What is the meaning of life?
Last week, you overhauled your web site and did a lot of SEO work to get listed on the first page of the search engines. Your web site is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but it is only one part of the layers of marketing you need to do in order to reach a tipping point in your chosen market.
Another huge part of my marketing is mailings - both postcards and emails.
One of the advantages of using CRM software like Act! or Daylite is that it allows you to create an unlimited number of contact groups so that you can target your customers and potential customers with very specific emails. The fancy name for this is niche marketing.
On a basic level CRM software is a contact manager. A contact is simply a person with an email, phone number or address.
There are three main types of contacts in my system:
Leads, Prospects, Customers
Leads are lists of contacts you have gathered from public records, usually web sites or you may have rented a list from a mailing list company like InfoUSA. These people probably have not seen you perform or even know who you are. But you have their address and you are not afraid to use it!
So you send postcards to 1,000 leads and you get 15 calls.
These 15 people who have requested more information now become prospects. Any time somebody contacts YOU as a result of your marketing, or because they have seen you at another event, they are automatically a prospect, literally because you have a good prospect of booking a show with them.
Of the 15 people who requested more information, you book 3 shows. These three people are now your customers.
So now I am ready to give you the answer to the question, "what is the meaning of life?"
It is to take a list of leads, convert some of them into prospects and then convert some of those into customers.
The devil is always in the details...