Robert Middleton

Passive or Active Marketing?

Last week someone forwarded to me a CoachVille eZine interview by Stephen Fairley of "Today's Leadership Coaching." Stephen has just published a book called "Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching."

In the interview, amongst other things, Stephen discussed the distinction between passive and active marketing activities. I found it so interesting that I contacted Stephen and did a one-hour interview with him on the topic.

I'd like to give you some of the highlights of our discussion.

Passive Marketing

You might define passive marketing activities as putting out information about your service and then waiting for a response from those who got your information. Truth be told, I LOVE passive marketing. As an InfoGuru, you ideally want to develop enough visibility and credibility so prospective clients call you.

Active Marketing

I would define active marketing as all the marketing activities that are related to following up with prospective clients. So, active marketing can be everything from following up with someone you met at a networking event to making a cold call to a company you think would be a great client.

Finding a Balance

Good marketers work at finding a balance between passive and active marketing. Passive marketing builds your personal brand and your reputation. Active marketing gets appointments with prospective clients.

If you put all your time and resources into passive marketing in the early stages of your business, you're going to build your business very slowly indeed. You'll soon discover that it takes a lot of positive exposure to get people to pick up the phone.

On the other hand, if you put all your efforts into active marketing, you'll never really gain any momentum. Getting new business will always be hand-to-mouth, because your word-of- mouth business won't be supported by reputation-building marketing activities.

Combining Passive and Active Marketing

A good example of combining passive and active marketing was my very focused campaign a few years ago to do speaking engagements. I researched organizations, put together a package, contacted them and got myself booked. After giving my talk (and the talk has to be great or you'll only hurt yourself), I got cards and followed up with everyone who attended.

This combination approach generated a lot of new business for me in a relatively short period of time. If I had just waited for people to call, I am certain I wouldn't have landed nearly as many new clients.

The smartest thing to do in marketing your business is to combine passive and active marketing. Here are several other ways you can do this:

• Send out mailings or individual letters to prospective clients, and then call them up to discuss your services or to set up an appointment.
• Offer a complimentary coaching or consulting session to a select group of people (by email or mail), and then follow-up by phone to set up a time to talk.
• Build your eZine (email newsletter) list and send out valuable information on a regular basis, while always including an offer for a product or service they can order online.
• Participate actively in networking and meeting good prospects, and then set up meetings with those who could either be clients or lead you to prospective clients.