(Part 1 – The Big Idea)
Marketing your professional services can be challenging to most people, because (1) we tend to believe that being good at what you do should be enough to make you successful, and (2) we want to invest most of our time on getting better at what we do – and to keep up with new developments and changes in our various fields/markets.
Except that getting good at marketing your services (or failing to do it) can mean the difference between your business thriving, or just barely surviving – or even folding (going out of business)! In fact, it's usually the really good service professional guys and girls who struggle the most.
In this post-COVID slowdown, unfortunately, a lot of businesses, including service professionals, will be thinking to cut back on promotion and marketing, because when times get a little tight or business is slow the natural instinct is to cut down on expenditure and the first casualty is usually the marketing and advertising budget!
That’s a serious error, one that guarantees only one thing – contraction.
You have to step up the promotion, not cut back. The trick is to find ways to get the maximum results with the minimum expenditure, but never to cut back and promote less. That’s suicide.
The goal of this series of posts is to show service professionals how to increase services marketing while keeping costs down, using what you already have, especially your hard-earned knowledge and experience.
We’ll give you a quick and easy strategy (information marketing) that you can implement right away to boost the marketing/promotion of your service/practice/business – a strategy that’s cheap and highly effective especially if you’re experiencing a recession of sorts, in a climate when all businesses are scrambling to up their game in digital marketing.
The goal is to bring in a steady stream of new customers/clients without a lot of hard work.
Once these new customers/clients are coming in steadily into your business you can then use other strategies like referral marketing or word of mouth to build a growth model for your business that doesn’t rely on getting more and more new customers all the time.
The big benefit with this is that it frees up your time and grows your profits through focusing on referrals, endorsements and repeat business.
This is a smart marketing strategy and if you want to succeed in your professional services business, this is probably the best strategy there is. Marketing your business is not an option, as we’ll see shortly.
Dan Kennedy is one of the best business consultants and he’s worked a lot with dentists, orthodontists, doctors, chiropractors, and many other service professionals. Here’s what he says to small business owners:
“For most small business owners their number one job should be chief marketing director. Because almost nothing else matters if that is screwed up.” ~ Dan Kennedy
So, the first idea is to consider leading with information in your marketing/promotion of your services. Information becomes your lead product (or you can call it a service). As the follow-up idea will show, you don't have to become a "salesman" (as in becoming "markety", "salesy", or having to use "hard-sell" methods. This approach is cheap, it's dignified, and it works like a charm…
You then do whatever it takes to become really, really good at marketing this lead product – your “customer-magnet” information product. This then becomes your “meta-skill” that improves everything else!
According to Michael Masterson, in Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero To $100 Million In No Time Flat (Agora),
“Your educational objective during the start-up stage of your business is very narrow. All you really want to learn is how to sell one particular product to one particular market. You don’t need to acquire any generalized marketing expertise or dozens of selling skills that won’t apply to your situation. In essence, you are going to become a one-trick marketing pony – someone who can do one thing, and perhaps only one thing, very well: selling the hell out of your lead product.”
For your information, as a small business you’re always in Stage One of growth, according to Masterson’s classification – meaning that compared to large companies you’re always, more or less, a start-up. It means that generating positive cash flow is usually – or should be – your greatest need.
Leading your marketing with information is easy, it’s doable, and it works like a charm, to repeat that mantra. Here’s a cool, informative little story to drive that point home…
In his book, The Ultimate Success Secret Dan Kennedy gives a very good example of Dr. S and how she transformed from being a passive and reactive dental assistant (marketing-wise) in her and her husband’s dental practice to a very effective and “pro-active” chief marketing director of that business. This is a very good example and we’ll mine it for all the nuggets of success wisdom embedded in it…
“Mary S. was at a seminar I presented for Doctors some years ago. She was there with her husband, a dentist. She pulled me aside on a break. “Could I talk to you alone for a minute?” So she and I ducked out of the meeting room, went down the hall, and found an empty meeting room to step into.
“I’m so frustrated,” she told Dan Kennedy. “There are so many things you’ve been talking about that we could do to build up the practice. We keep going to seminars, hearing good ideas, but my husband never gets anything new implemented.”
“Nothing happens. The staff now knows when he comes back from a seminar talking about new ideas, all they have to do is wait a few days and it’ll all blow over. And the practice hasn’t grown a bit in three years.
“What kind of things would you have him do?” Kennedy asked.
“Join the Chamber of Commerce, attend meetings and make contacts with other businesspeople in the community,” she said. “And start a mailing campaign to area business owners and executives. And put out a monthly newsletter for our past and present patients.
“And put together a little how-to book, something like ‘How To Keep Healthy Teeth For Life.’ And, in the office, our reception area desperately needs redecorating. The staff needs some help with handling telephone calls, especially from new patients calling in because of our yellow pages ad. And -
“Wait a minute,” Kennedy raised a hand like a traffic cop and brought her to a halt. “Mary, these all sound like inarguably good ideas to me.”
Mary then lamented how her husband wouldn’t do any of the things she wanted him to do to market the practice. Dan Kennedy then challenged her…
“Well, Mary,” Kennedy asked, “what are you waiting for?”
According to Dan Kennedy, for the first time that night, Mary was speechless. She returned to the meeting room with a particularly thoughtful look on her face.
Mary was certainly justified in being frustrated with her husband’s lack of ambition and initiative. But she’d been complaining to him and about him for three years. She’d been frustrated for three years. Obviously, that wasn’t going to change anything.
But after Dan Kennedy challenged her, Dr. Mary swung into action.
She took Dan Kennedy’s advice to “pick the ball and run with it.” A year later she appeared at another of his seminars for doctors. Again, she cornered Dan Kennedy on a break, apart from her husband.
“I want to tell you,” she began, “that I was very angry with you and the way you answered me that night. I wanted some sympathy. And I wanted you to go have a tough talk with my husband. But I sure didn’t want you to challenge me.”
“Should I apologize?” Dan Kennedy asked.
“Hardly,” she answered. “Let me tell you about my new life.”
Mary no longer worked in the office as a dental assistant. Instead, she had hired her replacement, then appointed herself ‘Director of Marketing.’ She joined the Chamber of Commerce, a businesswoman’s club, a Toastmasters group, and enrolled in a Dale Carnegie class. She assembled a book – “Secrets of a Healthy Smile for Life” – and she began speaking to groups of school children, PTA meetings, civic groups, everywhere she could, on behalf of the practice.”
She also put together a practice newsletter, assigned writing tasks to other staff members and occasionally even to patients, got it done, published and out every month. She designed a new “Family Plan” to promote to the practice’s patients. She created and promoted “Patient Appreciation Weeks.”
In five months, the practice doubled. Although shocked at first, her husband adapted to her new role and new interests. And he was kept pretty busy just handling the new patient flow anyway.
“Now I work just three or four hours a day, doing all the marketing and promotion for the practice – I’m our ‘Mrs. Outside,’ he’s our ‘Mr. Inside,’ and I’ve even got time for my new venture, creating and publishing health-related coloring books for kids, distributed through dentists nationwide. I’m not waiting anymore,” she concluded.
So, what do we learn from this example?
First, a lot of us give up control very easily. It’s easy to say, “We are not doing well in business because of our location, or the season, or the competition” or “It’s my partner/co-worker/spouse/etc. that’s not playing his/her part” or “I know nothing about marketing” or “I’m not cut out for this or that” or “I don’t have the skills/the education/the time, or any number of excuses.
Any time you say any of these things you’re giving up control. And the solution to this is to accept responsibility and take control.
Never underestimate yourself (or what you can do). If information marketing sounds like a good idea to you, stay tuned for Part 2: How To Come Up With Ideas For An Information Marketing Customer Magnet/Lead Magnet Report
One last word... We want your HELP! Give the idea in this post momentum; share it. Here's why... A lot of thought and preparation went into writing it, and so we want it to reach many people. It's intended to help service professionals out there who struggle to keep their businesses profitable... good people (usually the best) who want to contribute and improve their communities. For them, this idea can be a game changer. Share buttons are just below.
