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Guest post by: Mark Satterfield Become an Author

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This is somewhat overwhelming. I Googled “marketing advice” this morning and guess what? There’s a mere 99,300,000 results. Although I’m being slightly facetious, going online to research how to get more new clients, probably causes more harm than good. It’s not that there’s a lack of information (some of it actually quite good). The problem is that there’s (obviously) too much information. So why is this important? Because if one takes even a modest dip into the pool of advice, it’s amazingly easy to get overwhelmed. And unfortunately when we get overwhelmed, we tend to resort to a default position: we do nothing. Which of course just makes matters worse. I’m a firm believer that we make marketing far too hard. Way too complex. It’s one thing to have a multi-step marketing system after you’ve put in place the basics. But if you attempt to go from having no marketing system, to one with 18 steps…well it’s no wonder why so many people give up in frustration. It’s a bit like golf. My instructor tells me about cocking my wrists, keeping the club shaft parallel to the ground, body weight transfer…my mind goes numb with all the advice. While the reality is that my golf shot will pretty much do what I want it to do if I just keep my head down and quit looking up to see where the ball is going. The point is that when we keep things simple-good stuff happens. True in golf. True in life. True in marketing. So here’s my advice to you for keeping the process of getting more new clients simple, less frustrating and actually, more productive. All you need to do is to keep 3 things in mind. Three simple components of the marketing system. No big deal. Component #1: Create something that you think your target audience would be interested in getting, that you can give away for free. It might be an article, recording of a speech you gave, video, piece of software, book, assessment, or something else. The important point is that it should be something that your particular niche is interested in. This usually this means that it focuses on a problem they’re suffering from. How do you find out what the best topic is? The easiest way is to simply ask them. Put together a quick survey on SurveyMonkey and send it out to those who are already on your list. So what if you’ve only got 12 people on your list-survey them. That’s a heck of a lot better than sitting in your office deciding on your own what your niche is interested in. The offer should be something you can send electronically at zero cost, rather than a free consultation. That’s not to say that a free consultation is a bad offer to make, you just don’t want to offer it at the very beginning. Component #2: Create a one-page microsite that promotes the free offer. That’s all it does. In effect it’s a long form sales letter with one purpose: Get your visitors to opt-in to get the free offer. When people opt-in, their contact information goes into what’s called an autoresponder. That’s basically a database that then enables you to send these people additional messages that build trust & credibility, and eventually turn large percentages of them into paying clients. Component #3: Promote the one page microsite and get people to come to it. Lots of ways to do that. Pay-per-Click advertising, online advertising on relevant association sites, direct mail (letters and/or postcards), social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter…No, not all “social media” is the same so you need to decide what’s best for you and your market), blogs, joint ventures (fancy way of saying, align yourself with those who are also selling to your target market), articles, white papers, books, PR, direct sales, speeches, webinars, telemarketing, teleconferences; the list goes on. So here’s my point. These are the 3 components of marketing. All you need to do is start with component #1 and progress from there. By all means don’t start with component #3 (which many people do) since all you’ll wind up doing is spending money on driving prospects to a website from which they bounce off. It’s somewhat difficult to build a relationship with someone if they don’t leave any record of who they are when they come to visit. Will this work for you? It’s hard to argue against a strategy that fundamentally says, “Offer people something free and then stay in touch to build a relationship.” Although I hate the term “no-brainer”, in this case it certainly does seem to fit. The bottom line is that there’s simply no reason why anyone can’t have an effective marketing system up and running inside of 30-45 days. Unless they start making it complicated.

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