The basis for the successful application of proven marketing strategies is personal relationships. Regardless of the medium you're using to deliver your marketing message, what your message is or what kind of volume you're dealing with, you must keep one thing in mind. You're speaking to one person and only one person at a time when you send out your message. In all of your marketing, you are always speaking one-on-one with each of your prospective clients.
Think about this: when you read an ad, sales letter, or magazine advertisement, who's reading it? Who decides whether it's relevant to you? When you receive a postcard announcing the newest release of your favorite product or latest real estate listing, who is it addressed to?
That's right, the answers are you, you and you! Unless you have multiple personality disorder, that marketing piece is speaking directly to only one person. You.
Your Ultimate Marketing Goal: Building rapport and creating relationships. Only when you've accomplished this goal will you have the on-going size of business you desire.
The number one focus of any marketing strategy you engage in should be building long-term relationships with your prospects and clients.
Why? Because once these relationships are sufficiently nurtured, you can ethically build on them by providing your clients with many other beneficial products/services that solve their problems and fill a need. It also allows for them to say yes when the timing is truly right for them.
The fact is: if you really are providing your current clients a truly valuable product or service that improves their life in a measurable way, you are actually doing them (and any prospects in the same target audience) a great disservice by not giving them every opportunity possible to enter into a mutually beneficial business relationship with you.
When your marketing is always focused on building long-term relationships (instead of generating immediate sales like many businesses mistakenly do) you're building what's called a "relationship marketing funnel." It's the funnel that will channel an on-going stream of new and repeat sales into your business, along with organically self-replicating profits. Be sure to take care of some critical prerequisites before beginning to build your funnel:
1. You must know specifically what your clients' wants/needs are, and you must have a proven product or service that provides a solution to current challenges that exist for your clients. (There are not really any right or wrong ways to gather this information. But in my coaching with business owners around the country, there are just a dozen or so highly effective methods. However you choose to gather this critical data, be sure it is a maximum leveraging of your time, money and energy.)
2. Once you know exactly what your clients' needs are, you must focus exclusively on those needs (not your own). That means planning your approach... and then working that plan without any unjustified variance. This is where Strategic Partnerships can come in (more about that soon).
3. You must service your clients way beyond what any of your competitors are currently providing. "Satisfaction" in today's marketplace is not enough. You and your team must always be seeking to convert every client into a raving fan!
Now these may seem like simple principles to implement, but you would be amazed at how many business owners cannot accurately fulfill these prerequisites. Many business owners may "think" they know what their target market wants, how the people in that market want to be communicated with and what their true needs are. More often than not their assumptions are way off base. They have never done the research or planning necessary to find and take action on the requirements, and so their marketing efforts fall flat.
Bottom line: most business owners assume they know what their clients want and/or need. If you are willing to address these three fundamental prerequisites, and before you begin building your funnel, I can assure you that you'll experience the same growth my coaching clients do. You'll also be more profitable than you've ever dreamed possible.
Advanced principles of effective marketing communication:
Once you've fulfilled these three prerequisites, you'll be ready to start building your funnel by compiling messages that speak directly to your target audience. Truly effective messages that focus on the specific needs of the people in your niche market or target industry. Messages that speak directly to the diverse behavioral styles, motivational values, and learning modalities of each individual in that group.
You see, while it's true that each of us are as unique as a fingerprint - there are some observable similarities between human beings that you can leverage to accelerate the development of your funnel and the resulting growth in your business. Here are fourteen distinctions that should be considered when composing any marketing message. People fall into:
*Four main behavioral styles: Driver, Influencer, Steady and Compliant. *Six main motivational styles: Utilitarian, Theoretical, Individualistic, Social, Traditional and Aesthetic. *Four main learning modalities: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic and Digital.
In an article this brief, its not possible to go into full detail on these distinctions. However, I can tell you this: if your marketing only speaks from your style of communication, it's like trying to get home with three nearly flat tires on your car.
If you do make it, it's going to take you a lot longer than it has to, and certainly longer than you'd like it to! On the other hand, if you take the time to ensure that a part of every message in your marketing speaks in some small part to people of different communication styles - it'll be just like bolting a supercharger on your marketing engine.
The bottom line is, the more directly you can speak to the needs of your target market, and the more accurately you can communicate with each person within that niche in their own individual communication style -- the more effective your marketing will be.
Remember, when using the funnel, you're always building relationships with individuals, not with a group. Get started by taking action on the prerequisites I mentioned above. Then, when you're ready to make some serious improvements in the results your funnel generates, learn how to integrate the advanced distinctions into your marketing messages.
There are advanced courses you can take for this, or you can try it on your own. But either way you'll find effective communication can be more profitable than you've ever imagined.
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