How fast do you follow-up on an email? On a telephone call? On faxes or letters? On webinars?

Immediately?
Same work day?
Within 24 hours?
Within a week?
Or never? Like many companies.

Large and small companies have all the same problem: no following-up.
Maybe sole-traders or micro companies do a better job.

Do you track how well you follow-up?
If not, you probably don’t know how good or bad your company is following-up on emails, calls, faxes and letters.

Who follows-up?

Who follows-up on inquiries by your sales leads and opportunities?
Who follows-up on messages of your customers?
Who follows-up on incoming phone calls?
Who follows-up on emails?
Who follows-up on web forms?
Who follows-up on faxes?
Who follows-up on letters? (if still any)
Who follows-up on web seminars?
If you don’t know: it is time to act and to implement a procedure in your company.

What’s wrong with following-up?

Seems like people don’t want to be doing this as it is too easy? Not challenging enough?
People pose difficult or different questions that need to be answered with attention and care as no standard answer applies.
Or are we all in the opinion the leads, prospects or interested parties should find themselves the answers on the company website?

Increase your sales

In order to increase your sales, just follow-up systematically.
Auto-responders are not the right remedy as they create even more false expectations for the prospect or customer if you don’t answer afterwards.

Just follow-up and increase your sales as it requires effort of your lead or an interested party to try to contact your company and pose questions.
Your prospect or the interested party went through the effort of:
- Taking the time to try to understand your offering.
- Finding the contact data or online contact form.
- Writing a few lines or formulate questions.

It is as if they are almost ready to become a customer, but need:
- A final information
- A personal answer
- A convincing fact
- Or a “gift” from you.
The “gift” could just be your personal attention, your persuasion or an additional discount.
You can only find out by replying to them and ask.

Increase your sales: now or later

Whatever situation: follow-up and increase your sales.
If you don’t succeed in winning the lead as customer for now, he will at least have a positive impression from your company as you have answered him quickly and with care.
He might/will consider you on a next occasion or suggest your solution to a relation.

How good are you at following-up?

You need attention for your product or service?
Why not let people compete for a job related to your product or service?

Marketing with content

That’s what the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef did: they are offering “The best job in the world” on Hamilton Island for only 6 months, but paid AUD$150,000 (US$107,000 or EUR79,000)
As applicant you needed to create a 60 second video and write a short summary about them.
About 34,800 people from more than 200 countries submitted their 60-second video applications. Probably many of them have gotten interest from local media.

The website has crashed when too many applied on the last moment. That generated even more press interest as she got banned.

As so many people want to participate, it was likely some of the applicants have been active in the adult entertainment industry. That generates even more interest.

Additionally one Baby Boomer contestant accused the organization of age discrimination picking only bikini babes and good looking young men. This could conflict with the goal of the campaign, as the marketing is geared towards “Baby Boomers”: they have the money to spend to pay a vacation on the Great Barrier Reef.
In any case the complaint generates more interest from the media.

These are the 16 finalists from all over the world.
Several of them used a website in order to support their application: like Ben from France or Juweon from Korea

Seen the amount of content created and the interest generated by Ben from France, we would pick him as the winner: media coverage overview, YouTube video page, facebook and Twitter.

The job itself will require publishing a video diary. Thus more content will be generated during the 6 months of the job.

The cost benefit analysis

The cost of:
- Creating and running the website.
- The PR.
- The selection procedure
- The 6 month wage
Total cost best guess: USD$200,000

Total value of all the publications, references and links up to now: AUS$70mio
Thus the total project could generate up to AUS$100mio (US$71mio or €53mio in publicity value.
That a very big multiple of the invested money.

Your company job contest for media attention

Not every company has something exotic to offer like a job on the Barrier Reef.
Still almost every company has marketing dept where good people can be used. If you have a vacancy, you will end up paying someone do to the job: beef it up with a better pay.
Why not open a contest for a great well paid job offer requiring writing original content on a website as application. It will be hard for a B2B company to get any interest in your contest, but what do you have to lose?
The job itself could be writing the company blog or whatever related to you products or services as long as content is created and interest is generated.

What are you waiting for to promote your products or services with a job contest?

Did you hear about the new X-Men movie?
Strangely before the release on May 1st, copies have been found on the Internet, and highly visited and regarded websites like TechCrunch, msnbc, BBC News, Hitfix, and almost 2 million links more if you search on Google.

Marketing a movie is expensive and is a significant part of the total budget.
If you can get free publicity and interest by letting it getting published on the Internet and distributing a Press Release about it that gets copied in many newspapers, journals and blogs then you have achieved what you wanted to obtain: to let announce the release of the movie to the world.

Hoax for business too?

Would this be applicable in business-to-business too?
When all marketing has failed like PR, emailing campaigns, advertising or even your viral marketing campaign, is there one last hope by creating a hoax?
A hoax that you hope it will spread virally.

A hoax collection:

We have collected a few examples of hoaxes:
- Museum of hoaxes: Business – Finance
- Internet Hoax Busters
- Media hoaxes
- MS iLoo and Wikipedia about the iLoo.
- Walt Disney and Bill Gates
- Nestlé: super cooled water
- Danish P2P Site The Honest Thief and The Honest Thief Story
- Stars: Hannah Montana, Adrienne Bailon
- The biggest drawing in the world
- Was man on the moon a hoax? Wikipedia: The conspiracy theory
   Or not? The Great Moon Hoax.
   It generated worldwide interest and showed the power of the US.

Movie stars have used it, large corporations have used it, and movie producers have used it.
Then why wouldn’t you use it too for your business?

Creating the hoax is the problem

A hoax needs to attract the media and if possible generate buzz and word of mouth.
If you are lucky, it can go viral.

The problem is crafting a hoax that:
- Relates to your company or solutions
- Doesn’t harm your company or products / solutions
- Generates interest
- Exposes your brand
- Avoid all legal and liability issues

The hoax has to relate to your solution directly or indirectly:
- Your solution could be the cause of the problem in the hoax.
- Your solution could be a remedy of the problem that is the subject of the hoax.

The main rule is not to lie about your product or solution itself.

Requirements:
- It has to attract the media by the subject
- People, money or animals need to be involved

Thus if you are running out of marketing budget, your press releases don’t get any interest or your advertising doesn’t generate leads, think about a hoax.

Could you imagine a hoax that generates a large amount of interest and press coverage?
All suggestions for our LEADSExplorer lead generation and customer retention web service are welcome.

It is just so easy to say “Yes” upon all questions of your potential customer as you have been working and have put in effort since long.

On the other hand it takes courage to say: “No” as this might kill your sales instantly.

Not feasible obligations

Saying “Yes” implies an obligation or obligations that you or your company need to deliver.
Obligations that might not even be feasible.

If you have said “Yes” and it is not feasible then you can:
- Try to explain to your prospect the complete picture.
- Pass on the problem to engineering, development, production or logistics: thus it becomes their problem.
- Still tell the customer it is not feasible and negotiate a different conditions.

In any case the costs involved for changing your “Yes” with all the false promises into “No”, will probably costs the company more than immediately telling the truth. Moreover your company can lose its’ image.

The power of “No”

Telling immediately “No” requires:
- The right sales skills for explaining and convincing
- The conviction in your products and solutions
Recognized market leadership can help a lot in these cases.

If you succeed in saying “No” then you have power and are leading the sales process.
It’s the power of “No”.
Actually buyers and decision makers might just like your honesty.

How hard is it for you to say “No” during a sales process?

“You can rank with bad content, but good content will keep you ranked.” comments Justin (SEO Zombie) on the blog post “As It Turns Out, Content Is King” by Court (CourtneyTuttle).

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly content

Google and the other search bots will index content after it is published in order to show up in their search results.
Any content will show up in search results.

The Ugly content is content that has been copied from another source: search engines will notice and the copied content shall never ranked high in the Search Results.
At first both Good and Bad content have an equal chance to get a decent ranking in the search results.

Then the search engines will keep track of:
- The number of clicks on the link in the search results
- The duration of the visit on the page.

The more clicks, the more interesting or appealing to the people searching: thus positive for the ranking.
However if there are many “bounces”, then the link will not get promoted higher.
If the clickers don’t return to the search engine, it is interpreted as interesting content.

Bad and Good content will first get equally ranked, but in the end the Good content that catches the interest of the most visitors will get promoted higher in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
This is how the Good content will slowly climb higher in search results.

How do you know you are writing interesting content?
That nobody knows exactly: else everybody would be writing and publishing a bestseller.

There are other interesting comments on that blog post about “Content is King” to read.