How to Kickstart Your Marketing

Today I’d like to teach you about the three most important startup marketing tools you need to get and keep new customers.

1. In person: It’s essential you meet with customers/clients in person whenever possible. This shows you respect them and take the time to work with your clients to give personal attention to each of them.
2. Follow up letter/email: Always take a moment to send a follow up letter or email about what you talked about, new agreements or partnerships made and to thank them for taking the time to meet with you. Likewise, it’s great to send thank you letters or small gifts to partners you find success with. This goes a long way to solidifying the relationships you have by showing them that they are important to you.
3. Phone call: In this day and age of quick messaging or emails actually picking up the phone to call someone and follow up with them is rare. Just like the other suggestions it's all about making deeper, more personal connections and making sure that customers know that you're there to offer any assistance you can to help their business run smoothly and more successfully.

Here’s the caveat: None of these will work if you don’t have a quality product/service to back you up!

I can’t tell you how many times I was able to get repeat business from clients because I implemented this system, especially when I used it with joint ventures/partnerships with other businesses/people I worked with. Deciding to be intentional about this process is a great way to kickstart your marketing. 

Here are the key steps for putting together your start-up marketing tools:

1. Research potential customers, buyers, competitors and their preferred methods of distribution.
2. Talk to potential customers. Take a hard look at your product from a customer’s perspective and see what it needs to be successful. Are you missing anything?
3. Follow up with your 3-step process from above.
4. Develop systems for contact follow through, quality control standards and customer service.
5. Develop a post-sale follow up system to keep lines of communication open with customers and build on your current relationship which increases future purchases.

Here’s another one I love from an icon:

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company

I hope this post today has allows you to see that the best marketing plan is one based on connection, consistency and showing up in way that provides value for your clients. These simple tools can be put together in no time to create a start-up marketing plan that can be used over and over again to help your customer base and business grow in a manageable way.