How To Use Focus to Rescue Your Marketing
You need at least one formalized referral strategy.
I’ve worked in sales since high school. It takes 4-5 attempts to have the opportunity to communicate with the prospect and another 7-12 sequential communications to make a sale.
Whether you’re working on a specific project or for a company, figure out all the different touch points and avenues in which you can communicate with your target audience and of those touch points, which ones carry the most impact.
Focus on the ones that have the most effect. Some examples of touch points are:
- Advertising - posters, fliers, newspapers ads, billboards, etc
- Sales Promotions - “buy two, get one free”, “early registration discount for next seminar”, product giveaway (have a 70% higher retention rate than any other sort of advertising).
- Events and Experiences - Special one-night guest speaker, entertainment night, etc
- PR and Publicity - getting community newsletters to write about you and/or getting local newspapers to cover the story, bloggers to blog, tweeters to tweet, youtubers to make vids, producing your own newsletter
- Direct & Interactive Marketing - social media, snail-mail campaigns, email campaigns
- Word of Mouth - gossip circles, eat outs, social networks
- Personal selling - very important at every level, at events, where people gather
Figure out who already has the highest influence, reach, impact and goodwill in the audience you want to reach. You want to start there.
Get those persons of influence to extol the benefits of what you’re offering or the organization itself. At the same time, you need to be able to measure-quantify, compare-contrast specific dynamics, either as the alternative means of addressing a problem the community or it’s people have. Get someone of stature and respect to endorse it
The implementation of this specific strategy has been key having AlMaghrib Institute expand from city to city.
Keep in mind, there’s a fine line between harassment and sequential communication. In the work that you do, the key is to understand that it’s only a matter of time that people will hear your message. Patience and pig headed discipline is super important.
Continously think and seek to understand what the community want and need. One way to do this is to interview key influential individuals that could be your key to getting the information about the seminars out to your community.
WOW!
MashaAllah, I’m happy to see you’re starting to post posts like these with more in-depth information regarding marketing.
Question, what do you mean in the first line when you speak of a “referral strategy”? Is that referring to all the touch points and avenues to reach your target audience that you mentioned there? Or is that something separate, like having the beneficiaries of your service/product being able to easily spread the word?
InshaAllah, going to read the next article. While I think you might lose some generic readers, I hope doing more articles like these will attract those more suited to the niche your marketing to.
A basic example of a referral strategy:
Assuming you’re a professional in a particular field, whether it be medicine, marketing, photography, etc.
When you engage in business with a client, you have at least a verbal agreement stating that you’ll do your absolute best to service the individual(s) that are coming for you and that you’ll do that which is in their best interest.
If the client is satisfied with the service and/or product that was delivered as promised, they in return will render payment on time and extol the benefits of what you do to at least two of their friends. Friends who will converse and contact you as a result of that referral.
The benefit of this approach will be that the cost of marketing on your end goes down, thus the cost to your client remains affordable b/c you can put more time and effort towards servicing then marketing. – This way the marketing is built into the service.
It’s also good practice to give a gift to those who send business your way. It shows affinity and that you care about your client’s well being.