If your goal is to grow your business, there are several ways to make sure you are getting the best bang for your marketing buck. Rather than trying to be known for everything you do for your customers focus your marketing using these steps:
1. Pick a single topic – Yes, I know you’re expert at a lot of things. Even so, for a 90-day period, select a single topic to use as the foundation for your marketing activities.
2. Make that topic the first thing you use when introducing yourself in networking settings.
3. Send a quick survey to your customers and prospects asking them what their “Single Biggest Question Is” about that topic.
4. Use that topic to write 12 articles. You can put those articles one per week on your blog and web site, submit them to article directories, and email them to your list of customers and prospects.
5. Offer to give a 20-minute talk on that topic to your best referral sources. This might mean a brown bag lunch talk at law firms, accounting firms, banks, professional association meetings and so on.
6. Tell your customers that you’re giving a talk on that topic on a teleconference and invite them to join in the call.
7. Have a colleague or friend interview you using the top 10 questions people shared while others listen to the interview.
8. Record the interview and make the recording available on your web site.
9. Send an email to your customers and prospects letting them know they can hear a recent interview you gave on the topic.
10. Create a tip sheet on the topic for people to download from your web site.
Bonus Tip – get permission from several of your clients and customers to use case studies of your working on the topic with them. These case stories are the foundation for testimonials that raise your credibility and authority in other people’s minds.
Each of these steps boosts your expert status, no matter what the focus of your business is. Once you’ve used all these steps on a single topic, you can now identify if there is another angle that will increase your expertise further and repeat all the steps.
