Is There a Perfect Marketing Approach?5 min read

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Wouldn’t you love to know the perfect marketing approach for your business, you know, the one that brought in droves of clients with ease?

Well, of course, there isn’t ONE.

Then how about the most effective approach to marketing, one that at least gave consistent results?

The thing is that there are a LOT of effective marketing approaches, dozens at least, perhaps hundreds.

Then, where should you start with your marketing? After all, you want an approach that will give you a chance to attract more of your ideal clients, right?

The first thing to understand is that your marketing approach needs to be customized to you. You should implement marketing activities that are appropriate for where your business is right now.

And you also need to understand that an approach to marketing is never just “one thing.”

For instance, if you focus your business on “webinars” or your “selling process” or your “website” you don’t have a complete approach to marketing.

I’ve found that the best approaches to marketing include many steps implemented in an effective sequence.

You start with a simple sequence and then build the effectiveness of that sequence over time.

Here’s an example of a complete marketing sequence:

1. Develop a marketing message or brand. Then communicate it verbally and through marketing materials such as a website, articles, emails, presentations.

My current message strategy is to put the emphasis on your “Ultimate Outcome,” that is, the biggest result your clients get when they work with you. This kind of message is focused on your client, not on you. And it needs to be a result or benefit that is highly desired by your prospective clients such as:

“We help you double the effectiveness of your top leadership teams.” Of course, then it’s your job to prove that you can, in fact, accomplish this.

2. Develop a program or service that can deliver on this promise. If money was not an issue, what program would you design and deliver that consistently produced the results you promised?

We rarely think this way and instead develop programs and services that we think our clients can afford. What does that lead to? Compromise and settling with OK results, not breakthroughs.

I’m aiming for breakthrough results such as the ones my clients, Sal Sylvester achieved:

“Robert’s program fundamentally changed my business. Before my work with Robert, I ran mostly short-term workshops – one or two-day sessions. Sometimes a series of workshops. My average deal size was probably $2,500 – $5,000. Today, my average deal size ranges from $25k to $100k.

“One year after the course was complete, my revenues went from about $170k per year to $260k. Then to $300k. They then doubled to $600k. And this year to over $900k. The foundation for all of this growth is the hard work that went into Robert’s program. He not only taught me sound marketing and sales principles but helped me change my mindset on what was possible.”

You won’t see those kinds of results from half-hearted, low-cost programs that promise little and deliver less. 

3. Develop and Implement a marketing strategy that gets your program or service in front of the right prospects. Again, there isn’t a perfect strategy, but there are many very good ones.

My two favorite strategies are:

1. Giving live talks in front of groups of qualified prospects.

2. Promoting my services and programs to those on my e-list.

Many other strategies can work as well. More often than not it will take a few different ones to effectively communicate your message to enough of the right people.

4. Learn the practices and skills of effective person-to-person selling. Selling is one of those terrible words that has so much negative baggage. But good selling is not about hype or manipulation – it’s more of a focused conversation to discover if what you offer can solve any of your prospect’s challenges.

Selling includes many elements:

• Following up after someone has responded to your marketing,

• Setting up appointments for selling conversations,

• Designing those conversations so that a high percentage of prospects choose to work with you.

The good news:

The four basic marketing steps are really all you need to get the attention and interest of your ideal clients and convert them into good clients who pay you well. The system for developing them and getting success with them is tested and proven.

The bad news:

Learning and ultimately mastering these four steps takes study, practice, and hard work. All of them include concepts that are counter-intuitive and that most people implement ineffectively, if not avoid completely.

For instance, most business owners have a “Me-Centered” marketing message as it can be hard to wrap your mind around a “Client-Centered” message.

In developing high-end programs, we tend to think they won’t sell and therefore we don’t even attempt to develop them.

With marketing strategies, the most common thing is to emphasize the processes we deliver instead of the results our clients get.

And with selling, we often think of it as a contest where we are trying to “win” business from an opponent who doesn’t want to work with us, instead of as the beginning of a profitable partnership.

The next step:

Please take the ideas in this article to heart. They include the core ideas that have helped both me and my clients experience great successes.

Cheers, Robert

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