Business Growth Strategies In Las Vegas
Business owners in Las Vegas are besieged by marketing companies toting the latest greatest strategy to find clients. In one case, I observed a business owner actually disconnecting his phone in order to find some uninterrupted focus time! Here are a few of the marketing “solutions” we’re told will bring in a flood of new clients:
- Redesign your website. Once redesigned, it will begin attracting new clients who will fall for the new look and functionality. Problem: A website redesign is expensive, time-consuming and rarely produces results other than personal good feelings for the business owner.
- Get your website on Google page one through the latest greatest SEO method. Problem: SEO will always be a moving target as the rules continually change, and getting on page one, especially in a highly competitive profession is becoming extremely difficult and expensive.
- Grow a huge email list and drip market. Problem: It’s getting more and more difficult to deliver an email into your contact’s inbox, let alone get them to open the email and click on a link.
- Send out direct mailers, no inbox problems here. However, in the majority of cases, following huge expense, the sender realizes the inbox is the trash can.
- Create a TV Ad. Problem: So many of us are recording broadcasts and fast forwarding through the T.V. ads.
- Put up a billboard. Problem: To a driver, billboards become invisible.
Now, I’m definitely not against digital, print and media marketing, and many of the above marketing methods can still be effective given skill, creativity and a healthy budget. And, the above can help keep your business top of mind to your market audience. But they all share one problem: They are all impersonal. None of these marketing strategies involve making a personal face-to-face contact with your market audience and the truth is that…
People Buy from People They Know, Like and Trust
therefore…
Face-to-Face Relationship Marketing Is the Single Most Effective Marketing Strategy Bar None
From nearly 20 years of successful relationship marketing, here is my best knowledge on how to quickly create your own powerful relationship marketing network.
1) Create an Intention
- Who do you want to meet? Everyone out there is not equally capable of helping you grow your business. Who is most capable?
- What are their primary goals?
- How will you help them achieve their goals?
2) Clarify Your Value
- Formulate Your Message: Be able to briefly and succinctly articulate your value to the key people who can help you grow your business.
- Internalize Your Message: Know your value so well that you don’t need to make a speech. You’re going to lead off with your genuine interest in the person you’re meeting…their issues, their interests, their needs, their goals. But as you do so, you’ll need to be fully aware of your value, because when you’re genuinely interested in someone, they’ll also become interested in you. When they show that interest, you need to be ready to articulate your value.
3) Connect
- Where are you most likely to meet the people you decided are most capable of helping you grow your business? All networking venues are not equal.
- What type of event?
- Informal networking? Value: Meet lots of networking people quickly. Limitation: Lack of focus.
- Informational meeting? Value: Greater focus, defined interests. Limitation: The people there are not necessarily looking to connect, so you have to go out of your way to make that happen.
- Trade show or “expo”. Value: You meet a lot of people who are interested in telling you about their business and looking for help growing their business. It’s like visiting their place of business. Limitation: They are not necessarily interested in you or your business and may not be looking for an ongoing networking relationship.
- Charity event? Value: Greater focus, defined interests, givers who value givers. Limitation: More likely to need a longer-term engagement.
- Task group? Value: You get to sample the other person in action, and they get to sample you. Limitation: Longer term engagement needed.
- Hard contact networking? Value: The members of the group become your sales team. Limitation: There must be an opening for your profession, and you’ll need to be consistent and abide by the group’s potentially strict rules of the game.
- It’s not an “either or”. The greatest power comes in activating a mix. My own rule of thumb is to shoot for 2 larger informal networking events.
- Create a style of approach. How will you engage an attendee at the event? If they’re already in conversation, listen. You’ll know what to say based on what you’re hearing. If they’re not in conversation, how will you start the conversation? Consider some good opening lines that have nothing to do with your business or their business. This may be a refreshing approach.
4) Continue the Connection
- Is the person with whom you’re in conversation someone you’ve identified above as a person who can help you grow your business?
- Does that person know someone who can help you grow your business?
- Is that person a natural networker? You’ll recognize this by the fact that there is a group gathered around them. This type of person is perhaps most important regardless of whether they have any direct involvement in your business or profession. They know somebody you’ll want to know.
- Schedule a follow-up one-to-one conversation where you can focus, engage and continue the connection.
5) Collaborate
At the follow-up meeting you’ll both want to learn the following:
- What motivates you? Why are you in your business?
- Who are your clients?
- What value do you bring to your clients?
- What sets you apart from the competition?
- What are your goals?
- Who are you looking to connect with? (both clients and client sources)
- Are you interested in collaborating? (Is there a good chemistry between you, and a willingness and ability to help one another?)
- Define a “Next Step”.
6) Catalogue
Organize all those connections you are making so that you can easily recall them by name, profession and who and what they need. As you meet more people, you’re now looking not only for yourself, but for others in your growing network. Every time you can connect someone with someone of something they need, that is golden. Now you have a raving fan who will go out of their way for you.
7) Check in Consistently
- Review all your contacts at least every couple weeks.
- Make your contact list a living dynamic entity.
- Identify what connections you can make.
- Take at least one action weekly to make a connection happen. Make an introduction. Be a connector.
Putting It All Together
By consistently activating the 7 “Cs” you are activating the single most effective way to grow your business. Want to leverage your networking to make your marketing across all media more powerful? As I said in the beginning, all of the other media (your website, email marketing, mailers….etc.) tend to be impersonal and can come across rather weak. However, face-to-face networking is dynamic, living, a constant exchange of energy and ideas.
What if you could capture the dynamic energy of face-to-face networking and infuse it’s life into the other marketing media? It can be done, and the results can be explosive!
At https://marketingdepartmentlv.com we continually leverage the dynamic energy of face-to-face networking in creating a website that engages the viewer in a dialogue, as if you were there…email blasts engage the viewer in a dialogue. Be sure that your marketing providers are continually getting experience on the front line in face-to-face networking dialogue with your market audience.
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