It’s easy to get carried away with your marketing efforts, and frantically try to be on every platform, and looking into every opportunity, but it is possible to do far less and get better results. How? Watch this to find out!

Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to de-mystify the world of accounts and tax, and to help your business grow.

I heard something, recently, that really surprised me. Someone said that there are 49 different marketing pillars that you can use to develop your business, and to raise awareness of what you do, to people that might want to become a customer.

That’s a massive number, and absolutely daunting for any business owner who’s trying to work out which ones might be best for their business. The examples listed ranged from Facebook Ads to billboards, to leaflets, to LinkedIn. A huge number, a huge range and, obviously, some of them are very complex, while some of them are quite straightforward. You’re going to get different success rates out of each one.

So, how do you know which one is going to work best for your business?

Well, it’s going to depend on who you want to speak to, and whose audience you want to get into, so that they can start to learn about what you do, and start to decide whether or not they want to speak to you. So, you could spend a lot of time, and a lot of money on the wrong platform and, actually, get nowhere fast. The thing is, many businesses tend to lose sight of who they’re trying to get in touch with, and how many of those leads they actually need.

A lot of businesses actually only need a very small number.

To get, for a lot of businesses, 12 new customers a year, could make a massive difference. For other businesses they need 12 new customers every week. As with so much, it does, very much, depend on your business. You need to take a big step back, and you need to think about your current customer base, and how many more you actually need, to get your business to where you want to get it to this year.

Then you need to work back.

You need to think about, who those customers are, where they are, what their hobbies are, where they are likely to be looking. So, if they are on social media, which platform? And how you actually can get into their mindset.

The best way of doing that is to look at your current customers.

Go through your current customers and work out who the best ones are, for you. How did you find those? What do they do? How old are they? What sort of markets do you think they’ll be moving around? And when you’ve actually got under their skin, and, potentially, spoken to them and said, you know, “What magazines do you read? What platforms are you on? Why did you decide to come to us?” It’s those sorts of things that you then want to target, and to focus on, to get hold of your new customers. Then, once you’ve got those ideas, you can start to think, “Well, okay. Where am I going to find those people?” Once you’ve got that, you can actually be far more targeted if you’re looking at a restricted list, a ‘Dream List’, if you like.

You can buy a list of those, the right industries, that shows the contact numbers, the contact names, and then you can start to get a little bit creative as to how you’re going to get in touch with them. If they’re on, perhaps, LinkedIn or a social media platform, you can start to try to show up in their timeline, or show up in the groups that they’re in. On LinkedIn, you do a search of the industries that you’re looking for, even in the areas that you’re looking for.

You can start to get creative:

• You may decide to run an event and invite some of these people.
• You could send a direct mail piece or a video card could be really good, with a conversation, a pitch potentially, directly to them as to why you would like to meet with them or why you’d like to book a phone call.
• You could just pick up the phone and see if you can get through to them, depending on how confident you are, and how likely you think you are to be able to get through a gatekeeper. That could actually make a really big difference because we all hide behind emails now. We’re very wary of actually making those initial calls.

Essentially, all you’re looking to do is get a meeting, or a conversation with these people, and then you know how to talk about your business; it’s what you do all day, everyday!

So think about, actually creating your Dream List. Rather than trying to cover off all the 49 marketing pillars, try to get very targeted, and think about how many customers you actually, really need. And then stop doing all of the stuff that’s distracting you from getting to those customers, and you might find a massive difference in your business, this year.

That’s my lesson or my thought for this week, so I’m going to leave you with that, and I’ll see you all, very soon.