Need More Clients? Use This Simple Formula To Attract All The Clients You Need.

“Let Your Image Consume People’s Memories”

-       Unknown

When I was a child, I remember watching some grainy, black-and-white footage of an 8-foot zombie-type guy. He had a pudding bowl haircut, banged-up green skin, and bolts protruding either side of his neck. Not one for scary movies, I’m sure I would have scuttled out of the room and tried hard to forget the image I just saw. 

Many decades later I can still see the original image of Frankenstein in my head as clear as day – his britches too short, his arms too long, his body lurching from side-to-side as he lumbers after his next target.

Turns out this childhood trauma ended up being a great metaphor for a very common marketing affliction, what I call Frankenstein marketing. It’s when there’s no visual branding system, or cohesiveness across the way a company is advertised. Campaigns are bolted together. Branding looks haphazard. The messaging does a poor job of resonating with its audience.

Have you ever clicked on a digital ad with high hopes, only to feel like you’ve been misled once the ad directs you to a lackluster website with clunky navigation and dated graphics, or a landing page that doesn’t even relate to the ad at all? 

Occasionally, this is done deliberately by a company as” click bait” which is an unethical tactic used by some advertisers to get traffic to a website and then sell advertising space based on an inflated number of visits. 

Another example of Frankenstein Marketing is the healthcare company that uses the yawn-worthy “we care” and “your health is our number one priority”  in their marketing message. Yet patients have to regularly wait half an hour or more in their waiting rooms, or even worse, in the emergency room.

Everyone is certainly not singing from the same hymn sheet in this example.

More often than not, inconsistent brands and bolted-together advertising campaigns are certainly not intentional. They’re usually caused inadvertently by some or all of these three main reasons:

1)    There is more than one agency working on different parts of a company’s marketing, but there’s no consistency and no visual branding system or consistent core messages. Sometimes the same can be said for inhouse marketing – the sales team is developing their own collateral and pitch decks, the CMO is tearing their hair out and it’s like trying to herd cats.

2)    The company website has been left at “set and forget” for a year or two, meantime the world has moved on, and visitors can see in two seconds that it’s dated.

3)    The company has been trying a lot of different methods to attract new clients, sometimes on the fly, with not much cohesive marketing strategy behind it. Their marketing strategy to date has likely been more of a “throw things at the wall and see what sticks” type-strategy, which is no strategy at all.

You get the idea. The problem with Frankenstein Marketing is that the lack of consistency erodes prospects’ trust (best case scenario), or makes the company look chaotic, disorganized, and schitzophrenic (worst case scenario).

Bottom line, if you’re not attracting enough clients, then Frankenstein Marketing could be to blame.

It’s not your fault. No one showed you any differently.

So, how do you fix it? Let’s do a quick consult on this:

1.    The first step is to take stock on every single piece of marketing and marketing communication being used in your business. Just like a department store takes inventory of every item, you have to do this of every single marketing asset you have. It helps to divide it into sections:

-       Marketing collateral (all printed promotional materials):  business cards, flyers, corporate brochures, newsletters, new client welcome packages, magazines, posters, new member kits, printed case studies and white papers, product catalogs, etc.

-       Sales collateral – sales presentations (electronic and physical): order forms, email sequences, forms used during the order and contract process, forms and presentations used in webinars and seminars – all activity conducted by the sales team to precede, facilitate and follow up on the sale. It also includes sales scripts and the way your team answer the phone (especially if you use a call center)

-       All digital marketing assets – this is by far your biggest category. It means reviewing every advertisement your company has placed digitally over the last 12 months. In some cases, this can be in the hundreds of thousands of ads. You want to identify the top performers in particular. Other digital assets include (most importantly), your website, landing pages, eBooks, blog posts, infographics, case studies, and copies of your social media postings on every channel.  Review your videos, email follow up campaigns, your autoresponders, podcast scripts

-       Other printed marketing collateral – such as direct mail campaigns, billboard campaigns, print magazines, advertorials, published articles, print advertisements, books, etc.

-       And, last but not least, your client experience – This needs to be assessed at every single touchpoint – from the first phone call or online chat experience, to the way your staff troubleshoot problems and resolve issues. 

Starting with this important benchmark for your company is a critical step in charting your growth.  It’s usually a bit of an eye-opener, but the same realizations of weaknesses in your organization are what can now be turned into strengths.

Here’s how that’s done: As always start with strategy, and the 7-Step Client Stampede Formula.

Step 1 – Your target market and markets. Answer these very important questions – who are your best and biggest buyers? Where is the money flowing now in your industry?  What are the biggest trends happening in your target market that your business can leverage?

Step 2 – Irresistible messaging. 

Does any of your current marketing messaging resonate with your best buyers? If yes, great, can you say it even better?

If no, then it’s time for a core-message overhaul. A good example of a core message overhaul is the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group and their launch of their low-calorie drink, Ten. 

Dr Pepper TEN, took a leap and specifically targeted men instead of women.

While diet drink companies have attempted this before, research showed that women still outnumber men in diet-drink purchasing.

Dr Pepper recognized that men are less likely to choose diet sodas because they aren’t perceived as manly. So, they launched an entire campaign with the headline, “It’s Not for Women” showing men running through jungles, leaping boulders, and watching football, conveying that women were not welcome, despite the fact that women represent 50.8 percent of the purchasing public. 

The company also created a Facebook page for the drink which contained an application that allowed fans to exclude women from viewing content, as well as games and videos geared to men.

It was strategically a very clever move because even though the ads targeted men; the humor in the ads also appealed to women, just like Bud Light, AXE or Old Spice.

The campaign was a huge success and performed 9% higher than other innovation product launches, resulting in more men and women asking for additional Ten drink options.

Step 3 – Extraordinary Branding.

Now it’s time to transform your brand and re-engineer a cohesive, eye-ball grabbing visual identity for your company that looks better, and performs completely differently to anything your competitors are doing.

Lego is a great example of a pivot to an extraordinary brand.

Lego has been around since 1932 and at one point in 2014, Lego even became the top toy company in the world, surpassing Mattel's Barbie doll.

But Lego wasn’t always a star performer. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company was reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy around 2010.

The growth of video games and the internet threatened the toy company, which had not caught up with the digital times.  In 2011, they did a strategic overhaul of their business, cut the non-performers, and pivoted their brand by introducing a Lego line called “Lego Friends”.

This helped the brand appeal to young girls and combat the stereotype that only boys play with building blocks.

But jump ahead to 2014, when "The Lego Movie" hit theaters – and since then its numerous sequels. We now have Lego characters, Lego video games, Lego TV shows, Lego commercials, Lego short films and Lego destination theme parks.

Lego is now far more than just a toy brand — it's a billion-dollar entertainment and learning franchise. Now that’s an Extraordinary Brand.

Step 4 – Packaging up your Products and Services. 

This means re-engineering your products and service offerings, as Lego did, to appeal to the wants and needs of your target audience.

Are they looking for membership?

A sense of community?

To feel prestigious and elite?

To be entertained?

To be educated?

To have a problem taken away?

Your product and service offerings need to take advantage of these opportunities.

Step 5 – Pricing and Sales Ascension.

Perhaps the simplest step of the Client Stampede Formula.

In a nut-shell, are you providing innovative packages at different price points in your business?

Do you offer packages at starter price points as well as prestige?

Is there a clear path of customer ascension?

Do you utilize upsells (like the infamous McDonalds adage “would you like fries with that?” – responsible for generating additional hundreds of millions in revenue for its franchise owners).

Don’t underestimate the power of a great upsell!

Step 6 – Your High-Performance Marketing System.  

This is where all your marketing tools come together to form one cohesive client attraction, conversion and retention machine for your business.

Every marketing activity your company does needs to be divided into these three categories – attract, convert or retain.  

I’ll let you in on a secret – most companies focus enormously on the attraction tools, but the real gold in your business is on improving your conversion and retention marketing systems. 

At the beginning of this process, you took your marketing inventory, which if you’re like most companies, included the good, the bad and the ugly.

In building this new marketing system, you’ll have incorporated all the good that was working before – but now at a much higher level because the messaging and branding has been elevated.  

And it means all the holes in your marketing leaky buckets have been plugged.  No more Frankenstein marketing. No more bolted together campaigns.

Now your marketing is streamlined, elevated, and best of all, automated. Your website is a sales machine and a big rapport builder with your prospects.

So there you have it. A step-by-step guide to ridding your company of its Frankenstein marketing once and for all and attracting all the clients you need.

Oh, but I didn’t talk about Step 7 of the Client Stampede Formula. This step is optional but is what makes your company go viral, (in a good way), in the blink of an eye. 

Here is Step 7. Delivering an extraordinary experience to your clients. What does that look like? Below are two great examples:

A family traveling to the Ritz Carlton in Bali packed special food for their son who suffered from severe allergies.

Unfortunately the food went off before they arrived at the hotel.

The kitchen staff couldn’t find replacement ingredients locally, but the executive chef knew they were available in Singapore.

He had his mother-in-law buy the products and fly to Bali to deliver them—a journey of more than 1,000 miles!  

Ok that’s an extreme extraordinary experience, but how about this simple one – one of my favorites.

A Trader Joe’s cashier heard a customer mention she was a single mother and gave her a free bouquet of purple roses as she left the store.

The small act deeply touched the woman, who had been going through a hard time. She posted it online and it immediately went viral in a huge way (which is how we all know about it). 

I discuss the Client Stampede Formula in more depth in my upcoming book The Client Stampede. If you have specific questions about how the formula would apply to your marketing, you’re welcome to send me an email. It might take me a little while to respond due to my schedule but I promise to personally respond.  Send your email to hello@Bolderlouder.com and put in the subject line Question for Julie.

And if you’d like to get added to the list to preorder The Client Stampede book, you’ll get a free audio version of it along with your print copy. 

Just follow this link to be added:

https://www.bolderlouder.com/the-client-stampede-book

I’ll conclude this article with some parting wisdom from Steve Jobs on the need to always stay ahead . . .