Want to Scale? Then Ask Can I Find My Prospect Electronically?

Today, I want to talk to you about, can you find your prospect easily? The number one question I ask myself when I enter a new market or I have a new product or service I want to push through my agency or through my business is can I find the prospect easily? But not just can I find them? You know, we can all find Apple. Apple’s in California.

We can just go to the head office. We want to be able to find them electronically. Can you find them easily electronically? Why? Because I’m a digital marketer. I’m an internet marketer and I want to be able to reach out to them on scale using online marketing methods. And if I can’t do that, then that discourages me.

And I think, well, I don’t want to cold call. I don’t want to walk the streets. I don’t want to door-knock. I don’t want to have to go to networking meetings to find my prospects. I don’t want to have to do all of that stuff. What I want to do is to be able to reach out to them electronically and put an advertisement in front of them or some sort of message in front of them.

And so I can do that at scale. And that is the number one question you should always ask yourself when you enter a new market or launch a new product or service. In this video, I’m going to show you exactly the requirements I go through. And what I look for when I enter a new market and say, can I find that prospect electronically?

All right, what are the ways that I, what are the methods I use to test whether I can find them electronically? Let’s go through a few. For example, if I wanted to promote my services to restaurants. They’re pretty easy to find, right? If you walk the streets, there’s restaurants in any main strip in any, main town or any main city. But that’s easy to find them if you want to go door-knocking, right.

You’d go to the Yellow Pages. Now that’s electronic. So you can get a list of all of them but how do you reach out to them? Just because they’re on an electronic board, like Yellowpages or some other listing site. Menulog. There’s so many menu sites at the moment. But can you take that information?

Can you extract it and then use it to reach out to them? Well, you can, technically you can extract the information from a menu, a website, or you Yellow Pages or something like that, and you can then email them the email addresses. So that’s another way you can electronically do it. Is it a good way? Well, some people love cold email and other people hate cold email.

I think very few people have been able to make it work at scale. Some do though, but that’s not my preferred method, but that is a way that you can reach out on mass electronicallyto restaurant owners. What are the other ways? Just say you’re trying to deal with tradespeople, right? Carpenters, plumbers, electricians.

Well, on Facebook there’s great communities of tradespeople or contractors in groups, Facebook groups. So there are Facebook groups that dedicated to electricians and plumbers, and they all go in there and they help each other and they help out. And if you can enter that community and add value, you can then reach out to those people, not by spamming them, but by helping them.

I know one of my clients was able to go to a group for electricians and then pay the admin, the person who runs the group a set amount of money to do four posts of promotion in that group. And that is a great way to reach out on mass electronically to electricians. So Facebook groups is an amazing way if you can find your target market. You know, I have another client that deals with kids with autism.

There are many many groups with mothers and fathers that have kids with autism and they are in Facebook groups. If you can enter that Facebook group and add value and maybe promote your services through the administrator of the group, you can then reach your audience electronically. It’s another way of doing it.

Another way is, is ads. Ads is very very powerful. If you are able to go to Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn and target people and find them and then show ads to them, it’s very powerful electronically to scale. The problem with ads is that even though Facebook says you can target real estate agents.

People interested in real estate or investments. A lot of those people who are interested in investments are financial planners, right? If you’re targeting financial planners. If someone’s interested in say financial planning and it’s an interest-based targeting. It’s not like 1% of those people are financial planners or wanting to thousand of financial planners.

The rest are just normal people who are interested in financial planning. So even though you have this great ability to target, it doesn’t necessarily make it effective, okay. When I say can I find them easily? I don’t go to Facebook and say oh, I can type in financial planning and therefore I can target financial planners. No, because one in the thousand or one in three thousand, one in five thousand people are actually a financial planner.

That is not a good way of trying to target financial planners. It can be done, but you’ve got to use brute force. You got to lose lots of money to get to them. That’s not a good way but there are other ways of dealing with financial planners and finding them on Facebook. Facebook groups is one.

A better way to find financial planners. Not a better of way, a good way is LinkedIn. So on LinkedIn, you can go and say, show me all the people who are CEOs or owners of financial planning companies. And you get a list of financial planners then you can reach out to them through LinkedIn and connect and then offer them something of value. Try and book an appointment with them.

That’s reaching out electronically. Now, yes it’s a little bit tedious. It’s a little bit like cold calling. You’ve got to do some work, but you can outsource that and get someone else to do that work. But it is a great way of targeting. I think that’s very powerful. You can show ads on Facebook to people who are financial planners, but the problem with, sorry, on LinkedIn.

I meant LinkedIn. On LinkedIn is that it doesn’t have a lot of traffic. Like there’s not a lot of traffic with LinkedIn. People go there once or twice a month. Maybe three times a month. It’s not as effective as Facebook, even though the targeting for business is very, very good. Now on LinkedIn, it doesn’t work that well for tradespeople. So tradespeople aren’t on LinkedIn.

So if you want to find tradespeople or contractors, LinkedIn is not the place to go. You’ve got to say, well, where can I find them? We talked about the Facebook group idea before, and there’s other ideas that you can use. Another good way of finding professionals or people who are in the industry, is an industry association.

They typically will have a website with a list of all of the members. And sometimes you can get their email address and phone number and you can call them. There’s a great site. Great few sites for real estate agents where you can find a list of all the real estate agents and their phone numbers are on there.

And you can just call them, right. Get their phone number and call them. You know, real estate agents are happy to talk to you because they used to speak to people. They’re very friendly and they’re very open and they do cold calling as well. And so they’re quite open and they’re quite easy to contact.

For me, The question I asked is, can I find my prospect electronically easily? And can I show some sort of advertisement or get in front of them or get their attention at scale? Because if I can do that, I can grow the business quickly. If I can’t, then I have to revert to the old methods, which is cold calling, networking, referrals.

All of these methods are very good, but very slow at times. Partnerships, now all of those, I’m not saying any of those are bad. I’ve got no problem. I do a lot of those already. But if you want to scale quickly, you need to be able to reach out to your people electronically and get a message in front of them and get their attention.

And typically that will be through some sort of ad platform. Some sort of social media site and some sort of reaching out where it might be email or something that you can get someone’s attention. I want to encourage you when you start looking for a new opportunity. The first thing you should be asking yourself is can I find these people electronically and can I get a message in front of them so I can scale it out?

And if you can’t, with that particular service, but there’s a secondary service, which you can, that may be a better way to go. If you want to grow pretty quickly. All right, I hope that helped. I hope he got to see a little bit of insight into how I approach this with new opportunities. If you’ve got any questions, you can join our Facebook group where we help business owners grow and scale their business and lots of training like this.

Or you can book an appointment with me and where that 15 minute appointment, we’ll look at the top three things that you can change in your business to grow using online marketing. All right, have a great day. Speak to you soon. Bye.