“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence—only in constant improvement and constant change.” – Tom Peters
Let’s face it: we’re all business owners, and we want results now. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. Ask my staff. I’m known for making plans to get projects done quickly and then wanting to add more to the list.
I’m not patient when I’m working on a project. I don’t want to wait for results. I want it, all of it, and I want it now.
How about you? Do you want it all now or are you OK with waiting until someone gets around to it? Whatever “it” is today?
The truth is that we can’t have it all today. We can only have more than we had yesterday.
I was very impatient in my younger years, but as I’ve aged, hopefully, some wisdom has come with the years. I now know that many good things in life take time to develop naturally.
Things like good wine, cheese, and my relationship with my wife all get richer and stronger as time goes on.
What about your marketing? Is your marketing getting richer and stronger as time goes on?
When using Facebook to help grow your business, it’s all a process.
As we begin working with new clients, many times they have little presence on Facebook or sometimes none, and they may have limited marketing assets to use. In these cases, it takes time to develop an audience. It’s important to test messages and offers and discover what your customers and clients want.
When you’re using a sound strategy, it all comes together over time. Developing a strategy looks something like this.
Start with anything you can get. Many times that might mean only a small e-mail list or existing Facebook likes.
As you design systems to target your best customers and people like them, strive to capture more e-mail addresses. One of my clients took five years to accumulate a list of 8,000 e-mail addresses and had 7,000 people liking her Facebook page.
These people knew the company, had interacted with it, and liked the company’s service. Every time we e-mailed the customer base, we had a good open rate and sold our services, but we only had 15,000 people to talk to.
A year later, the same client had 20,000 people on the email list, 25,000 likes on the company’s Facebook page, and because we had started tracking Web site traffic, we knew we had 26,000 more people in this audience. We maintained a consistent response rate, so when we sent out a message now, we had 4.5 times more people responding. It doesn’t cost more to send messages to more people via e-mail, and the cost of Facebook ads to reach more people is insignificant compared to the results. This client routinely realizes a 15- to 20-time return on the investment of marketing dollars.
We’re still growing this business’s list, and every week we routinely accomplish more than we did on our earlier campaigns.
This has happened for many of my clients. I’ve watched as their audience size has grown, and I get to see their results ratchet up as they increase their audience and no longer have to rely on getting new people to purchase every time they want to sell something.
The first key to achieving this growth is having a sound strategy to move people closer to you. You can’t just do one ad or campaign and expect to get great results.
The second key is having the patience to let your strategy develop; you will start to see results quickly, but not on day one. Sometimes it takes a month or two, and it feels like it’s moving slowly. However, as long as you’re using a sound strategy, you’ll get results. Within a year, results that seemed too good to be true at the beginning will be routine, and you will expect even better results.
You can have great results as long as you remember that getting to them is a process. You can have everything you want; you just can’t have all of it today.
For an overview of a system that will show you a profitable strategy to bring you a steadily growing audience virtually on autopilot, click here.
Have a great week!