As part of my job I’m lucky enough to get to travel and share my knowledge with people who are passionate about their business. Speaking gigs are my favourite thing to do. I really enjoy getting in front of a crowd. It was hard at first, at my debut performance I kept walking backwards until I fell off the stage!
Another gig that stands out was two years ago in Perth. We hadn’t expanded into Perth yet and I was eager to see what business education and resources were like there. In the mayhem of trying to be organised with three very small children at the time, I completely forgot to pack a pair of heels. A woman separated from her shoes is not a pretty sight, I was able to scramble and buy the first (albeit very expensive) shoes I could get my hands on before getting on the plane.
Last week I signed on a new client who I had met that day two years ago. The fact we hadn’t expanded into Perth didn’t deter me – at the event I collected email addresses to add onto our database and still treated them all as potential customers. Without trying to woo this untapped market aggressively we were able to still nurture these leads through multiple touch points, starting with inviting attendees to join our database.
Your database can be your most powerful marketing tool and is often overlooked. You don’t have to do a whole lot of work if you get into some good habits and understand how your database “thinks”. It will make a huge difference to your bottom line. Ongoing, passive contact if done correctly can pay dividends to complement your short term marketing tactics. Here are the rules we play by to keep our database delivering results.
First step is to always collect subscribers whenever you can, at big events or even when you meet someone new and take their card, ask if you can add them. When we add people into our database we really segment them. This is to make sure they only get information relevant to them. We ask them where they’re from, their industry, and what they’d be interested in hearing about. We use that information to make sure we don’t send them useless eDMs- people in VIC who keep receiving news about Sydney will quickly unsubscribe. We use MailChimp for our email marketing. Lists are easy to make and maintain, and the reporting is invaluable to testing different messages.
We also made sure we keep in touch regularly so we stay top of mind once people are ready to ramp up their marketing. A newsletter goes out every month, and we encourage people to jump onto our social networking to get updates in the meantime.
Content is important. Having something to say is more important than being frequent. You need to make sure these touch points are more than you saying “hello, we’re here, buy something”.
Save the sales pitch to a small section of the newsletter and only let them know when there is something different happening- for example a new product or when you’re running a special offer. Give them interesting news about the marketplace, comment on issues that might affect them, link to news stories, let them know about interesting events, anything.
One of our clients is a financial planner and communicates with his clients and database every time there are concerning shifts in the market. Potentials will feel like this is someone that knows what they’re doing and cares about them. when they’re ready to invest he’ll already have done some groundwork to build trust.
Give knowledge away for free to your database. Our free marketing educational resources drive some great traffic to our site. We trade our e-guides for an email address, so it’s a win-win.
So two years later, after our lovely new client received our newsletters, status updates, tweets, downloaded two e-guides, invites to our webinars and a special offer, she hired us, and the shoes have finally paid for themselves!
