Marketing & Advertising

[MindMan]

I recently received this question by eMail and thought the answer may interest other coaches:

Q. I want to advertise my services to a larger audience but advertising is quite expensive. I've heard there were many ways to advertise without the need to spend a lot of money. In particular using Google because you only pay when somebody buys from you. Do you have any comments or suggestions on other ways I could use?

A. One of the first things I learned when starting up a small business is to qualify whether something is an expense or investment. If you're a huge multinational, then blanket advertising is an investment. If you are a small company, then that same action would be considered an expense. The difference being that with a small company, every ad you run is done so that a potential client can find you and book your services. A large organization has already established itself within the market and is doing advertising campaigns to increase its brand awareness in the general market.

My suggestion to you would be to start looking at all advertising and marketing as an investment. This would mean tracking the effectiveness of every campaign in terms of revenue received against money spent. If you're not making a return of at least eight times what you have invested, stop that marketing activity.

In your question, you made reference to Google and their pay-per-click system. In principle this is an excellent system if you have a product that everybody who comes to your website, will buy. Google's system is designed to put your product or services right there in front of the Google searcher and then redirect them to your site. You then pay Google for everybody that they have sent to you. You pay Google regardless of whether this person, buys anything from you or not. In my opinion, this is not a logical approach to marketing a small business. What would make more sense is to pay a performance based fee to organizations or people that drive business to you.

In addition to options like Google, you may want to consider online networking organizations. In my experience, I have found that what happens online still closely follows what happens in the real world. The people who are most likely to refer business to you are other professionals related to your field of work, as well as friends.

Most organizations agree that the best place to meet a potential customer is at a trade fair, organized by the industry, for the industry. I'm assuming that you're a coach and would suggest that you seek out trade fairs in this industry that you may attend. If there are none, I would recommend that you urge your local representative body to organize one. While there is no online trade fair for the coaching industry, I would suggest joining an online community such as "ecademy" where you will be able to connect with other people in a similar industry for the primary purpose of business.

The other thing that I would recommend is leveraging on the popularity of online social networking sites, in particular, Facebook. This gives you the opportunity to connect with a huge audience that has already agreed to find out about you and what you do.

[triks]

Nice post & information.