Conversations on marketing are all too often “Academic” for contractors, working in the field appeals more to us than in the office. This article is a great resource for a glimpse at some of the patterns we are guilty of in our businesses. To help you understand, I have added personal comments in red. – HomeBuildR

Mistake #1: Lack of Marketing Mindset!

Most professionals shiver with disgust on a mere thought of having to promote and sell their service because they are confused what marketing and selling really is.

Regardless of how good you are at what you do if you can’t get enough visibility and not enough people are interested in your products and services, you’ll have a mediocre business at best and always struggle to stay afloat.

You are in business to solve other people’s problems profitably, and marketing helps you “get exposed” to more people and make them “hungry” for your solutions.

Make a commitment to become a life-long student of marketing and continually apply what you learn. Soon your business will soar.

Mistake #2: Spraying and Praying!

Poor strategic planning, lack of clearly defined target market, niche and ideal client result in confusing marketing messages and costly “hit and miss” promotional tactics that fail to deliver the desired response.

Evaluate who your best clients are and invest time, effort, and money into only those strategies that help you best reach the largest number of prospects who can potentially become your ideal clients.

The more precise and targeted your promotions become, the more successful and profitable your business will be.

A great example, sending out mailers to a zip code with out identifying your potential clients first. It makes no sense to me to send a mailer out to homeowners that already have a swimming pool in their backyard when I’m looking to build new ones.

Mistake #3: Confusing Marketing with Sales!

Before you can have a paid client you must have a prospect. And before you have a prospect you must have a lead!

Lack of effective, systematic lead generation strategies, and trying to jump from “stranger to client” keeps the business pipeline very dry for most service professionals!

Make lead generation one of the core activities of your business. The bigger you can build the database of qualified prospects the more relaxed you’ll be about the future of your business.

You’ll also become more effective in pursuing only those potential clients who are the best match for you – resulting in creating a more fulfilling business for you and better results for your clients.

Sales happen when you market well.

Mistake #4: Under- or Over-Spending!

Without knowing the value of each client there is no appropriate marketing budget. Promotional efforts are abandoned all together, or there is too much money wasted on tactics that eat up all potential profits.

Track each customer’s spending habits. Over a period of time you’ll be able to determine the value each customer represents to your business. This number is critical in your marketing efforts. Without it you never know how much you can really afford to invest in your new client acquisition strategies.

Mistake #5: Failing to Keep In Touch!

A lack of consistent contact causes valuable client relationships to suffer, and results in increased attrition and permanently lost sales.

At times we all forget that people buy when they are ready not when we need to make a sale. Developing ways to keep in touch with prospects and clients generates six-figure windfalls for me every single year.

Often my clients reveal to me that they have been reading my tips for years before ever investing a dime in one of my products.

Start an ezine. Send out a monthly postcard. Write and publish an article a month. Start a blog. Host a monthly teleseminar. Get into podcasting. Whatever your method – find a way to frequently and regularly connect with current, potential, and past clients.

Real estate agents do an excellent job with this, every year they will send out magnetic calendars for their past clients. I often amazed how many of these calendars are on refrigerators in the homes I visit.

Mistake #6: Refusing to Brand Yourself as an Expert!

A close relative to “spraying and praying.” Being a Jack (or Jane) of all trades confuses your potential clients and diminishes the perceived value of your services and products.

Analyze your strengths and the market you serve. Can you identify a specific service or product that is more popular than others you offer and that you are really good at and passionate about? Can you notice a trend that some clients tend to get better results with you than others?

If so, make a conscious effort to position yourself as an expert who offers only specific solutions to specific audience and in the upcoming months and years become better than anyone else at doing it.

Most of us prefer do deal with experts. So the time and effort you invest in positioning yourself as one will pay huge dividends; you’ll effectively differentiate yourself from others offering a similar service, and gain a competitive advantage that’s nearly impossible to beat!

Mistake #7: Engaging In Price Competition!

Failure to properly position and differentiate your services from competitors forces professionals to sell their skilled service at too low, “hours-for-dollars” rates.

Often prospects can’t tell the difference between one service provider and another and base their decision to price alone.

Unless you don’t mind being treated as a commodity and making only a fraction of the money you really could me making, you should take steps to clearly communicate you HUB (Hot Undeniable Benefits) of doing business with you.

Mistake #8: “Winging it” Sales Process!

Not understanding the proper syntax of an enrollment conversation, most professionals practice the “show up and throw up” sales method, which easily turns off even the most eager potential clients.

Develop a set of five to ten “must-have-answered” questions that illustrates your expertise and ensures you this prospect is the right type of client for you.

It’s important to remember this: While you are engaging in sales conversations about your product or service all the time, your potential clients only do it once in a while and they rely on you to guide them through this process.

Don’t disappoint them and rob them of opportunity to work with you by being lousy at closing the deal!

Mistake #9: Over-Depending On Referrals!

Not knowing the difference between getting referrals and a strategically developed word-of-mouth marketing system many professionals can’t understand why satisfied clients don’t refer them to friends and colleagues and they don’t know how to solve this problem.

Your good clients want to refer you to their friends they often don’t know how to do it. Unsure about how aggressive you’ll be in pursuing the contacts they give you, they prefer the safer option of not giving it to you at all.

Know when it’s best to approach clients about referrals (hint – it’s not at the end of your engagements!). Educate them about your follow-up process to make them at ease with your practice. Those two simple tweaks alone will make a huge difference in your “referral-ability”.

You probably wouldn’t be reading this, if you were not guilty of relying on referrals as your sole method of lead generation. It’s Shocking, how many contractors stick with referrals as their main way of getting leads, as if it were a badge of honor.

Mistake #10: Misusing Technology!

Many professionals mistakenly assume that “internet is a business”. They either refuse to get into “that business” all together and miss out on huge marketing possibilities, or try to convert their business to be 100% internet based. Both are costly mistakes.

Savvy professionals recognize new business development opportunities that internet makes possible so they make online marketing an important part of their strategy, but they don’t drop everything else.

Employ the power of online marketing to make your business easier to find, and to keep in touch with current and potential clients. But also give your promotions a healthy “multi-dimensional” appeal with offline strategies like postcards and phone calls and watch your business explode.

Mistake #11: Being a Lone Ranger and a Super Hero!

Lack of delegation skills, not having a support team, and working alone without access to a community of like-minded peers who are committed to our success diminishes the opportunity to creatively brainstorm new ideas, explore new opportunities, or uncover blind-spots.

Admittedly, lack of good delegating skills is my personal biggest vice I continue to work on. It’s also what keeps most professionals and entrepreneurs from building a more successful business.

I’m finding that better planning, reminding myself of the value of my time, and constantly improving my delegation skills is very helpful.

Also, forming my personal board of advisors (mastermind) and being able to seek their counsel when needed is very powerful tool to keeps me focused and on track to achieve my business goals.

Mistake #12: Lack of Business and Marketing Systems!

Too much creativity negatively impacts profitability. Constantly working on new one-shot strategies and reinventing the wheel results in larger than necessary workload, overwhelm, and diminished profits.

Remember that many of your business growth strategies can become more profitable as you implement them again and again and tweak and perfect them over a period of time.

Bigger payoffs can be generated from focusing on one strategy, optimizing it for best results, and systemizing and automating it than from chasing a half a dozen of ideas that never get fully implemented.

Make it one of your business goals to create systems that can be duplicated, automated, or delegated and free your time to focus on money-making aspects of your business – like improving your marketing and generating more leads.

Here is just a short list of “marketing culprits” that are likely keeping your business from
reaching its full potential:

• Unclear Target Market.
  It absolutely makes my marketing blood boil when I hear “our service can help
  everyone”. How on Earth do you find everyone?

• Confusing, Self-Centered
  Marketing Message. Since the early 1900 marketing geniuses like Claude
  Hopkins have been telling us that shouting “we are the best, come buy from us”
  doesn’t work – no matter how loud you scream! Amazingly, over 90% of all
  marketing materials out there are doing exactly that!
  
• ‘Hop-And-Drop’ Approach.
  Any worthwhile skill takes practice. Yet most small business owners abandon each
  marketing tactic after just one try, without giving themselves a chance to get
  good at it. It’s like a running rabbit – switching direction with every hop!

• On and Off Approach.
  Spending a lot of time and effort on marketing when the business is slow, but
  then giving up on almost all promotional activities when business gains
  momentum!

• Not Preaching To The Choir.
  Most businesses make the mistake of chasing new markets all the time instead of
  maximizing profits using their existing database of current and prospective
  clients.

If you can put a “yes, guilty as charged” checkmark next to any of those statements, chances are you are not profiting from your business as much as you could. To help unleash the extra profits currently hidden in your business or practice here is a simple Six Step Marketing Model.

1. Create a MAP!

You don’t need to kill a tree to create an effective Marketing Action Plan. Simply describe
your target market, their problem, and the benefits your service or product offers. Identify five to ten ways in which you can get visibility and generate new leads. Finally, list all the action steps
you need to take daily, weekly and monthly and assign specific deadlines and outcomes to each step.

2. Craft Your Magnetic
Marketing Message!

Potential clients don’t give a hoot about your titles, awards, and prestigious office location! All they want to know is that you understand their problem and have an effective solution to it. Communicate those two things clearly and new clients will flock to you like bees to honey!

3. Develop Attraction
Tools!

Forget about the self-focused brochures! You need promotional materials that intrigue interest and generate response. Today’s technology allows to easily and inexpensively assemble and distribute information products – like special reports or CDs – that illustrate your capabilities and effortlessly promote your services.

4. Generate Leads.

Getting all the visibility in the world will not do any good if you are not giving your potential client an irresistible reason to contact you. Try and test several marketing messages and media to see what promotional strategies bring in the biggest bang for the buck.

The key here is testing - tweak your approach multiple times before you decide to completely abandon it. What might have been a big flop at first, with a bit of tweaking can turn into a total goldmine!

5. Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up!

Studies show that over 80% of all sales are made on or after five contacts with the prospect. However, more than 80% of follow-up ends after just three attempts! Creating and automating a systematic follow-up process is a must to maximizing your marketing ROI.

Develop a series of 12 to 24 meaningful communications each addressing something of relevance to your prospects and find a way to periodically distribute them to prospects and clients.

6. Learn To Sell!

The thought of selling causes most professionals to cringe. Fact is, effective selling is not about memorizing hundreds of closings tactics or becoming an attack dog that corners prospects into saying “yes”. Instead, study a consultative approach model and become a master of asking powerful questions that compel others to action!

(c) 2004 Adam M. Urbanski

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Urbanski, the Marketing Mentor, helps Independent Service
Professionals and Small Business Owners attract more clients. For more
promotional tips and a FREE 32-page marketing guide go to

http://www.themarketingmentors.com