigns accordingly.

I’ll be adding to this series each Thursday, and you can check out all the past posts in the Why Marketing Fails series here.

When it comes to marketing to multiple niches, I have two words of advice:

1. Go ahead! There’s nothing wrong with targeting multiple niches. BUT…

2. Pick one and become a leader in it, then move on to the second one.

If you try to go after too many niches (target audiences) at the same time, you will wear yourself out. It’s exhausting and doesn’t use the “best of you.”

When you go after too many niches simultaneously, your marketing time and money is scattered too broadly. Say for example that you want to go after “salespeople in the pharmaceutical industry” and also want to go after “salespeople in the auto industry.”

Their appears to be a common denominator (salespeople), but the two industries and the two selling styles are dissimilar.  You would have to connect with both industries simultaneously, which means you can’t really focus all your time, energy and marketing money on just one target. Scattered focus equals scattered results.

In my article, The Problem With Niches, I said that the whole purpose of choosing a niche is so you can find a central place that potential clients congregate. Find ALL the places where auto industry sales people congregate: meetings, magazines, conferences, classes…especially those that are specifically focused on the niche you’re going after. Center your marketing attention on those areas first. Once you become known and recognized in that niche, then move on to other industries or other niches.

I’ll be adding to this series each Thursday, and you can check out all the past posts in the Why Marketing Fails series here.