Just got off the phone with one of my clients, who sent me an email saying she’s thinking of trying something different with her business because she’s really struggling to get clients. It’s a familiar story that many small business owners share. However, she’s only been going after this particular target market for 9 months – and her marketing efforts have been sporadic.
I reminded her that it takes a typical small business 5 years to succeed, and she shouldn’t give up so easily. I also reviewed her marketing strategies and offered some suggestions on how she could improve her efforts. The main point I shared with her was the need to be consistent.
She’s using a variety of tools to market her business, including writing a blog, posting videos to YouTube, running a Facebook page and sending out an e-newsletter. Email marketing has been one of the bright spots for her business. The last issue of her e-newsletter achieved a 40% open rate! And she admitted that she has gotten one new client from the newsletter. That’s pretty good considering she started the newsletter last December and has only mailed out 6 issues so far.
If you’re going to send out an e-newsletter, you have to be consistent about how often you publish. If you’re going to do it on a monthly basis, then select a date and send it out the same date every month. If you’re going to do a weekly newsletter, send it out the same day of the week. The goal is getting your readers into the habit of expecting your newsletter to arrive on a certain day, or certain time of the month.
I also reminded her about the strategy of using LinkedIn to find potential partners who could advertise her services to their clients. I wrote about this strategy of converting cold calls into warm leads in a recent blog article. I asked her how many letters she had sent out, and her answer was 6! I suggested that she needed to gather a list of twenty prospects. Then, as she contacted them and received replies – whether yes or no – she should remove the name from the list and add a new one. This way, she would always be rotating out prospects and continuing to solicit business.
This is an important lesson for anyone in business: if you want to attract new clients, you have to work at it. It takes a consistent effort to be successful. After all, if it were easy, everyone would do it!
Image courtesy: Stuart Miles / freedigitalphotos.net
