Become an Expert In Your Market and Explode Your Leads Flow.

January 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Don't  Cold Call Me, Be An Expert is important today in business because your suspects and prospects have become searchers. They search to solve the problems in their lives an they search to find their fun. Your customers are searching and they are searching for expertise.

Experts like Brenden Burchard, Frank Kern, T Harv Eker and other experts publish regularly and have earned millions of dollars from their expertise and celebrity.

Being an expert is all about publishing these days. Think about everyone you know that is perceived as  expert, they all  publish and publish regularly. The really famous, write books and work hard to get  their books on best seller lists, they then leverage the book into all types  of media opportunities that increase their perceived expertise and celebrity (I'll talk about the importance of celebrity in a later posts).

But even if you don't want to be a national celebrity and expert, cultivating expertise and local celebrity is important to your business. Experts (real and perceived) get more attention, people are more inclined to listen to their advice, pay attention to their opinions and want them to talk at all types of events. So cultivating expertise and celebrity is important to your business.

And in today's world being an expert could not be easier because publishing could not be easier.

The difficulty of publishing in the past is that the media was limited. Basically, there was television, newspapers, books and not much else. But today there is all types of publishing media including blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and all of the other publishing media and that is why publishing is easy there is a lot more media to publish on and they are generally free to use. 

So , if there is more media, the way to become an expert is to publish and to publish in all types of media. 

In todays world the best way to be considered an expert is to publish great content on every media. White papers, videos, PowerPoint presentations and webinars posted on a variety of media, focused on your area of expertise that solves your clients problems and indexed by Google, will allow your clients to find you when they are searching for problems.

Social media also increases the perception of expertise. Using Twitter and other social media increases the preception of expertise.

They will find your published work in volume and because you have published great content that solves their issues  or tells them how to start to deal with their issues will help them see you as an expert and increase their interest in buying your service.

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Filed Under: Inbound Marketing, Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to Build Your Book of Business… Don’t Cold Call Me…. Be an Expert

November 11, 2011 By 6 Comments

Don't Cold Call meHow to Build Your Book of Business… Don’t Cold Call Me, was one of my most popular posts. It seems as if many financial advisors  and other service professionals, spend afternoons and evenings dialing for dollars, hoping they can reach someone interested in buying a muni-bond or some other product..

Cold Calling – Blast from my past.

I remember when I was in the insurance business. Every night from 6pm until as late as 10pm, I was cold  calling prospects from a cold call list, hoping to talk to someone.

 

Once in a blue moon, I'd get a live person on the phone, a person  that was willing to  listen to what I had to say and sometimes I lucked up and that person would actually buy from me.

But I realized the cold calling hope is NOT a business strategy!!

Just think,  I was dialing for dollars, but that was 25 years ago and people had land-lines at home and at least I had a chance of talking to someone.

But today th world is vastly different, many people today don't have land lines and they have all kinds of ways to prevent from getting cold calls including the "Do not call list:".

As more and more people move to cells phones and don't have home phones it seems almost ludicrious to spend night after night, interuppting folks dinner or kids bed time,  hoping that they you will get someone on the phone and sometimes even get a hit.

A Better Strategy Become an Expert and Attract Prospects to Your

A few years ago, after I lost all of my money in a franchise I bought, I was helping turn a friends business around. He was losing about $100k on a $1.5 million dollar computer business. Things were bad and he didn;t have the tools to fix the problem. I came in to be the GM and help out. 

We didn't have a marketing budget to speak of, so we decided to be a expert in the network managed service business. We had to identify the challenges our prospects faced and educate them about how managed services could help fix their challenge and ask them to do business with us because we where the expert in the field.

We converted his business from a hope we find prospects business to a expert service business with more clients than capacity. 

We Even Turned OFF the Lead Flow for a while.

Since we had no marketing budget, we decided the best strategy was to create content that helped potential clients understand the advantages to having a managed service contract and paying for the service in advance. Long story short, we became experts.

Beginning of an Inbound Marketing Expert. 

That was my introduction to Inbound Marketing. Helping solve customers problems by creating and promoting content. Valuable, interesting content that helps or educates a client about how to fix something or do something better and then making an offer.

That is part of what Inbound Marketing is,  creating optimized content, promoting thaqt content on every web channel and tracking the results. That's the gist of Inbound Marketing. 

By creating valuable content, when our client looks  to solve a probem using a search engine like Google, they find  your content everywhere in every format, audio, video qnd text and that multitude of content makes your business look  like the expert your are.

 

So start to think about using Inbound Marketing in your financial  practice. Start thinking about how your services can help solve a clients problem, if your an FA, your clients may want to;

  • Grow their investments with little risk
  • Protect their savings from inflation and erosion
  • Save for Kids college

These are just some of the problems and in my next post, I 'll talk more about what I mean and show examples. 

So, start thinking about becoming an expert that solves your clients problems, create valuable content  and Don't Cold Call Me.

Next post, How to create valuable content, some examples and more.. 

Filed Under: Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing

How to Build Your Book of Business… Don’t Cold Call Me

January 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

If your strategy for building your business is cold calling me, don‘t bother, it's a waste of your time and mine.

I got a call from a Financial Advisor, (you remember, a guy that was once a stock broker who now calls himself an advisor). I must admit I was surprised to say the least. When he called he said "Hello, Mr. Miller, My name is Bob Robinson from XYZ Financial Services and I wanted to know if you needed any help with your portfolio?".

What a surprise, my portfolio, what portfolio (like many, my finances have been devastated in the last few years. In fact, my "portfolio" looks more like Nagasaki after they dropped the a bomb), he didn’t waste much time after he heard my state; he ended the call as quickly as possible.

After I hung up, I was still amazed. Here was a guy calling me to build his business but he had no idea about the condition of my finances, my financial goals or anything.

Apparently I was on some list from 2006 and the advisor didn't realize that sh&t had really changed. Had he been on Mars during the last 6 years? Was he living on the space station? Didn't he know or care what has happened to millions of people in the US over the last few years including me?

After I got over myself, I started to think about this situation and his marketing strategy specifically.  This guy was looking for new clients and his "creative" strategy was to invade my day with his need for a more money.

He interrupted whatever I was doing, not knowing anything about my current situation. Not knowing if I had money to invest. Not knowing that my investments were in the toilet? Not knowing if I was still a qualified prospect? He didn't know anything about me and I have NOT expressed any need for his services.

He took a shot in the dark hoping that he would get a bite and that did not work.
As I thought more it occurred to me "how so 1980's", cold calling a cold list without any knowledge of the prospect.

As I thought more, it also occurred to me that despite the fact my current portfolio sucked, I had no intention of staying in this situation. My intention is to resurrect my finances and my portfolio and become more successful then ever.
 
That’s my goal, to rebuild and be even more successful.

Which takes me back to Bob Robinson and the antiquated way he is trying to build (or rebuild) his business. If Bob wanted to “help with my portfolio” he would need to do the following;
  • Clearly understand where I was today financially
  • Articulate a plan to help me powerfully rebuild my finances
  • Understand my needs and how you can help me.
So just a little inbound marketing would have helped Bob.
 
Bottomline, don’t cold call me looking for business, interrupting my day wit your agenda. While in the past I worked with advisors that I didn’t know and didn’t know me now I’ve decided “IF AN ADVISOR DOESN’T INVEST IN ME, I WILL NOT INVEST WITH THEM. INVEST IN ME FIRST.
Filed Under: Advertising, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Tagged With: , ,

How Inbound Marketing Would Have Gotten A Local Plumber a New Customer

January 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Like many, Christmas Day was all about family. We stayed up until 5am Christmas Eve wrapping gifts and promply at 8am are kids where awake wanting to start the holiday festivities.

We have a great Christmas, we have teenagers and they got gifts like DF Hero and watches and clothing, we ate breakfast and the kids played DJ Hero all day while we prepared dinner.

We had a great dinner, watched movies and eventually I did the dishes, dumping the garbage in the garbage disposal, ran the disposal and washed  the dishes. Everything was done when I discovered that we had a clogged sink and dispite my working hard to unclog, the sink was full of water, clogged, a disaster.

I'm no handyman but I did try the plunger to no avail, the sink was clogged with standing water and garbage and nothing was working. So, like any good geek, I went to Google and entered "how to unclog a sink", here was what Google returned.


The results where somewhat helpful but what strikes we is the following;

  • Not one local plumber ranks in the search results
  • Not one local plumber is running PPC ads on this phrase.

What I was looking for where some really simple tips from a local plumber. My plan was to try the tips and if they didn't work call the plumber that provided me help. If I had found one local plumber with just that, either a site I could read with pictures or ideally a video, that guy would have gotten my business.

Instead I used Craigslist.com, guessed at a plumber, called him only to be told he could come out for 5 days. I called another plumber who didn't answer and finally called back a few days later. Bottomline, my kitchen sink was clogged for three days with water and smelly food. I eventually go the problem fixed, I did it myself.

Moral of the story, a little inbound marketing guide from a local plumber would have gotten a new loyal customer, instead a half competent do it yourself jobs

To discover how Inbound Marketing can help your plumbing or Service Business, get our free special report by completing the form
 

Filed Under: Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Mobile ECommerce, Mobile Phones, Pay Per Click Tagged With: , , ,