The BIG Thinkers Blog

Online Engagement & Relationships Are Everything (And change everything)

What do successful entrepreneurs do differently to create online success and monetize their time?

They create a strong and solid foundation in their relationships which leads to big success.

If you haven’t heard about how online sales (and offline for that matter) and marketing has changed, then you may have been living under a rock. Today, to thrive and prosper online, you must have a mindset shift towards creating online engagement first. By using what’s termed “relationship selling.” It is the most effective and best strategy to improve your bottom line in any economy.

Your skill, mindset, ability to engage, connect, develop, and maintain enduring ideal client relationships is the foundation for your success as an entrepreneur and your success using client attraction online using social media on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Changing your mindset to what is termed relationship selling calls for a clear understanding of the new selling process as it is experienced by your ideal potential client.

This calls for a mindset that involves long term thinking.

For your ideal potential client, a smart buying decision typically means a decision to go into a long-term relationship with you, your team, and your business. It is very much like a serious long term committed relationship, like you would have in your private life, with a partner or spouse. Prior to the potential ideal client deciding to buy your products, programs, or services, they have a lot of choices out there and can leave or choose to remain with you. They don’t really need you or your business.

Your competition is easy to find, they are all on social media just like you. They have lots of options, offers, and choices open to them and can involve not buying anything at all. But when your ideal potential client does make a decision to buy from you, and purchases your products, programs, or services, they heavily rely on you. Since they have most likely have had previous experiences that were bad, they are very uneasy and uncertain about relying on someone else and engaging in this relationship with you.

To create real and long term engagement do what you say you are going to do. What if you let the ideal potential client down? What if your products, programs, or services do not have the benefits or outcomes as you guaranteed and promised? These are real issues that go through the mind of every ideal potential client when it comes time to make the critical buying decision and lay out their money.

And if they have had a negative experience in the past it is even harder.

Smart entrepreneurs who want to thrive on line focus on the relationship. The relationship is actually more important than the product, program, or service that you sell. Your ideal potential client most likely doesn’t know or care about the components of your product, how your business functions, or how they will be treated after they spent their money with you. But they can make an evaluation about you, and the relationship between the two of you throughout the selling process. Your ideal potential client’s decision is based on the fact that they have come to know, like, and trust you.

What changes everything? Develop, grow, and build a solid trusting relationship. For the most part, the quality of your relationship with your ideal clients, (I sure know that the quality of my relationship is there, they stay with me for years.) is the competitive advantage that allows you to nudge out your competition offering similar products, programs, and services. The quality of the trust that is present between you and your ideal clients can be so resilient that no other competitor can ever come close to you.

Truly create a successful online entrepreneurs dream. Can you imagine really keeping your clients for life? What is one of the biggest and most common mistakes that I see after coaching and mentoring thousands of people? How you can lose money and sales fast? It is taking your clients for granted.

Just when you settle in, starting relaxing your efforts, and begin to ignore your clients, just like a relationship, after it happens some of them will start to look elsewhere. Once you have invested the time, money, and energy to engage potential clients online, you did necessary work to create a high-quality, trust-based relationship with your ideal potential client, you must continue working on that relationship and nurturing it for the life of your business. You need to be smart about it and never, ever take it for granted.

Focus on building a high quality relationship with each potential client by treating your clients so remarkably well that tell anyone and everyone about you. They will come back again and again, and buy everything that you sell.

Treat them like royalty and you will have their loyalty. They will also become the best ambassadors for your business, that no marketing online or money can buy. Let them know on a consistent basis that you appreciate them and value them and their business. Find creative ways to thank them, show your gratitude, and encourage them to come back to do business with you again.

7 Ways to Screw up Client Attraction on Facebook (That costs you money)

1) Your profile is somewhat filled out, and lacks any style or personality.

You may have filled out some areas of your profile on Facebook, and believe that is enough to attract plenty of ideal clients. You offer very little style or personality. When people read your profile it’s as boring as waiting for wallpaper to dry. You never test and tweak your information on a consistent basis. You never add anything new like applications, elements, articles, blogs, your offerings, or videos on your profile.

Be honest with yourself here. When was the last time you looked at your Facebook profile to see if it was interesting, had personality, and focused on what benefits and results that you get for your clients? When was the last time you looked to see if there were any new applications or elements you could add to your profile to jazz it up?

When was the last time you added or changed videos, blog posts, and articles? Then did you invite your friends and followers to view these exciting new changes that you made?

2) Engaging and friending with anyone and not having any true purpose behind the engaging and friending.

We all know you can have 5,000 friends in relatively a short time. Would you prefer to have a couple of hundred people on that list you engage, connect, and stay in touch with as opposed to seeing how fast you can friend and follow 5,000 people so you can get everyone over to your “like” page? If you haven’t figured this out yet, Facebook is not about the amount of fast friends that you can make and the amount of “real friends” you carefully select and choose. One of the wonderful things about Facebook is the amount of high quality real friends that could lead to potential clients, affiliate opportunities, joint ventures, and so on.

Want to improve your client attraction, and quality of friends? You have to be very selective about who you invite to become a friend and who you accept. I suggest taking a look at their profile, their website and blog. The more that you can learn about them and what it is they do the better choices that you can make. Once you do that, before you hit that send button determine the purpose of the friending. This will help you to determine how to engage, connect, and even possibly have a sales conversation with them. You can start to laser focus your marketing to them.

3) Your profile reads like a resume for some uptight, buttoned up, boring entrepreneur that no one want to work with.

I know that is statement is sassy. Let me explain.

If your profile reads like a snoozing and boring kind of resume, rather than a focus on how you help, serve, and the benefits and results that you get for clients, then that is a clear indication that you will struggle with attracting plenty of new clients. You have to think like your ideal potential client who might be reading it and viewing it. Honestly, would you want to learn more about you, and what you have to offer in your business? Or would you rather click and go straight to your competition?

If your profile is drop dead boring and bland most likely your friends and followers are not going to take the time to figure out what it is you have to offer. You have to give them a compelling reason to scroll down the page to visit your blog or website.

If you have taken the time to create an engaging, interesting, and effective profile, but you fail to reach out to others and engage in conversations, then it won’t matter how great your profile really is. To step up your client attraction and get plenty of ideal clients, you need to join target groups where your audience can be found, let your messages be heard, and seen within the different discussions. To even further improve your client attraction you can also let your content guide you in creating new and relevant conversations. Here you are in complete control and can help more people that are a perfect fit for you and your business.

4) Never creating your own tribe or community.

Creating a tribe or group is one of the best tools and client attraction strategies that you can do to improve your bottom line on Facebook. It is a way to create your own group of followers, listeners, and potential ideal clients.

At the appropriate time you can use your group to put your content, products, programs, or services directly in front of the group’s members.

What better way to market, and improve your client attraction by being in front of a captivated audience?

5) Never actively engaging, connecting, and communicating with your friends and followers.

What is the point of having all these friend and followers if you never engage, connect, and communicate with them on a consistent basis? You will want to share any developments, changes, or updates to your profile or business. People like to work with successful people. You want have regular tele-seminars, offering special reports, programs, products to your group, and move your friends and followers over to your blog so you place these high quality connections onto your main mailing list.

You should be changing and updating your Facebook status messages regularly so you show up on your friend and followers pages.

If you do not actively engage, connect, and communicate with your friends, and followers you’ll be forgotten about. To improve your client attraction you want to stay top of mind with your potential clients. So, when it comes time that they are ready to invest in your products, programs, services or refer people to you, they take their business over to your competition because you failed to further develop the relationship once you became friends.

6) Never tracking your client attraction on Facebook using strategic marketing.

Like any other client attraction strategies and marketing, you have to measure your return on investment. In this case you would measure both time and money spent on your plan. You have to know what’s working with your target audience and what isn’t. You have to discover what information is making your ideal potential client reach out and want to connect. What is getting them want to visit your profile, bog and website? You have to discover what information is attracting your ideal potential clients and what is pushing them away from you.

7) Hiring the wrong business mentor and coach to help you improve your client attraction marketing.

If you have already invested money with business mentor and coach to create improve your client attraction marketing whether it is on Facebook or not, and you are not getting results you may want to rethink what you are doing. If you, your profile, and your marketing is not fascinating or interesting enough, and you aren’t engaging enough online, it most likely is reflecting onto your offline presence as well. You need an expert who is going to look at your Facebook profile and other client attraction marketing with a bigger, bolder, and more experienced approach with a results oriented perspective. You need someone who is not going to have you be like everyone else and never stand out from the crowd. You need someone instead to go after your ideal target audience consistently. You need someone to help you communicate your messages, and attraction marketing in the most effective manner.

You see many people who claim to be client attraction experts and lots of them are on Facebook as well. They claim to be experts because anybody can reach out to people and invite them to be friends, and offer them the world. Anyone can post a couple of status updates, some content around client attraction, engagement, and connection. But only a true expert can support you, your message, and your brand. Only a true expert will know how to position you as fascinating, socially influential, leader who is well thought of in your specific industry.

So what are you going to do? Wish, hope, and pray that you’re fascinating enough to engage and connect enough to improve your client attraction? Do you want to continue doing the same thing and expecting different results or do you want to change the way you do client attraction on Facebook? If you serious about improving your client attraction, and are ready to take action now, I can help you.

Client attraction is good, but so is client retention

Happy Clients, Growing Business I speak a lot about client attraction and how to improve it, grow it, and expand upon it. But what happens as you are growing your business and filling your practice, you get a whole slew of new clients, or repeat clients. If you are only focusing on building, growing attracting clients, you may be dropping the ball in other areas of your business.

I am a master at attracting, and retaining clients for years and years in my mentoring and business coaching accountability, responsibility and mindset programs. And just like you in your business, my clients focus a lot of time building a business that focuses on attracting ideal perfect clients.

Let’s face it, in order to expand; after all, small businesses need to continue to grow sales and income as well as profits. One clear and obvious way to do that is to consistently attract and manifest new potential ideal clients.

But the one thing that’s sometimes lost in that process and is just as critical is essential to keep those new ideal clients loyal, long time cheerleaders and happy. That’s above all essential for the expansion stage of your business, because when you get so busy, you may drop the ball and lose those hard earned loyal clients as the marketplace is frequently filled by lookalikes and wannabes in most markets and in every kind of business today.

For some businesses, it doesn’t seem to matter to them if their client attraction business model is based on having to go and get new clients all the time, or have difficulty in retaining clients. For instance, their business model or plan is offering month-to-month contracts and crossing their fingers that at all costs they will keep their current clients for the long term. In my opinion, after working with thousands of entrepreneurs it’s all about unparallel client care service and keeping your cherished ideal clients coming back for more. Again and again.

Unparallel client care service is a crucial and a very essential piece of every business’ short term and long term success to improve your client retention. One of the first things that I get clients to do in their businesses is to create a strategic 90day plan for step up and improving their client’s experience.

Effective client care service should be much more about being proactive than reactive. If you listen to your clients and genuinely work to solve your product’s, programs or service glitches or problems before your clients comes to you for solutions or even worse strong complaints, there may be very little necessary for the traditional and unfortunately in some cases conventional concept of the old school term and thinking “ customer service.” Note I used “client care” service because that is the type of world we are in today. It is all about the experience the client has working with you.

It takes both you and everyone in your business to have the kind of values, principles, accountability and shared responsibility to achieve that, but the reward is happier clients, improved client retention and clients that will not only stay with you, but become your cheerleaders for years to come.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind, while you are working on improving your client attraction and client retention.

Be a problem solver

Your client want to know at a deep core level that you’ll be there to help them with any challenges or problems that may take place. If you’re a proactive problem solver, working with your clients until they’re absolutely 100% fully satisfied with the results and outcome, it will create a sound sense of confidence, trust, and faith within your client base.

Keep in touch on a very regular basis

Send targeted and relevant letters, direct mail, eZine, blog posts and emails to clients to keep them engaged, connected, and fully aware. You want them to know that you care about them and their business and it’s a great way to determine any potential challenges or problems that may come about with your products, programs or services.

Create and offer renewal discounts for you loyal clients

One very easy way to your current clients’ hearts is to create packages and then offer those ways to save money while working with you. With renewal packages and discounts, you help them save some money and give your business a cash flow boost at the same time. For instance, with an annual coaching program model, offer clients the opportunity to save 5% the first year, 10% the second year and so on when they pay up front for their renewal.

Continually innovate and improve your systems

Soliciting and making use of client experience feedback through the product, program or service management process is essential. With that enormously helpful feedback when done right, you can con tinue to improve upon on your product, program or service offerings and it will let your clients know that you’re listening to their suggestions. And implementing the ones that need implementing quickly. That client engagement builds the know, like and trust factor which leads to a longer term solid relationship and client experience.

This is just the beginning, and my programs go into deeper far greater detail about the need for outstanding proactive client care service as a means to eliminate the need for it altogether. However, this will get you started on improving your client retention now. Client care service doesn’t have to be difficult. And if you’re able to keep your current clients experience happy, your biggest cheerleaders and loyal, it may even lead to helping you attracting new ideal clients that all businesses desire.