I’m very excited about the launch of my new service offerings targeted at independent professionals and small business owners. Masterful Marketing™ is an 8 step system that helps you create an effective marketing plan for your business, learn how to successfully market your business and attract more clients.

Masterful Marketing™ covers the important areas needed to make marketing work for your business. This service is structured in 8 sessions held via telephone, each providing practical advice and actionable activities. The sessions are scheduled over 8 weeks to make it easy for folks to apply what they’ve learned to their business and see the results. The program combines information, support and feedback to keep you going in the right direction.

We cover the following topics:

• Identifying your Ideal Client
• Uncovering your unique differentiator
• Writing your core marketing message
• Defining your vision and goals
• Selecting your marketing strategy and tactics
• Creating your brand image
• Developing your marketing materials
• Mapping out the marketing activities and budget

What you get:

• Eight (8) 90 minute tele-advisory sessions scheduled over 8 weeks to help you plan and market your business.
• The Masterful Marketing™ workbook with explanations, examples and room to work on your plan.
• Recordings of your sessions so you can participate actively and review the important information discussed later.
• A private web page to access all your program materials, tele-advisory audio recordings, plus a variety of downloadable tools, worksheets and exercises for developing your plan.
• Personalized feedback on your marketing materials with advice on how to make them more effective at reaching your Ideal Client.
• Copy of “Create the Business Breakthrough You Want: Secrets and Strategies by the World’s Greatest Mentors”.
• Unlimited email access to me throughout the program for questions on anything pertaining to marketing your business. You also get limited phone and IM access to give you a way to quickly resolve issues that keep you from moving forward.

Services range from private one-to-one mentoring to tele-clinics. If you are interested in finding out more about this program, contact me or visit the Masterful Marketing Web site and request an application for the program.

We just returned from Aruba, our annual destination for completely doing nothing and recharging our worn batteries. We love it there and the question many have asked us has been why we haven’t bought a timeshare yet. We’ve more than spent the price in hotel bills. The answer to that question was because it never seemed right for us.

But that has changed. The reason? Marriott Vacation Club™. They got us there on a promotional package, which my first thought was, “great, 5 nights for cheap in Aruba just to take their 90 minute tour”. Unbeknownst to us, we actually were sold and we’re now the proud owners of a two bedroom villa at the Surf Club in Aruba.

Why did we change our minds? There were 3 vital reasons:

• They sell their timeshares in seasons, not weeks. We can choose a timeframe within a 7 month period to vacation.
• We can trade the second bedroom (called a lock-off) for a second week either in Aruba or elsewhere (so two weeks for the price of one).
• We own the property for life and can pass it on through our estate.

So what part of the marketing worked.

• The telemarketing call - I’m normally not receptive but I remember the person getting my attention quickly before I tuned out. Do I remember exactly what she said? Not really but I didn’t say no and hang up.
• The offer - I got 4 nights/5 days in Orlando for $399 if we used it before the end of 2007. I said I was more interested in Aruba. They said ok. No arguments, no roadblocks.
• Ease of signing up - I called an 800 number and spoke to someone who was friendly and informed. Offered me a 5th night for free - cool. So I got 5 nights/6 days in Aruba for $399.
• Welcome package of $100 in coupons - yes, I’m easily sold on a free dinner.
• The 90 minute tour - they really did a nice job. The sales person didn’t sell, she educated. I think I’ve touted the effect of educating your prospect, not selling. She listened, didn’t try to oversell, explained all the trading tips we could use to maximize our investments and let us make a decision. I respected that and it made a huge difference. In the past, other timeshare vendors pushed too hard.

So, I guess I eat my previous words to folks when I said “Nah, I’m not interested - just using the promotional package to get a good deal on the vacation.

So Marriott, you definitely have your campaign down and it works. As a very critical marketing person, you got high marks on how you handled this entire process.

Why is it that some people contact you, ask you for information about your business, have you come meet with them and then never have the common courtesy to complete the conversation with an answer, regardless of whether the answer is yes or no?

Hey business owners: If you have had a “sales” conversation with another business and you have decided on another firm or different direction, use common sense and let that person know you are not going to hire them. Trust me, it’s not like we can’t handle rejection! We are in business for ourselves, right? We really don’t feel all that bad about it as that’s part of business. And by telling us we didn’t get the business, it helps us make decisions about taking on other clients. But not saying anything, not even an email to let us know, is basically a rude business practice that makes me question whether I really want to do business with you.

In business today, the world is small. It doesn’t take much to tarnish your brand. Your brand identity is built through all your interactions in business, including your marketing materials, how you answer the phones, to how your service and support organizations treat your clients. So when you deal with vendors, extend the courtesy to them that you would your clients, business partners and other people associated with your business. I know people don’t like delivering negative messages, but if you treat your vendors this way, do you treat your customers any differently?

I get a lot of calls this time of year to help business owners develop their marketing plan. But one common theme is beginning to stand out as I speak with more and more business owners - they don’t have a vision for their company and they haven’t determined their short term business goals. To develop a sensible marketing plan, you need to know what you want to achieve with your business and how you are going to get there.

Knowing what you want your business to be in the long run (5 year vision is a good target) helps you keep an eye on the direction you sometimes get forced to take in order to make money. John Jantsch has an interesting post about What’s the picture of your business when it’s done? that keeping an eye on your vision. Is everything you are doing in your business helping you move toward your vision?

But once you have your vision, knowing what you want to achieve in the next 12 months helps you focus your marketing effort.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your revenue goal for the year?
• How do you want your business to look at the end of the year?
• How many new clients you need?
• How many current clients you need to sell more to?
• What new services or products do you need to offer to achieve your business goals?

For example, you have a service that you sell for $1000. If you want to make $60,000 from this service in new business in 2008, you need 60 new clients over the year. Now break it into months and you need to close 5 new clients a month. Now your marketing plan can focus on getting you 5 clients or more a month, right?

Now let’s determine what will that take. How many prospects do you need to have in order to close 5 new clients a month? 10? 20? 50? Look at your history - for every 10 prospects, how many do you close? If you are not closing many, take a look at your:

• Target market - are you trying to sell to everyone and anyone? Have you selected your target and focused on your ideal client?
• Marketing messages - are you not communicating your value appropriately?
• Marketing strategy - are you wasting money on inconsistent activities that are not focused on your ideal client? If you know your ideal client, you should be able to figure out how to reach them with what marketing activities.

From this effort, you should be able to come up with what you need to do and how much it will cost. Lay it all out in a spread sheet in at least a quarterly format (revenue goals, marketing activities with associated marketing budget by quarter), and there you have it - a simple marketing plan.

Now do the same thing with revenue from current clients. What is your strategy to upsell current clients?

By breaking your marketing planning process into smaller pieces, you have a more manageable marketing task ahead of you. Even if the plan is simple, it will help you focus your efforts and know what it really is going to take to achieve your goals.

I was offered a great promotional deal from Comcast to move my phone lines to their service which saved me about $90 a month in phone service for the next 12 months and about $50 after that. Since we already had cable TV and Internet through them, the deal was one phone for free for 12 months and a second line for $20. With these savings, and the fact that our phone lines have never been the best quality, I decided to give it a try.

The process to switch was pretty smooth and so far I like the phone service. It has a lot of options I didn’t have on my business line through Verizon (which they offer but I never was successful at getting them turned on) and our home line which I added for the $20 also has unlimited calling, making that even a better deal (our home line was bare bones basic which we still paid $30 for!).

Now the marketing lesson here is what Verizon didn’t do to save a customer. All I got from them was a recorded message on my answering machine and two form letters sent special delivery (one for each phone number) saying the same thing they said in the recorded message. This actually made me laugh as I felt that I was not important enough to save. I hope they didn’t think that the special delivery of the letters would make me feel special!

Had I received a call from a human to discuss my switch with them, I would have at least felt as if losing a customer for whatever reason was important to them. Even if they couldn’t match the price and service Comcast is offering, they may have learned something from our conversation.

Every one who touches a customer has to be part of the marketing effort to ensure your customers maintain a high impression of your business. Making it human and personal is still the best way to maintain a relationship, even if you lose that customer. Who knows, that customer may want to come back someday and they will remember the personalized touch.

In the post Five Key Parts to the Marketing Plan, the first thing you need to do before all else is to identify your ideal customer. It seems that most business owners don’t want to do this for fear of “leaving money on the table”. Being a generalist business that tries to satisfy a broad audience will never get you the success that you desire.

Choosing an ideal client allows you to target a more lucrative audience and develop messages with greater precision. The clarity you achieve in your messages about what you offer makes other businesses even outside of your ideal target more likely to call you, giving you the choice of whether you want to work with them or not. If you narrowly define your market, your messages are clear, your offerings are precise, and your marketing efforts are more effective, even to those not within your primary target market.

You will also find that ideal clients take less time, resources and energy to satisfy because they value what you have to offer.

Drew’s Marketing Minute has a great post about helping an IT Services company refine their target market. The thought process he uses to help them refine their target is a good exercise for every business owner to go through.

Once you define your ideal client profile, you can be more selective and weed out those clients and prospects that don’t fit the profile. The more focused you are, the more you will attract and retain those ideal clients that can help your business thrive.

A post on Drew’s Marketing Minute, Are you being held hostage by your web developer? hit a nerve for me. Although I have spoken with people who have experienced the nightmare situation described by Drew, there is another more subtle dimension that needs to be considered when hiring a web developer.

Does the web development firm include marketing expertise as part of the project team?

The firm you choose may be a great Web development company but if they don’t understand marketing, they could develop a site that never meets your marketing expectations.

If you want to be sure your web presence achieves results, hire a marketing company to help you get the site you want. A marketing firm approaches a web site or blog from the perspective that it is a tool to help you market your business and can put a plan in place to help you do that. Having the marketing person as your point of contact makes the process simpler for you, eliminating the need for you to work directly with the web developer. This person can also translate what you are trying to achieve into what needs to be developed to ensure you get the desired results.

During the workshop I gave to small businesses in July, I started talking about web sites and blogs and was totally surprised when most of the audience did not know what a blog was. Upon further inquiry, they also did not know anything about podcasts or social networks either. If out of a group of 50 people, 40 were unaware, does it follow that 80% of all small business owners also not know what these new tools of marketing are as well?

Whether or not those statistics are true, it opened my eyes to the fact that there are many small business owners unaware of these new marketing tools. Some basic education on what these tools are and how they can use it for their business would be a valuable resource. Therefore, I have written the first in a series of articles called Social Media Marketing Basics.

As the title indicates, it is very basic information for those not exposed to this new media as many of us have been. Future articles will dive deeper into the various topics, describing how they can be used to market their businesses. Feel free to read and comment back here on your thoughts and suggestions for the next in the series.

In the B2B business world, there is much discussion about new media marketing and how it will impact the marketing plans of B2B companies now and in the future. I am still investigating the use of social media marketing as a component in my client’s (and my own) marketing plans, but I see podcasts and blogs becoming much more important sooner than later in businesses that need to convince prospects that they are experts in their discipline. Blogs and podcasts are great resources for building awareness and promoting knowledge.

Why is this important?

Professional services businesses sell expertise. You can’t touch the product or get a 30-day trial like you can with a physical (or software) product. A good way to prove that you have the expertise a prospect is looking for is to give some of that knowledge away that intrigues your audience and makes them want more. You can accomplish this by writing articles or tips that would interest your target audience.

When I started my Vista Viewpoint newsletter five years ago, I included an article and a tip of the month. Today, email newsletters are the medium to use when you want to nurture those who have requested your information (that is opted into your mailing list), but a blog with useful tips, articles and information for your target prospect will reach a far wider audience if marketed appropriately. People searching for information will find your blog or podcast and can anonymously subscribe through RSS. Those that find you, are interested in what you have to say and regularly read your information are more likely to call you if they need your services.

People normally choose to do business with those they trust and somehow get to know in some way. Building trust is something your blog or podcast can help you do. So if you are considering one of these newer mediums as marketing tools for your business, don’t shy away from them. However, put a plan in place that describes your frequency, focus and tactics to publicize them, and join the conversation on the Web. It will take time but will pay off in the long run.

I created a visual marketing plan model that helps small businesses create a marketing plan. Most of my work with my clients uses the model to simplify the process and help the business owner understand the components and how they interrelate. The model contained 7 categories - Advertising, Events, Public Relations, Direct Marketing, Internet Marketing, Word of Mouth and Strategic Alliances.

I use this concept as the basis for a presentation on developing an integrated marketing plan that I offer to small business owners (a topic that easily can run from 30 minutes to 3 hours).

As I was updating my slides for the marketing workshop that I gave today, I wanted to include social media (new media) marketing as part of the marketing mix. My perception prior to thinking this through for the workshop was to include social media marketing under Internet marketing along with search engine marketing, PPC advertising, SEO and other Internet related activities.

However, as I organized my thoughts, I started categorizing the marketing mix into the following areas based on their primary marketing objective:

• Generating leads
• Increasing visibility
• Developing credibility
• Building relationships

By looking at the tactics through this lens, my “ah ha” moment was when I realized that Internet marketing fell into the “generating leads” category because it was a direct marketing activity that drove your prospect to do something (visit the site, sign up for the free offer, etc.) while social media marketing fell into the “developing credibility” and “building relationships” categories.

For completeness, here are all the activities by category:

• Generating leads - direct marketing, Internet marketing, events (tradeshows)
• Increasing visibility - events, public relations, advertising
• Developing credibility - events, public relations, new media marketing
• Building relationships - word of mouth, strategic alliances, new media marketing

The beauty of this classification is that it helps business owners understand what tactics they may wish to use depending on their marketing goals. If this helps you, let me know. If you have a different classification for all the marketing tactics out there, let me know that too.