Well, I had my first “Ultimate Marketing” webinar yesterday, live from Chris Cardell himself. He even took the time to welcome everyone (supposedly) attending – yes, he specifically mentioned my name and the name of my business. For all the money he makes, he’s very earnest and equanimous with those “lower down”… I like that. It’s possible that I like him more than Simon Cowell. But enough of that.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he went on and on about the importance of implementation and being true to your financial and personal goals in life. Aside from the “gun to the head” approach he was vocal about the importance of following up with potential clients. What he means by this is making the first move in starting a relationship with potential clients by sending them something free, like a report or testimonials. But I wonder just how much scope there is for that. If I sent follow-up material to potential clients, I wouldn’t want it to be:
• Boring: i.e. going on and on about who I am and what I do, maybe revealing a little about my latest business aims, while knowing that there’s only so much of it that they’d be prepared to absorb “without really trying.” They have busy lives too, you know. Especially if they’re not familiar with my industry and probably never will be. But therein lies a good reason for following up, really: they’d rather hear about my industry and developments in it from people who are actually in it, the information sent to them wherever possible; as opposed to them relying on hearsay or wondering where to begin finding the places where people in my industry talk about their work amongst themselves (like the forums on ProZ and TranslatorsCafe, and maybe LinkedIn, in my case) – and in layman’s terms, in some cases.
• Measly: If someone expresses an interest in your company but they don’t actually buy anything, it’s all very well to get back in touch with them, but I would want to do my utmost to prevent it amounting to nothing more than the message, “So, I know you’ve looked at me, but have you decided to go ahead and do business with me yet?” Especially if I did it multiple times! How annoying would that be?
• Too self-congratulatory: As Chris Cardell said, “people buy benefits, not features” i.e. focus on what you’re offering and how it can benefit your customers. However good the reasons to be proud of your work and your products / services may be, it’s unwise to ramble on and on about it: if it won’t impact your clients’ lives in any way they will lose patience eventually. Being too self-congratulatory in follow-up material does not necessarily mean saying anything liable to condescend your competition. Which brings me to my fourth point…
• Saying anything that would encourage or give succour to your competition, such as give them ideas, if your follow-up material ended up in their hands. After all, why risk someone else stealing your business?
Maybe I should examine my junk mail more closely lol. But what I’m really looking forward to is mastering Internet marketing proper. Apparently, my Touch Local / Scoot account is doing well – not that I’ve actually seen the results for myself (yet). It seems that when online marketers talk about linking being important, they do not always mean linking with other people i.e. networking. Just placing links on your online profiles to other online profiles helps, apparently. That’s what Lisa of Touch Local told me.
Ever since I attended Chris Cardell’s “Ultimate Marketing” webinar on pricing this week (see also my latest comment in my personal Facebook wall), I’ve been meaning to look at revising my prices. But it’s not just increasing or decreasing, really. Should I carry on charging per word in the source material by default? I can certainly understand people doing automatic counts wherever possible. But when I charge a project per word in the source material, I’m effectively saying that my rate for the translation of small and common words and short sentences is the same as that for my translation of long words (which may be specialist in nature) and lengthy, complex sentences. And I accept that in my various translation projects I’ve come across many words to be translated that are not really words to be translated at all; like phone numbers, or email addresses. Not that I ever was that surprised to see other translators with different default fee bases from my own (per page, per line, even per character). The Germans even commonly charge per line, by which they mean 55 characters (I think it’s with spaces), according to a certain “DIN” norm. Watch this space…