“Patience is a virtue,
Possess it if you can,Seldom found in woman,Never found in man”
I could also add rarely found in people starting out in marketing!
Why is patience so important when marketing your products and services?
I was on a great teleclass recently with Jay Conrad Levinson, the genius who coined the phrase “Guerrilla Marketing” back in the 80’s. On this recent call Jay shared 12 Personality Traits of Wealthy Guerrilla Marketers.
His #1 trait was patience.
Many would think there would be many more fancy things he could have thought up to place in the #1 spot but I also believe patience is the number one thing you need when growing your natural therapy business because patience and persistent consistent action brings results in every other area of life ......... so why wouldn't it bring success in marketing.
I encourage my people to start doing good things like blogging and setting up their website and regularly doing newsletters very early in the set up of their practice. I get VERY frustrated when I go back to them a few months later and ask how they are going with those tasks only to hear them say that they gave up because they thought it a waste of time because no one was reading them.
One client was recently featured on a two hour radio program. Was her website finished, did she have a free product to offer the listeners to encourage them to visit her site? Did she have a blog so people could get a sense of her opinions and methods? No, so all she could do was hope they would write down her phone number. People will remember a catchy website name but they have little hope of remembering a phone number so her wonderful piece of free publicity was limited to people with a pen and paper close by.
Another client was recently telling me how her partner had read the single blog post one of my old clients had put up and it changed his life in that instance. Imagine if he had kept up the posting, he might by now have changed many more lives with his words.
You can see why I get frustrated when people lose patience because they end up losing patients.
These stories highlight the need for patience. It is also based in the beautiful words of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Take the first step in faith.
You don't have to see the whole staircase,
just take the first step.
Most who are starting out want the big sweeping staircase from Gone with the Wind but the reality is that most don't have the budget to purchase one step, let alone the whole solution. That is where Guerrilla Marketing hit the spot for so many people because it offered low cost ways to get your message out and gave many of us the faith to stay in the game because Jay's methods worked for so many.
The staircase appears after you have patiently worked your strategies for a long time and been patient enough to test and measure your results, tweaking as you go and eventually working out what it is you like doing and what it is your clients like receiving. I’ll give you a hint – when those two things are the same, magic happens BUT it takes a little time, effort, energy, frustration and feeling like you are wasting your time to get to that point.
But if you don’t start you will always be struggling to get your message refined enough for people to want to listen to you.
Marketing is not a short term fix. You can’t write one newsletter and expect miracles. I’m not saying that won’t happen but in my experience it takes a little while for you to find your voice and find out what does resonate with your people and what does get them commenting and letting you know they are reading.
For a long time I also thought no one was reading until I started to speak to small groups and associations. Then people would start coming up to me and talking about small things I had written in a newsletter that had helped them or had inspired an action that helped them move to the next level.
If I hadn’t been patient enough to keep writing even when I thought no one was listening, then for sure I would have given up and those people wouldn’t have had that small success or small step up that made a difference for them.
Jay shared on his call a strategy that is key to Guerrilla marketing and that is the concept of getting known. He shared the importance of getting known by forming interactive dialogue not monologue with your audience. The Internet creates so many ways you can interact with potential clients but most still aren’t making the most of it because they run out of patience and stop the activities that could result in many more clients being attracted to them.
During the call Jay also spoke of a survey that was done that calculated how many times it took for someone to experience your marketing message before they bought something. The magical answer that this survey came up with was nine times. I’ve heard some experts say it takes eleven touches before someone will move from apathy to “purchase readiness”
Each one of these “touches” or “experiences” of you or your products and services moves the potential client one step closer to purchasing from you.
But here’s the thing – there is another crippling piece of information that goes with being patient – you must also be consistent in getting your message out or people will forget you. I have heard it said that if you don’t keep in touch with your people at least bi-monthly they will forget you.
It stands to reason then that if you only have one post on your blog, have sent a couple of newsletters and meant to get around to building a website and people can’t easily find you, then you are going to struggle.
If you are prepared to get into the game for the long haul, these are the things you will need to have on your to do list:
- Send out your newsletter each month
- Post to your blog at least once a week
- Spend 15 minutes each day on social media sites
- Create a free e-product to give away on your website that gives people a taste of what you do
- Speak to people in your target market, it can be small groups to start with at least twice per month
- Submitting articles to websites or media once a month
- Make contact with an important person in your industry (at least one per week) and then make it easy for those people to send you clients
- Arranging small workshops so people can understand how much you know about your preferred topic and get to know a little more about you.
Most certainly the most powerful way I know of connecting with people is in person so that puts speaking right up on top of the list of things you patiently need to be delivering to people.
If you take these type of actions, eventually people are going to notice you and then guess what? Your business will start to get traction.
Natural therapists are some of the most patient people I have ever met. They will sit for hours listening to people’s stories, taking case notes, being there for their clients at all hours of the day and night.
So why not move some of the traits of patience over to your marketing and start doing all the actions that are necessary to grow your business.
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