Marketing and Attracting Clients
When establishing a VA practice, what seems to be the most important activity that a VA needs to spend time on - is it improving your skills and getting a VA certification - or is it marketing and attracting clients?
This is one of the many question many VAs or would-be VAs are asking themselves. In my opinion, learning and improving skills is a must-do activity. It should be incorporated as a process in our business plan as a progressive entrepreneur seeking and using feedback strategies to learn and improve; it is part of reviewing and evaluating how well we are doing in performing and providing the services we offer to our clients. Acquiring a VA certification is physical proof of the effort we have put into studying the concepts and principles of how to handle a VA business. However, learning and improving our skills is not something we do once and forget about it. It is integral to our normal approach to work and study throughout life and our career.
Marketing and attracting clients is a daunting thought to a small business owner. You can almost imagine pouring a large amount of your hard-earned savings into marketing activities that we are not comfortable with. The term marketing is normally associated with sales and promotion techniques. Marketing and attracting clients encompasses so much more than advertising. It is simply studying our products or services from the clients' perspective. Before deciding on what advertising and promotion techniques to adopt, we need to carefully consider the branding and the kind of image we wish to project to our clients. Our prospective clients' perception of our VA practice will dictate whether or not they will approach us for support. A very important foundation for successfully marketing and attracting new clients is a creative flair for words while conveying a complicated message in a small space of a postcard, a top-notch command of the English language, including a mastery of grammar and spelling.
Bernadette Doyle's report on Attracting Clients with Ease describes several low-cost ways to attract clients and position yourself as an expert in your field.
Colin Campbell of Colin Campbell Consulting holds CJ Hayden's Get Clients Now! 28 day marketing workshops, Guerrilla Marketing Coaching and Sales training in Wales and Bristol. I know Colin personally and had attended his workshop and learned a lot about marketing.
Fabienne Frederickson, the Client Attraction Expert, holds various webinars and teleseminars which I have attended and found to be very useful. There are also loads of resources she has made available through newsletters and articles she sends via email.
The answer to the above question then is to constantly improve our existing skills and learn more new skills to perfect our craft and balance it with a follow-up, review, evaluation and re-structure of our marketing strategies to gain new clients. Marketing after all is the life blood of every business.