That means thinking about potential new prospects you should be networking with, but don’t forget that your former clients are some of your best allies and a tremendous source for nurturing leads. Small businesses in particular rely on colleagues to refer them to professional services firms who have helped them succeed. Maximize your own outreach capacity by arming your allies with information they can use to point colleagues in your direction.

Here are 5 steps you can take to get you started:

Step 1. Review

Take a few moments to review your client list and start thinking about those clients with whom you enjoyed largely positive relationships. If you haven’t continued to nurture those relationships, now is your chance to make it happen.
Step 2. Identify
From that list, choose no more than 5 clients for your outreach efforts.  Be purposeful in your choices. You’ll want to identify clients whose work intersects with your ongoing outreach efforts because:

• the work you did for them was so good that you and the client remain proud of it to this day
• your principal contact is well-connected and well-respected in their field
• someone at the company is involved with a thought leadership initiative that could benefit from your expertise
• the work you did reflects an idea or process you have honed and are ready to expand on
• the company has made some changes and might benefit from your expertise again
• your principal contact has moved on to a new company that you would like to work with
• the company hired someone to replace a former contact and that new person has yet to meet you

Step 3. Research
Find out what they’re doing now. How might you help them do their job better? Assess how the work you did for them holds up today. Consider where they are trying to go with their own career. How might you help them achieve one of their goals by networking with you? (Aren’t you glad you started with just 5 names?)

The research part of this takes real work, patience and perseverance. Your goal here is to develop a real understanding of how your work intersects with their needs so you can conduct your outreach with meaningful insight.

Step 4. Act

If a current initiative is relevant (or could be made relevant), reach out to your client to inform, invite and involve them. Some shared initiatives they might get involved with:

• Guest blogging on your site
• Co-hosting or co-sponsoring an industry event (such as a conference lecture or workshop)
• Co-presenting a webinar
• Co-authoring a white paper or other publishable article

Look for win-win situations: individuals looking for opportunities to get involved, broaden their own profile or involve their company in a new initiative. As appropriate, ask if they have colleagues or friends who might want to be in-the-know or involved. They’ll want to engage with you if your ideas will help them succeed.

Step 5. Record
Hopefully you have a good client tracking system already. If not, here’s your chance to begin the process. Record the relevant information about your efforts and their responses so that you have a way of following up with them in the future.

Now the Don’ts

There are a few big ones.

• Don’t call or email a client just to say hello. Respect their limited time.
• Don’t invite a client out to lunch just to ask for a referral. Desperation does not inspire confidence.
• Don’t invite a client out to lunch just to pick their brain. You should walk into every meeting with at least the kernel of an idea. Yes, you want something from them but it’s about you coming to them with something they can use.
• Don’t schedule a chat with you client just so you can talk about your latest project. Be prepared to talk about your work, of course, but don’t lead with it. Let the client ask.
• Don’t make promises you’ll regret later. That includes offering them your services in exchange for a referral; and certainly don’t offer them gratis in the hopes that a referral may come some day. Be generous with your expertise but be savvy.

Remember, new business development doesn’t work overnight. Expect your initiatives to yield results when you’ve made a genuine connection with someone, but know also that new business can’t happen unless your clients have work to offer you. A good connection made today might mean a new contract 6 months, a year or two years from now. But get your outreach habits formed now and there will be exponential rewards to come.

Let’s start by defining the two approaches.

What is Service Selling?

This approach focuses on highlighting your skills and capabilities: Who we are, What we do, Who we work with, What we say. All of this information is pertinent, relevant, critical but it’s also all “Me” or “We” focused. It centers on the services you provide but asks your audience to make a cognitive leap from what they see to how it applies to them.

What is Content Marketing?

Simply put, this approach focuses on developing meaningful content for your constituents. By developing meaningful content, you connect with a constituency that is actively seeking your guidance and expertise. Content marketing presents the authentic core of your business because it:

• Highlights your capabilities and credentials but also allows you to provide insights they can use
• Demonstrates your relevance by making the overt connection between your creative expertise and their industry’s needs’
• Showcases your personality, so they know what they’re getting when they decide who they want to contract for their next big project.

All factors that inspire clients to want to do business with you.

So content marketing includes all of the relevant service details but is outward, client-focused: What your constituents need, How they can work better (more efficiently, more successfully), Why their concerns matter.

Why Content Marketing for Creative Businesses?

Content marketing is a competitive advantage for small creative businesses because your value is in your thinking as much as in your services. You know firsthand that your business is greater than the sum of your portfolio; your vision matters. You can present that vision through a smartly-written vision statement or through succinct project descriptions and case studies. Great first steps toward developing content your clients can connect with. But go the step further and prepare content they can actually USE.

Here’s why:

• Sharing your ideas builds knowledge
• Meaningful content fosters trust
• Sharing your vision inspires
• Content sharing is a win-win
• Most importantly, knowledge, trust, inspiration, mutual benefit are all ingredients for developing Long-term partnerships with your clients. And those long-term partnerships are critical to the success of your business.

So what are we talking about here? I’m absolutely not advocating work on spec. But think about it this way: You cannot over share your design vision through meaningful and strategic content development.

Inspire. Educate. Advocate. Lead.

Here’s what that might look like for your small creative business. A toolbox of possible content you might want to consider as you evolve your communications strategy:

Inspire.

Give them ideas that hold up a mirror to their own vision.

• Well-curated project images
• Case studies
• Vision statement
• Informational graphics
• Thought-provoking articles
• Co-written articles with other thought leaders

Educate.

Give them information, advice, tools and insights they can use.

• Q&A
• 5/10 EZ steps
• Workshops at industry events
• Technical demonstrations
• Webinar workshops

Advocate.

Speak on behalf of your constituents. Promote their work, their causes, their concerns. Be in the mix.

• Re-tweet their events, ideas and publications
• Quote their work on your blog
• Co-sponsor events
• Co-author white papers
• Attend their functions

Lead.

Demonstrate the intersection between your and their larger ideas.

• White papers
• Blog articles
• Written interviews with experts
• Webinars with experts in the field and strategic partners
• Lectures at industry events

As you see, content marketing does not just mean putting information OUT into the world. It also means taking information IN. Your participation in the community of ideas is essential to successful content marketing. After all, you must have a genuine knowledge of and interest in your constituents’ ideas in order for your content to be meaningful, right? Don’t think you can just phone it in. Literally. This is not telemarketing 101 and you’re not cold calling businesses in the hopes that someone wants to contract your services. What are you doing? Nurturing, investing, evolving for that long-term reward.

One question design firms have to confront: Do you consider yourself a typical B2B business? Certainly all professional services firms fall under the category of B2B but their communications and outreach needs are highly differentiated from, say, a pharmaceutical rep or a company that sells parts to auto dealerships.

That said, there are similarities and some worthwhile lessons can be learned from those traditional B2B colleagues.

• They recognize the need to build meaningful relationships with their constituents.
• They recognize the need to EDUCATE their consumers.
• They see the value in ADVOCATING on behalf of their community.
• They benefit from providing THOUGHT LEADERSHIP, establishing their credentials as providers not only of a service but of a vision.

Two recommendations offered in the book that I think are a great starting point:

1. Answer your constituents’ questions! Like all professionals, designers hear some of the same questions over and over again. Write a searchable white paper or article that addresses a key question that you frequently get from clients. Make it clear. Don’t exaggerate and don’t sell.  Just answer the question.
2. If you are serious about providing meaningful content on your website, be consistent (and yes, physician heal thyself is a reminder to me here). MarketingSherpa suggests 2 articles per week for 6 months as a test to determine the future path for your ongoing content. But that assumes that you have someone dedicated to blogging. Let’s face it, you’ve got work to do! You don’t have time to write two blog articles each week.

For small design businesses, here’s my addendum to their suggestion.  Set aside a few hours before the summer is over to develop a timeline for publishing that begins the day after Labor Day and ends on Tax Day (there’s a useful bookend for you). You know what issues your clients might be facing over that period. Create a series of topics that you know might be useful to them as they plan for the holiday season, annual report season, spring fashion season, etc. Map out your basic content outline then plan to blog at least once every 3-4 weeks.

But remember, make your content useful to your client. You know the phrase ‘news you can use?’ It applies here. Do not simply publish summaries of your projects.  Educate. Advocate. Lead.

Here is an excerpt from a 99% article entitled “It’s Not About ‘Engagement’: Using Social Media to Make Ideas Happen“:

There’s nothing more rewarding than feeling like you’re a part of something, so let your audience in on your project. A great way to engage your community is to ask for their input. Share your experiences, and ask for something back from them. – Dan Brown, Etsy

If your current circle of friends and contacts were enough to help you reach your goal, you would be there already. Finding a new community, one filled with people who are already doing what you want to be doing, will push you to accomplish it yourself. But only if you jump in. – Andres Glusman, Meetup.com

Your audience needs to care about you before they care about what you have to say. Build your audience just as you would in real life – by being a real person, and by devoting real time to individual relationships. Take the time to delve into what others are doing and share their work with your community – that kind of generosity and collaborative interaction goes a long way. It’s a complete rejection of the “all about me” tendencies that the Internet can breed, and it’s what lays the foundation for lasting communities to support you and your work. – Cindy Au, Kickstarter

For more, read the article.  But it might also be worth thinking about this.  There is a lot of noise out there.  A lot of your competitors are making that noise.  Many are smart, interested and engaged with their communities while others are just going along with the latest trend. Do you know which camp you fall in?  Are you (at the risk of sounding cliche), “faking it ’til you make it?” If so, really think about what you’re communicating to your audience, those prospective clients whose first impressions of you will mark either the beginning or the end of a long-term relationship. If those prospective clients believe you and believe IN you, they might follow you along your journey as you evolve your business.

All the talk about differentiation does matter. Don’t be content to let your point of differentiation be superficial. Your website probably doesn’t need a “facelift.” But if you’re struggling to connect with your target constituents, you might want to consider the content of your communications.

What are you talking about? Why should prospective clients care? Are you engaging with them in ways that matter? (Do you even know what that would mean for your constituents?) If not, consider spending some time learning about what really does matter to them.

Then transform your communications materials – your website, social media output, presentations, elevator pitch, etc. – into vehicles that go beyond creative showcases to focus on providing real service to your clients . . .  meaning,  engagement, and change that matters for them.

For more on what she did and why, here she explains:

Hi guys,
In April I will be participating in a 5k run through the Lincoln Tunnel. It’s for a good cause as they will be raising money for the Special Olympics of New Jersey.

I “donated” a design for a t-shirt since all these kind of races give out free event-shirts to all runners prior to the race. Would you please visit the link and vote for my design? It’s a March-Madness kind of voting so you need to select 4 favorites… not just mine. My design is the one with the light blue rectangle that has a gray diagonal bar through it. (It implies the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River).

http://www.sonj.org/LawEnforcement/LincolnTunnel/Contest.php

Thank you!
Nina

Good luck Nina!

One key differentiator is that a business should have a business plan.  The dreaded business plan!  How many creative business leaders have I talked to who said they had never written their business plan.  They started but never finished.  They wanted to but never got around to it.  They tried but it was too complicated.

I get it.  But here’s the thing.  Your business should not be a seat-of-your-pants operation.  You must have a plan.  You must be able to set goals and expectations.  You should know what services you provide, even if they may change over time. And it’s never too late to get started.  Your business plan might be the best first step toward differentiating you from your freelance counterparts – the ones who just get work by word of mouth, who don’t have a sustainable business model, who are just taking things as they come.  If you are flying by the seat of your pants, how can you convince clients of your stability and enduring value?  At the same time, if you are starting a business, what better way to hit the ground running than to go through this exercise?

Business Plan Writing Workshop 101

In 2011 I am persuading all creative business owners to write their business plan, and I am going to offer my help.  I will offer a 2-day in-person or 4 90-minute conference call sessions to help small business owners write your business plan.

Why Write a Business Plan?

Writing a business plan is the first step toward building a solid foundation for your business.  It enables you to establish expectations, devise language that describes what you do, prepare a roadmap for growth, hire employees and manage budgets.  Your business plan can be used to guide the development of several key aspects of your business, including your accounting and billing system, employee training, marketing, and outreach planning and implementation.

Goals

• The business plan should tell a compelling story about your business, explaining who, what, when, where, how and why.
• Your plan should be focused and clear. It’s not about the number of pages or style of the cover.  It is not a public document or a marketing tool.  Write for you.
• The plan should define specific business objectives and goals with general parameters to guide your key stakeholders – investors, loan officers, partners, collaborators – and employees.
• Writing a business plan should force logic and discipline into a business.
• A good business plan is a living document. It should be updated regularly.  To that end, it need not be perfect on the first try.  The goal is content over style, and evolution over stagnation. If you can say it better later, great.  But for now, write what you know the way you know it.  You should also maintain this document in an active project file so that you can easily refer back to it and make adjustments as needed.
• Consider scheduling an annual or semi-annual review of the document in the first five years in order to review goals, successes and problems, and to make any necessary changes.

And for further motivation, take a look at what Entrepreneur Magazine says about writing your business plan. Then, let’s get started!

The Rise of Creative Collectives & Mixed Media Partnerships
The unfortunate thing about trade associations and online websites devoted to one particular field is that they don’t help foster creative collaborations across disciplines. An illustrator is unlikely to connect with a photographer in the Society for Illustrators. With the rise of distributed creative production and more independence for creative professionals, we will need to connect and collaborate with creative talents that are different from our own.

I anticipate formal alliances between industry associations. Online websites and industry blogs will become multi-disciplinary (rather than serve, say, just designers or architects or photographers). We will also start to see more co-working arrangements and shared studio space between professionals from different fields. The rise of collectives and loosely assembled creative teams will support the increasing need to connect and collaborate across creative fields.

I don’t see this as prediction so much as a strong wish for our creative industries.  So many talented designers have left major firms to start their own small businesses, and yet what it’s led to is not a handful of firms with unique stand-alone talents but an overwhelming redundancy.  Most clients simply cannot distinguish between the hundreds of one- to two-person design firms that showcase, to an untrained eye, similar design portfolios and often the same few catchphrases about “solving problems” and “unique solutions.”

What might strengthen the entire design community and those small businesses might very well be strategic alliances with creative partners, demonstrating a broader skill set and service than any one can offer on their own, whether as permanent partnerships or as well-networked communities of professionals who work together to share resources, overhead, contacts, etc.  A community of peers who recognize that the new economy is based on this notion of global sharing, and so the model of the single designer working alone in a room is only marginally sustainable.

So I second Scott Belsky’s prediction and look forward to seeing more creative partnerships blossom in 2011.  Let’s change the game from competition to collaboration and, in so doing, make our clients see the real value in working with small, agile creative businesses.

So what does a small business-owner do when the life-work balance is suddenly shifted out of whack?  How and where do we make adjustments? How do we prioritize?  How can we effectively set appropriate expectations for clients and partners, maintain the integrity of our work, evolve (and/or avoid stagnating) and still keep the needs of, in this case an infant, as a top concern?  These are difficult questions and I certainly do not have a lot of answers.  But I think it is worth discussing in a serious way, particularly in the context of how we maintain sustainable businesses.

Over the course of the next few months I plan to reflect on some of these questions, and welcome thoughts and feedback from anyone who would like to contribute to the dialogue.  At the same time, I would like to offer my thoughts on what small creative businesses should be thinking about in the coming year.  Among the topics I will raise are what it means to have sustainable communications and a sustainable outreach plan; differentiating between freelance and small business (not the legal definition, but the more nuanced distinction); some key questions creative professionals should consider before starting their own businesses; and the distinction between marketing and communicating.

Happy 2011 everyone.

You should be able to link to it here but in case that doesn’t work, go to the PROLibraries link and search for C001 – Brand Longevity: Maintaining Brand Visual Identity Across Departments and Communication Channels.  Enjoy!