– by Craig Wilson
I am involved in a couple of different businesses, but one of the common denominators is the need for these businesses to generate leads and clients. That’s one of the main things I focus on.
So when I am talking to other business owners the question I am usually asked is, “how do you generate so many leads month after month?” Many of these people are desperate for more enquiries.
The simple answer is that I am always doing something to stir up new business. Always trying new ideas. Always testing campaigns. I have something active in the market every week.
What surprises me is that many business owners tell me how much time they are spending planning their marketing, or learning new strategies, or reading new books, blogs and newsletters. But they aren’t actually implementing!
Instead, I encourage them to take a “ready, fire, aim” approach.
Decide on a plan (it doesn’t have to be complicated), rough it out and then start it. Once you have started you can refine and improve based on actual data or results or feedback. Until then everything else is just assumptions.
The great thing about marketing today is that you can turn an idea into a campaign in hours. You don’t have to invest heavily in media production, book it months in advance and hope it works.
Most online marketing gives you the ability to get started quickly, test relatively small budgets and adjust until you get the desired results. Then you can scale up your budget.
Need some examples?
Last week I was talking to a business partner on my way to the office about generating some more clients for one of our services. On the call we agreed on a email campaign to our database. I drafted a short email and scheduled it to go to segment of our list the next morning.
The result: 8 strong leads in 24 hours.
Ready, fire, aim.
Recently we decided to launch a new service into a foreign market. We weren’t sure how well it would be received or if the responses would be similar to our experiences in Australia. So we tested it.
In one day we set up a Facebook advertising campaign for our target market in this region. We put a small daily budget against it and went live.
A week later, having spent just over $100, we looked at the campaign results, which weren’t exciting yet, and decided to make one change.
Within 2 days the campaign was delivering great results. So we doubled the budget. It now delivers us a steady stream of valuable leads and clients.
Ready. Fire. Aim.
The difference is that we move quickly to implement decent ideas, then improve on them once we have something to measure.
It’s more important to implement and then iterate than to plan obsessively to “make it perfect”.
So, what will you be doing today to grow your business? Get it out there and see what happens.
Ready. Fire. Aim.
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