By Scott Bywater
I don’t know if there’s a cheapest way. Once again it’s testing. It really all boils down to testing and measuring and what I would be doing if I was looking to generate leads and get new clients is testing a whole range of different things. So if I was an accountant, the first thing I would be focusing on doing is trying a free report strategy, offering a free report on let’s say, how to legally save tax. And you’d send out a minimum number of those; but let’s say you put an ad in the newspaper and you got inquiries and you basically test and measure and see how well it works for you.
The next week you might do joint ventures. So you might say, “Okay, I’m going to chat with the guy next door who’s a financial planner and I’m going to offer him this report I’ve created for all these customers. And if any of those customers turn into clients then I’m going to give him a percentage of what I make.” And you would make that evident to your clients. But then you’re benefiting and you’re leveraging from the relationships which other people have generated.
Now joint venture marketing is probably the single most powerful thing that you can do. The challenge with joint ventures is obviously that you’ve got to win people over to get them to do joint ventures with you so there’s a little bit of lost control.
The other thing I would do is look for your target market. Let’s say you’re an accountant and you say, “Okay my target market is business owners who turn over more than a million dollars a year.” So what you do is buy a mailing list from somewhere like the Prospect Shop or the List Bank and you send out, not one letter, but I would look at sending out three letters to that group of people. And basically you would either offer the free report. I would probably say, “I’ve created this report on how any business with an income of over one million dollars can save up to 20 percent on your tax this year.” And you send it out to them and you send a second letter and in the third letter you might actually send the report with it as well. So that’s a really valuable thing that you can do because you’re going directly for your target market and that target market may be worth 10 times what a normal client may be worth to you. So getting clear on your target market is very important. Continue Reading
