Terry’s Top 10 Tips for Personal Marketing Terry Kendrick

What is personal marketing and why should I bother? Personal marketing is making sure that people think of you and give you a chance Selling is converting the chance they give you into a sale Selling is hard work without previous effective personal marketing. When competitive products and services are roughly equal, people often buy from people they like and trust

Why Terry’s Top 10 Tips? You need ACTION points rather than a whole book! These may not be the full story but they’ll move you on Because I can use them to show you in this lecture how I’ve been successful

Let’s get this out of the way first It means more work I tried it before It’s just a fad It might cost money There might not be much in it Networking is enough for me Lots of other reasons! OK here come Terry’s Top 10 Tips

1. Get the basics right...then you can start Make sure you are an expert, highly professional and established as a real player. This is essential to survival and collaboration (but not necessarily enough to win business!)

2. Be clear who you are marketing Think carefully about how you want to be perceived by clients. Make sure there are enough of them who will see this as a “hot button” to make it worthwhile creating this image (dare I say personal brand??). Only then start to think about looking for collaborators to help you create/ communicate your existing /new image

3. Be clear on what you are hoping to achieve by marketing yourself. Are you trying to get more clients? Or “better” clients? What do you want out of your business life? Your self marketing mindset should be built around this.

4. Look for collaborators, not targets Think of it as fishing. Where are your favourite fish (clients) in this big lake? Who else might help you to catch them? How do you make sure that your line is near them when they get hungry or need something? When looking for help to market yourself try not to use the language of war - think of collaborators rather than “targets”. You should be sharing not hitting! Make your own luck!

5. Be honest. Are you worth the effort? Market yourself to yourself. Would you collaborate with you if you weren’t a relation? If not, get down to a detailed and honest personal strengths and weaknesses analysis (involve others!). It’s no good marketing something you don’t believe passionately in. You just won’t be convincing. You might be able to sell you (push yourself on people)but you won’t be able to market you (get them looking for you)

6 Make sure it happens Assuming that you understand what you want to market, who you want to market to, who the best collaborators are, and you have absolute confidence in the product (you) then start to PLAN (I’m sorry I know it’s hard work and difficult to commit to. At the very least, it’s important to plan to increase your chances of luck!)

7 Choose the appropriate approaches It is absolutely key to make sure that all this interaction is CO-ORDINATED and gives a CONSISTENT message OVER A PERIOD OF TIME. Do not expect immediate results and do not be disappointed if your first personal marketing activities seem to have no effect (It takes time. They are probably working).

8 Get yourself on the web Consider a personal website to point people to. Give some information away for free. Personal marketing is about developing collaborators not battering people to buy you. Websites are nice gentle shop windows This should not be difficult if you are PLANNING your personal marketing activities. It will only be difficult if you are PLAYING at personal marketing. If you haven’t enough material to make a personal website interesting - worry!

9. Have your own marketing action lists with milestones Set yourself a quantified target. Examples might include: –x number of letters out per week (“Hello”s, “Thank you’s” “I was just thinking..”s and others) –x number of articles written in the next six months –do x minutes of personal marketing every day THEN DO IT!!!

10. Be persistent and monitor progress Review how you are doing. How will you know if your personal marketing is working? Have realistic expectations of your personal marketing impact, but check that you are making progress. Piecemeal personal marketing will almost certainly disappoint.