My involvement with running a "business" goes back to 1978 when I was selling Cycling Helmets whilst studying at the University of New South Wales. I placed a small strip ad in the Student Newspaper "Tharunka" and was thrilled to see over 100 orders stuffed in my post box.
Magazine ads also served me well from 1984 when I launched a new business publishing and distributing the DeSmet C compiler for the PC and Mac. Many of my ideas for marketing during this time came from John Caples book, "Tested Advertising Methods", where I learned of the importance of measuring the results of each ad placed. My advertising budget was quite low and I found that after a number of years the return on investment of the ads was diminishing so I tried direct mail for a while with very little profit.
My first attempt at fax marketing was in 1992 when Microsoft Access 1.0 was released. The faxes were personalised and targeted at C programmers and resulted in over 150 orders. Fax marketing worked well for a few more years but then the profit return started to drop and frustration from unwanted faxes was growing.
I gave email marketing a go for a while, but never experienced the good results of the early magazine ads and personalised faxes. Since 2004 with Axsapt, our focus has changed from selling product to providing business consulting services and we tried seminars, trade shows, direct mail and telemarketing all with very limited success.
We continue to send out infrequent email newsletters primarily to keep our customers informed of important software patches and new releases. The difficulty is that everyone is swamped with "spam" and very few people have the time to read emails these days.
Until about 2006, most of our new business was sourced through leads received from our suppliers and referrals from our existing Customers, Accountants and Business Coaches. In recent years however, we've noticed a substantial drop of leads from suppliers so we experimented with a 3 month campaign with Google Adwords through Reachlocal. Although impressed with the professionalism of ReachLocal and the Adword mechanism of measuring results, we felt it didn't suit a service based business like ours.
Referrals have always impressed us as the most effective source of business primarily because of the low cost and minimal effort to progress the sale due to the "trust" factor. And so, we decided 3 years ago to try Business Network International ("BNI") to improve our referral rate. So far our experience has been quite positive in more ways than just increased sales. We've used the trusted services of fellow BNI members to improve our own business and have referred quite a bit of business to other members along the way.
This morning, I attended the BNI Conference in Townsville and the keynote speaker, Dr Ian Misner, the expert on referral marketing and BNI Founder, reminded us that building a referral network such as the BNI model takes a significant amount of effort. The secret, the "Givers Gain" philosophy, is to focus on helping other BNI members, and in time, you will receive referrals once your credibility grows. I have to agree as it took almost 2 years to receive our first sale, but now I notice we're receiving good quality, substantial leads and the future is looking very promising for our investment in BNI.
Growing any business is a rewarding journey and so far I've learned that you need to adapt to changing circumstances in order to thrive. Marketing is certainly an important aspect of most businesses and especially for service based businesses, I can highly recommend you consider BNI.
I'd be interested to learn about your experiences in growing your business. Please let me know if you agree or disagree with me. Is there another form of marketing that works for you? Click on this link to let me know.
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