I have a quick question: What is successful marketing?
My answer would be . . . Whatever gets people to take the action you want.
I like to tell people that the most successful seminar I ever promoting is one that I never held. It was in 1999. I was marketing Y2K seminars in order to help businesses get ready for Y2K and not have to panic.
I promoted that seminar again and again.
People called me said, “I don’t want to attend your seminar. I just need you to come in and make sure we’re okay. How much is that?”
In other words, they bought my services because I was the expert putting on the seminar. I did probably $50,000 worth of consulting based on phone calls like that.
No one ever signed up for the seminar. I never analyzed this, so I don’t know why. My guess is that they didn’t want to understand it, they just wanted to be safe from it.
My ultimate goal was to sell a $99 seminar and get people to hire me. I never got the $99, but I did get the consulting gigs. So it was successful.
As my friend Stephanie Chandler points out in her new book, positioning yourself as the expert in your field is the key to success. (See Own Your Niche at http://www.stephaniechandler.com/books.) This is particularly true with service businesses. It is your expertise and knowledge that makes you valuable.
Promote it!
