Duct Tape Marketing

Creating customers offline will, in my opinion, always (okay, for the next few years, anyway) be the most profitable way for a small business to build long-term, high-profit revenue. But those revenues will never appear if you don’t master the online information space first.

The Client Tracker Profile will go far beyond the basic contact information of your clients and ask you to discover and record personal information about your clients such as the hobbies and interests I spoke about earlier in this chapter. Other areas may include family information and school information.
Individually this information will help you do a much better job of providing value to your clients. Collectively this information will help you understand and shift your ideal market description as well as the words and messages you use to communicate with this group. This tool can prove invaluable when a salesperson leaves your organization and a client is moved to a new salesperson.

The greatest problem my Ideal Prospect faces is that they have lost control over the various marketing initiatives and marketing materials that have been created on the fly over the years. Internally, there is no marketing accountability, and most, if not all, of the marketing responsibility falls to the owner of the business. They have also found it difficult to grow their business beyond its current market share due to increasing competition.
They desperately want to take their business to the next level.
The best way to reach these Ideal Prospects is through direct mail offering productivity tools, business workshops sponsored by trusted business professionals, and referrals from other business professionals.

A big part of the ideal client profile lies in understanding what your clients value, fear, want, need, and dream about

The one place I turn to keep myself rooted in how the world thinks and buys—you know, marketing research—is People magazine.

My Dirty Little Marketing Research Secret

you sell solutions to problems.

One of the easiest ways to start to get this picture of who or what makes an ideal client is to take a close look at the customers your business has attracted to date

And in systematizing these activities you will discover how great marketing can continuously increase each of these five keys: know, like, trust,contact,and refer.

Duct Tape Marketing asks you to make that fundamental shift I alluded to earlier. It requires that you come to terms with what your business really is—a marketing business.