Many businesses and salespeople concentrate all their energies on the really “hot” leads - the people who want something right now and are willing to pay for it now.

I believe this is a big mistake.  ALL of your leads are valuable.  Just because they aren’t customers yet, doesn’t mean they won’t become one later on when their circumstances change or their need is more acute.

There are many reasons why prospects may not be willing to engage your services immediately:

• they are dealing with more pressing things at this time
• they do not have enough information about your product or service
• they are not ready to make a decision
• they do not yet feel comfortable or trust you enough yet
• they are comparing information from other companies and trying to determine the best choice for them

By following up repeatedly with prospective customers, you have a better chance of getting the sale when they are ready to buy - because you’ve remained top-of-mind by providing valuable communications with them.

When you keep in contact with your leads - warm or cold - you are sending them a powerful message: that you believe they are important and worth cultivating a relationship with - even if they haven’t bought anything yet.

So be a smart marketer and treat all of your leads - wherever they are in your marketing funnel - with the same level of respect and importance.  Remember that today’s leads are tomorrow’s customers.

If you are a business looking to grow your lead volume, consider Resource Nation’s vendor program.

I know that many businesses feel that their main purpose is to make a profit and provide for their family and employees.

But I would say that your prime purpose is to give as much as you can to everyone you meet during the course of your business.

Many people wait until someone becomes a paying customer before they start adding value to that person’s life.  I think that’s short-sighted thinking and definitely not in line with the idea that we are all connected, and that prosperity and abundance flows amongst us.

To be successful within our businesses and our lives, we need to start giving.  Giving of our time, our expertise, our opinions, our strategies, our mistakes, our triumphs, our ideas, our money, our credibility and on and on.

I believe that at the heart of each of us, we have a deep desire to make a real difference with our businesses - that’s where the passion and fuel comes from that sustains us through shaky beginnings, down times and expensive mistakes.

Try to approach you business for the next few weeks in the frame-of-mind of giving.  Add value to anyone and everyone you run across in the course of your business day.  Not only will people feel good interacting with you and get an amazing experience, but you’ll have a great day practicing abundance with everyone.

Some ways you can add value are:

• gracefully acknowledge the comments people give you via your blog or online forums/discussion groups, and give them an extra tip
• when people register for a course or teleseminar, always give them a bonus report
• after people buy something, have an extra little goodie they can access on the shopping cart page
• surprise people with discounts on your products and services at unexpected times (everyone gives on their birthday and around Christmas)
• pop a great article into the mail to a client you know would get something out of it
• send a cool link or uplifting video to your list - just make sure it’s something that would be of value to them
• offer special deals and VIP pricing to your top clients
• have a contest for your prospects and offer 3 months in your membership program free for the winner
• pass along a great marketing opportunity you’ve come across to your peers and similar companies
• give a new person in business a break - support their launches with a bonus product, share a business or marketing idea, introduce them to your list

There’s many ways that you can give in your business - try to cultivate opportunities to give value to everyone you talk to…you’ll not only boost your good feelings, but boost your success.

There are tons of different marketing tactics that are available for you to use and you get inundated with many “new” opportunities every week.  How do you figure out if you should do a specific marketing activity or not?

Below are a few questions to ask yourself when confronted with a great, new, one-of-a-kind, stupendous, money-making, guaranteed marketing opportunity!

1)  Will this marketing strategy actually reach your target market?

It goes without saying that any marketing you do needs to be aimed at your target market.  That being said, we can still get wooed by a great talking sales rep!  You want the marketing vehicle to be as specific as possible in targeting your target.

That’s why you need to really think hard about advertising in more broad-based mediums like magazines and newspapers.  For example, you maybe don’t want to reach all financial planners but only those that specialize in legacy and inheritance issues.

Try to get into special supplements, inserts or sections that are particularly focused at your segment of the readership.  This is key with these broad-based media vehicles because they also are usually quite expensive.

2)  How frequently will your message be seen by prospects in your target group?

This is an important consideration when choosing any marketing activity because we’ve all heard it takes anywhere between 7 - 11 exposures to your message before people will react.

If you can only afford to run an ad in the newspaper, magazine or ezine once then it’s most likely not the best use of your money.  Of course, you need to weigh the perceived credibility of the marketing vehicle and how much “bang you’ll get for your buck”.  For example, one ad during Super Bowl may make sense if you’ve got the money - because of the number of people you’ll reach and the prestige of being one of the advertisers during the Super Bowl is priceless.

So maybe you’ve got a great one-time opportunity to advertise in a big-name person’s workshop binder or new book they’re putting out.  Just make sure that the value and exposure to your target group make the one-time price worth it.

Try to use marketing tactics that allow you to keep in contact with your prospects and clients frequently.  That’s why email marketing and having a newsletter are such cost-efficient and effective marketing strategies.

3)  Is this marketing tactic something you can do consistently?

One of the worst things people do with their marketing is to start something, do it for a little while and then abandon it when something else grabs their eye.  To reap the most benefits (read: profits and great relationships) you need to choose marketing tactics that you can do consistently and in that way build the relationship with your prospects and customers.

When evaluating a new strategy figure out if you’ve got the time, money and sometimes most importantly - the interest in doing it on a consistent basis.  For example, don’t start a weekly ezine unless you can dedicate an hour each week to writing it.  You don’t want to send a message to your prospective clients that you can’t be reliable and “stick” with something.

Next time you’re told about THE newest, best marketing activity that you MUST try, step back and take a few minutes to ask yourself these 3 questions.  It will make marketing easier and less stressful for you and also for your prospects!

It’s pretty hard to have a relationship with somebody if they don’t ever hear from you!

That’s why the cornerstone to creating an ongoing marketing relationship with your prospects and clients is to build a permission-based email list.

Only when people have given you their permission to market to them, and you have their name and email address, can you start to have any kind of business relationship with them.

In order to build a hot and steamy list….or at least a satisfied and happy list of prospective and current customers, you need to strategically use every point of contact with people.

Here are some suggestions on different ways you can get people to opt-in to your list:

• make sure you have an opt-in box/sign-up form on the top of every page of your website
• advertise your opt-in form when you ship products - include it in a postcard or a colored one-pager included in the shipping box/envelope
• include a “send to a friend” option with your ezine, special reports and so on
• have the link to your free-giveaway/ezine sign-up form in your resource box at the end of any articles you distribute to article submission sites and other people’s ezines
• give information on how people can sign up for an email subscription with all your print ads and direct mail
• have your opt-in message and box on your shopping cart pages when people purchase something
• have email signatures on all email being sent out by you and employees to have a one-line blurb about signing up for the company email newsletter or free report
• include information and link to your ezine/free report opt-in page in any press releases you send out
• add sign-up information to invoices, warranty and product registration cards
• have call center and sales staff ask people if they’d like to receive ezines and informational emails - whenever they’re talking to a prospect or customer over the phone
• promote your free-giveaway and provide sign up information at all your in-person meetings, workshops, trade shows and presentations
• promote your ezine or free special report in consumer and trade publications, other company’s publications, industry sites and directories
• add the opt-in box to any reports, white papers and registration forms you send out
• include information on how to opt-in to your ezine or free-giveaway on any surveys you send out to people

As you can see, there are many places of contact with your prospects and clients where you can tell them about your free-giveaway, special report or ezine subscription. Take advantage of these opportunities to add people to your email list - so that you can ensure a profitable and productive marketing relationship between you.

In order to gain your prospects’ and clients’ attention you have to appeal to their pleasure or their pain.

Your future and current customers are looking for products and services that will enhance their lives personally, professionally, spiritually, emotionally or physically.  You will enhance their lives either through alleviating or eliminating some kind of pain for them OR providing them with something pleasurable and enjoyable.

You’re probably thinking that I’ve “dumbed” it down too much but it really is that simple.  Your prospects and clients will go searching for something when they have pain or want some pleasure.

Or maybe I should say, they will pay money to you to change how they feel - positive or negative.  They might go looking for solutions out of curiosity but the majority of them won’t hand over their hard-earned money to you unless they are actively needing something.

So that means your marketing needs to target people’s points of pain, discomfort, dissatisfaction or on the flip side, it must show how they can add more pleasure, enjoyment, joy, happiness, satisfaction into their lives.

Of course, sometimes the two (pain and pleasure) aren’t mutually exclusive….get rid of some pain and the person will feel better, but the important thing is that the person went looking for pain relief.

Before you can determine if your marketing message and communication is around pain or pleasure, you need to figure out what your products and services promise.

What benefits do you guarantee your business offerings will provide?  Does your product help people alleviate pain or obtain pleasure?

Remember that people make buying decisions because they believe that a service or product will help them in some way.

It may help them gain more:  money, health, success, love, time, recognition, security, confidence, respect, and control.

Or it may help them avoid:  danger, losing money, ridicule, losing love, frustration, pain, risk, failure, embarrassment.

A free-giveaway is a vital first step in marketing your business and building a list of prospects that you can turn into customers and clients.

Once you create your free-giveaway, you don’t need to touch it again.  Remember, there will always be new people who “discover” you - new people you’ll be getting into your marketing funnel, pipeline or pyramid (however you think of it).

Your free-giveaway is aimed at this constant stream of new prospects and is the vehicle you use to build the marketing relationship with them, build credibility, earn their like and trust and convert them into loyal clients and customers.

So your free-giveaway will always exist as a stand-alone and entry point into your marketing system for the majority of your list.  This doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t build on the work you’ve done with your free-giveaway and leverage its power.

Another word for this is re-purposing your work.  That’s what smart marketers and business people do:  take the time and money you’ve invested in something and re-purpose it to use in conjunction with, or as another marketing tactic or product and service.

For example, with your free-giveaway you can take out pieces of it and write articles around it, blog posts and ezine content.  In this way, you spend the time once on creating your free-giveaway but you take parts of the content and re-purpose (or recycle) it to use in other marketing strategies that you employ.

Smart marketers, like yourself, know that the power of leveraging new marketing tactics with existing strategies is the way to get the most out of your time, expertise and resources.

Schedule a few minutes today to see if you are utilizing the power of your free-giveaway to the fullest.

This is our third and last installment in this DIY Series on Developing your Brand.  This three-step approach will help you define your brand if you have limited resources to consult the outside expertise of a brand strategist.  In the first posting we talked about where to start.  How do you begin to define a brand and where you find the definition for your brand?  In the second posting we looked at how an analysis of your competition can help you develop a clearer message around who you are and how you are different.  In this final step we’ll look at how benchmarking can help you discover an edge or an approach that reflects what you offer authentically and differentiated from everyone else in your industry.

If you need help with branding for your company, visit Resource Nation’s marketing experts.

A benchmark is a standard by which something is judged.  In this last phase you’ll learn more about your brand by benchmarking brands outside your industry.  Here we begin to look to standards that are upheld by other brands that you admire to see what you can learn from them.  Whether a tennis racket manufacturer, clothing designer, a soap company or a car company, these brands can teach you something.

The process will require you to look at their websites, note the language they use to speak to customers, figure out what you like about how they present themselves to you and take note.  Similar to what you did in the competitive review make note of three key elements: content, visual language and the emotion.

Content:
Read what your favorite brand says about their product on their website and/or in their brochures.  Hear what they have to say on TV or in radio ads.  Note their language.  Is their message focused on their customer “we meet your needs” or on their product “we have the highest quality…”.  Understanding the content of their message will give you clues to how you may approach your brand.  If your favourite brands, outside your line of work, focus on customers then perhaps the way you communicate your message should do the same.

Visual Language:
Take note of how your favorite brands present themselves visually.  Are TV commercials fast-paced with dark and metallic colors?  Are print ads on bright white backgrounds with bold text?  Are websites filled with movement and color?  Take a look at two or three of your favorite brands from different industries, like a food company, a sports equipment company and a chocolate company.  What is similar about their visual language?  Note these similarities; it may inform how you want to present your brand to the world.  If the visual language is very different for each then note what parts of it you like the most.  Perhaps you like the vivid colors in one and the wide open space in another.  Then, ask yourself why do I like these visual cues in this context?  A pattern will certainly emerge.

Emotion:
Noting emotion is really about how you feel, not what you think they want you to feel but how you really feel.  This is where authenticity rings true.  As you engage with your favorite brands think about how you feel.  Do you feel trust, power, speed, confidence, luxury, serenity, or energized?  What kind of feeling is the brand eliciting in you?  Take a moment to note which of those feelings you want for your customers.  A respected market researcher, Frank Luntz said “80 percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect” – focus on the emotion it is what drives us.

Often when the vision for an organization is being held by more than one person, a team or a committee it is difficult to get agreement on where to go.  When I was hired to head up the brand revitalization effort for a large office furniture manufacturer, based in the US Northeast, I used this benchmarking strategy to coach the management team through a visioning session that would help to define precisely what they wanted for their brand.  This company manufactured office furniture that appealed to the broadest customer base.  It was not elite high-end furniture but it did offer a design and functionality that was loved by a majority of the marketplace.  The problem was that the marketplace felt this brand was getting stale.  In order to help the management team create a vision for the brand they could believe in we looked for a company outside of our industry that also appealed to the masses and offered nice design but had a brand that customers were drawn to.  We chose Kenneth Cole, a brand that was known by the management team and admired by all.  Kenneth Cole provides the latest designs to a majority of the marketplace and they’re appealing to the market.  Just what we wanted to accomplish for our brand.  We benchmarked their approach, language, even stores to get inspiration for what we could do with our brand.  Having a benchmark in mind kept our entire brand revitalization team focused on a singular vision.  In the end we accomplished the mission.  In the years following the brand revitalization the manufacturer experienced growth that exceeded expectations and developed a loyal following of customers who are in anticipation of future product launches.

Your free-giveaway needs to be something that your target group finds valuable and has need of.

The product (ebook, CD, etc.) you are giving away for free needs to be something similar to your other products and services (if you have any yet) that you will be trying to sell to these people later on.

Everybody starts to get a bit panicky and anxious when they think about coming up with content for their free-giveaway.  But the truth is that if you take a look around your office, you’ll see you have lots of information that you can pull together or put into a different format that would make a great free-giveaway.

• bundle together articles you’ve written
• combine blog posts you’ve written
• provide a song clip or art sample of your work
• copy of audio of a speech you’ve given
• offer free chapters of a book you’re writing
• transcribe audio or video of a speech
• audio of a teleseminar you gave
• use existing handouts and PowerPoint slides
• transcribe a teleseminar you’ve given
• bundle tips and checklists together
• a video of a speech you’ve given

You can use the content from above to create all kinds of different free-giveaways:

• a checklist
• a quick-start guide that helps people get started in the area of expertise you specialize in
• lessons on how to do something
• offer a free consultation
• 3 months free to a membership group you have
• self-evaluation test or online assessment
• offer an introductory/quick-start session
• list of top ten tips & tricks
• steps to creating something
• free software
• links to free products
• free membership to a forum you run

Take some time today to jot down some ideas about what you know your prospects and clients need on information on and start writing….or better yet, just re-package/re-format something that you’ve already done!

Offering something of value for free is a very important step in marketing. It is a way of introducing yourself to prospective clients in a non-intrusive, friendly manner. People are naturally more cautious and skeptical these days so you need to make it as easy as possible for them to get to know you at their pace - which will be different for each person.

As well, offering a free-giveaway is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to build a list of prospective clients and customers.  In order to do this, you must ask for the person’s name and email address. When people have indicated an interest in finding out more about you by asking for your “sampler”, then you can offer it in exchange for their name and email address.

The easiest way to get a prospect’s contact information is to have an opt-in box on your website.  When you use this in conjunction with an autoresponder/list management system such as Aweber, people’s name and email addresses are captured automatically and put into a list so you can contact them further via email.

In this day and age of Internet selling and buying, the majority of people are comfortable with giving you this information. Once you have this data you will now be able to continue to develop the relationship with these prospects and move them through the other steps in your marketing process.

If you don’t have an opt-in box but you do have a website, the best thing to do is get one created and set up.  It doesn’t cost much as it’s pretty easy to do and many Virtual Assistants can do it for you.

However, don’t worry if you haven’t got your website up and running yet, you can still collect names.  You’ll just have to do it manually and then input them into some kind of spreadsheet (Excel) or a database program like Microsoft Outlook or ACT.

There are many ways to use your free-giveaway and leverage it.  But first you need to have a free product to entice people onto your list, and into a marketing relationship with you.

I encourage you to spend some time today thinking about what you already have of value and how you can repackage it into a valuable free-giveaway that your target group wants and needs.

Part of marketing is measuring how well each marketing tactic is working - on an individual level and as a contributor to your overall success (or not).

Some simple methods for measuring that you can start implementing right away are:

1)  Ask your prospects and clients how they heard about your business, product or service - when they are making a purchase or getting some information.

This is not an exact science because people often don’t recall exactly how they heard about you, especially if they have been exposed to several of your marketing activities.

2)  Do a survey.

You can send your clients a satisfaction survey after they make a purchase and include a tracking question in the survey.

3) Track you website statistics.

To find out how many people are visiting your website, be sure to have a statistics program in place and know how to read it. I like Google Analytics, but there are many good ones out there that are free, including www.webstats.com.

4)  Use unique codes.

If you are creating flyers or coupons promoting a particular product, service or offer, include a unique code and require clients to enter that code on your web site in order to qualify for the special bonus or discount.

When you take the time to look at how well your marketing is working, you increase the chances for your success.  You can toss out what isn’t working and expand on what is working.

If you need help with your marketing, check out Resource Nation’s online marketing business service center.