How to Get More New Clients. Quickly. Easily. With No Cold
Calling
Ultimately the success of any business depends upon having a
consistent flow of new prospective clients. Unfortunately, far
too many individuals rely solely upon their existing clients and
referrals as their primary methods for getting new clients.
While this may prove to be a successful strategy short term, it
invariably leads to the "feast and famine" roller coaster that
so many firms and individuals experience.
On a fundamental level, marketing for new clients is pretty
straightforward. We have found successful marketing campaigns
focuses on: 1) Targeting a hyper-responsive group of prospective
clients. 2) Identifying the issues that are of most importance
to this group. 3) Motivating them to self-nominate themselves as
being interested in learning more about your services. 4) Moving
them along a sequence of steps that encourages them to take
action.
If you focus on these four steps, it is relatively easy to
create a marketing system that will consistently brings you a
steady stream of new clients-all of whom have pre-qualified
themselves as being interested in learning more about your
services.
Let's look at each of these steps in more detail.
Step 1: Determining Who you are going to target.
Too often this is given only a cursory consideration. Since we
all operate on limited marketing budgets and only have time to
follow up with those most likely to actually engage our
services, identifying the most hyper-responsive sub-groups
within a targeted market is very important.
We define Hyper-Responsives as the sub-group that is most
interested in obtaining a competitive edge. Thus, they are most
likely to hire outside advisors to achieve that objective. In
order to identify this group we look for specific traits and
behaviors which enables us to segment this group from the larger
target market.
One trick is to look for those that read the relevant trade
publications and are members of the professional associations.
These data-points usually indicate that the individual is
interested in staying current and maintaining their competitive
edge. Thus they are likely to be the most interested in at least
learning more about your services.
Step 2: Create a Free Information Report.
Remember that the goal of any lead generation tool is get
prospective clients to "raise their hands" about being
interested in your services. The "hook" to achieve this is the
free special report.
The goal of the free report is two-fold. First it must contain
enough practical information so that the reader feels that they
have learned something that they didn't know before. This is
crucial for developing credibility. The second objective is to
entice the reader to become hungry for more information. This
balance of providing enough (but not too much) information is
crucial for moving the relationship process to the next steps.
We recommend that your free report be between 4-12 pages in
length and be available from your website.
Step 3: Crafting the One-Page Lead Generation Letter.
Among all the lead generation methods we track, the one page
letter has the highest metrics in the B2B market place. We
recommend that you write your lead generating letters after you
have created the free special report. Remember the objective of
the letter is to position oneself as an industry or functional
expert with an interesting perspective on an issue the
prospective client may be facing. We cannot emphasize strongly
enough that it is a mistake to simply include your report along
with your initial letter. The letter's sole purpose is to
intrigue the prospective client enough so that they want to
request the information.
Successful markting campaigns emphasize consistency and
repetition. Thus we recommend that you develop a series of three
letters which will be sent in sequence-each focusing on
compelling reasons to request the free report.
Step 4: Sending the free information report and collecting data
about prospective clients.
As mentioned earlier, the offer of the free report in your
letter should direct prospective clients to your website.
As a "Big thumb" goal you should try to get 75% of these
visitors to follow through and fill out the information form to
get the report. Although it would seem natural that people going
to your site would follow through and request the free report,
this is unfortunately not the case.
Care must be taken to ensure that the landing-page you are
directing readers to, re-emphasize the benefits that will be
obtained by requesting the free report. Don't assume that just
because visitors are at your site they will automatically do
what we want them to.
Precisely what information to request becomes a crucial issue at
this point. While you want more that just name & email,
requesting too much information will suppress response.
Successful marketing campaigns on the premise that through
consistent and regular contact we can move prospects through a
carefully orchestrated series of steps which results in an
identifiable percentage of them purchasing our services.
The key is to automate as much of it as possible.
We suggest that the initial auto-responder be sent out three
hours after the report is requested. It should serve to simply
thank the recipient for requesting the information and to
introduce yourself.
The next series of messages should move the conversion process
through a carefully designed series of steps in which you both
build credibility for yourself and move the prospect to take
action. As with the other steps in the process the ability to
communicate content in a compelling manner is crucial for
success.
One of the main challenges of any marketing effort is the
follow-up stage. When we look at marketing campaigns that have
achieved outstanding success and compare them to those that have
performed below expectation, the difference is almost always in
how effectively the stay in touch process was implemented.