You might offer a great product or service, but does anyone else realize that? The fact is, you've got to get more people to "raise their hands" to work with you if you want to accelerate your success.
Here's how to do exactly that, courtesy of Dean Jackson. A real-estate entrepreneur and the co-founder of the hugely impactful I Love Marketing podcast, Dean has long been one of the most sought-after marketing experts around.
Here are three of his top strategies that can guide your marketing efforts so they pay off big time -- and help you generate a steady stream of clients whom you are ideally suited to serve.
1. Develop a context to guide your marketing efforts. Jackson urges entrepreneurs to develop a context -- what he calls a marketing operating system -- to guide their marketing efforts.
To do so, break down your business into three main units: before, during and after. "This structure allows you to see where the opportunities are, as well as how the business is doing right now."
- Before unit. This is the part of the business where you identify exactly who you should be serving and marketing to -- the ideal target clients to whom you can bring enormous value (and get paid well for doing so).
2. Design your marketing to compel, not convince. Too often our advertising efforts try to convince people to buy, buy, buy right from the start. But truly effective marketing takes a more nurturing approach by compelling people to "raise their hands" and start a conversation with us. To start that conversation, you need to know what your ideal clients really need and want. Says Jackson: "You want to get in front of them with a message about what they already have on their minds and what they're searching for - a compelling offer that gets them to say "I want that." Then you start educating and motivating those people."
So what type of content draws people in instead of hammers them over the head? Jackson recommends writing an ebook to offer to prospects free of charge. "A book is one of the most compelling marketing strategies that I've ever seen in terms of opt-in rates or generating new leads," he says.
The secret to using e-books for marketing is that your book doesn't need to be long, or even especially well written. "Most people won't read it, to be honest," says Jackson. "What's most important is that you have a book to offer, with a title that gets your target audience excited, and a way for them to access it easily."
3. Maximize your ROR -- return on relationships. If you deliver on your promised value, you'll have a roster of clients who know you, like you and trust you. These are perfect clients to cultivate referrals from and generate additional income. And yet, too many entrepreneurs overlook this low-hanging fruit when seeking new business. "In that group of people, you've got two opportunities: To develop new ways to add value to them and get recurring revenues, and to orchestrate referrals of new people into your business," says Jackson.
Ideally, you want to generate a 20 percent yield from your existing client base (what Jackson calls your "relationship portfolio"). That doesn't take much. Concludes Jackson: "A 20% annual yield means that within the next five years, each one of your customers either does another transaction with you or refers one person who does business with you -- that's it."
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