- The size of the marketing budget.
- The size of audience (mass market or target audience).
- The nature of the offering itself.
Verbal Communication
A face to face meeting with a potential client is the most effective way to convey the nature of your offering. As executive Joseph Bevan put it:
To really make it happen, you have to commit more effort. You have to work harder and knock on more doors.
In person meetings are clearly selling opportunities. Though they often require a great deal of time and expense, they offer the opportunity to tailor your offering to the clients' needs and the chance to further interest clients. The objective, of course, is to move the sale along, but it is often difficult to determine how far to go in the first meeting. If you sense that it is not the right time to attempt to close the transaction, set up another meeting, volunteer to supply further information, or offer to enter into a tryout situation with the client. A former vice president of marketing for Eveready Battery, Dave Thorpe, does a masterful job of helping potential customers share their professional problems, which makes it far easier for them to identify the ways in which he can help them. Face to face meetings should always heighten a potential client's awareness of your offering and deepen your understanding of the client's needs.
Letters or Correspondence
Personal letters offer an effective means of conveying your message to a highly defined target audience. Your correspondence should always be tailored to the particular client to whom you are writing, and be as personal as possible, and as succinct as possible.
According to the newsletter Clips & Tips, if you answer the following questions in your letter, you are more likely to make a sale:
- What will you do for me if I listen to your story?
- How are you going to do this?
- Who is responsible for the promises you make?
- Who else have you done this for?
- What will it cost?
Brochures and Promotional Materials
Brochures and other promotional materials give s a real opportunity to convey their message in greater depth to a broader audience. These materials should be aimed at the potential customer in your market. Brochures should begin with an inspirational lead, describe the product or service in detail, offer testimonials from satisfied clients if possible, and contain concrete stories that demonstrate how has successfully applied his or her core capabilities in real life situations.
The Design of Your Materials
The design of your brochure and promotional materials are every bit as important as your message. Must create a visual impression in the potential customer's mind. It is actually less important for the reader to remember your entire message than it is for him or her to remember seeing your brochure.
While new users of desktop publishing packages are often enthralled by the design options and typefaces they can employ, this is not the place to demonstrate what your software package is capable of doing. Every page should be visually clean, with adequate margins and simple, easy to read type. No more than two typefaces should be used in any one brochure and italics, bold print, and underlining should be used minimally. If you find you are relying on boldface and underlining to emphasize your point, try rewriting your copy so that it communicates your message effectively without the need for typesetting frills. Of course, your copy should be free of grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors, as your own promotional materials are the best demonstration of your quality control. If it seems you can't handle your own quality control, chances are a potential customer will ask, "Why should I allow this portable executive to handle mine?"
You must also consider the size of your brochure and other promotional materials. Do you want a small fold over piece that can be mailed without an envelope (which saves postage costs)? Or a glossy brochure that a potential client can't possibly resist opening? Whatever size you do choose, keep in mind that these pieces are essentially throwaways. You must remember to weigh the benefit and cost of sending them.
Direct Mail
The objective of doing a direct mailing is to get the potential client to contact you. Of course, this promotional effort should also be aimed at the potential customer, as well as those who have expressed an interest in your offering. Practically speaking, this technique is only effective if you use it consistently over a period of time.
The "Canal System" of direct mailing developed by Saatchi & Saatchi is an excellent example. In this system, you communicate with potential clients every three months for a nine month period with a follow up phone call approximately ten days after each mailing. Portable executive Wendy Evans has employed this system with a number of companies and says.
If you use this system consistently and send a believable message, people will begin to trust you. After nine months, you will see your response rate climb from one percent to three to four percent.
There is absolutely no point in sending out a single direct mailing or worse, sending one out and not following up on it.
Consistent message sending is the key. A potential customer who receives only one mailing will wonder if who sent it still exists in the marketplace, whereas those executives who send multiple messages in an organized manner and follow up on them are perceived by the potential buyer as being in the market to stay.
Newsletters
Newsletters are a terrific opportunity for to present a message in an educational document. The technique here is to blend educational information about your industry or service with a subtle conveyance of your capabilities. Case studies and testimonial copy about your services are easy to weave into a newsletter, and since the newsletter also communicates industry information to the client, it is far more likely to be read. Portable executive Dick West, who established his own consulting company in Wichita, Kansas, found a company that provides him with a prepackaged newsletter that is relatively low in cost.
The company gives you an exclusive on your trade or territory. I basically have Kansas. They write an orderly newsletter, and from time to time I provide them with articles I would like to see published, usually about thirty to forty five days in advance of publication. They send me draft copies of articles they are planning to include that quarter, and if I don't want them included, they'll delete them or use something else. It can be customized, but most of the time I use their version.
West sends his newsletter to a target list of people he knows are buying services similar to his own from other providers, thus keeping potential clients aware that he is in the market and offering them an alternative to the services they are currently buying.
In doing this, West is following one of the basic axioms of marketing, which is to make sure that potential clients are already aware of your offering when their need to use it develops.
Advertising
As business develops and her budget grows, she may very well evolve to the point where the higher cost of broad market advertising is justified. Radio and TV commercials, as well as print advertisements, offer the broadest possible exposure but are usually prohibitively expensive. Another way to advertise on a smaller scale is to simply place an advertisement in the "Situations Wanted" or "Business Opportunity" section of either a major paper like the New York Times or a local paper, depending on the market share you're trying to reach. Again, the key here is consistency. An advertisement that appears once is almost useless, while an ad that appears regularly sends the signal that is in the market for good.
Public Relations
Public relations can be a cost effective way to communicate your message, but you can't always control the way that your message is going to be conveyed. Anyone who has gotten his name into a newspaper or magazine or has appeared on a TV or radio interview knows that there is no better way to make yourself known to a broad audience. With the recent expansion of local cable television and print media, more and more material is needed to fill the available time and space, creating a real opportunity for to get exposure at a relatively low cost.
Hiring a freelance public relations consultant or publicist can help you break into these markets. Once the doors have been opened, the best way to approach your encounters with the media (and thereby maintain some control over the way the message will be sent) is to think your message through in as much detail as possible and arrive at a theme that will convey a consistently be livable idea. This way, you are prepared to respond to any question asked of you with some variation of the root message you wish to send.
Consistently Convey the Message
One of the early lessons portable executives must learn is that while potential customers may in fact convert into buyers and repeat buyers at the appropriate time, they may not be ready to buy when they first hear about your product or service. These delays seldom ever have anything to do with the quality or appropriateness of your offering. Sometimes, it just isn't the "right time" for that particular customer they either don't have a current need for the product or service or they just haven't "focused" on their need for it because they have other things on their mind. While these responses may be frustrating or discouraging, it is nonetheless very important that you continue to convey your message consistently over time to build trust and be top of mind when the need arises for your services.
