People can buy experience by paying full money or can borrow the experience by paying half. What you want to do?
Remember in professional life most of the professionals pass the same situation at a certain time. So the problem you are facing now may have been faced by someone else at past. Every year we plan for big, we dream for big, but at the end most of us just be disappoint. It happens because we don’t have idea how to plan and execute. I am just like you but I learnt some important lessons from my mistakes. Here are some of those findings:
1. Set a Smart Goal:
In New Year I talked about setting a smart goal on a Facebook live session. You can watch that if you are from Bangladesh (As the language is Bangla).
But for others here what it does mean.
- S = Specific
- M= Measurable
- A= Attainable
- R= Relevant
- T= Timely
In most cases, we have some goal like – I want to be a big marketer or a famous blogger or a big business owner. But how should you calculate how big they should be? How can you calculate when they should be attained? We need to ask ourselves what is the most attainable goal we can set in this year. I know I can’t be a big brand like Neil Patel / Pat Flynn by this year. It’s not attainable. But I can set a goal like – I will write 50 posts this year and want to get 10K new subscriber from them by December. I can set a goal that I will write a specific number of guest post for them by this year. Now it’s easy for me to evaluate my progress.
Now I need to create a step by step plan, how I can achieve it. To that I can further breakdown my yearly goal to by quarter followed by by month, week and day.
2. Run a Survey:
What we feel is not important in business. What our customers feel actually the most important part. The best way we can learn from our customer is running a survey. So January is the high time you contacted them and asked for the survey so that you can get clear data about their demand.
How we can create a survey:
It’s easy. There are lots of tools available on the web by which you can create free survey form and analyze the data. Survey Monkey is one of them. You can also do it with Google form. To use Google form simply go to drive.google.com/forms
Select the best template. Google already have a customer feedback template ready for you. The use is too easy and I’m not going to discuss this part here.
What is the most important information you should ask to your customer:
- Does your service fulfill your clients’ need?
- Was the pricing good fit compared to service / product quality?
- Was the communication perfect?
- Does your client recommend you to his friends and colleagues?
- What else you could do to increase their satisfaction level?
Remember, try to make the survey easy for your customer. So avoid open ended question. Give them easy option by adding multiple choice types of question.
3. Knock All Your Old Clients:
If you are in marketing industry like that of mine, this is the high time you achieved few new projects. Most of the businesses start investing on SEO and Marketing from January because they also have new plan. So start with your old clients. Keep sending them email to get few projects from them.
How you can keep record of your old clients
It’s actually both easy and problematic. The best way to do it is by using a CRM. Hubspot is a free one you can try. Zoho is another great one with some limited FREE functionality.
If you don’t want to use any CRM then you can do it with a project management tool like ASANA or TRELLO. I will upload a video in my youtube channel to show you how you can use asana as a CRM (For small business). So subscribe to my channel and don’t miss it when it is on live.
What to write them on email:
If you are confused how you can bring them back then here is a template you can try.
Hi Client Name
Hope you’re doing well. How your business website is performing this New Year? Do you have any plan to resume your SEO and Internet Marketing campaign again? I believe you will because you should not allow your competitors to beat your position.
So it’s high time you planed for a new start. Let me know the best time to catch you so that I can do some homework on your project. And prepare a better plan before I try to find few other projects.
Regards
Nahid
Your Marketing Blueprint, for Successful SEO Advertising
I have lots more templates which helped me to get new projects from old clients. I will share those templates to my email subscriber. So if you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do it now.
4. Create a New Lead Generation Funnel:
If you want to get client from online, you must need to have a better funnel to get the leads and convert them. To create the funnel you need to have a better plan. Small businesses mostly get stuck because they have less capital and resource. So it is always good option for them to know how they can get leads by using third party white label tool. I use different third party tools and those tools help me generate 80% of my leads.
How My Previous Funnel Worked
In last two years I achieved most of my clients by using this tool. This tool allowed to embed their form to all my SEO related websites. Which helped my visitors to audit their site. And in return I was getting their email addresses and websites info. So my next step was to do do some research and sent email to convert them.
To pass traffic I worked on different forums. In signature section I added my audit tools landing page url. Also worked on blog comments, produced valuable content for various social channels. Medium, Linkedin are couple of them. I also wrote guest posts and involved on some facebook advertising to generate leads. Facebook advertisement worked very fine for this funnel.
I also wrote lots of content to my personal blog which also helped me to generate some social shares and get more leads from there.
Last year I wrote an article on How to Add Keywords to your website which helped me get 20% of my leads.
5. Redesign Your Reporting / Delivery Channel:
It doesn’t matter how well you are doing. People always love to see something new. But it is not too easy to provide new things by ensuring the same cost and effectiveness. So the best way to do it to work on the design part.
You can simply change few basic things to give a new look. If you are involved with local business you can simply change the packaging design, color etc. If you are in online sector you can simply change your websites layout a bit. Also you can change the email signature if you are dealing with lots of email every day. The goal is to show something new to your regular customer.
For example, I am working on my reporting system. I have changed my logo for NahidHasan.com. Also I’m working on email template design and few more things. I am also changing the color of my client portal to give it a fresh new look.
So these are the five things I have been working on for the last few years. They worked very fine for me and I am sure they will work the same way for you as well. But if you have any other thought or plan I would love to hear that as well. So leave a comment with your feedback and share it to help your friends.
