Category: Sales & Marketing

This article is by our guest writer Diana Ennen, who is also the Author of Virtual Assistant: The Series, Become a Highly Successful, Sought After VA, & The Corel Word Perfect Office Ready Virtual Assistant Solution Pack. She also owns a website: http://www.virtualwordpublishing.com
Marketing your business is essential to its success. You can have the greatest service or the best product, but if you don’t market it and let others know about it, then it’s doubtful that you’ll be very successful. When considering your marketing, you first want to take into account who your clients are, and what your clients might be looking to you to do. To do this, you need to do the following:
1.Know Your Client’s Business: The first step is to know your clients. Do some research so you can have a clear understanding of what your clients’ business is and what they do. What does this business hope to achieve? What are its needs and how can you meet those needs?
What can you do that will allow that client to perform better in business? By knowing your client and finding answers to these questions, you can become an immediate asset to their firm.
2.Offering Clients a Convenience: One of the main conveniences you can offer is that of time. Clients realize that their time is valuable. Anything that will allow your potential clients more freedom with their time is an immediate plus. But you need to be able to show them this in your marketing. Take for example a virtual assisting business, when you market to potential clients letting them know that you will do their correspondence typing, answer their e-mail, handle all their publicity needs and even keep their office running while they travel, they realize they will have the time they need to do the work that often so desperately needs done. They will have the time to draft that pleading or finalize the proposal. For the realtor, when you do their marketing they can see how they would be allowed the freedom to be out there selling.
3.Solving clients’ problems: If you can find a way to solve a client’s problems, then you are able to make your business a valuable asset to them. For example, let’s say they are having problems with their website and getting visitors to it. You can send them a letter addressing specifically how you can bring more visitors and also mention what other advantages you can offer. You become a very valuable asset when you do this. They have a problem they need fixed. You have a solution you can solve that problem. They are eager to talk to you immediately to get their site up and running and not miss out on any more missed revenue from their site being down.
4.Proving Clients with Something Better Than What They Have: In your marketing efforts, make sure to mention anything that might be of interest to your clients to run their business better. For example, you might have Voxwire capabilities. This allows you to do web conferencing. You can offer your clients the convenience of having meetings, classes online, etc. Or perhaps you are an expert at Outlook and e-mail management. You can emphasize how much time you can save them daily when you handle this for them. Also, how much more they can connect to their clients when you organize their contacts with Outlook so they can keep in better touch with them.
These are essential key points to remember in marketing to obtain clients or even to keep those existing ones. Now, it’s also important once you get those clients to keep those clients. To do this, you just provide the best possible service always.
For additional marketing tips, you can look to our articles at http://www.virtualwordpublishing.com for articles on all topics of marketing, as well as other business needs.

Before you can have clients, you need to have prospects — that’s what marketing is all about. If your marketing isn’t attracting the kind of people you’d like to be working with, it’s like pushing a rope — you are trying to sell them something they don’t need, and they are looking for something you don’t offer. A little fine-tuning of your marketing plan can make the difference between a solo business that lurches and stalls, and a business that runs smoothly and is fun to operate.

Your Four-Point Marketing Tune-Up Checklist:

Understand the difference between your Target Market and your Niche.

A target market has distinguishing demographic characteristics; for example, recently widowed working women under 50. A niche gets more specific in characteristics that might not be as easily identifiable as demographics; using the previous example, you could further narrow your target market by including only women who want to remarry and don’t know how to meet suitable men.

Make sure your Niche is focused enough.

Think of all the people who might fit in your niche. Imagine them all in a room at a business or social event. Would you find them all interesting and enjoy talking to them? If you cringe at the thought of meeting some of the people in that imaginary room, note what it is about them that you’d like to avoid – and re-define your niche to exclude them.

Perhaps you want to coach women who will be patient in their search for a spouse — not desperate! If your marketing message implies easy, immediate results, you’ll be attracting the wrong prospects. Fine-tune your language so it is clear that your solutions may take time to be successful. You won’t be eliminating potential customers – you’ll be saving yourself time wasted on less-than-ideal prospects. And you’ll find yourself more effortlessly attracting clients in the heart of your niche market.

Choose marketing techniques that fit your strengths.

Just because every other relationship coach has written a book, doesn’t mean you have to! If the whole publishing and book promotion exercise sounds like torture, don’t waste your time. Maybe writing a Dear Abby type of newspaper column is more your style. If you find dealing with your website to be confusing, but are good at speaking to small groups, ignore the advice to do a lot of online marketing and instead look for opportunities to speak at senior centers.

Be authentic – be yourself.

Building an image that isn’t who you are is a setup for disaster, especially for the self employed. You’ll be exhausted keeping up the façade… and potential clients will sense the lack of integrity. If you yourself are recently widowed and learning how to meet the right kind of men, don’t try to imply that you are an expert. Your personal dating stories can be a great way to establish a relationship with a potential client, who can see themselves in you. Clients want someone they can trust — it is more important than all the credentials in the world.

Small Business Branding: How important a core difference is essential to marketing success.
Marketing behaviorQuite often a small business owner will ask me to reveal the most powerful marketing strategy I have seen. The answer may surprise you.
The most powerful marketing strategy I know has little to do with direct mail, adverting, special promotions, websites or referrals. No, before any of those ‘tactics’ will have any major impact on your business you must first find, commit and communicate a compelling difference between you and everyone else that says they do the same thing as you.
Let’s do a quick mental exercise.
Pretend that you are in a room full of your competitors and I asked this question. “If you think you offer a fair price, please raise your hands”. “Now, lower your hands if you don’t offer great customer service.” “Lower your hands if you don’t feel you are an expert and can deliver valuable advice” How many hands do you think would be up? Almost all right? So, if you don’t do an effective job at “educating” you customers on how specifically you are different, guess what the deciding factor is? PRICE!!!! Who wants to compete on price?
Look, we all know that every business is special and unique in its own way. But the bigger question is does your potential clients know? You have to answer the following question “why should I choose you?” from the customer perspective. There are several ways you can establish a unique selling proposition. Here are a few:
* Unique service
* Market niche
* Special offer
* Solve a specific problem
Once you have spent some time and discovered your uniqueness, you must commit to it. These core differences will become the foundation for all of your marketing material and advertising messages. You will use these unique differences to create your marketing materials that educate.
Differentiate or Die: Standing Out In A Crowd [Small Business Branding]