When I’m lecturing on marketing or advising clients in a consultancy capacity I always tell them that you can’t rely on one type of marketing activity or channel to bring in new clients. People respond to different communications for different reasons. Some prefer letters to emails, some prefer face to face meetings to phone calls. However, what you’re trying to achieve is brand awareness so that over time they get to know of you, your firm, your brand and how your products or services could help them.

I’ve experienced a perfect example of this today with my own marketing. Here’s an example of one prospect’s marketing journey with Momentum:

• 6 months ago I bought a list of accountancy practices in Yorkshire. The list was cleaned by my outsourced telemarketing company and where possible personal email addresses collected of the relevant target contacts.
• Their email addresses were added to the Momentum monthly e-newsletter.
• Over the past 6 months this particular individual has received this e-newsletter. Sometimes they open it, sometimes they don’t and sometimes they open it and click on an article that is of interest to them.
• 8 days ago they received a printed mailing from me offering a free probate service marketing consultation.
• 6 days ago my telemarketers made follow-up calls to this mailing to ask the target individuals if they would like to book a free consultation. The message which came back via the receptionist was “sorry, we’re not interested”.
• 5 days ago I presented a session at the SWAT UK Probate Conference on marketing your probate services – perhaps they were in the audience?
• 3 days ago they were emailed Momentum’s regular monthly marketing e-newsletter.
• Today at 1.46pm they opened the e-newsletter.
• At 1.49pm they rang me to book a free probate service marketing consultation.

So why the change of mind? Who knows – maybe I’ll find out when I meet them!

It’s a great example of how you can’t rely on one marketing activity and that persistence can pay off.

Incidentally, the e-newsletter didn’t mention anything about probate marketing. But a combination of the branding, name recognition (and hopefully being able to demonstrate my marketing capabilities in the newsletter articles!) helped this prospective client make the decision to pick up the phone.

Marketing – it does work when you target your audience with relevant messages, use different marketing activities/channels and are persistent in what you do.

Try it!