Many business owners think that in order to build their business it requires money to market their business. They think they need a fancy website, flyers, brochures, business cards, SEO, direct mail, and other expensive marketing items. In my experience, over 30 decades of marketing with 5,000 business owners, only one thing is needed to be successful in building a business… proven marketing ideas.
What do I mean by proven marketing? Let me start with the opposite of proven, since this is where I personally wasted most of my money and made my biggest mistakes as have a majority of the mentoring clients I’ve worked with. See if you’ve made some of these same mistakes and feel free to comment on this post.
Top Marketing Mistakes:
1. Advertising
2. Pay per click
3. SEO
4. Expensive business cards
5. Flyers, brochures, pamphlets
6. Poorly written direct mail with no call to action
7. Promotional items that are meaningless
10. Holiday gifts that are soon forgotten
I actually have a list of over 114 ineffective marketing campaigns. I think it’s useless to spend negative energy writing an entire article about those and posting all of them! So, let’s forget about the money we’ve wasted and shift right over to the things that are “proven” to work.
What do I mean when I say “proven”? When I use the term “proven” I am referring to a trial and error process that has been used consistently in my business and at with at least 40 of my other business mentoring client’s businesses (from all different industries). The proven marketing has to have yielded a positive return on investment for all of us.
The proven ideas are all low and no cost and come from creativity only. Many of my clients will tell me they are not creative. I love to hear this! I can easily get their brains fired up by sharing my own list of creative idea. We then tweak my ideas and quickly pick 3-5 proven to work ideas they like and get them implemented in their business to increase their ROI.
Let me ask you a question to spark your creativity…
What irresistible free gift can you give your potential/patients/customers?
Hopefully you came up with an answer but if not I’ll share anyway…
Here is a one of my very favorite proven ideas just to get your creative juices flowing. You educate people about your value. To do this you provide them with helpful information and then you begin to build a relationship. The goal is to get people to see you and your business/practice as credible and to see you/your business as THE credible expert and THE only logical choice.
Here are some proven ideas for you: downloadable items: ebooks, PDFs, audio clips, downloadable articles, etc.
Physical items: free massages, free teeth cleanings, free consultants, come by and get a free service, etc.
Make it super easy to get the gift – if it’s downloadable name and email or email only (and DON’T spam them!) or if they come in to get it – tell them how – give them directions, a map, send them to an online calendar service to book their appointment for the free service, etc.
Author: Terri Levine, PhD is the owner of Terri Levine Worldwide and is a business and executive coach, and experienced entrepreneur.
