When I meet with prospective clients, they're often interested in implementing a marketing tactic, as in, an activity.  Like publishing a newsletter or getting involved in social media.  While those may be great activities, absent a marketing strategy, they won't get you very far.   
 

When it comes to marketing, random and haphazard won't cut it.  You have to think strategically. 

As Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School is fond of saying, "The company without a strategy is willing to try anything."  And many do try anything and everything.  Very simply, that spells doom. 

If you're running a service-based business, you have to have a plan to reach out and touch your target market as personally as possible.  Rather than doing a little bit of networking, a little bit of social media, an occasional talk, a website, and maybe some advertising, focus in on one or maybe two primary methods of connecting with people in your target market and keep at it. 

Once you've made the personal connection with them, use certain tools to stay in touch and follow up, to provide value, and highlight the advantages of working with you.

The simple fact is that people are most likely to do business with people they've gotten to know and like. You can only accomplish that by building a relationship with them.  And you can't establish and foster meaningful relationships by sprinkling a little effort here and a few resources there willy nilly.  A sprinkler won't get the job done.  Only a fire hose will do. 

Only a targeted, powerful, focused, relentlessly consistent and enticing message that features a "high touch" connection that allows people to have a personal experience of you will do.   

Having a strategy means knowing who you serve.  You know where they are.  You know how to reach them.  You know what they'll respond to.  And so, when you reach out to them, the methods you use to connect with them make sense.

More than anything, it means figuring out which methods can help you maintain and strengthen a relationship vs. which ones help you establish one.  This is critical. 

Speaking, networking, and establishing strategic alliances help you connect on a personal level.  Almost everything else is a way to stay in touch and nurture the relationship.  If you confuse the two and expect a website or a blog or advertising or a newsletter to actively bring in clients, you may be in for a rude surprise. 

A newsletter and a facebook page can work great as tools to keep in touch, provide value, and deepen the relationship, but not as ways to generate business from scratch.  Not that it can't happen, but it typically takes time and you're very unlikely to get anything approaching a steady stream of prospective clients. 

After all, a newsletter without a substantial mailing list of people to send it to who know you and are interested in you isn't going to amount to a hill of beans anyway.  And you only build those lists via personal connections.  Ditto for a blog or twitter feed.  Expecting these tools to bring in clients without having established those connections is like expecting the cart to pull itself with no horse. 

As most of you know, we do a lot of speaking and we invite you to sign up for these newsletters at the end of our talks.  You've gotten to know us and if you want to stay in touch and get a little something from us in your inbox every month, you can.  Our mailing list is now rather large ... in the thousands ... and it feels like we know you when we write these newsletters, because we've met so many of you one-on-one.  And we hope you feel as if you know us.  That's what makes the system work.  That's why the strategy works.

Bottom line:  Rather than doing activities you hope will bring in clients, find the best way for you to go to your would-be clients, meet them face to face or at least by telephone or video, get to know them and what they want, and provide value for them.  Then figure out the best ways to keep them in the family.  That's thinking strategically. 

You'll love what this approach does for your business and how it can change how you feel about marketing. 

Warmest Regards,
Barbara