Graham McGregor: Attracting new clients with helpful tips

9:30 AM Tuesday Jul 24, 2012

A simple (yet surprisingly effective) way to market your products and services is to put together helpful tips that a potential new client will find useful.

Then offer these helpful tips to people who may be interested in what you offer.

Personal trainer example:
A personal trainer working in a fitness centre wrote a short two page tip sheet called 'Seven secrets to a great looking body'.

In this tip sheet he explained seven helpful tips that people could use.

One tip was around how to avoid injury when working out. Another tip was on how to keep yourself motivated with your exercise programme.

The last tip was pretty obvious.

It was to use a personal trainer like him!

Each tip had helpful info that explained each tip in a bit more detail.

At the end of tip sheet, he made an offer of a free personal consultation for people who were interested in using his services.

"For a free personal fitness consultation at no obligation phone 123-4567"

The personal trainer made 1,000 copies of his tip sheet and then spent a few hours personally delivering them to letterboxes in three of the most expensive suburbs in his city. His reasoning was simple. If you live in an expensive home you probably made a reasonable income to be able to afford to live there. (This meant you could probably afford to spend money on a personal trainer like him.)

Within a week of the tips sheets being delivered, the personal trainer had received several dozen calls from people interested in using his personal training services.

These people all said something very similar.

"I read your article on creating a great looking body and found it very interesting. I've been thinking about getting in better shape for a while now so I thought I would give you a call."

He booked a number of these people for a free consultation and a high percentage became paying clients.

A great benefit of providing helpful written information like this is that it positions your business as being an expert or authority in your field.

You can market many ways when you use tip sheets.

You could do something as simple as write up a short 1-2 page tip sheet called...

The seven most important questions you should ask when buying XYZ. (In this case XYZ is the producer service you sell.)

Examples:
"The seven most important questions you should ask when buying a spa pool"

Or how about:

"The four most important questions you should ask when choosing a good dentist"

You then explain why each question is important to ask and how asking them will help a person make a better choice around buying this type of product or service.

When you provide helpful information like this make it very easy for someone else to recommend your business to people they know.

Imagine if you have just read a really helpful tip sheet on the key questions to ask when buying a new men's suit. If you know someone who is interested in buying a new suit, it is very easy for you to give them this tip sheet to read. This is helpful for the person buying the suit and it's also smart marketing by the suit retailer who wrote the tip sheet. They are positioned as a helpful business in the suit field and a number of people who read this tip sheet will often make contact with their suit business.

Tip sheets are well worth testing in many businesses.

"Life is trying things to see if they work"
Ray Bradbury

Action Exercise:
Create a 1-2 page tip sheet that potential clients for your products or services would find useful. Give this tip sheet to several dozen people who could potentially be clients.