The sales portion of the profit formula demands the largest portion of the owner's time. This ties in with the idea that every business is, at its heart, a marketing business. You are not in the business of what you do or produce. You are in the business of getting new customers, keeping them as long as possible, and selling to them as much as possible while they are your customers.
A 10 percent increase in qualified leads
- Above all, you must be able to answer why the customer, when faced with all of the choices available to them (including doing nothing at all), should buy from you. Otherwise, how will you attract your ideal customer?
- Determine who your ideal customers are, what their needs are, and how you fulfill those needs better than your competition.
- Use social media to attract qualified leads. Facebook and YouTube ads are very reasonably priced and are providing a massive amount of traffic. This great opportunity won't last forever. The same thing happened with Google ads a few years back. Now demand has increased prices dramatically.
- Create a plan to grow your email list. Most business owners don't spend enough time on this. We designed and implemented a complete marketing plan starting with collecting customer and prospect emails.
- Once you have their email addresses, use auto-responders to welcome them, upsell, and cross-sell automatically. Both Constant Contact and MailChimp offer affordable email management options.
- Identify your entry products—those products that typically bring in new prospects. Design a marketing strategy to funnel prospects toward those products. The entry points in our CPA firm are tax returns, QuickBooks training, and new business questions.
- Choose sales tools that also direct your prospects to your entry products. I always recommend buying Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson. He lists hundreds of tools that every business owner can use without spending a fortune.
- Use content marketing to attract prospects. Every company should have a blog. This is where every business starts educating prospects on how the company can meet their needs. The articles can be combined into an e-book and sold on Amazon to attract even more qualified prospects.