Can you imagine having a phone conversation where you couldn't hear what the person at the other end was saying? You would have difficulty getting much done and you certainly couldn't tailor your response to their needs and interests. Yet this is the way many people market their products and services.
Most people make the mistake of thinking that marketing is one-way communication. The tendency is to create marketing materials and push them out to your target market and hope for a response. Marketing monologues, whether in person, in a brochure or on a web site are a sure way to scare prospects and clients away.
If you want to grow your business your objective should be to create a dialogue with prospects and help them become clients. Starting your marketing efforts by creating a two-way conversation with prospects can help you target your marketing efforts and open the door to future business.
Large corporations provide annual job performance reviews and conduct annual customer satisfaction surveys. While annual feedback like this may be useful to you and is better than nothing, your goal is to create an ongoing dialogue with your prospects and clients so that you can regularly improve how you market your services.
You won't want to rush back to the office after every client meeting to revise your marketing strategy, but the more often you ask questions to understand client and prospect concerns and then shape your marketing to match, the more new clients you'll attract.
Improve your marketing by listening to prospects and clients. Get them talking by asking the right questions and then hear what they have to say. Fortune 500 companies use marketing firms, charging tens of thousands of dollars to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. If you