Way too many small business owners rush into doing things without adequately planning and preparing. And marketing is a great case in point.

You set up shop and then hurry to get the word out about your business and services. You rush to get a brochure made up, develop a web site, and get out and start networking without much planning or preparation. And then you wonder why your results are so poor.

If you do nothing else from a marketing preparation standpoint, I suggest you spend some time thinking about your best clients. Your best clients aren’t simply the ones who pay the most money, but also the ones you enjoy working with the most. Spend some time to create a profile.

1. Define Your Target. How do you describe your ideal target market demographically and characteristically? Demographics are the basic facts like the kind of industry they’re in, size of company, revenues, geographic location, etc. If your target is individuals, then it means income levels, age, gender, education, etc. Characteristics deal more with things like the style, philosophy, and approach to business of your targets.
2. What’s The Problem? What are the problems, issues, challenges, or predicaments you’re trying to help your target customers and prospects with? Every product or service is designed to address some sort of issue or challenge for your client. What is your target market dealing with and what’s the potential impact of not being able to address those problems?
3. What Do They Get From Working With You? What are the solutions you provide? What benefits do you offer? What results do you produce? Note that this isn’t “what you do” or a list of services you provide, but what your clients actually get from you.
4. What’s It Like Working With Them? What is it about working with your best clients that makes them your best clients? What is the relationship like? How do things work? What is it that you’re able to uniquely do for them that makes it a great working relationship?

You’ll be amazed at what it can mean for your business when you spend some time preparing a profile of your best clients (and potential clients). If you know exactly who your potential clients are, then you can more effectively focus on them in your marketing efforts.

So now that you’ve defined your best clients, do your current marketing efforts really reach these folks and others like them?

We all need a website, right? However what is the typical web experience?

I came across a great article on Marketing profs discussing designing a website to put the customer in charge of the experience. Well, that sounds obvious doesn’t it? As a surfer or a prospect it would seem logical that you are in control of what you do and where you go. However is that really the case?

How often do websites suffer from the same problem that afflicts many of us when we are selling or marketing face to face - namely: too much telling. In the web context this is about a home page that is all “About Us” or “our services” or even the better, but still self serving, “Things our customes say about us”.

How about me? What are my issues as a prospect? Buried in the message somewhere may be what you can do for me specifically. How you help my pain, but I am not honestly going to bother to search for it.

You can see the marketing prof article here which talks about some of the more technical ways to design a customer friendly website. In my view the initial impact must be about the customer and their experiences directly - telling customer stories (generic if you don’t want to be specific) is a great place to start. The source of these? Yes! Your most satisfied customers.

Do you know what your prospects really want?

Well let me ask the question this way. Are you attracting all the clients you can handle? If not, then the answer is probably not really? Experience tells me that most small business owners feel like they have a pretty good idea what potential clients want, but they’re often missing the mark.

This much we all should know… If you want to get marketing results, then you need to get into purposeful marketing action. However, if you’re in action but still not getting results, then it means you’re not giving prospects what they want. (And by-the-way, trust me, not all prospects expect everything for free.)

The typical small business approach. If you think you’re going to pick up clients because you have the best product/service, the most experience of anyone in your field, or because you offer the best service at the best rates then YOU ARE WRONG! This flawed, but widely-used approach is based on trying to get potential clients to notice you so they want to come work with you. But that’s not what your prospects really want.

I’m not saying that your experience and quality products/services are not important. It’s just not as relevant to a winning marketing message as you might think. And that’s largely because the focus tends to be more on you and not on your prospect(s).

Your prospects want to know that you understand what they’re dealing with and that you’re focused on helping them. For the most part, your prospects are looking for the promise of a solution to some problem, issue, or challenge that has been weighing them down or holding them back from some greater outcome.

Avoid the “who cares?” information overload. People want to know “what’s in it for me?” They’re looking for information that will help them resolve that problem, issue, or challenge once and for all. That’s what your prospects really want.

On the Get More Clients Fast Path, we want to show you how to leverage this marketing insight. Will you join us on the Get More Clients Fast Path? Details Inside!

I used to work in a medium sized business and I was often asked this question - what is your USP - i.e. unique selling proposition?

I have always been uncertain about USPs generally. On one hand, if you have a product or service that is totally unique in the market place AND serves a need then I think I want to invest in your company! How much is really unique in terms of what you do?

However, on the other hand, we are all unique aren’t we? Although we may run businesses that do the same thing on the face of it, each company does things a little differently, as does each person.

So, what is it that you do differently that REALLY HELPS YOUR CLIENTS IN A UNIQUE WAY. If you answer this question with: “We believe in partnership/relationship/customer service” or a variation on that, guess what? Most everyone else says that too!

So what about what you do, do your clients LOVE about you? What do they tell other people when asked what’s great about you? I am willing to bet it’s something about your personality, your philosophy, your approach rather than a unique product.

What do you think? Somewhere in there is likely to be your passion and how you tap into something that is truly important to your clients. There is the heart of your marketing message.

Are you in search of the Holy Grail of Marketing?
 
At the risk of having you click away and not reading the rest of this post… you won’t find the Holy Grail of Marketing here today.

Too many small businesses are wasting their time endlessly searching for the “Next Big Thing” in marketing. It’s like searching for the Holy Grail.

According to Wikipedia, the next big thing “is a concept in marketing that refers to a product or idea that will allow for a high amount of sales for that product and related products…”

In searching for the Holy Grail of Marketing, small business owners are constantly switching around from one idea to the next. They’re searching for that one big idea that will make the skies open up and rain down clients from heaven.

So do you know what the next big small business marketing ideas is? Is it blogging? Is it podcasting? Is it marketing through YouTube? Is it social networking through Linked-In and MySpace?

What exactly is the next big thing in small business marketing? Where do I find this Holy Grail of Marketing?

My advice is to forget about the next big thing. Stop looking for it. There is no Holy Grail of Marketing that is going to outperform everything before it and be the one thing to grow your business like never before.

As you are introduced to new marketing tools such as those mentioned just above, you should simply evaluate them for what they are. They’re just tools for you to consider as to how, or even if, they fit into your overall marketing strategy.

None of these marketing tools by themselves are going to magically relieve all of your marketing frustrations. It’s still going to take regular and consistent effort on your part to get results from your marketing strategies and tactics.

What you should be focusing on is creating a more systematic approach to marketing. A smart marketing system should utilize a good balance of online, offline, in-person, and remote tools and tactics.

That’s what we teach on the Get More Clients Fast Path. It’s not about finding the fast path to the Holy Grail of Marketing. It’s about putting you on the fast path to getting more and better clients consistently. Join us at an upcoming Executive Briefing or Boot Camp and you’ll see what we mean.

I am talking about your business focus of course!

In a previous post (Attention Getting Message), we discussed the merits of keeping your message focused and thinkign about the specific problems you solve for your clients and prospects. There is a obvious objection to that and here it is: “But I serve a wide range of clients with different problems and I want to make sure I cover every possible issue so I don’t miss someone, and therefore miss out on business”.

Believe me, I get that. I’ve done it. The irony is you probably CAN solve a range of problems. However if you focus your message to a few specific areas that you are passionate about here’s the benefit: People will get what you do and if they have a related problem they will ASK YOU IF YOU CAN HELP THEM TOO.

For example our program is primarily aimed at helping small, service companies attract more clients consistently. If you are a manufacturing company can we help you? Probably, it depends on your issues and what you want to do about them. However if you are putting out a vague message (and I have heard people say this) that you can help anyone who “has a house” for example, it is so broad that prospects generally don’t bother to try and qualify or disqualify themselves or others on that basis.

Try it - what are you passionate about? What problem do you ideally want to work on with that best/ideal client. That is probably the message you will benefit from sending - keep it tightly to that and see what response you get…..