Apr 4, 2022
In my business I like to use the content I create in articles, blog posts, white papers, podcasts and interviews to develop a position in marketing called omnipresence.
Omnipresence means your prospects can't look in any direction bumping into you. Somebody is talking about you, somebody is showing them you, you are in the media they see you on socials.
The most effective thing you can do for yourself is to put yourself in the centre of the right group of people who you want talking to each other about you. This will lead to a mass of potential clients to “swim upstream” into your network and start paying you money.
To evidence the power of this phenomenon, I outline my client acquisition data from the last full year of the consulting arm of my business.
For the year I attained 76 new clients. 10 of them came to me directly from my marketing, two found me through my wife and eight others had worked with me over the years but are now in their own business or are fronting a new business and sought out my services. The “eye popper” a whopping 63% of last year’s new clients amounting to 45 businesses “swam upstream” via my network (of which I am in the centre of).
Eleven (11) came from purchasing a book. That too is a little deceptive, because most of them said they bought the book as the second thing after hearing about me somewhere in a newsletter they read, or someone mentioning me to them. They then went to Amazon and bought a book.
There are two things about these numbers that I think are extremely instructive.
One is that upstream is a significant strategy.
Meaning you should find ways to put yourself in a similar position. Whether it is builders feeding clients upstream to a Mortgage Broker or a fabulous restaurant finding ways to get other types of businesses with the right customers, feeding clients upstream to them.
Keep in mind, I specialise in advertising and marketing and yet 63% of my new clients came from someone else. What is more when I drill down into the 63%, there is no source that is really good by itself. One from here, one from there. two from here, three from there. It would have been nice just to have one or two sources that they all came from, but that is not the case. (In fact, it wouldn’t be nice because “one is the worst number” you can have in business – as I have already talked on about in multiple podcasts.
In my world, I like to provide my referral network with great content and resources to use for their purposes. I trade on the fact that everybody is lazy when it comes to content creation and, they welcome good content that they do not have to create themselves. This provides a positive benefit for them. In doing this what I have essentially created is around a hundred influencers who expose me to their customers on a regular basis.
From this, the best customers swim upstream.
The smartest one’s swim upstream.
The biggest spenders swim upstream.
The most common comment I get is, I have heard about you here, heard about you there, so I decided to go to the source, and find you for myself.
The second thing to understand is that if you assume that the 45 new businesses are worth on average forty to eighty thousand dollars in annual value as customers, that is a pretty big number. Which all came to me from simply stitching together little numbers, which cumulatively became a solid number.
This strategy takes work, this strategy is not for the faint hearted and at times this strategy requires you to get out of your comfort zone, but a considerable number of my clients that have adopted the same “swimming upstream” strategy conclusively swear by the results.
To find out more about my Fast Money for entrepreneur strategies please visit petergianoli.com/fast-money