Where To Focus Your Small Business Marketing?

Where To Find The Most Clients…

Are you pulling in new clients one by one when you could be bringing them in by the dozens or even hundreds? Most people make the mistake of marketing to bring in new leads individually when they could be bringing many at a time.

If you fished for a living and had the choice of two places to drop your nets, where would you go fishing – in the spot where you’d identified one big whopper, or the place with a school of hundreds of fish?

Obviously you’d seek out locations where you’d catch the most fish with the least effort and cost. Shouldn’t you be doing the same with your marketing?

Every business has at least two sources of profitable prospects.

Individual Prospects
You’ve got loyal clients who may be big spenders. These clients should be treasured, but if you’re like most business owners, you need more than one or two ‘gorilla’ clients to keep your business growing.

Referral Partners
In any business, referral partners are those people who can send you not just one client, but dozens or in my case thousands.

What’s a referral partner? It’s anyone who targets and or influences your target market. In my business the best referral partners are others who have a list of 50,000 or more small business owners and entrepreneurs. For one of my clients who sells hearing aids referral partners include companies that target products to the aging baby boomer market.

The first step to growing your business by leaps and bounds is to identify potential referral partners. Then work out the details to provide them with a share of the profits to motivate them to promote your products and services.

Want to know the secrets to growing your business in leaps and bounds? Use this link to get the answer >>

In the last 12 months I used this simple referral partner strategy to increase my annual sales by 100%. At the beginning of 2007, I created a campaign targeting marketing partners who had the potential to send me huge numbers of new customers.

It was more work to develop a relationship with these partners than to sign up an individual client, but the return can bring in 50 to 100 times as many sales, at least in my business.

What’s the fastest way to grow your business?

Recently Joan, who owns a printing service in Philadelphia, signed up for my marketing mentoring services. Joan told me her sales were stagnant at $5,000,000. She wants to push sales to at least $7,000,000 in the next year.

When I asked her where her present sales were coming from she told me that 60% was from individual clients and the remaining 40%, or $2,000,000, was from one print broker.

As I’m sure you have deduced, the fastest way for Joan to grow her business won’t be in spending all her time bringing in individual clients. Instead the simple solution is to target a few more print brokers. Add one and she’d reach her goal. Add two or three and she’d double her business.

Want to double your business this year? Use this link >>

Marketing is like bowling.

To win you don’t aim to hit each bowling pin, one by one. The winning strategy is to hit strikes and knock down all ten pins with one ball. Of course it’s harder to do but bowlers who hit the most pins with the fewest balls win every time.

So where should you focus your marketing?

Prioritize your time and efforts based on your marketing goals.

Some businesses get 100% of their sales from marketing partners but until you do I wouldn’t recommend abandoning marketing to individual clients. The key is to prioritize your time and efforts based on your marketing goals.

For example, if you’d like to get 50% of your sales from referral partners, allocate 50% of your time and marketing budget to building these super-profitable relationships.

How much time are you spending now on developing referral partnerships?

Don’t be embarrassed if your answer is close to zero. Most businesses neglect their biggest sources of potential profit. Takes the following three steps to change this now.

Step 1 – Set Aside the Time
Joan knew she wasn’t going to make any progress with her marketing until she could carve out the time to work on it. Every time she set foot in her printing plant, she was deluged with questions from her staff. Finally, after months of hearing me insist on it, she took a big step and decided to work from home one morning a week so she could devote time to marketing.

Step 2 – Have a Marketing Plan
Setting aside time to work on marketing won’t pay off unless you know what to do and how to do it. Find out what works to attract both individual clients and marketing partners. Use this link to get the details >>

Step 3 – Take Action
Successful marketers and business owners take action to bring in new clients, including these:
– Developing the tools their marketing partners need to promote them,
– Following up every couple of weeks with their prospects and marketing partners to build and maintain the relationship.

Are you an action-oriented business owner or marketer who is focused on success?

Then you’ll want to take the next step and discover where and how to focus your marketing to maximize your profits. Use this link to get the details >>

Gotta go. I need to call a couple of referral partners and see if I can double sales again this year.

Charlie
Small Business Marketing That Sells