Expanding your Market Influence

Practical Tips For Expanding Your Market Influence

How to expand your marketing influence:

Know Your Stakeholders

Stakeholder Analysis is an important process that successful people use to win support from others. Managing stakeholders can help you, too, to ensure that your projects succeed where others might fail.

As your career develops, and you become more successful, the actions that you take start to affect more and more people. And the more people you affect, the more likely it is that some of them will have significant power and influence over your work.

These people are your stakeholders. They could be strong supporters of your business – or they could block it, so you need to identify who your stakeholders are and win them over as soon as possible.

Identify your stakeholders - all people that have an impact or a potential impact, negative or positive on your business.

Then, analyse their power and influence in your business.

And lastly put a plan together on how you want to communicate and make contact with them.

You can use the template provided to conduct your stakeholder analysis.

Click here to download a handout about the stakeholder analysis template.

Build Your Network - it's Your Sales Lifeline

Your network includes business colleagues, professional acquaintances, prospective and existing customers, partners, suppliers, contractors and association members, as well as family, friends and people you meet at school, church and in your community. Contacts are potential customers waiting for you to connect with their needs. How do you turn networks of contacts into customers? Not by hoping, they will remember meeting you six months ago at that networking event. Networking is a long-term investment. Do it right by adding value to the relationship, and that contact you just made can really pay off. Communicate as if your business's life depends on it.

Develop Relationships with Your Customers

Customers are people - not numbers - and it is important that you put consideration and effort into building personal relationships with them. For example, when you send out Christmas cards each year, you not only gain customer loyalty, but you also inspire customers to promote your business to the people they know.

Encourage Customers to Talk About their Experience Using your Business

There is no tool more powerful than people talking with their family members or friends about your product or the quality of your work. If your customers are fully satisfied then you should ask them to refer you or your product to their family or friends. It is important to realise that your customers may not do so automatically and sometime a little poke requesting them to refer your business may work wonders. Go ahead, be bold and ask for more work.

E-mail Marketing Keeps Relationships Strong on a Shoestring Budget

Build your reputation as an expert by giving away some free insight. You have interesting things to say! An easy way to communicate is with a brief e-mail newsletter that shows prospects why they should buy from you.

For just cents per customer, you can distribute an e-mail newsletter that includes tips, advice and short items that entice consumers and leave them wanting more. E-mail marketing is a cost-effective and easy way to stay on customers' minds, build their confidence in your expertise, and retain them. Contacts and customers who find what you do interesting or valuable will forward your e-mail message or newsletter to other people, just like word of mouth marketing.

Go the Extra Mile

As you grow your business and your client relationships, there will be times that you will have to make a decision on when to adjust or expand your core offerings to cater to the needs of a client. The benefits of offering customised solutions are two-fold:

Clients remember the times you came through for them, and

It may open up additional revenue streams and new product offerings you had not previously considered.

A word of caution, though: if you are making a significant departure from your core offerings, ensure you are adequately compensated.

Click here to view a video that explains networking tips.