2: Put video on your website. That's because roughly 30 percent of the population has grown up with the internet always present in their lives - they are looking for video. That's what they expect. It's very easy to record a video and put it online. If you don't have any video on your site, you're really missing a good trick. It's a great opportunity to present how you look, how you talk, what you're like, and make yourself more attractive to clients. It's a great business-getting technique.
3: Don't waste any money on marketing that is not measurable. If you can't measure it, don't do it. For instance, advertising and public relations are widely used, but after you've spent £10,000 on it, do you have any way that you can check to see if it actually generated any results? What I would suggest you do is pursue the techniques that you can measure. That would include blogs. You can publish up a blog and see how many people visited. On a blog, you can also see how many people commented. If you really have to advertise, take out a banner ad. A banner will tell you how many people took a look at your banner and how many people clicked on it. The same thing is true with email newsletters. It's possible to send out an email newsletter and get a report on how many people actually opened it, and if there are links inside it, how many of the links were clicked on and who clicked on them. That's all measurable stuff.
4: When it comes to business development, start with the low-hanging fruit, and that is your own clients. These are people who love you, they trust you, they send you work, they are sending you cheques. It's incumbent upon you to get to know them better to see if you can generate additional business from them. It's much easier to generate business from a current client than it is to originate a brand new client. Again, this is something that you can measure. You can measure the number of times the fee-earners in your business have actually visited the client, how many times they had lunch with a client or a referral source. Or, if you have an event at your business, you can count the number of attendees, keep track of all their contact information, and then determine how many of them turned into new clients. The bottom line is you should start at the beginning of any sort of marketing initiative by working out how are you going to measure it. If you don't do that, you have no way of knowing whether it succeeded or not.
5: A lot of businesses get most of their new clients from referrals, and that's a wonderful thing, but the point is that it doesn't just happen all by itself. The people who get these referrals are those who cultivated them. Where I would start is with clients. Again, these are people that you're doing work for, but unless you tell them that they're supposed to send you new work and that you would welcome this new work, they won't know that they're supposed to do so. You actually have to tell them. Step two is you tell them what kind of work you're seeking. There are lots of other referral sources besides clients. There are people that you will know in other professions such as investment brokers, accountants, and bankers. These are all people that can send you business so long as you tell them that you would like them to and what kind of work to send. The same thing is true with former school or college classmates and business colleagues. These are people who know you.
6: Get active in a trade association, and if possible get on its board of directors. You'll notice that I said, trade association, and not professional association. You should join an association of clients. You want to get in front of a room full of clients, people who can potentially hire you. You find out about these trade associations by asking your current clients what meetings they go to. Then it's a simple matter of saying, "I'd like to join you at the meeting. Would you introduce me to your friends?" These friends, of course, are all potential clients for you. It's no good just going to the meeting; you have to be visible. Your goal when you join a trade association is not to be just a face in the crowd. Your goal is to get on the board of directors. The way you do that is you seek out the president and you volunteer. You volunteer to help put together programs; you volunteer to help with the newsletter; you volunteer to help in any sort of activity that is going to lead to a board position.
7: Only after you've done all of these things, then pursue individual target clients. What I mean by "target" is a business executive whom you already know. You don't have to make any cold calls. Whom you're contacting could be a neighbour. It could be another dad or mum at a kids football match. You can meet targets in the religious organizations that you go to and the clubs that you belong to and the charities that you're active in - these are all people who have businesses - that's what you looking for - and they all have careers. Ask them questions about it.
8: If you do have a business plan, write it down. It's not real until you write it down. What you want to be writing down is whom you're going to call, when you're going to meet them, and some sort of an outcome that you're expecting to have. The idea of writing it down is now you've moved it on to your calendar. Once it's on your to-do list, you're going to do it.
9: Devote at least 200 hours a year to business development. That may sound like a lot, but when you break it down by week, it's really only four hours a week. You can meet somebody for coffee in the morning. You can meet a client. You can meet a referral source for lunch. You can go to a trade association meeting in the evening. All of this you can weave into your ordinary to-do list, and before you know it, you've devoted 400 hours. It's guaranteed that you are going to get way more back in new business and new clients than the value of the effort that you devoted.
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10: (Although perhaps should be number 1): Track your results. If you are undertaking a marketing initiative such as, "joining the local business owners club", make a point of writing down the people that you want to meet before you go. After you meet your target clients and asked them about their business challenges, later you can go back and ask yourself, "Did this work? Did I get a new client from that approach?". You may be spending money on radio ads and reaching a huge number of people, but if you examine your new clients and find that none of them came from the radio, you're not getting any new business out of it at all, so discontinue it. That's the approach you have to make, but you only will be able to do that if you track your results. So pick the ideas you will pursue, and just do it. The more activities you choose, the more clients and revenue you'll bring in. |
