How selective are you, regarding the people you work with? Many small business owners make the costly mistake, of working with anyone, who has the ability to pay them.
In this post, I explain why this is a bad idea and how you can avoid wasting YOUR time and money working with low value clients.
Many small business owners attract too few good quality inquiries and end up building a client base that’s of little real value. Even though they know from their conversations with a prospective new client, that this person will be a total nightmare to work with, they still decide to work with them because they need the money.
With a low quality client base, working for people who are a pain in the rear, their work ceases to be enjoyable and their business suffers in every respect, as a direct result.
The answer?
You can increase your income, lower your stress levels and develop a more robust business, by focusing your marketing messages so that they exclusively target inquiries, from people with your ideal client profile.
This means moving away from the mindset that any business is good business and using a more strategic approach to your business development. It means not wasting another minute of your time developing large, untargeted networks and email lists. It means no longer writing your marketing messages, so that they are of some relevance to almost everyone, and focusing them like a laser-beam, so they are 100% directly relevant to your ideal profile of client. Of course, by making the content of your website/blog as relevant to this group as possible, your SEO should also improve, as Google and Co are always looking for the most relevant sites.
What next?
I recommend that you spend some time determining exactly what type of clients or customers you most want to work with, and then shift your marketing focus so that you are as relevant as possible to them.
What are their challenges? Find out and demonstrate that YOU have the answers.
Where are they, online and offline? When you know where they are, you know where to connect. Look for groups, forums etc online and also the exhibitions or conferences they attend offline.
The bottom line: If you want the right people to get in touch with you, you need to motivate them to send you an email or compel them to give you a call or visit your premises. This means that what they see/hear when they connect with you, either on your site, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc, needs to be as relevant as possible to them and their needs.
A message that’s designed to appeal to too wide a group, is just not powerful enough to motivate people to take action.