Thursday, January 24, 2008

          

The Art of Successful PR - the follow up

When you are your own boss you know its hard to be off duty. New ideas and thoughts pop into your mind at the most inconvenient of times. This is something we should always remember as you are always an ambassador for your business.

1. Whenever you meet new people, spend your time listening to them. People will more readily talk about themselves. Remember that everyone you meet is a potential customer, lead to a potential customer, or recommend you to a potential customer.

2. Always ask new contacts for their business card, its so much better than offering them to take yours, and only offer your card if invited to do so. Human nature dictates thats they will happily give you their card, however they might lose yours or only accept it to be polite. Remember your business cards cost YOU money, whereas theirs cost you nothing.

3. Make sure you enter their email address as a friend in your spam filter so you dont block their return email.

4. Look at their website. Having made the new contact, reinforce it, with a brief nice to meet you email, and refer to some point that they raised in the conversation or some point of interest on their website.

5. Make sure you enter their details into your contact manager, such as Outlook, whilst their details are fresh in your mind, recording any other personal information, such as birthdays.

6. Having exchanged emails, quickly follow on with a phone call, (This is Jack Sparrow , from The Black Pearl etc, ie full name and importantly your business name) confirming they had received your email. Check back to your only prior conversation. Remember they will probably have a spam filter too. Let them know if your email to them bounced back as they could also be losing valuable leads? Your goal is to cement yourself in their memory

7. Leave things for two weeks or so then if you have a free product such as a newsletter or a useful resource on your website or even a blog which they may be interested in, or contributing to, send them a link.

8. Never be afraid of asking people for advice or a contribution. How you use it is up to you, and it flatters them in being asked.

9. Categorise your contacts in a useable fashion, to which way your business might target them. It could be by demographics, or by number of dependants, or on turnover/income.

10. Forward on any contacts that you may already have could prove beneficial, or ones who they would enjoy meeting.

Your goal is to make yourself invaluable and unforgettable. The art of PR is to follow up both immediately and continually in order to cement a lasting business relationships.

Author: Rachel Titheridge
http://www.castrilwebsolutions.com

Rachel Titheridge is one of the English copywriters for Castril Web Solutions, and also the editor of the free monthly newsletter giving IT news, tips and techniques and Marketing and IT articles, and free software downloads. See http://www.castrilwebsolutions.com.Ethelin Blog89838
Evangelina Blog59631

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Besucherza sexsearch