Rule #1 about marketing: set a goal and create a plan to achieve it

If you are wondering how to increase your business and client attraction, the most important first step is to set a specific goal. So many people in business, especially those just starting out, don’t have a goal. They just want to get some clients. That does not really work very well.

I have very specific goals. Every year I know exactly what I want to earn and because of that I am able to completely focus in order to reach that specific goal. It’s not about being money hungry. It’s more like I know what I want to create and I know it’s possible if I have clarity on what the end result looks like.

Follow this step-by-step method to set your goal and create your own marketing plan.

The Goal Setting Process:
1. Set your goal. Let’s say your goal is $100,000 for next year.
2. Divide the number by 12 and you’ll get a monthly goal of $8,333.
3. Figure out how many clients you need to reach the monthly number with your current rates.
4. If you close a sale one-third of the time, (hopefully more) and you need five clients each month, that means you need 15 get-acquainted sessions every month to reach your number.

Now that you know the numbers you are aiming for regarding client attraction, you can start to think about marketing and what you need to do to make that number possible. Do you see how that works? It’s actually a formula.

The Marketing Plan Process:
To create your marketing plan, focus on those 15 get-acquainted sessions per month and look at your marketing pie. Think about each slice:
- How many speaking gigs would you need per month?
- How many networking meetings would you need to attend?
- How many warm letters would you need to send on a monthly basis?

Include JV partnerships, article submissions, social media, warm letter campaigns, and ezines – everything that’s part of the marketing pie. This is an easy way to build your plan, by backing into the goal you’ve set.

Now you may think this sounds overwhelming. But trust me, you will get into a routine. After you go through the process once, you are recycling the information. The overwhelm comes from not having client attraction systems set up. After you do that, the marketing is just something on the calendar that you take care of, delegate or both. In fact, for my students, many not only feel relief after setting up the marketing plan, but positive expectations about the client attraction machine they set in motion.

Your Assignment:
Get a year-at-a-glance calendar and map out everything you’re going to do. You’ll need to make time to do all of this work because marketing and client attraction are more important than anything else in your business. The only possible exception is the client work which is almost as important as the marketing.