The starting line

Before you jump into a marketing program, it helps to look at what activity you’ve got going on right now. Even if you’ve never tried organized marketing, you might find you’re already generating some interest in the form of traffic to your website. The info you get from this exercise will help you decide where to focus your initial marketing efforts.

For this bit of discovery you’ll look at two things:

1. Number of people you are already attracting and
2. Your website’s bounce rate. To do this you’ll use info from your website analytics and any other method you have of tracking inquires.

How many leads are you generating now?

Most likely, you only need to consider the number of new visitors to your website each month. This is because nearly every prospect will visit your website at least once before buying. If you’re convinced you speak with prospects who do not go to your website, go ahead and add that number to the number of new website visitors. (Do this after you apply the bounce rate).

If you added Google Analytics to your website in the first week of this program – or you already had some kind of analytics program running – the number of new visitors is at your fingertips.

Just log onto your analytics report, make sure the date range is set for one month, and note the number of new visitors. The default dashboard in Google Analytics gives you a total number of visitors, but you want to know the number of NEW visitors. Click on the Visitors link in the left-hand column.

Then click on New vs Returning.

You’ll find the number of new visitors in the chart under the main graph on the new page.

Let’s use the number in the sample of above and say your website is attracting 422 new visitors monthly.

How many website visitors stick with you?

Unfortunately, not all new visitors will love your site. A certain percentage will immediately decide they’re in the wrong place, and they’ll hit the back button or type in a new URL and leave your site. This percentage is called your bounce rate, and you need to factor that into your view of monthly new visitors.

Google Analytics gives you the bounce rate on the main dashboard – the page you see when you log on to your report.

Apply your bounce rate to the number of new visitors to get the number of visitors who actually stick to your site. In this example we multiply 422 new visitors by 40% (percentage who DON’T bounce, which is 1 – {bounce % Google displays}) and get a sticking visitors number of 169.

Compare this number to your marketing objective.

Pull out your marketing objective spreadsheet from last week and compare the two numbers. What is the total new leads you figured you need to be generating? How does that compare to where you are now?

Where to focus first

If you’ve done little or no marketing to date, you’re almost certain to find your current level of inbound leads is lower than it needs to be. Driving traffic to your website is first priority. We’ll start to look at how to do that next week.

If you find you’re generating plenty of traffic, you’ll want to focus on efficiency.

Take a look at your bounce rate. A high bounce rate (anything over 40 – 50% for non-pay-per-click traffic) makes your marketing efforts very inefficient. If your bounce rate is over 50%, this means that more than half of the people who come to your site leave right away. You’ll want to fix that before you do anything else.

Next look at your conversion rates. In particular, how good are you at turning mere visitors into active prospects and prospects into proposal opportunities? Most marketers find that once a sufficient level of traffic has been reached, they can get more business much faster and with less money by improving conversion rates.

Next week: Get Noticed.

We’ll address all of the marketing priorities eventually. Next week we look at how to get more website traffic by making yourself more visible.

Productivity is how I get things done. If I’m managing other people, I can specify how we get things done together, but I can’t extend that over their entire lives. They have to work that out for themselves.

Spoken like a man who has spent many years managing others.

New managers try to micromanage methods and details. I certainly did, and it made the first couple years painful for everyone. Experienced managers manage results and only consider details or methods when results are not being met.

There is this new web app currently in beta called Flow. Its project management app based on GTD methodologies with an emphasis on delegation. After some spending some time with it, I’ve come to two conclusions:

1. Its a beatifully designed app.
2. I question its long-term viability because it requires teams or companies to unilaterally adopt a complicated productivity system. Read  the rest of Randy’s article to better understand why this is an issue.

I prefer simple tools, like Basecamp, where people have a lot of freedom to integrate their tasks with their own ways of getting things done.

[via Randy Murray - You Are Not Responsible For Other People’s Productivity.]

What’s the point?

Very few – if any – freelancers or small business owners can afford to waste marketing time and money on anything other than generating new business. This makes setting your marketing goals pretty easy.

Marketing should either a) deliver more customers (in the case of an ecommerce or SaaS site) or b) deliver more good prospects (in the case of a lead generation site). To help you stay focused and make logical decisions, you need to put some numbers to it.

Your initial marketing goal is actually a factor of the following:

• How much you want to make in the coming year

• How much your average client or contract is worth

• How often you turn proposals into paying clients

• How frequently your raw leads become proposal opportunities

Time to do a little math. The following steps explain how this works. To make things a little easier, you can download a free copy of our How Many Leads Do You Need spreadsheet and plug your numbers in there.

1. Start with your sales goal. Let’s say your sales goal for this year is $100,000.

Annual Revenue Target = $100,000

2. Convert your sales goal to the number of new customers you need. Divide your annual sales target by your average contract value. If you don’t already have this number, you can get it by dividing your total sales from last year by the number of active customers. For this example, we’ll use an average contract value of $5000. That means you need to acquire 30 new customers in the coming year.

Annual Revenue Target = $100,000

Average contract value = $5000

Number new customers needed = 20

3. Now look at your closing ratio. When you find someone with a legitimate project and you get far enough along to submit a proposal, how often do you get the job? (At this point, it’s okay to guess). Divide the new customer target by this closing percentage to get the number of opportunities you need to achieve. Let’s say your closing ratio is 50%. That means you’ll need to produce 40 proposals.

Number of new customers = 20

Closing ratio = 50%

Number of proposals needed = 40

4. Finally, apply your lead-to-proposal ratio. Of all the leads you’re able to generate (through networking, advertising, referrals, whatever) what percentage become actual proposal opportunities? If it’s 20%, you’ll need to generate 200 leads.

Opportunities needed = 40

Lead-to-proposal ratio = 20%

Number of leads needed = 200

Now you know, if everything remains the same, your marketing efforts must generate 200 leads if you’re going to hit a revenue target of $100,000. You can make this your primary marketing objective: generate 200 leads.

Are leads all there is?

If 200 leads seems like a lot, don’t worry. There are other ways to hit your revenue target. What would happen if you turned more leads into proposal opportunities? What if you got better at closing those proposals?

Go back to the spreadsheet and play around with increasing the percentages on your closing rate and your lead-to-proposal ratio. You might find you want to spend at least part of your efforts improving those numbers.

Next week – Take the Temperature…

Now you know what your marketing needs to accomplish. Next week we’ll find out how well you’re doing so far.

I don’t really think it’s “cool” to go to a salon or a barbershop and wait for long periods. I don’t think it’s particularly “awesome” to spend $15 minimum to have someone else use a pair of scissors when I’m fully capable of doing it myself.

As a fully functional human being, I’m quite capable of standing in front of the bathroom mirror and using hair clippers and scissors to make my hair look decent.

Not what we believe in.

Capability and competence are two different things. The purpose of delegating, or outsourcing, is to free up time and energy to focus on what makes you awesome.

P.S. To be fair, Trent is not alone in his way of thinking. I leave you with my all-time favorite Dwight Schrute quote:

Why tip someone for a job I’m capable of doing myself? I can deliver food. I can drive a taxi. I can, and do, cut my own hair. I did however, tip my urologist, because I am unable to pulverize my own kidney stones.

[via The Simple Dollar » Some Thoughts on Haircuts and Frugality.]

It’s not enough to be great

Harsh reality warning: No matter what you’re selling, offering or providing, you’re not the only one. Your future clients have options, and they expect you to be great.

You have to go beyond great. You have to give them the right reasons to do business with you. And to do that, you have to make them see, hear, or feel how they will benefit from choosing you.

It’s all about them

The first step toward making your ideal clients and customers want to do business with you is to understand they don’t care about you or your product or your service. All they care about is what you can do for them.

So, figure out what it is they really want that only you can provide. Get inside the mind of your best customers and look at your product from their standpoint. Go deep. It’s not enough that someone needs a new website. You need to understand not only why they want that new website, but also what criteria – conscious and unconscious – they’re going to use to select a vendor.

The following questions will help you identify hot buttons and unmet needs. To make it easier, you can download a free copy of the Messaging Worksheet we use with clients at Clicks ‘n Conversions.

Pull out your Ideal Customer description from last week and let’s get started.

1. Who will be involved in the decision to purchase your product or service? Does the buyer make the decision alone or does he/she consult others?
2. What problems, challenges, or opportunities are your ideal clients facing that your product or service can solve?
3. Why haven’t they solved these problems and challenges or taken advantage of the opportunities? What’s standing in the way?
4. What would a perfect solution look like for them?
5. How does your product or service help them solve their problems and challenges? How does it meet the description of a perfect solution?
6. What is the potential value of your solution? Quantify this if you can. For example, it’s not enough to say you save them money. How much money will you save them and how fast?
7. How can you prove it?

Once you’ve been through the process of figuring out what is really important to your prospects and how you can meet their needs, you’ll have a heads up on nearly all of your competitors. Few of them will have bothered to do this.

Now you can craft messages – verbal, written or images – that connect with your prospects, let them know you understand them, and make them want to do business with you.

Next week – Marketing Goals …..

In the last three weeks, you’ve set your website up to collect information about your visitors, identified your best customers and figured out how to make them love you. Next week we’ll show you how to spend less than an hour figuring out just what you need your marketing to accomplish.

Delegating out pieces of a freelance business can be frightening and challenging, but I think it’s pretty clear that if you want to grow, you’ve got to let go. So for all of those following along on this journey and trying to live it out for the first time, way to go. You’re stepping out on a new adventure that will take you places you’ve never thought possible. You’ve made your list of job responsibilities, and you’ve spent the time you needed to craft detailed “how to” guides for all of them. Now it’s time to test out the system.

I think it’s fair to say that any time we build something new, we have to test it before releasing it to the wild. In the movie Julia and Julie we get a glimpse into the life of Julia Child as she and her partners write the two-volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking. What surprised me about her writing process was the fact that, for each recipe they put in the book, they tested it out in the kitchen over and over to make sure it was easy to follow the instructions. Perhaps that’s the reason for the timelessness of her book.

If we are going to delegate tasks effectively, we need to write them effectively. And the only way to know if we have accomplished that is to test them out. Put your procedures in the hands of someone you trust and tell them to get to work. Specifically, when you ask someone to test your procedures, have them look for:

• missing tools or items they need to complete the task
• steps that are out of order
• missing steps
• unnecessary steps
• unclear language
• broken links
• general typos and spelling errors

Some of these are issues we might notice ourselves if we look hard enough. But some are errors or omissions due to the Curse of Knowledge, and we could never find them on our own. This is why finding a trusted friend or family member to test the procedures out is so important. You don’t want nice responses; you want honest responses.

Lastly, one more point to keep in mind. Testing out our procedures becomes a way to break the seal on delegation. If we can’t find the courage, time or energy to hand a new procedure to a spouse or friend and ask them for a no-pressure test drive, how will we ever be able to do this with someone on a permanent, paid basis.

Delegating is about baby steps, not jumping into the deep-end. Testing out your procedures on others before releasing them “into the wild” is one more small step to move you in the right direction. Give it a try today.

Because my team was running the business, I was free to actually improve the business!

I moved to California, just to make it clear that the running of things was up to them.

I was still working 12-hour days, but now I was spending all my time on improvements, optimizations and innovations. To me, this was the fun stuff. This was play, not work.

Ah, the Holy Grail of small business. Delegation is not about doing less, its about getting back the freedom to do the things that made you want to be in business in the first place. This is why any business owner or freelancer must learn to delegate.

Craig Newmark founded Craig’s List and is now known for doing nothing but customer service. Thats his choice and effective delegation is what made it possible.

Every business owner has their own cup-o-tea. My cup-o-tea is closer to Derek’s. I love working on and building businesses, but not working in them. You may love designing or writing or managing projects. Your goal is to figure out how to do more of “that.”

The team I’m putting together at Cranking Widgets will help you, but first you must be open to the idea of delegation. Many think its not possible or not worth their time or they just can’t find someone to do anything right. These are all terrible excuses.

The hardest part is letting go of that first task that you (incorrectly) assume no one can do better than you. It’s mostly psychological. Once that first task gets delegated, and you realize you’ll never have to do it again, delegation becomes addicting. All those other excuses holding you back will magically disappear.

Some clients are just better.

Before you jump into any marketing program, think about who you really want to attract. Even if you already have a marketing program, do this exercise anyway. You may be surprised at what you learn.

The best hints about your ideal prospect are found in your existing client base. Identify your most profitable, easy to work with customers. Figure out what they have in common.

Whenever possible, do this with real data – not just anecdotal evidence from your sales force, account management teams or your own experience.

First look at what their companies have in common. This could be:

• Industry (banking, retail, wholesale, etc)
• Annual revenue
• Number of employees
• Geographic location
• Anything else that’s appropriate to your product or service.

Next, take a look at the individuals who buy from you. What characteristics do they share? Here are some things to consider:

• Job title
• Age
• Sex
• Education
• Number of years of experience
• Professional challenges
• Marital status
• Children
• Associations they belong to
• Primary language
• Resistance to risk
• Values
• Goals

Roll all of this together to create a profile of your ideal customer – and your ideal prospect.

This information will help you decide how to reach your best prospects, what to say to motivate them to buy from you and even what look and feel wrap around your company ID. Share this with anyone and everyone who is developing marketing programs or materials for you.

Next week: Why you?

Now you have a general idea of who you want to reach. Next week we’ll show you how to tell your story in a way that makes customers what to work with you.

Jason sums up the issue with these laugh-and-point blogs:

Hiding behind your Twitter avatar and telling the world how terrible everything is is pretty easy. It’s even funny sometimes. Putting yourself on the line and making something original is really hard work. Which one do you want to be. Which one deserves our respect and attention?

Amen.

The Evil Twin Sister

Before “Read the fucking HIG” began its mission to make developers look stupid, there was a blog called “Clients From Hell” that aims to make clients look stupid. I loathe Clients From Hell. So much so that if I happen to find out a prospective freelancer reads it regularly, I’d look elsewhere.

I’m not worried about being a client from hell. It’s more about principle. I don’t want to work with someone who doesn’t get that client relationships, even the “dumb” clients, represent the lifeblood of a professional’s career. Freelancers and small businesses cannot survive without repeat business and referrals. You will get very few of either if you do not respect your clients for what they are.

Our very own Aaron Mahnke doesn’t seem to be fond of this blog either. Back in May 2010, Aaron wrote a post entitled Clients from Heaven:

I get it. Your client doesn’t have a good color sense. They don’t understand filler text or placeholder images. They don’t know how to calibrate their monitors or use the correct language in their feedback. I understand how frustrating that can be. But it’s not their fault. You are the designer. They aren’t. That’s why they hired you, right? Grow up and be a professional.

You have a choice as a designer: you can set unrealistic expectations and complain about how the process unfolds, or educate your clients from Day One in order to give them the tools and skills to help you in your creative process. You aren’t just a creative-for-hire. You are a teacher. You have to be. Because if you don’t help the client understand what’s happening, you will work twice as hard. Maybe more.

Before you complain about a client and the frustrating things they have requested or said, ask yourself if you ever took the time to guide the client. Yes, you are the expert and they aren’t. But they have the money and vision, and it is your responsibility to teach them what is possible and what is not, and you have to earn their trust. Don’t expect it. Set aside your pride and become a servant of your client. Earn that trust.

Amen again.

Aaron’s post is precisely what made me decide I wanted work with him the first chance I could (Aaron doesn’t know this — well, didn’t know this). Our professional relationship started with a simple logo design and has blossomed into quite a bit more, with ever-increasing amounts of billable work to boot. I couldn’t be happier and I think (hope) he’s just as happy. Mutual respect is a beautiful thing.

The bottom line is that there is no place for just shitting on your clients, especially when their ignorance is what makes them want to hand you fistfuls of cash in the first place. Stop reading the point-and-laugh crap. Spend more time figuring out how to delight your clients instead. Your wallet will thank you.

After reading the first few installments of Aaron’s weekly series on preparing for The First Hire, Susan felt inspired to write a weekly series showing freelancers and business owners ways to spend an one hour per week building a basic marketing program. These posts are meant to be short, sweet and actionable. We both agreed The Cranking Widgets Blog was the ideal place to publish the series.

Start with the Basics: Website Analytics.

“Website analytics” show you how many people are coming to your site, how long they stay there, what they do while on your site, where they come from and how they find you. All you need to do is add a chunk of JavaScript to your website

I’m starting week one with analytics because it will generate valuable information in the weeks we’re working on other things. We’ll use this information to optimize marketing performance in future weeks.

While there are many options for tracking this information, I recommend Google Analytics because a) it’s easy, b) it’s free and c) it gives you all the data you need to get going.

Go Install Google Analytics

If you’re not already running some sort of analytics on your site, follow the link below for a step-by-step guide to installing Google Analytics. Fair warning: this step may require the help of your web guy.

http://properprocess.com/public/67/process-for-installing-google-analytics-on-a-website

If you are already running analytics on your website:

Spend your hour this week reviewing your data to understand where you are now. Look at trends in particular. We’ll come back to this in more detail in Week Four.

If you don’t have a website:

It’s hard to imagine any company that can do well without a website these days. If you don’t have one, I encourage you to get one. (Here’s a  list of questions to answer before you talk to a web designer.)

Next week: Your Ideal Prospect…

That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll showing you how to spend an hour reviewing your current client base to identify your ideal prospect.