The Marketing Mix | official blog of the Marketing Mentor community

Keep in Touch Toolbox: The Face to Face Lunch

A couple of weeks ago I started a new blog post series titled “The Keep In Touch Toolbox” where I’ll be suggesting tools and strategies to keeping in touch with your clients and prospects. If you missed it you can read it here.

Today’s tool is called “The Face to Face Lunch.” I’m suggesting this to some of my clients who are wondering how to start getting some more work through the door as their work load seems to be drying up. This tool is not just a quick fix. In fact, as I see it, it’s one of the most important marketing tools you can have in your business. It provides you one on one face time with your clients which is another step towards deepening your relationship. After all, people hire people they like first.

So here is the idea. Go through your contact list and identify as many clients and prospects that you have not seen face to face in the last 90 days.  Pick up the phone and start calling them. Simply ask them for lunch. Tell them that you will be in their area on a specific date and would love to treat them for a quick lunch so you can catch up. Your goal is at least 2 lunch meetings per week. 

And what do you talk about during that lunch? Not much. It’s not about you. It’s about listening to your clients and paying attention to what’s going on with their business. So try to get them to tell you all of that. Ask as many questions as you can. Sometimes our clients just want someone to listen and understand their world. Now if you were like me, you may have some ideas and suggestions on how you could help their business grow. Try to not share those ideas during the lunch meeting. Here’s why.

A couple of days after the lunch, you can call you client back, thank them for the time together and tell them that you’ve been thinking about what they shared with you and that you have some great ideas on how they can grow/improve/market (choose the one that fits your idea best) their business. Ask if you can drop by their office to share some of those ideas. They most likely be open to taking this meeting now that you already had a nice social lunch together.

We are facing some interesting times where business development and marketing require unusual and innovative tactics. This one works. I’ve done it and had great success with it over the years. I’d like to hear from you when it works for your business too!

I broke down and joined Facebook. Now what?

Last week a good friend of mine was in town from Australia for a few days. We only get to see each other about once or twice a year as pops into town on his worldwide travels. I was giving him grief for not doing a better job at keeping in touch and he said “if you were on Facebook we would always be connected”. 

I have been resisting joining Facebook for a while now. I’m not a big fan of social network sites because I don’t have the time to manage them and I don’t get what benefit they provide to my life. Earlier this year I joined Twitter and just a few days later I opted out as it was sucking away too much valuable time. Same with LinkedIn. I still haven’t figured out how to make the best use of that site. 

So when joining Facebook came up I was hesitant. But I’m an open minded kind of guy so I said to myself “Self, give this one a try”. And I did. And boy, am I glad. 

Within a few hours I got in touch with 3 long lost friends from Israel, Sweden and England. Good friends. Solid relationships that were missed. Although I tried to get in touch with these friends through traditional old fashion means (you know, phone, email) it’s been hard to pin them down. Facebook brought us back together.

I know that many people use Facebook for business networking. To me it feels like a sacred personal space. An exclusive, private area that I can nurture as much as I nurture the personal relationships in my life. Or so it feels only after being on there for less than 24 hours.  I guess time will tell. I’m curious to see who else shows up and what the connections I make here lead to. After all, connecting to people is number one marketing activity on my list. Hopefully Facebook will ease the process.

A new tool for worry-free email "vacations"

As email continues threatening to bury us all, more and more people are coming up with creative ways of dealing with it when we've got to knuckle down and get real stuff done.

The "only-check-twice-daily" method is great, except for those few emails you're always worried about in the back of your mind. You know--the emergency emails that really are an emergency.

AwayFind deals with just that problem. The freshly-launched web app acts like a filter, shielding you from email onslaught while letting the people who really, truly need to get through to you via text message. You sign up for an account (free or pro), create a special autoresponder that goes out to anyone who emails you and go about your business as usual. 

To celebrate the launch, AwayFind is offering a really great ebook on how to control your email flow along with any free subscription you sign up for by November 21. After that, the ebook will only come bundled with the pro version of the account, which also gives you features like the ability to brand your messages, access to support, etc. (And it really is a great ebook—I previewed it, and I'm picky as hell.)

AwayFind is the brainchild of an enterprising chap, Jared Goralnick, whom I first met back in May at SOBCon in Chicago. He is obscenely young to be so accomplished, but I forgive him that because he not only comes up with great stuff, but is the good, nice kind of networker: proactive, friendly and always looking for ways to be helpful. His excellent productivity blog--one of very few in my Google Reader--is here.

See also:

• A great page of uses for AwayFind that may not be immediately obvious
• A great write-up with screenshots by Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani

New resource of business help launched for designers

If you’re looking for a good place to visit on a regular basis for business articles and ideas check out the newly launched CreativeBriefcase.com. You can find a range of business articles targeted for creative professionals, newbies and veterans too. The membership site includes hundreds of articles about accounting, business planning, client relations, employees, pricing and marketing (with a few articles by Marketing Mentor too!). The site also includes a business directory of essential resources for all areas that can support your creative business. Check it out and let them know Marketing Mentor sent you!

Great resource for women in business

When I was in Seattle recently, I spent my last day networking, from breakfast to coffee to lunch, then another coffee (actually lemonade) and then dinner.

The lemonade was with Lisa Quast, Founder and President of CareerWomanInc.com. This web site is part of Lisa's mission to help women in the corporate world succeed.

Lisa knows what she's talking about. As Executive Vice President of Strategy Planning for Philips Healthcare, a $10 billion division of Royal Philips Electronics, she is one of a small group of women executives in a company of ~150,000 employees; hence her mission -- to help women in the corporate world take control of their careers and achieve their career aspirations.

Her web site is here and her book, Your Career, Your Way: Personal Strategies to Achieve your Career Aspirations can be found online at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Frankly, Lisa wants to help all women succeed. So check out the site and if you have ideas that would be useful to this market (and want to get some more exposure on the web), send them to Lisa at lisa -- AT SIGN -- careerwomaninc --DOT-- com.

HOW Webinars with Jeni Herberger

Our friend, Jeni Herberger, principal of DesignMatters and founder of Big Fish, a creative staffing firm, not to mention an extremely popular speaker on career issues for designers, will be presenting the next series of webinars for HOW Magazine.

The three-part series, "Get Your Design Career on the Right Track," will to help graphic designers chart their career, learn to balance their work and personal lives, and discover how to develop strategic thinking skills. The 3 topics are:

• Planning Your Design Career (archived already)
• Designing Your Reality (July 24)
• Making Yourself "Priceless" in a Crowded Market (August 21)

Plus, they're offering a free "Career Guide" when you register too. And who doesn't love a freebie?

(You might remember the 4-part webinar series on Marketing and Pricing that Peleg and I did recently. They are still archived and available for download, by the way.)

It's all posted on this page.

Guest Post: There’s Gold in Them There Tweets!

Looks like the communicatrix ain't the only Twitter apologist in the Marketing Mentor fambly; previous guest mixer and Marketing Mentor client Drury Bynum of Workerbee Creative—that's @drubynum for those of you on Twitter—also has good words for my current favorite time-waster—er...social media space.

You can't throw a rock in the blog world and not hit someone evangelizing about how social networks have changed everything. But I've always felt it hard to justify my time spent adding friends to Facebook, photos to Flickr or alerting my 68 followers on Twitter that I drink too much coffee this morning. I've always thought, "Am I really making connections here, or am I just personality spamming?"

Well, now I’m a believer because I actually I turned a relationship on Twitter into a paying job.

Twitter is a public instant messaging service, where you can subscribe to the posts of whomever you like, and vice versa. Like most, I originally didn't see the value. Yet it started to become clear when one evening I posted, "Thank God, or whomever, for Pandora." The next morning Pandora was following me. Pandora was obviously searching for Twitter entries (probably with a 3rd party app like Summize) that contained their name, and, as a bonus, accolades. I realized then the value of access to an audience that is actively listening.

The Twitter call to action is “What are you doing?” It should be, “What are you focused on right now?” This clarifies the point a bit – if you answer the first question, you may say, “I’m drinking coffee,” which is a dead end. But if you say, “I’d love to find a way to keep my coffee warm to the last drop,” (I did this) then you’ve created an invitation to respond. If your Tweets (individual Twitter entries) are useful, interesting, entertaining, part of a larger conversation or contain keywords that others are searching for, then you will get attention.

So how did I turn this attention into a paying gig? After posting a link to a video that I had created, one of my followers viewed it and sent me a direct message (via Twitter). "I've been following you on Twitter for a little while now and was checking out your blog." In the next sentence, she offered me a video job. Shortly after that, I came very close to securing a video shoot in Portugal after sending a casual tweet to a member of a large filmmaker network. I didn't get the assignment, but the point was that I was in the right place talking to the right person.

There is obviously no formula for getting work from Twitter, but if you use your imagination and talk about things that are valuable to the Twittersphere, then you will make some valuable connections.

DIY web site template sites

If you still don't have a web site, don't be ashamed.

Just realize that there are really simple ways to create a phase 1 site so that you can have the online presence that legitimizes your business.

A few clients in our "Feet to the Fire" Group are looking for templates to use.

Here are a few we know of:

• Yahoo Small Biz
• Google Apps
• GoDaddy.com
• IV Websites
• Intuit's option

Do you know of others?

Do you have experience and opinions on these? If so, please share it in a comment.

5/16 UPDATE FROM COLLEEN:

Sandra Koenig emailed us to say some photogs she knows use LiveBooks. I checked it out and there are some pretty spiffy portfolio options. And Vanessa Stump gives the thumbs up to RapidWeaver, a Mac-only program with good templates.

Email marketing goodness

We at the Marketing Mix Blog were thrilled to see that our pals at Emma got a mention in this month's Inc. Magazine along with a nod as best design email provider.

No news to us, of course—Ilise sends out Quick Tips via Emma, and I use Emma for my own 99.99% non-sucky newsletter, communicatrix | focuses. Everything about the Emma experience is stylish and a prime example of good branding practices, from the copy on the website to the very consistent look across their communications. If you're not a designer like me or Peleg, they'll still whip up a tasty-looking template for you, either from materials you give them, or thin air.

But they especially shine when it comes to customer service—I've been told they fight over who gets to talk to me when I call! And hey, even if it's not true, what a great story, huh?

If you're interested in using Emma, consider signing up through Ilise & Peleg's affiliate link. They get a little bump, and you'll get 20% off your Emma service forever!

As for me, I just get that warm, fuzzy feeling of steering people in the right direction.

Pass this along to your prospects

One of the other speakers at the RGD Ontario professional development day on Tuesday was Kit Hinrichs, of one of Pentagram's San Francisco-based partners.

During his presentation, which followed mine, Kit told stories and showed pictures (which the 100+ designers in attendance absolutely loved!) about recent Pentagram work he's been involved with. One of the examples he showed was work from a journal he co-founded with the Corporate Design Foundation 10+ years ago called "@ Issue" -- a journal about the effective use of design in business.

I remember when this beautifully designed magazine was introduced and have always appreciated the mission: to help the business world understand design and to help designers understand the business world.

As I was listening to Kit's stories, it occurred to me that the material in this magazine is what many prospects and clients of designers need to read. So why not pass it along through your own newsletter -- with full credit, of course. There are interviews with top CEOs and articles about the effect of many popular brands in our culture. Here's the latest issue.

Subscriptions to the printed version are complimentary here.