Marketing Your Consulting Services.pdf - epiheirimatikotita.gr

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dozens of personal notes, or you have spoken at conferences. Yes, your name is
passed around by past, current, and potential clients. But you must have completed
some marketing activities that fed the word of mouth. And you must continue to
feed the word of mouth.
I remember reading a quote that said, “It’s funny, the harder I work the luckier
I become!”
Marketing is like that as well. The more you market, the more work comes your
way. A few years ago I dealt with a personal tragedy. I did not conduct the marketing
activities that I usually did for over twelve months. In a year’s time when I
normally sent about eighty articles, I sent no more than two; when I normally sent
350 handwritten notes, I sent about two dozen; when I normally sent fifty books,
I sent fewer than five; when I normally attended about eighteen conference days,
I attended about six; when I normally initiated hundreds of phone calls, I returned
only those that I had to. The result was that the phone stopped ringing during that
year and the word-of-mouth marketing dried up. It was quite dramatic! My clients
had not forgotten about me, but without the regular reminders, they turned to
other consultants who kept themselves in front of my clients.
Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective. But it must be fed with the
marketing tools and techniques you will find in this chapter. Don’t delude yourself
into believing that word of mouth is a standalone marketing technique. It is
not. You must feed it with other marketing techniques.
MARKETING TOOLS
In his book Guerrilla Marketing, Secrets for Making Big Profits from Your Small
Business, Jay Conrad Levinson, states, “A great deal of marketing isn’t merely poorly
executed these days; it’s not executed at all! I’d venture a bold guess that fewer than
10 percent of the new and small business owners in America have explored most
of the marketing methods available to them.” It is with this spirit that I present any
and all marketing tools that have a possibility of making it into your marketing
plan—even blimps.
I present an exhaustive list of marketing tools. Some, like prospecting letters,
slide into the selling arena. Don’t worry about that. Now—before you develop your
marketing plan—is when you should be thinking about all the tools. As you go
Marketing Your Consulting Services