The Foundations That Maximise Your Marketing

Like any building, marketing is only as good as the foundation it is built on. If you want your marketing to perform (by producing sales and clients), there’s a few key areas that will help you to maximise any marketing efforts, ensuring you get better results each time.

Marketing is only as good as the foundation it is built on.

1. Your service offering:

Trying to market a sub-par offer or service is always going to slow you down. On the other hand, a great service is still not going to sell itself, contrary to what well-timed quotes and gurus will have you believe. A couple of things to consider when it comes to ensuring your service is up to scratch:

• The service that you sell should be client-centric, not competitor-centric. Far too many businesses are trying to one-up their competitors. If they pour more of that time and energy into focusing on their client and their needs, they’ll see what’s going to give them the edge. This same thinking is what led Domino’s Pizza to create their 15 minutes or it’s free promise, they focused on frustrations experienced by their customers, not competitors. Once they had this, that became an excellent angle for their marketing.

• The packaging of your service needn’t be forgotten even though it’s often intangible. How you present your offering to potential clients is important, for some they can beautifully articulate their service on a sales call, others create digital brochures or proposals. Whether it’s how you describe it through words or how you showcase it through visuals, the packaging of your service still matters as this is the tangibility that people can hold onto which leads them to buy.

• Design your service to allow for repeat business (where relevant). If you can keep a client for longer, you won’t have to go searching for more clients as often. Your service offering could be built on a retainer or subscription model - or if it’s project-based, broken into phases or follow-on projects that make sense for the nature of the work your business does.

While this is by no means an exhaustive list of how to improve your service offering, just remember that what you sell needs to be of a certain standard in order to maximise your marketing.

2. Who you’re targeting:

You’ve heard it before, market to everyone and you’re marketing to noone. Like I shared in my previous article (which you can read here), so much of the heavy lifting, particularly when it comes to your marketing, comes down to your ability to laser in and target the right people effectively. When you have clear sight of the specific people who are the perfect fit for your services, you’re able to:

• Have a clear understanding of how to reach the right people
• Create a service offering that is specifically suited to the right people
• Price your services accordingly to suit the market you want to work with

When you target the right people and they hear from you (through your marketing), they are far more receptive to you, they want to give you their attention because every element of your business has been designed around them, their problem, their needs, all of which is becoming evident to them that you can solve.

3. How you’re reaching them:

To strengthen your marketing, you really want to make sure you’re finding the best path to reach your ideal clients, if they were on a map where would they be? It’s captain obvious that this should be considered however, way too many businesses will try marketing that couldn’t be further away from where their ideal clients are currently. This distinction is paramount, where are your ideal clients right now?

For most service based businesses, attracting clients to you isn’t going to work (at least not yet, not until you build up your audience or network in one reliable place). What you want to do is go to your ideal clients. Part of the beauty of specifically identifying who your ideal clients are is that it often reveals exactly where you can find them, you might have their website, you might be able to find them directly on LinkedIn, you might see they’re part of particular associations and events.?

So, instead of posting on social media hoping they will see your content, use your map to locate them first and foremost - what will follow is a creative method to speak to them, this is your marketing.??

4. Your sales and conversion process:

The biggest let-down to any marketing initiative is a poor or overly complex sales and conversion process. In addition to this, many people will preach the idea that sales is a numbers game. However, as someone who loves to push the envelope and aim for the highest possible conversion rates, I’m always looking for the gaps and holes in a process that are causing leads to slip through or reduce conversions. Here are some areas to consider that will make sure your marketing is worth it:

• Warm up and qualify your leads prior to sales calls by having them answer questions about working with you (my podcast episode here will help with this).

• Ensure leads that you speak are clear why you’re speaking by building this into your sales process - e.g. excited to have a chat today to see if we’re a fit and how I can help you (this is pre-framing your sales call so the lead is anticipating making a decision).

• Build in a follow-up process that you or your team follows consistently. The truth is not everyone is going to say yes in the first instance or they need to think about it or run it past other decision makers - this is ok! Just ensure you’ve got a documented followup process that is followed 100% of the time.

If you want to get more out of your marketing, I’d encourage you to review these foundations in your business on a regular cadence. These can often be the small yet mighty shifts that make all the difference to help your business make more sales and sign more clients, helping your marketing to perform better.

In my next article I’ll break down the anatomy of the model sales call, a name my clients have dubbed which have taken them from oddly quoting their services to confidently sharing prices and closing clients in one call.?

? I'm Shannon Stone, award-winning business & marketing consultant and I specialise in helping service based businesses strengthen their sales, enhance their team and better manage their business.

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