How to Keep Marketing Spinning Up Business

Back in another century I loved circuses. One of the regular clown acts was spinning plates. It was very amusing to see them run from one end of a row of spinning plates all the way to the other end to keep up with them before they fell off onto the floor and broke. It is exhausting work, but once the plates fall the damage is done. Same holds true with Producers needing to always add more prospects to their line.

Marketing a practice should be very regular to stay in the game. One thing that is common among top producers is a steady flow of qualified prospects. Just as a good landscaper would make sure he has a steady, flowing supply of water, so a producer must identify a great reservoir of prospects. Then he must make sure that he has a way of delivering those prospects to his conference table. But the spigot must remain open. When you turn on and off the spigot you’re in danger of choking off production. So, dedicating a proper budget, acquiring an effective method of delivery, and remaining steady and persistent with the flow of uninterrupted prospects works as long as you don’t turn off the process intermittently.

The most persistent marketing requires money. Consistent investing in marketing will give you a consistent flow of prospects, sales and cash flow. A good ratio of marketing spend to revenue is 1–5. Spend a dollar, get back five dollars. Failing producers want to invest a dollar and get back $50 or $100. That’s not at all realistic.

Beware of marketing by suppliers that use one off success as normal. That’s immediate and only happens occasionally. You can’t count on it and it doesn’t happen very often.

When coaching producers, I help a producer determine what marketing plan will work for their practice. We determine a proper marketing budget. A budget must be substantial enough to make an impact. Let’s say you want to allocate $50,000 to marketing. Then spread that out over a 12 month period. That’s $4,167 per month. Decide what means you will use to deliver your message. Then develop a schedule for the year. Execute the plan. That’s the hard part.

You will be compelled to change some small aspects of a marketing approach, but resist changing what works. I had a producer who insisted on presenting his practice at a movie theater. He asked me what I thought of his idea. I told him that I had no precedent with which to base my opinion. He tried it with $3,000 in mailing costs and blamed the poor turnout on a bad list. When you are mailing thousands of pieces of mail, a list would have to be pretty bad if it doesn’t work for that reason.

Doing a deeper dive into the problem, he realized that older people rarely go to movie theaters in large numbers, so they were obviously uncomfortable with his venue. The producer enjoyed the movie theater, but he was not his target audience. Acknowledging that your own opinion is a very poor poll source is important when making a marketing plan.

When you have a personal opinion on what will work, you must make sure that what you believe is consistent with history. You must also fight against doubt and confusion when the marketing isn’t delivering as expected. If the marketing methods are proven to work for someone else, then they will work for you. Then evaluate at the end of the year and adjust.

You want course correction, but not too frequently otherwise you could be chasing a shiny object with your marketing plans. That’s a death warning. It doesn’t work consistently.

Here are some very important questions that must be answered before you will have an effective marketing campaign.

• What do you sell?
• What service does your practice deliver to a client?
• Is what you do attractive and does it have a unique offer?

There are tens of thousands of producers in the USA. Average producer production is so low that it suggests that marketing is being ignored by most. Elevate the importance of good marketing. You won’t regret it.

Kim Magdalein is an advisor with 30 years of speaking and writing experience about prospecting and marketing in the industry. Co-founder of Seminars for Less nearly 20 years ago, he is a leader in seminar marketing, assisting financial advisors and insurance agents. Contact Kim at www.seminarsforless.com.