You want to make more money.
As obvious as that statement may seem, it is the most important thing to remember when planning and executing marketing for your channel company, and people sometimes lose track of it.
It used to be said that effective marketing had to make as many impressions as possible by hitting as many eyeballs as possible. “Getting your message out there” was the key goal, and volume and variety seemed to be the core strategies.
The rise of the Web and email made it far less expensive and far easier to put messages out there. As a result, more marketers did exactly that. More and more companies doing more and more messaging on the Web and in email did not create more effective marketing. Instead, it created an unprecedented level of “noise”—so much so that it has become completely impossible to rise above the noise and get your message seen, read or heard. Potential customers have become so overloaded with competing messages that they have been forced to fundamentally ignore all of it.
The Secret to Effective Solution Provider Marketing
If you can’t rise above the noise, the only effective strategy is to cut right through it. But how?
Effective marketers have transitioned from a process of attraction to a process of enlistment. Combining Web, email, social media and more with more traditional activities—such as events, seminars, webinars and even direct postal mail, these marketers are doing more than just putting messages out there. They’re also enlisting and leveraging existing customers and others to help them get those messages through to new prospects.
Even the most experienced marketers will acknowledge that there is no marketing more powerful and effective than the business referral. Customers who know and trust you recommend you to one or more of their colleagues, associates and even competitors. And this is no surprise because the core value running through it is completely based in trust. The customers trust you, and their associates trust them. In an industry where relationships are everything, a strategy based on trust is the most natural thing possible.
So if something works that well, your best strategy is to figure out how to do much more of it much faster and much more effectively.
Creating and Expanding Your Community
The customers who trust you, along with the vendors who know they can depend upon you, the suppliers and other partners who value your business all come together to form your community. These are the people you want to communicate with all the time, especially because it truly is much easier to create more sales with existing customers than it is to create new ones.
However, it’s also easier to create new customers by automating and making routine the process of leveraging existing community members to obtain introductions and referrals.