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Often solopreneurs get frustrated with the results of their marketing efforts because they haven’t clearly defined their niche and/or value proposition. Thus, their marketing message is sent out to too broad of an audience, diluting its effectiveness and/or the message is sent to the wrong audience completely resulting in the message falling on deaf ears.
With a little front-end planning you can target your message to the right audience to increase the effectiveness of your marketing. For example, I just did this with an email marketing message to my LinkedIn contacts. If you didn’t already know you can build a contact list of the professionals you connect with on LinkedIn. When you invite others on LinkedIn to connect with you and they accept, or vice versa, both parties receive the available contact information of the other person (often including an email address). A .CSV file of your contacts can be exported from your LinkedIn account if you go to your Contacts tab when logged into your LinkedIn account. On the Contacts tab in the lower right hand corner of the web page you’ll see an Export Connections link. Click that to be prompted to export your LinkedIn contact list. From there I filtered my contacts down to those who I know are solopreneurs, creative professionals, small business owners, or peripheral contacts who may know other solopreneurs, creative professionals and small business owners and may pass along my marketing message to their contacts as it makes sense, widening my marketing exposure. I then drafted a message that informed people of how and why they were receiving my email. I asked recipients of the email to take specific actions, like sign up on my official GrowLoop email list, subscribe to my blog feed, contact me directly or pass the message along to one of their contacts for whom it makes sense. I assured folks that I was not intending to regularly email my personal contact list, but rather my intention was to inform everyone once and if anyone on that list who received the message decided to contact me back to “raise their hand” to join my official GrowLoop emailing list, then and only then would I add them to my business’s regular email list. In my opinion the email was a success because it resulted in several responses – some were simply to support and encourage what I’m doing with my business venture, others were to discuss referral partner relationships with other businesses (to pass leads back and forth to one another when appropriate), I also did receive leads on new business as well as some folks simply agreeing to pass along my email to a few of their contacts. The longer term effect of this initiative is still panning out, but I’m happy with the immediate effects and response…all because I took some time on the front end to plan what I wanted as an end result, what I was going to do, how I was going to do it, then I executed it, analyzed it and am learning from it and cultivating the fruits of my labor. I hope this was helpful and maybe gives you insight into a tactic that may help you. Posted by: Nick Venturella Comments are closed.
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