Have you ever thought it would be so great simply to pay one media outlet all your monthly branding, marketing, and advertising budget and be able to get all the leads you could service each month? Yeah, me, too. I’ve both had dreams and lived through nightmares like that. In a prior post, we saw how you could end up spending $2,500 a month for warm PPL (pay per lead) Internet leads and come up short hitting your $25,000 per month revenue goal. So, how can you get more business walking in your door for less, or, better still, almost nothing at all?
First, let’s review all the various ideas that may populate your BMA plan. We saw them a few posts ago. They are:
- Advertising
- Alumni programs
- Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
- Blog
- Charitable contributions
- Client entertainment and gifts
- Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
- Collateral materials
- Continuing education seminars
- CRM system or client database
- Digital marketing
- Directory listings
- Events and seminars
- Graphic design and branding costs
- Internet directory referral fees
- Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
- Marketing-related training
- Market research and client surveys
- Marketing staff professional development
- Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
- Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
- Proposals and pitches
- Public and media relations
- Retreats
- Social marketing
- Tickets and sponsorships
- Web site design and maintenance
Note that “Internet directory referral fees,” which are the”professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) services we’ve discussed paying $25 per lead, are almost in the middle of this alphabetical list. This is probably where such things belong in a living, successful BMA plan. There are a lot of things you must invest in before paying PROMO services and there are also still a lot of things you should invest in after resorting to PROMO services.
Here are some of the must do’s you must do before investing in PROMO referral services:
- You must choose a “result-oriented” customer value proposition to serve as the anchor of your branding, marketing, and advertising plan.
- You must create a good tagline.
- You must create, print, and carry plenty of copies of a nice traditional size business card, a more memorable quarter-sheet “ten-second” service card, and a trifold “elevator speech” brochure.You must create and claim your Internet address.
- You must invest resources in a good, in contradistinction to a “bad” or a “killer,” reader-device-responsive, website. We have talked and will continue to talk about what makes a website “good.”
- You must claim and optimize your social media accounts, your industry web aggregators’ accounts, and local marketing aggregators’ directory identities.
- You must relate (i.e. be social) with other people in as many social media spaces your time budget will allow and convince them to follow your blog.
- You must blog with relevant content that is supplemented, persistently and consistently, at least weekly, but preferably more often.
- You must create a valuable lead magnet to give prospects in return for them giving you their email address.
- You must convince people viewing your site (for the first time, hopefully) to let you continue to send them your new blog posts every time you send one.
- You must create and implement an e-mail drip marketing program including both content and a platform through which to send it.
- You must invest in and use an effective and efficient customer relationship management program that ties your prospect management into your client management aspects.
- You must network in person and by email with current clients.
- You must network around “pools” of prospects and people who can refer you prospects.
- You must create and implement a referral recognition and thank-you program including a shout out in your blog and at mailing them a handwritten note containing at least a $5 Starbucks card. The size of the gift is not nearly as important as the handwritten note and the fact you personally took the time to say thank you in a demonstrative way.
Contrary to conventional thinking that everyone searches for whatever they want on the Internet, word of mouth still generates a lot of business for small business owners. It also costs you pennies on the dollar vs. pay-per-click or pay-per-lead.
If you do all of these things effectively, efficiently, consistently, and persistently, then you may well escape the need for long-term dependence on PROMO leads.
Nonetheless, come back next post and we will take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of PROMO leads. Spoiler alert! One of my main complaints about PROMO leads and other PPL and PPC digital advertising is PROMO leads only work what little they do only as long as you continue paying the PROMO website owners to send them to you.
[reminder]What’s your experience with PROMO lead generators?[/reminder]
Do you want your website to deliver you a super-engaged community that will then buy and use and return to buy and use more of whatever product or service you are selling? Yeah, me, too. Alas, however, before you can enjoy the benefits of such a relationship, you must invest some of all your resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in online cultural branding to create and sustain that relationship.
Have you ever wondered why that spiffy new, professionally crafted website you spent a few grand developing to show yours is a “serious business” sits all alone on the web, unvisited, unfriended, unshared, untweeted? Yeah, me, too. Rereading a long series of articles written by some “people who ought to know” about marketing in the age of social media may, however, clue us all in on an answer to this dilemma.