FOCUS ON SELF-PROMOTION

Before clients will buy from you, they have to buy into you. They have to know you and trust you, know what you sell, and believe that you are going to treat them fairly and with respect. The goal of your marketing campaign should always be to build a high positive profile that constantly reinforces your image and the fact that you are knowledgeable and trustworthy in the minds of your clients and prospective clients.

You may also be marketing your company and the products and services you sell, but those entities are only peripheral interests. By promoting your self, you ensure long-term success. Even if you change companies or start selling other products, you retain all the benefits of the time, money, and energy you invested in your self-promotional efforts.

Caution: Although your marketing campaign needs to focus on you, I am not recommending that you use this opportunity to take an ego trip. The real focus is not solely on you but what you can do for your clients.

MAKE IT A PRIORITY

Far too many people approach self-promotion as something they do when they have time. They run a TV commercial and see how that does. The next week, they place an ad in the paper or run something on the radio to determine whether that will draw more business. Perhaps they dabble on the Internet, creating a second-rate web site that they later lose interest in.

These hit-or-miss marketing campaigns are destined to fail, because they have no lasting impact on clients and prospects whose minds are infiltrated with a daily barrage of advertisements. A single ad does not imprint an image on the collective mind of your audience.

To be effective, a marketing campaign must be comprehensive (as in multimedia) and unrelenting (as in never let up). You need to build a marketing blitz that never loses its intensity. Eventually, your marketing will develop a life of its own—it will “go viral,” delivering countless opportunities to your door.

START ON THE INTERNET

One of the first and best places to begin any marketing campaign is on the Internet because the Internet is the first place your clients will go when they have a problem or need information about products and services. They may not order your products or services on the Internet, but I can almost guarantee that they will shop on the Internet.

In addition, the Internet is one of the most affordable venues for marketing and advertising whatever you sell. For less than a hundred dollars a year, you can set up your own blog, complete with a unique address, such as www.YourName.com. This can become the focal point of your marketing campaign, giving you a central location where clients and prospective clients can find you and then find out more about you.

By establishing a presence on the Internet and building a reputation as the go-to guy or gal for the products and services you sell, you position yourself to become the sales representative of choice when someone is finally prepared to make a purchase.

To establish a strong Internet presence, focus on the following four areas:

• Blog: Blogging provides a quick and easy way to establish yourself on the Web. Posting content is as easy as filling out a form. For details about adding a blogging component to your self-promotional and marketing campaigns, refer to Week 37, “Launch Your Own Blog.”

• Web site: A web site is like a blog without weekly updates. It consists primarily of static pages and tends to be more difficult to create and maintain. However, newer content management system (CMS) tools are available to make web sites almost as easy as blogs to create and maintain.

• Newsletter: Publishing a weekly or monthly newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with clients and appeal to new, prospective clients. Make sure you add a page to your site where people can register to subscribe to receive your newsletter via e-mail. This enables you to capture e-mail addresses, which come in very handy for any future marketing campaigns.

• Social merchandising: Consumers often hesitate to make a purchase because they are waiting for permission from their peers. With social merchandising, you can nurture a community of consumers who eagerly promote you and whatever you sell. Some of the most popular places to conduct social merchandising are on social networking sites, such as MySpace.com and FaceBook.

Launching a web site or blog is no guarantee that people from around the country or around the world will flock to it. If you create a blog and post a great deal of unique content that is in high demand, search engines, including Google, will index your content, and you will soon have plenty of visitors. Otherwise, you will need to use other elements of your campaign to help drive traffic to your sites.

DISTRIBUTE REGULAR PRESS RELEASES

You may get “discovered” simply by posting content to your blog, distributing your newsletter, doing good deeds in your community, or writing articles for other publications, but the media probably will not go looking for you. They may need a little help, and you can often assist them in discovering you by distributing regular press releases.

When a newsworthy event occurs (or is about to occur), start writing. Announcing something that happened a week ago is not news. As you write, follow these guidelines for composing your press release:

• Read some sample press releases first. Model your press release after others that you find interesting and informative.

• Start with an intriguing headline. Nobody is going to read your press release if the headline sounds boring. The headline should draw people into the article.

• Start the first paragraph with the city, state, and date. Location and time set the stage for the rest of what you have to say.

• Stick to a single page. You have very little time to make your point. Remember, your goal is to convince people who read the release to call you. Limiting your press release to between 300 and 750 words is best.

• Don’t advertise. A press release is an announcement worthy of the news, not an advertisement for products or services.

• Edit carefully. Your press release is a reflection of you, so make sure it is well-written and free of typos and grammatical errors.

• Obtain permissions for quoted material. If you want to quote someone in a press release, obtain permission from the person or company you’re quoting.

• Include contact information. You want the press calling or e-mailing you or your assistant to set up interviews and perhaps appearances.

Several companies can assist you in distributing your press release, including PRWeb at www.prwebdirect.com, 24/7 Press Release at www.24/7pressrelease.com, and RISMedia (real estate-related press releases) at www.rismedia.com. You can search the Web for “press release distribution” or other related words and phrases to find a hundred other such companies, or e-mail me at RalphRoberts@RalphRoberts.com, and I can recommend a few more options.

DRAW FREE PUBLICITY AND POSITIVE PRESS

A close friend and colleague of mine, Michael Soon Lee, founder of EthnoConnect (www.EthnoConnect.com), specializes in cross-cultural selling. We are co-authoring Cross-Cultural Selling For Dummies. He relates the following story of how he drew some valuable free publicity and positive PR simply by doing the right thing for a local high school:

When I was Chairman of the Board of a credit union in the San Francisco Bay Area, thieves broke into a local high school softball team’s locker room and stole all of their uniforms and equipment for the upcoming season. We jumped into action and allocated $5,000 from our marketing budget to replace everything they had lost. The coach and school principal were so appreciative that they called the local media. When we presented them with the check, almost every local radio and television station along with many of the area newspapers ran the story.

One advertising agency estimated that our investment netted us over $30,000 worth of publicity. That’s not the reason we donated the funds, but the publicity we received was certainly a pleasant, unexpected surprise.

Although you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on professionally produced multimedia marketing campaigns, you can also generate a great deal of free publicity and positive press by investing only your time and expertise:

• Contact local reporters and journalists. Reporters and journalists need to crank out a steady stream of stories, and they are always in need of industry experts. Let them know who you are and what you do. Most of these folks are on tight deadlines, so be sure you’re available at a moment’s notice and train yourself to talk in short, significant sound bites.

• Get involved in high-profile community activities. Demonstrate your commitment to the communities you serve by giving back to the people who keep you in business. Communities can be online communities (such as user groups), medical communities (if you sell pharmaceuticals or medical equipment), neighborhoods, local business organizations, and so on.

• Take on leadership roles. Join community-based organizations and take on leadership roles to raise your profile. Leaders may not know all members, but all members usually know who the leaders are.

INVEST IN PAID ADVERTISING

Most of the advertising media I discuss in this chapter is free or very inexpensive, but you also have the option to invest in paid advertising. If potential clients watch TV, listen to the radio, or read the local newspaper, you should establish a presence in these media channels. Following are some options to consider:

• TV commercial: Hire a local video production company to produce a 30-second commercial for you and pay for a spot on one or more stations that your clients are likely to watch.

• Radio advertisement: Radio advertising has lost some of its effectiveness because fewer and fewer people tune in, but if you know of a hugely popular radio station that many of your clients are likely to listen to, give it a shot.

• Newspaper advertisement: If you sell products locally to general consumers, consider placing an ad in a local newspaper. Ask the sales rep at the newspaper about remnant ad opportunities; newspapers often offer left-over advertising space at bargain rates.

• Billboard: Another good way to advertise locally is to purchase some advertising space on a billboard in an area with lots of traffic. Keep in mind, however, that drivers have very little time to read anything you place on the billboard. Use an attractive design that includes your photo and contact information, and keep your message short.

• Internet advertising: Most of the big search engines offer pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, displaying ads on their own site and on partner sites for products and services. Rates vary depending on how much you are willing to pay to have a higher ad placement on the site. You pay only if someone clicks the ad. For more about PPC advertising, visit Google Adwords at adwords.google.com and Yahoo! Search Marketing at search marketing.yahoo.com.

Ralph’s Rule: Don’t let up. Maintaining an unrelenting marketing campaign means doing something every day to promote yourself—writing a press release, talking to a reporter, posting something on the Web, showing up for a community meeting. This takes a good deal of energy. Most people give up long before their campaign starts to show results. Keep at it.