You can seduce the market by being like a lover, full of care and interested in every move your loved one makes. You feel the little mood swings, know how to dance the dance of seduction, when to come close and when to move back.
It is not about pressuring anyone into anything! On the contrary, it is helping people to make the best decision for them.
Below you find the most important concepts, elements and tools to enhance your marketing communication.
Clarify Your Ideal Market
The first step is to identify a suitable target market that fits your uniqueness. Concentrate on getting to know the market intimately by developing personal relationships with people in that market. They might or might not become your clients.
Your market will always share some common problems that you have a solution for. The more targeted your solution, the better.
Build a Relationship
In the beginning, your market might be shy or weary of your advances. Give it time (practice patience) and continue to show who you are and what you have to offer (practice persistence).
Do not expect to make a sale at the first rendez-vous. Just concentrate on interesting someone in the next step. And as in real life, the more interest you show in them, the more interested they are in you.
So listen to what the market has to say and learn from it. If no one buys, keep your
vision and work on your service and communication to get it right.
Excite, Educate, Encourage
The most successful marketing strategies use what excites human most: some sensual element. Depending on your market, this could be quite sophisticated or very direct.
The other elements are to educate and to encourage (without being pushy or appearing needy).
Invest in the Relationship
Marketing is an investment. It is going to be higher in the beginning
because you are still learning about your market. The more you invest, the quicker you will have learnt enough to know how to get your ideal level of clients with fewer resources.
Measuring is essential, so always ask how a new client found you and test two variations where you can to keep improving.
How much should you invest? In the first year, you probably need 10-15% of your desired turnover (that is the money you receive) to get things going.
Make a plan of how you are going to spend that
money over the course of the year. Decide on the tools to use and how they integrate.
Marketing Tools
All the marketing elements can be used in most of these tools. Choose the tools that suit your market and fit your budget. Some tools can also be mixed and matched.
- Repeat business: It is six times more expensive to get a new client than have an old one return.
- Phone Contact: Use for past clients to keep in touch and see how they are going, choose the right time-frame
- Referrals: the cheapest and most reliable marketing tool, support your clients to refer to you
- Business Cards: make them active, include your photo
- Website: You can be online in a few minutes without detailed computer knowledge. Additionally you benefit from their webtraffic, rather than having to create it all yourself.
- Vouchers: better to give $ value, than discounting
- Allied Marketing: Find partners that market different products to the same market and market together
- Media Releases: You have little control, but an editorial has great credibility
- Flyers & Brochures: Expensive to produce, so better to wait until you understand your market
- Newsletter or Direct Mail (email or post): be informative and careful to comply with the SPAM Act
- Advertising (newspaper, radio, TV): go for size
- Yellow Pages: when you are a main stream service
- Promotions: useful when your target market comes together in one location
- Presentations & Demonstrations: Target well
- Letterbox Drop: 1-2% return rate normal
Marketing Elements
Mix and match these elements for optimal communication.
Headline
The headline (or title) is said to account for 70-80% of the success of a marketing tool.
Treat it like that and spend sufficient time on it to get it right. Write multiple headlines over a few days and test the best ones with friends or even some of your clients to find what is most successful. The better it resonates with your market’s problem, the better it works.
Benefits
Rather than listing features, show the benefits. That is often not easy when you are very close to your own service, so get some friends to check it for you.
Problem and Solution
Describe the problem and your solution, so readers realise that you understand them. This works really well when describing how people feel before and after.
Stories
We all love stories. Tell your own story, your clients’ stories or other stories that relate to your service. It is great to be personal in that, especially in health and wellbeing.
Testimonials
Testimonials are stories which add credibility by others telling them for you.
It is best to interview your clients (or just take note of what they say), write it into a suitable form and ask them for permission to use it. This will get you results much quicker than asking them to write something.
The more personal information you can include, the better (i.e. name, suburb, job title, possibly phone number).
Guarantee
Give great guarantees to reduce the risk for your clients. Services cannot be tested before buying. A guarantee substitutes that.
And if you ever get someone taking you up on it, use that as a learning opportunity to improve your service. There are very few free-loaders who just do something to get the money back.
Offers
Offers have to be in line with the value of your service. Think carefully (and test) what your market really values without it costing you a lot. It is the perceived value that draws people, not the
monetary value. So use this to show your appreciation. And think of ideas, other than discounting.
Call to Action
Always finish all of your marketing materials with a clear call to action. This does not have to be the purchase. Instead it could be the next step in building trust.
But never leave your clients excited without knowing what to do (or what is going to happen) next.
Include your contact details!
Conclusion
Have you ever been seduced? Was it someone that just kept saying: Buy me, buy me, buy me? Or did you feel excited, intrigued and understood by that person.
Marketing has a lot to do with exciting your market. That works best the better you understand your clients. So focus on getting to know and learning about your market. The tools and elements
are possibilities to test what works best for your unique market.