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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.
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 http://www.SandraMartini.com for details, compelling client testimonials and her free audio series "5 Simple and Easy Steps to Put Your Marketing on Autopilot".
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