Be Persistent In Your Virtual Assistant Marketing
I want to give you as many Virtual Assistant marketing themes as possible while also saving you from scams and additional varieties of bad marketing which will do your business more harm than good.
There is one thing about marketing that most articles forget to tell you:
The major trick is The Persistence Factor.
You may wonder what that is. Well it goes like this:
* On Monday you e-mail two clients you have not heard from for a while asking how they are and how their business is doing. Don’t get any deeper than that into the conversation just be pleasant and enquiring
* I keep URL’s of interesting information and e-mail them straight to clients who are in that line of work. I look for articles and reports that I can send to my clients with a business card attached saying I hope that they are useful. I just do this once a week on Tuesday.
* Any day is networking day if you have a meeting you can go to. Take business cards and LISTEN to what other business people have to say. Before you leave the car park, make a note on the back of the cards as to who you spoke to and what they do. Contact them the following week on your making contact day.
* On Thursday phone some clients to ensure the work is going well or any previous work was satisfactory. If there were not any problems, ask for a testimonial and also more work if you have space in your diary.
* On Friday write all this up in your diary. See if you need to contact anyone else this week and make notes for next week. Track any new work you may have got directly from this week’s actions.
You will see that you have made contact with many businesses, mainly while you were sitting at your desk. It took you only about half an hour a day and it may even have generated work the first week you did this. But we have not finished with the Persistence factor yet.
Now is the really cleaver thing - you keep doing this every week and it will get easier and easier.
Look at your week’s diary and see how many people you have contacted. Now multiply that by 48 weeks of the year. The amount of marketing you are doing is huge, yet you are spending a few hours a week doing it. People will come to know your name and the name of your business. They will also know what you do and so your likelihood of getting work grows with every week.
What about the rest of the world?
There are many forums on the Internet. Not just for Virtual Assistants but also for the types of client you have. You can learn about your clients work by joining their forums and getting good background knowledge of their skills.
Become active on world-wide forums and not just those in your country. I am working with another person who I think lives in Canada - what does it matter where as long as you can work together. I am also working with another colleague in France. Two of these are slightly outside the scope of work I would normally do but that is what makes it so exciting. Oh, I live in France - high in wooded hills. You can do this marketing and work from anywhere.
So back to stage one. Get out that diary or Outlook and write down your marketing task for every day next week. Make sure it is something you are going to enjoy. If you don’t like cold calling - don’t do it. I hate it.
Jerry Seinfeld was asked how he became a famous writer. He said he got a large ‘year at a glance’ calendar and every day he wrote he put a red cross on the day. He started Jan 1st and finished Dec 31st. Every single day had a red cross on it and he still does it every day.
No marketing equals no business. As a VA there are not many ways of getting your message across. You need to find out what works and do it day in and day out and you will then have work every day and a nice booked diary for the future. Virtual assistant marketing should be one of those good habits you do every day of the working week.
Tags: Becoming a Virtual Assistant, Virtual Assistant Marketing
