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The best clients and customers are those who seek you out because they have already heard of you. Get Slightly Famous shows how to build visibility and credibility by positioning yourself as a valuable resource and mini-celebrity within your target market.
This book provides a practical toolbox of strategies for:
- getting consistent media attention
- using speaking engagements to cultivate your target market
- becoming a center of influence within your industry
- leveraging the Internet to its full potential
- creating ancillary "info-products" that supplement your income and build public awareness
C.J. Hayden, author, Get Clients Now!
"The perfect recipe for any business
owner who wants to stop making cold calls and start making sales."
Click Here to buy the book
Table of Contents
Preface-How to Break Out of the Anonymity Trap
Part I: The Center of Your Universe
1. Just a Little Fame Will Do
The Slightly Famous You
Targeting the Best Prospects
Developing a Unique Market Niche
Positioning Your Business As the Best Solution
Maintaining Your Visibility
Enhancing Your Credibility
Establishing Your Brand and Reputation
2. Aim For a Target
To Find a Niche: Focus!
Niche By Design
Knowledge is Power
Competitive Intelligence
Getting Close
What's Your Position?
Standing Apart from the Crowd
Develop a Positioning Statement
Evolving Your Niche
3. The Brand Is You
The Soul of Your Company
Personality Branding
Trust Opens the Door
Expertise: You Have It, So Flaunt It
You Are the Resource
Brand Extension: Building on What You've Established
To Brand Is to Promise
Part II: Media Strategies
4. Media Strategies That Work
The Rewards of Media Exposure
PR Versus Advertising
The Media Need You
The "Slightly Famous" Media Plan
Tell Your Story
Build Media Appeal
Set Realistic Goals
5. Attracting Media Attention
Building a Media File
Press Kits and Media Materials
Positioning Yourself As an Expert Resource
Introduce Yourself
How to Give a Great Interview
Pitching Your Story
The Pitch Letter
The Press Release
Going It Alone Versus Hiring Outside Help
6. Getting an Article Into Print
Publications Need You
Your Road to Becoming a Published Expert
Selling to Editors
Writing the Article
Rights and Contracts
How to Get the Most from Your Articles
How to Become a Columnist
7. Broadcast Media
Understanding What Radio and Television Want
Media Kits
Identifying Broadcast Opportunities
Radio Versus Television
Interview Tips
An Overview of the Airwaves
Part III: Reaching Out in All Directions
8. The Slightly Famous Web Site
Master of Your Domain: Make Your Business Web-Centric
Design: Keep It Simple
Writing for the Web
Marketing Your Web Site
9. Stand and Deliver: Speaking Strategies
Get on the Program
Approaching Speaking Venues
Preparation
Your Public Speaking Engagement
Seminars
Join with Others for Panel Discussions
Teleclasses
10. Info-Products: Create Multiple Income Streams
Anybody Can Be an Info-Entrepreneur
What Products Are Best for You?
Marketing and Selling Information Products
Expand Your Offerings
11. Strategic Partnerships
Partnering with Competitors
Co-Branding Alliances
Cause-Related Partnerships
Cross-Promotions: Working Together to Get the Word Out
Action Groups
12. Reach Out and Connect
Why You Need to Network
Targeted Networking
Getting the Most from Memberships
Centers of Influence
Online Networking
Cultivating Referrals
13. Keeping In Touch with Newsletters
Print Newsletters
E-Mail Newsletters
Getting Subscribers
Distribution
A Solid Investment
Resources
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Just a Little Fame Will Do
Some business owners seem able to attract clients and customers by magic. Their marketing seems effortless. They may not have made a cold call in years, they may not spend a dime on advertising, yet somehow they’re regularly featured in newspapers and magazines, and get invited to speak at conferences. Everyone knows their name, and they get all the business they can handle. It’s almost as though they were famous.
In fact, they are, but not in the way movie stars and top athletes are famous-they're just slightly famous. Just famous enough to make their names come to mind when people are looking for a particular product or service, and let them reap the benefits. They get more business-not only more, but the right kind of business-and they don't have to work so hard to get it.
Want to join them and enjoy this ideal state of affairs, where customers come to you? You can, but it may require a new way of thinking and a new marketing strategy. And though it may seem effortless to the outside observer, it does require work.
The Slightly Famous You
In a crowded marketplace, where your potential clients and customers have lots of choices, you can stand out by being just slightly famous. This is the exact opposite of mass marketing. It's not about being all things to all people, but being a mini-celebrity to the right people. It's about targeting your market and developing a reputation as a great resource—trustworthy, knowledgeable, and close at hand. Your goal is to become the lord of a small, profitable domain of your choosing. Within that domain, you will attract more customers and clients, including those you want most.
Naturally, such results require thoughtful and consistent efforts. These efforts will take many different forms, but underlying and guiding them are just six basic principles:
1. Targeting the best prospects
2. Developing a unique market niche
3. Positioning your business as the best solution
4. Maintaining your visibility
5. Enhancing your credibility
6. Establishing your brand and reputation
Working on these principles is your recipe for getting out of the anonymity trap, creating a slightly famous you, and building a successful business. In the pages that follow, we'll look more closely at what these principles call for in the way of action on your part.
Targeting the Best Prospects
Market research is like sticking your toe into a lake before jumping in. If you know who you want to reach and what their needs are, you avoid wasting time and money in poorly conceived marketing programs. You can alter your product or services to fit the needs of your target market, and you can craft a message that reflects your business and your customer. Moreover, market research needn't involve expensive consultants, surveys or focus groups-it can be as simple as asking your best customers the right questions.
For example, Larry Klein discovered his target market from the inside. A successful financial advisor, he retired from his primary job and became a marketing guru to other financial professionals. He knew they needed several kinds of marketing help, but as he talked to them and worked with them, he discovered that what they wanted most were ways to reach seniors.
Klein explains, "I'm not 60. So, you don't have to be a member of your ideal marketplace. But if you talk to enough people in that market group, you're going to get it. You have to be awake and aware and be listening for what it is."
"All the information you need to target and succeed in an ideal marketplace is out there waiting to be found," says Klein. "You can take the guesswork out of building a business."
Having talked to enough seniors to understand their needs, Klein refined a series of methods for approaching them with investment opportunities. Now he offers seminars and writes articles about these strategies, and offers himself as a consultant to his former colleagues. You and I may not have heard of him, but within his targeted sector of the financial planning community, Klein is slightly famous.
Developing a Unique Market Niche
Large companies aspire to total market domination. Small businesses with a "slightly famous" strategy flourish by establishing themselves within a carefully selected segment of a market; they target a market niche that they can realistically hope to dominate.
Market niches can be defined by region, by special customer needs, or by demographics, such as a particular ethnic or age group; sometimes a market niche can be generated just by a product that's a variation on an established one. (Interestingly, the word niche, which comes from French, means "nest." As a small business you want to build your nest somewhere away from the hawks of big business.)
Real-World Success Story
Mari Gottdiener Finds a Market She Didn't Know Was There
Sometimes people find themselves thriving in a niche without planning it. Such was the case with Mari Gottdiener, who refocused her credit and consumer advocacy business from general consumers to the narrowly defined market of professional mortgage brokers.
Mari specializes in getting credit bureaus to address and correct credit-report errors. After struggling to find clients throughout the general population, she discovered that mortgage brokers were ready-made prospects. They had an ongoing need for her services on behalf of their loan applicants. She began networking with brokers at trade association meetings, and gave presentations at several mortgage offices.
"My decision to focus on the mortgage broker sector transformed my business," says Gottdiener. "The more I focused on being the person who fixes credit problems for mortgage brokers, the easier it became to define what I could do for them. Now, my name gets passed around, and I've developed a special reputation within that market that makes getting business easier than ever."
Mari's niche fame really became apparent when the California Association of Mortgage Brokers invited her to talk about credit issues at their luncheon. Since then, she's spoken to broker groups regularly, and has reached out to similar associations in other states.
"Word-of-mouth referrals built my reputation at a local level," she says. "Now I'm expanding to reach a national audience of mortgage brokers by writing articles in national mortgage broker trade publications and even doing online seminars."
Positioning Your Business As the Best Solution
In a crowded marketplace, it may not be enough just to carve out a niche. You've narrowed your focus, but you still have competitors. This is the time to distinguish yourself as the pre-eminent source of solutions by refining your expertise and conveying it to your target audience. You need to know more about something, or be better at something, than anyone else, and you have to let people know.
When you can honestly convey such a message, potential customers and clients see you as the obvious answer to their problems and challenges, and the logical choice when they're looking for a supplier.
Real-World Success Story
Fred Phillips Finds His Special Niche
Fred Phillips, a restaurant industry veteran, landed his first job at a hamburger franchise when he was in his teens. Now, twenty years later, he is president of RestQuip, a supplier of environment-friendly restaurant equipment.
Rather than blend into the woodwork of look-alike restaurant supply houses, Phillips focused on helping restaurants reduce waste. Drawing on his knowledge of industry issues, Phillips observed what he foresaw would be a major industry problem: "a ten-fold decrease in the amount of landfill space available for dumping refuse."
Within this situation he saw the business opportunity. "As a greater emphasis was placed on waste reduction by government agencies, my clientele needed options to deal with this potentially costly problem."
RestQuip developed a number of programs that addressed these issues, and at the same time made sure that their environmental products and services got plenty of attention in the trade press. They have consistently stayed abreast of environmental issues and solutions, and take advantage of this knowledge to market themselves as the experts within their industry.
Maintaining Your Visibility
When was the last time your name appeared in print? Yesterday? Last week? A month ago? Even if you remember, that doesn't mean a potential customer will.
One key to succeeding in the marketplace is to have your message out there, if not continuously, then often enough to keep your name alive in customers' minds. This is the meaning of visibility, and if you're not visible to your potential clients, you cease to exist. If you haven't done any marketing in months, you'll miss getting clients because they forget about you, and instead call your competitor, whose name was in this morning's paper.
Visibility is a cornerstone of every slightly famous business strategy, and it begins by placing your core marketing message in front of as many of your target customers as possible, as often as possible.
Enhancing Your Credibility
Visibility, of course, is only a means. To produce results, visibility must be combined with credibility. This means that you need to embrace visibility strategies that display your distinction, competence, expertise, authority, and leadership-and this is where the slightly famous strategies in this book go beyond marketing strategies that rely on advertising.
"Exposure plus 95 cents might buy you a decent cup of coffee," says networking expert Bob Burg. "The key is to position yourself in your market as the expert, the resource, the only person your prospect would ever even think of doing business with, or referring to others."
The surest way to make a credible name for yourself is by becoming a "recognized" expert. Who counts as an expert? Experts include authors, speakers, consultants, business owners, managers, and professionals. If you have in-depth knowledge about a specific subject-and that subject can be your business-you qualify, too. The test is how much you know, and if you know a lot about something, you can leverage that knowledge into a halo of authority.
As an authority, you can write articles for trade and special interest publications (if you're too busy to write, or uncertain of your writing skills, it's easy to find help-use the Web or the Yellow Pages to look for "Editing and Writing Services"). You can give talks. And you can become a news resource, providing quotes to the media on issues relating to your industry.
Theresa Iglesias-Solomon started Niños, a Spanish/English bilingual catalog business, out of her home in Michigan several years ago. Realizing that her focus on the Hispanic market made her newsworthy to business writers pursuing stories on niche markets, she regularly notified reporters and editors about new ethnic products and buying trends.
Over time she built a reputation as an expert on the Hispanic market, and this has led to frequent media mentions, including some in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, USA Today and Catalog Age.
In addition to making the news, you can augment your marketing and your business by creating information products-booklets, e-books, classes, audiocassettes-around your area of expertise. These will cement your place as the leader in your market niche.
A business coach herself, C. J. Hayden markets to other professional business coaches, marketing consultants, and sales trainers. While her book, Get Clients Now!, helped to establish her credibility in this field, Hayden took the concept one step further. After writing her book, she trademarked the name and developed the "Get Clients Now! Licensee Kit," which includes a 60-page facilitator's guide, audiovisual aids, and tools for marketing
the program to students.
The result has been a profitable package that helps others reproduce her program.
Hayden has sold more than 200 licenses internationally, and the program has helped her land book deals in the U.S. and China, and publicity in several national magazines. This is a perfect example of visibility and credibility building on each other.
Establishing Your Brand and Reputation
Nothing overcomes consumer skepticism more effectively than a good report from someone who's dealt with you before. When people get a recommendation about you from a friend, they approach you with positive expectations. In essence, they have an insurance policy that reduces the risk of doing business with you. If, on top of hearing about you from someone they know, they also see your name in print, the effect grows synergistically. Marketing guru Marcia Yudkin expresses this ideas in an algebraic formula: Visibility + Credibility + Word-of-Mouth = REPUTATION.
None of this is possible, of course, if you don't provide customer satisfaction. There are a number of good books on the subject of customer service, and you should take their advice seriously. Without visibility, you can provide excellent services and still find yourself without enough business. But if you pursue visibility and credibility marketing strategies and provide an outstanding product or service, word-of-mouth will take on a life of its own. And although you can't personally be present at every moment your prospects are about to buy, your reputation will function as a surrogate salesperson within your prospect's mind.
Roseann Sullivan, a corporate trainer and owner of San Francisco–based
Sullivan Communications, has an excellent local reputation as a public speaking coach. Nevertheless, she credits the articles she has written with providing the lion's share of new clients.
"I've landed work from clients who hear about me through my published articles," says Sullivan, whose work has been featured in numerous professional journals and business publications, including Apartment Owners News, Southwest Airline's Spirit, and The Business Journal "And I get calls from prospects who had already heard about me, but were then 'nudged' to call and hire me after reading one of my articles."
Big corporations spend millions to promote a brand identity because it pays. The best-known brands spread with the speed of spicy gossip, jumping from prospect to prospect, community to community. While you're probably not in a position to spend your way to success as they do, there are economical ways you can make your business an attractive, distinguished, and distinguishable microbrand that represents your values and expertise.
Your brand will integrate all your marketing around a core idea and vision. It will actually make knowing what to do to successfully market yourself easier. Because you have a unique identity, you will have less to fear from competitors, thereby opening the door for mutually beneficial partnerships with other businesses.
The Sonoma County Woodworkers Association (SCWA) emerged when a handful of independent furniture retailers in Northern California banded together to survive the recession of the early 1990s through cross-promotion and buying strength. Together, the group bought advertising at local radio stations and newspapers, and developed combined events where customers were eligible to win prizes. They even printed a joint brochure that included a map to their locations, along with a headline that read, "People You Can Trust." Because each retailer had a distinctive identity, they were able to work together to survive rough times.
Your slightly famous brand identity will become the guiding star of your entire business. It will ensure that all your marketing efforts pull in the same direction. You'll waste less time, and make fewer marketing mistakes, because you have a long-term strategy of investing in your slightly famous reputation.
6 x 9 Paperback · 271 Pages
2003, Bay Tree Publishing
Your Price $16.95
Click Here to buy the book
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