ECOBusinessAcademy.com

Kick-starting Your Marketing

Posted by jasoneconomides

So last week’s blog article was all about not wasting resources on trying to get new customers if you already have an existing customer base which you can reactivate.  But what if you are a brand new business without any previous customers?

Well today I’d like to tell you about the three most important start-up marketing tools you need to get and keep brand-new customers.

1. In person: It’s essential you meet with customers/clients in person whenever possible. This shows you respect them and take the time to work with your clients to give personal attention to each of them.
2. The Follow-up letter/email: Always take a moment to send a follow up letter about what you talked about, new agreements or partnerships made and to thank them for taking the time to meet with you. Likewise, you should always send thank you letters or small gifts to partners you find success with.  This is really important not only for your customer, but when you are having a lot of meetings you yourself have a useful aide-memoire to remind you of your interaction with them and helps you with further future follow-ups.
3. Phone call: Use a telephone call to follow up with them to talk again about the matters you talked about in your meeting and offer any assistance you can to help their business run smoothly and more successfully.

However, none of these will work if you don’t have a quality product/service to back you up!

Here are the key steps for putting together your start-up marketing tools:

1. Research potential customers, buyers, competitors and their preferred methods of distribution.  Take a look at where your competitors are advertising and advertise in the same place.  Russell Brunson has a great training program that helps with this one specific strategy, which I strongly recommend you look at.  The only way to get access to Instant Traffic Hacks is by getting a copy of his free book, “DotcomSecrets”, which you can get by clicking here.
2. Talk to your potential customers. Take a hard look at your product from a customer’s perspective and see what your product needs for it to be successful.  This discipline is actually called Usability testing or UX (User experience).  For some of the best resources and training in the business, we recommend you speak with Peter Hughes, CEO of Ascest to help you with this.  You can contact him here. Peter also runs courses periodically to help you get up to speed with doing usability tests, and again get in touch with him to find out about upcoming dates.
3. Follow up with your 3-step process from above.
4. Develop systems for contact follow through, quality control standards and customer service.  There are some amazing CRM systems out there.  You might be aware that we regularly host marketing training webinars for Contactually, who we partnered up with a couple of years ago.  Their system enables you to have highly customised and personal interactions with people on your list, without you needing a computer science degree from MIT to be able to implement.  They offer free trials here, but to get the most out of it, I would recommend the “Professional” level account as you get some crucial automation features that the free and basic accounts don’t give you.
5. Develop post-sale follow up system to keep lines of communication open is customers and build on your current relationship which increases future purchases.  Same again – use a good CRM system like Contactually mentioned above to help you keep on top of your relationships.

You might be familiar with this famous quote from management consultant Peter Drucker:  “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs”

Here’s another one I love from an icon:

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company

This lesson has offered you the tools to put together a start-up marketing plan that can be used over and over again to help your customer base and business grow in a manageable way. The tools offered in our FREE test drive offer these very same things.  But first I’d recommend you watch our free marketing pre-training video “Everything you ever learned about generating leads and marketing your business is Wrong!” by going here.  FYI the video tutorial is 100% meat and potatoes, there is absolutely no selling of our services or products in that video.  Just 73 minutes of pure marketing training.

Have a great week!

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