| 
Effective Marketing Ideas
Many of you reading this may be asking yourself, "Is there a best sort of business outreach?" and "Is any outreach better than none?"
Sure, any outreach effort could eventually lead you to a client, but those of us who pay our mortgages or otherwise depend financially on our memoir work, however, must work more efficiently than "could eventually."
In a recent note to the Association of Personal Historian listserve, a neophyte Personal Historian wrote in asking for help with packaging memoir booklets. To quickly summarize her situation, she had been asked to contribute her memoir-writing service as an item for an upcoming church fair which she would have to attend. She intended to write up 3-to-5-page booklets commemorating a special event in the life of the person who bought her service. The church had also asked her to make a presentation after two Sunday services to explain her contribution. She clearly felt she had been offered an opportunity to do effective outreach for her memoir business.
While the effort "could eventually" lead to sales, I was struck with how ineffective her concept of promotion was
The following is my feedback. I believe it could be helpful to many lifewriting professionals who are asking themselves if they are marketing effectively. (I have retouched my response for this TLP article so as to make it comprehensible out of its APH listserve context.)
My best business-coach advice to you is to understand that you have gotten yourself into a situation which is not viable as business development. You are in a huge time sink that will syphon off energy that ought to be devoted to more effective (lucrative) marketing.
1) Your effort is laudable as church-community development. That is fine, but your effort is different from effective promotion for maximum business development.
2) You are working TOO hard. A business person cannot maintain this level of effort. Keep your marketing in proportion to the potential for profits.
You marketing a product that one can only assume has a fairly-low profit margin--after all, how much can anyone charge for a three- to five-page booklet? Even if you sell some subsequent products as a result of this donation at a church bazaar, you are simply not likely to make enough of a profit from these sales to recoup the cost in time and energy of the outreach. Save this sort of expenditure, this huge effort, for big profit items--say co-authoring or multiple-session workshops that are likely to bring in thousands of dollars to you not hundreds (if that!). The limited profit available from a booklet is not justified by the effort you describe--unless of course, you are really doing this for church-community development.
You are not marketing to a pre-qualified audience (people within your potential buying pool). While some individuals in the church may have expressed general interest in your product, the group as a whole most likely has not. You are marketing to people the vast majority of whom are not potential buyers--nor will they ever be.
For appropriate business development, it is most profitable to identify a pool of likely buyers. (These are often called "suspects.") Suspects belong to writing associations, respond to an advertisement, receive your newsletter, show up at a lecture you are presenting on lifewriting. (No one attends unless s/he is interested in memoirs and therefore you can say everyone there is pre-qualified as a buyer. This cannot be said about a church group drawn from the general population.)
Outreach to anyone but the pre-qualified lacks focus and is a squandering of the energy that could be geared to outreach which promises greater return. If you had spent the same energy preparing a presentation at a public venue for people responding to a press release on memoir writing rather than to a general church group, you would probably have some viable additions to your mailing list and possibly some jobs. (I have had good responses to such presentations to pre-qualified people.)
To use a car salesman analogy, what you are doing is the equivalent of a sales person going to your church and mounting an all-out effort to sell a 1995 Hyundai retailing for $1,000 for which s/he will receive a 10% commission because someone at the church voiced interest in a good used car. (What good salesperson would devote time and energy to the entire group! Instead the sales person would go to the individual who had expressed interest and market directly to that person.)
To extend the analogy, car dealerships prepare open houses at which they feature their new, high-ticket cars and not their low-profit used cars. Only people interested in car buying show up for an open house (think: a public talk at a library on memoir co-authoring). They are pre-qualified. If the 1995 Hyundai should sell, that's an extra but it's too unprofitable an item to have any focus squandered on it.
Remember: 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your effort. Therefore, always be on the look out for the 20% of your promotions that will produce 80% of your profits--and then eliminate the 80% of the outreach that is squandered on producing only 20% of your income. My best business-coach advice to you if you wish to develop a viable business that will support you and your family is to steer clear of selling to unqualified buyers who are making huge demands on your time. ("...attend the coffee hours following two church services and show samples as well as answer questions"). This is trying TOO hard. You are investing 80% of your time in what promises to be 20% of your business profits. You are clearly in a zone of inefficiency.
EXERCISE:
1. Look at your business outreach of the last month or two. Was it aimed at pre-qualified buyers? If not, how might you have made it so?
2. Identify a promotion that did not result in enough sales. Is it possible that it was not targeted to a pre-qualified audience? (There can be many other reasons of course.)
3. Which of your promotional efforts has yielded 80% of your income? Repeat that promotion soon!
4. Where are the pre-qualified buyers lurking in your community? Design a promotion today to reach them!
|