Here are four reasons why your current marketing efforts may not be working and may never work if your goal is to generate qualified leads on continual basis. By remembering the acronym TERMs, you will be able to remember the individual elements of a great marketing campaign.

Make your efforts Targeted, Emotional, and geared to getting a Response...and make Marketing a priority. TERMs can help you meet that goal.

1. Targeted.

You’re wasting time and money throwing your message out to everybody hoping somebody will respond. In other words, your marketing is not targeted.

The first rule of successful marketing, both on the Net and off, is to develop a compelling message targeted to a very specific prospect. Buyers or sellers? First time buyers or repeat buyers? Determine your market, then gear your efforts specifically to them and for them.

2. Emotional.

Your ads, brochures, post cards, scratch pads, business cards, web site and marketing efforts are intrinsically boring and logical. In other words, your material isn’t emotional.

The first thing a prospect should see or hear from you is something about herself, something of use to her, something that makes her feel good about her favorite subject--herself! not something about you.

The goal is to get your prospect to feel you exist solely for him. Address your prospect’s wishes, hopes, fears, aspirations and desires. In a word, become client-centered.

3. Response.

You fail to ask your prospects to take action, to make a response.

Never spend a dime on any advertising or promotional piece that cannot be measured in terms of results. Hold everything accountable for producing a result. If it doesn’t, or if it cannot be measured, trash it. Hit the delete key and exile it forever! And the only way you can determine the profitability of a campaign is to ask for a response and then measure that response.

4. Marketing.

You fail to make marketing the highest of all priorities.

Marketing is everything you do to promote your business from the moment you hang your license to the point at which customers hire you and continue to use your services on a regular basis. The operative words are everything and regular.

It’s a circle that starts with your ideas for generating leads and new clients and completes itself when you are blessed with a highly dedicated, satisfied clientele who supplies you a bountiful measure of repeat and referral business.

In order to pull off this marketing coup, you need a strategic marketing plan that encompasses every nuance of your business: advertising, public relations, sales training, sales presentation, telephone inquires, problem solving, growth, follow-up, and referral generation.

It’s simply not enough to embrace a client-centered attitude in your prospecting and marketing materials and leave it at that. This same caring, compassionate, empathetic attitude and behavior must be explicitly present at each and every stage of your dealings with the prospect. From beginning to end. Sound like work? It is, but it’s worth it.

Come to TERMs. You’ll be glad you did.

Published: December 1, 1998

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