About a week ago Daniel Burstein ran a discussion on a Linkedin group where he raised the question of marketing effectiveness and what really worked for marketers in 2012. From the long list of excellent replies from fellow marketers worldwide, Burstein and the editorial team at MarketingExperiments (a MecLabs division) picked the top 3 marketing ideas, and “the WebMaxFormance way” was in this list!
Below is the transcript/quote that I posted on Daniel’s Linkedin discussion, you can read the entire post- Daniel wrote here.
“People buy from people” leads to 300% business growth
My experience in 2012 is that people want to see several things:
1. You’re a real person who is TRUSTWORTHY
2. You CARE about your client’s success
3. You’re VERSED in your area
4. You’re PROVEN to know what you’re doing
5. You’re WILLING to work over issues
As Flint McGlaughlin says, “People buy from people.” So being as human as possible online helped me achieve over 300% business growth in 2012.
Bring all that together, my best tactic for getting Web development and marketing clients isn’t really a tactic at all. I found that being who I am with people, showing genuine interest in their needs and expectations, and then going the extra mile to provide the optimal solution is what earned me new deals over and over again, and even got word-of-mouth referrals from my happy clients.
The way I achieved this is by being very thorough in my email explanations, offered precise game plan of how the project will develop, defined landmarks, and being quite accommodating for their needs.
With one client in particular, I exchanged about 90 emails before they agreed to work with me, but once we started, their list of needs grew from a single “we need a Web redesign” to providing them with business card design, brochure design, content marketing, social media marketing, offline marketing materials, etc. I’m very close to closing an ongoing marketing contract with them, which will pay out manyfold for those 90+ emails.
Content marketing geared to small- and mid-sized businesses proved to be quite useful too, not as much for getting new clients as it was for client retention. Case in point: on average I had four new projects per client this year.
Hand-holding: many SMBs don’t have the time and resources to know the ins and outs of online marketing, or marketing in general. By countless Skype talks and emails, I found that it is very beneficial for the clients to invest in educating them, and that the more they’re educated, the more they want to grow their marketing spending.
What really worked this year for me is to get an open table of desires (mostly for social media marketing), and out of the dozen or so popular social sites, clients loved the approach of me taking the time to explain, “Although Facebook is popular, it may not offer the best bang for your marketing bucks.”
Helping them realize that I’m not only interested in taking their money, but offer them with real, measurable marketing results helped them, and then my clients helped me with new projects and strong, VERY strong word-of-mouth advertizing.
For a non-U.S. service provider, this is invaluable. Thanks to this truthfulness and genuine interest in what’s best for my clients, I’m ecstatic with this year’s business results.
Hope my experience helps others, too.
– Igor Mateski, owner, WebMaxFormance
This is an excellent proof that perhaps the best data-driven online marketing agency in the world acknowledged WebMaxFormance for our marketing philosophy. Our clients have already acknowledged us with the increase in business in 2012, but getting such a recognition from the MecLabs guys is perhaps the best Christmas gift we could get.
Thank you, Daniel and MecLabs team for this great gift. We won’t forget it!
