There are two basic marketing strategies ... active and passive.  They complement each other.

 

Active strategies involve direct, personal interaction with potential clients.  Anything that gives them an immediate experience of you is an active strategy.  You might give them this first-hand sense of who you are and what you have to offer by speaking to groups, doing radio and TV interviews, networking, conducting classes and demonstrations, or just sitting down with prospective clients over coffee.

 

Passive strategies, by contrast, rely on indirect contact with people.  These include everything from business cards, brochures, and websites to traditional advertising and signage.  (New innovations such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogging are somewhere between fully active and passive.) 

 

Now, here's a quiz question.  Which brings in the business?

 

Active strategies.  While passive methods alone might bring in some business on their own now and then, the passive methods are ideally designed to play nothing more than a supporting role in any successful marketing effort.  They help establish your presence and credibility, but what sells you is you.

 

So, what do you think happens when people rely almost solely on passive strategies?  They typically struggle.  The arms-length approach usually isn't sufficient to engage people to the point where they just have to hire you.

 

Barbara and I have been talking recently about how there are different kinds of practitioners.  Some people have no reservations about putting themselves out there and jumping head first into the active strategies.  They're typically the extraverts ... the go-getter types.

 

Others find activities such as speaking and networking stressful and they would love, more than anything, to be able to just do some passive marketing and have people beat a path to their door.  

 

But here's the thing.  It doesn't work like that.  Sure, there are exceptions, but I'll say it again, what sells you is you.  As much as I know some of you would love to just do a great job of providing your service to people and never have to do any active marketing, I have to tell you that it's just not a viable plan.

 

If you recognize that you don't like to do active marketing, I see four potential choices.

Now, I am in no way disparaging people who don't want to do active marketing.  It's a choice.  My life partner, Tom, is an extremely accomplished presentation skills coach.  I sit and watched, amazed, as he helps people transform who they're being in front of an audience in just minutes.  He's as good as they come ... and he doesn't like to market himself. 

 

In his case, he knew early on that rather than force himself to pick up the phone and make the connections he needed to make to build a business, he'd rather team with someone else who secured the work.  And it's worked out fantastically well for him.  But it's not as easy to find those situations as you might think, and, as you might guess, he does present himself and what he has to offer quite well to prospective partners!

 

So, while a partnership arrangement where someone does the marketing and you provide the service can work out, I just don't want anyone to hang their hat on that approach or worse, think they're just going to do some passive marketing, sit back, and see what they get.

 

Of course, we think that most people can be very successful actively marketing themselves and many people who were anxious at first come to really enjoy it.  The key is to find something you're comfortable doing, get good at it, and stick with it.

And if you need help, we're here.

Best wishes,
Denise