Would you like a simplified, holistic way to approach the entire subject of client attraction -- from lead generation to prospect follow up to conversion to client to upselling and cross-selling of additional products and services???
This marketing philosophy, business growth paradigm, or practice growth dogma -- whatever the heck you want to call it -- is pretty simple. Here's the basic 3-step formula behind database marketing (yet another term for it):
Choose a specific industry or profession + a geography.
Build a list of people that know, like, and trust you.
Send educational information to that list, along with occasional solicitations for your services.
To put it in shorter marketing parlance for any business school folks in the audience:
Define your target market.
Build a prospect list.
Send them offers.
Easy peasy, extra cheesy.
Now, just to be clear, this is no different than how you've seen me talk about marketing in the past. All the same concepts apply. I'm just giving you different packaging.
Why?
Because defining a simple paradigm to work from makes all other conversations about growth hacking — the hip, modern name for it — much easier. It gives a starting point of reference. A place from which to start conversations, anchor business development initiatives, narrow our focus, align our strategic objectives, and apply many other MBA words.
In reality, all we're really talking about is direct response marketing. There's nothing new about that.
But, I want to give you a new structure from which to view it. A structure that will hopefully make it easier for you to implement and profit from.
Let me give you an example. When I was running my tax firm, about 70-80 percent of my marketing was to small trucking companies, with 5-10 trucks, in five states. This was my target market. Through a variety of marketing media, including direct mail, telemarketing, Google ads, Facebook ads, and the like, I generated leads. In other words, a list of people that knew me. Some of those businesses moved from the lead list to the prospect list by having a consultation with me. Some — never all — of those prospects then became paying clients. So, I was creating three separate lists within my database: Leads, prospects, and clients.
All of the follow up marketing to those leads and prospects was about resolving their tax debt problem. To my past clients, it was all about my POA Monitoring Service, wherein they would pay me to continue monitoring their IRS accounts for any future issues, for an annual fee.
I had nothing else to offer these past clients, because I had made the choice to not offer other services that are common in the tax profession, such seasonal return preparation, bookkeeping, etc. And, quite frankly, I'd never heard the term "advisory services" yet, so that wasn't on the menu, either.
If I had been far more ambitious at the time, and hadn't later wandered off and started a software company, I think (hope?) that I would have eventually started offering other services to my lead, prospect, and client lists. I would have figured out a way through the regulatory red tape to directly sell them accounts receivable factoring and get paid for it. I would have become a vendor for several types of software used for freight tracking, dispatching, digital driver logs, etc. I would have connected with Pilot and Flying J corporate, to forge partnerships that allowed me to offer rewards points on those company's loyalty programs. Etc., etc.
Oh, and yeah, I would have hired a couple people by now to prepare tax returns and keep books. Or perhaps I would have outsourced this to companies like SurePrep and Bench. Outsourcing these services is precisely what more than half of the 400 largest public accounting firms in the United States do for these particular services, so I would have followed their lead and done the same thing.
But, you see, the business could have been so much more, simply because I had a list and a relationship with those truckers and trucking companies.
You can now take what I've written here, and go off on your own and create your own target market domination. This paradigm is yours to run with. Run fast, run far, run profitably!