A Humane Approach to Marketing3 min read
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Last week I did a “webinar demo session” on how to send very simple emails to get meetings with prospective clients and those who can lead you to prospective clients.
You can get a copy of the session here.
And then the feedback started to roll in. The participants not only found the session valuable, but many had already started to implement the ideas and were sending out emails to prospective clients. A few had already set up meetings.
It’s becoming more and more obvious: I’m really on to something here!
At the beginning of the session, I talked about how online marketing is so difficult these days. It’s not that online marketing strategies and techniques are overly complicated. It’s that there are literally millions of articles, websites, videos, emails, and podcasts competing for our attention.
It is very hard to break through the noise. It was never easy, believe me, but now it’s ridiculously challenging.
For many marketers, the solution is to write more articles, do more videos and send more emails. But I feel that this can be a dead end.
Most self-employed professionals don’t want to spend endless hours creating and publishing material that very few people will ever read or listen to – let alone respond to.
So, my approach may be counter-intuitive, but it made a lot of sense to everyone on that session.
Stop obsessing about reaching the masses. Instead, connect with people personally, one at a time. Get to know people and their challenges. Build relationships. Ask for help. Give help in return.
My formula is simple: Make simple, sincere connections with those in your network. And have conversations about ideas, insights, resources, and connections that could help each other.
Look, if you have an email newsletter, post videos on YouTube, and LinkedIn is working for you, by all means, continue to use those marketing strategies.
But very few marketing strategies can compete with making personal connections. Hundreds of emails aren’t as powerful as a one-on-one conversation. A thousand likes on an article can’t substitute for sharing a potent idea with a prospective client.
I think the thing that amazed the people in the session was how simple and fast this can be. It doesn’t take hours to write an email to ask to meet with someone. It takes two or three minutes.
The formula is disarmingly simple:
1. Show some sincere interest in the person you’re contacting. Reference something they are doing.
2. Tell them what you are up to and what you are excited about right now. Say you have some ideas to share.
3. Ask to meet for a short coffee or Zoom session.
If you can do that, you can be successful in “jumpstarting your network” and getting the word out about what you are doing and what you are looking for.
This April I’ll be conducting a new program I call “More Meetings – More Clients” that’s all about being supported in getting the word out in a way that some of my clients are calling “humane marketing.”
There’s nothing degrading, embarrassing, or frustrating about this approach. In fact, it’s full of joy, fun, and discovery.
Stay tuned.
Cheers, Robert
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