Join Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, this Wednesday for our next free Web clinic – “The 5 Most Startling Marketing Discoveries from 2012: Including the 3 words that changed everything for a top financial product” – to learn some of our top marketing discoveries from this year.
But before we shared our discoveries, we wanted to learn what tactics have worked for you. Here are a few of our favorite responses from your peers …
Targeted campaign generates leads
For our B2B solar product, it has been a very targeted campaign reaching out to and educating facility managers and building owners where they read online and in print.
We tied together a multi-faceted campaign that includes online ads, e-news sponsorships, trade show sponsorships, print ads, case studies and whitepaper promotion.
By targeting our message that “Solar is Simpler, Solar is Affordable,” we hit the target repetitively for a solid outreach and a very strong campaign that has generated leads for my sales team and our partners.
– Victoria Vestal, Global Marketing and Business Development, Trina Solar
“People buy from people” leads to 300% business growth
My experience in 2012 is that people want to see several things:
1. You’re a real person who is TRUSTWORTHY
2. You CARE about your client’s success
3. You’re VERSED in your area
4. You’re PROVEN to know what you’re doing
5. You’re WILLING to work over issues
As Flint McGlaughlin says, “People buy from people.” So being as human as possible online helped me achieve over 300% business growth in 2012.
Bring all that together, my best tactic for getting Web development and marketing clients isn’t really a tactic at all. I found that being who I am with people, showing genuine interest in their needs and expectations, and then going the extra mile to provide the optimal solution is what earned me new deals over and over again, and even got word-of-mouth referrals from my happy clients.
The way I achieved this is by being very thorough in my email explanations, offered precise game plan of how the project will develop, defined landmarks, and being quite accommodating for their needs.
With one client in particular, I exchanged about 90 emails before they agreed to work with me, but once we started, their list of needs grew from a single “we need a Web redesign” to providing them with business card design, brochure design, content marketing, social media marketing, offline marketing materials, etc. I’m very close to closing an ongoing marketing contract with them, which will pay out manyfold for those 90+ emails.
Content marketing geared to small- and mid-sized businesses proved to be quite useful too, not as much for getting new clients as it was for client retention. Case in point: on average I had four new projects per client this year.
Hand-holding: many SMBs don’t have the time and resources to know the ins and outs of online marketing, or marketing in general. By countless Skype talks and emails, I found that it is very beneficial for the clients to invest in educating them, and that the more they’re educated, the more they want to grow their marketing spending.
What really worked this year for me is to get an open table of desires (mostly for social media marketing), and out of the dozen or so popular social sites, clients loved the approach of me taking the time to explain, “Although Facebook is popular, it may not offer the best bang for your marketing bucks.”
Helping them realize that I’m not only interested in taking their money, but offer them with real, measurable marketing results helped them, and then my clients helped me with new projects and strong, VERY strong word-of-mouth advertizing.
For a non-U.S. service provider, this is invaluable. Thanks to this truthfulness and genuine interest in what’s best for my clients, I’m ecstatic with this year’s business results.
Hope my experience helps others, too.
– Igor Mateski, owner, WebMaxFormance
Give till it hurts
Provide free seminars, give free e-books away, blog everything — you name it. Create it and then promote it.
It might seem that giving everything you know away for free is counterproductive, but if you won’t give it away, someone else will. Now is your chance to demonstrate your expertise and gain trust from prospects.
It’s also great to hear stories such as the one yesterday. I received a call from a new lead, a manager of a website development company. He wanted to discuss my services after he had read my e-book and enjoyed it so much that he’s making it a mandatory read for his website design team.
– David Goldstein, founder, 360net Marketing
Related Resources:
Email Marketing: Tips from your peers about writing subject lines
Content Marketing: Tactics that have worked for your peers
Conversion Rate Optimization: Your peers’ top takeaways from Optimization Summit 2012