Stop keeping yourself and your company a secret. One of the best compliments I received early in my entrepreneurial career happened at a business networking group in New York. As I walked in and scanned the room to see if there was anyone I knew, a man turned to me and exclaimed, “My God, you’re everywhere!” and I laughed and said, “Thank you!” Apparently, he’d seen me at several other networking groups over the previous two weeks. The following week, he hired me to help him grow his business.
This happened again a few years ago, when a joint venture partner approached me about doing a strategic alliance. We had just started a Skype session and before diving in, I asked her how she had found out about me and my business. She responded, “How could I not? Every- where I turn, there you are, Fabienne. It’s like you’re on surround sound in my life!”
Yet again, a week ago, a brand-new member of our program and I were beginning an initial strategy call and I asked, “What made you decide to enroll in the program and work with me?” and she replied, “I’ve been following you for about a year, and was thinking it might be time to work with you, and lo and behold, I received your letter in the mail, right after getting a lovely phone call from one of your team members. The next day, I saw you pop up on Facebook. It was a sign that now was the time I should work with you.”
I have countless stories like this and, although it feels synchronistic, even divinely led on the receiving end—which it may very well be—it is also not accidental. It is the end result of consistency and what I call Marketing Omnipresence.
Omnipresence can be loosely translated as “being present every- where at all times, at the same time” or “to appear everywhere simultaneously.” When applied to marketing, it is the kind of exponential leverage that is missing from most people’s marketing plans.
Imagine that your marketing message, your company name, your brand and offers, could be seen by your ideal prospects practically everywhere they turned. What would happen to your sales and your revenues? My guess is that more people would work with you and that it would drive growth.
Shooting for omnipresence means taking every opportunity to surround your prospects with, well, you. Or your message. This requires looking at all the places your prospects “hang out” and then being present there, in full force, in a variety of different channels, with valuable content and useful information.
If you don’t have ten times the number of clients or customers you want, the problem is likely not that you’re not good at what you do. No, your only “problem” may be a combination of obscurity and anonymity. The solution requires that, from this day forward, you make the commitment and constant effort to be out there in the world (well, at least in your prospects’ world) in a much bigger way than you are now, and let them know you exist.
If you or your company are currently reaching 10,000 people through all your channels and social media, the mindset shift that needs to happen is to focus on creating visibility to 20,000, and then eventually 100,000 or 1,000,000 of your prospects (or more) as your goal each year. It’s about dramatically adding quantity to your quality, and to stop the tendency of wanting to hide behind your computer or avoid marketing altogether.
It’s a commitment to leveraging your marketing so that you can reach more of the people who desperately need you but don’t know you exist.
Omnipresence in marketing allows you to fast track your expert status and be seen as the authority in your field. When a prospect looks for information about your topic and many of the useful bits of information they find have been created by you, you become their trusted source. This will considerably increase your credibility in their eyes and it paves the way for a much easier sale once they raise their hand.
Think blogging, free reports, online summits, webinars, free assessments, quizzes, articles, podcasts, free templates, checklists, a mobile app, books, lead-generating (online) ads like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, high-content videos, extensive social media presence, being a contributing author to publications or sites that cater specifically to your target audience, in your particular niche, speaking, sponsorship, booths at trade shows, etc.
We’re looking for (small) market dominance here. This is about you being the big fish in a small fishbowl, the first person someone thinks about when they talk about your industry.
You can manufacture what your prospects see as “a sign” to work with you. Have you ever been recommended a book three different times from three different people, and upon hearing about it the third time, you finally said, “Wow, it’s a sign, I need to get that book and read it”?
I know that if I am experiencing a particular challenge in my personal life or in my business and the same solution to this problem shows up from different sources (a friend tells me about a particular consultant; a business colleague recommends a book written by the founder of that same company; and a Facebook ad pops up inviting me to a webinar from, again, that same consultant), because I don’t believe in coincidences, I am going to start paying very close attention to this said consultant.
I will likely read the person’s book, sign up for that person’s email newsletter, maybe check out her videos on YouTube, sign up for a webinar, maybe even read her testimonials on the website. I would become very curious and want to find out more about how I can work with that person.
Then, if I get a call from her customer service team asking if I wanted to explore working together or if I received a letter with an outstanding client testimonial, maybe with a call to action to work with them, the odds are heavily stacked that I will likely work with that person. It’s as if they’ve been on surround sound in my own life and will begin to be very top of mind for me, feeling as if all these mentions were serendipitous, a lucky and unexpected sign, as if it is meant to be that I should work with her. And it likely is.
Now, if we put our business owner/marketer hats on, we understand that this type of omnipresence isn’t just a coincidence but rather a choreographed series of marketing touches. It is the sort of “serendipity” that comes from a company (yours) knowing exactly who your clients are, what their biggest struggles tend to be and exactly what’s going to get them the result they so badly want and help them to reach their highest aspirations.
And then, being committed to leverage your existing marketing efforts to lovingly surround them with content, solutions, social proof and calls to action, everywhere they turn, in a variety of channels with great frequency, so they see you in at least three places and consistently. Imagine that your solution kept showing up in their life (with authenticity, compassion, integrity, and a loving message) just at the right time, from different sources, again and again. Would they consider working with you?
Yes, probably, and with much greater frequency than is happening for you now. The key for it to feel right is not to be aggressive but rather, lovingly omnipresent.
The mindset shift I invite you to make as it relates to your marketing is that it’s YOUR job to be ever-present in your prospects’ lives and that you must show up in different channels, so that you literally, and systematically appear to be everywhere. The importance is to embrace the idea of seeming like you are in surround sound in their life and that working with you is the logical choice they look forward to making. When done with the right energy (pulling vs. pushing hard), this feels nice on their end, as well as yours.
Be the biggest fish in a small pond. One of my serial clients over the years, Kate, found me through a listing for a seminar I was doing in New York City close to fifteen years ago. Even though she never ended up attending my “How to attract all the clients you need” evening seminar, she looked me up and found me online and called me to set up a Get Acquainted Call. After a brief conversation, she quickly signed up to work with me.
Kate was an out-of-work actor who had taken a job as a receptionist to make ends meet in between gigs. Being high-energy and someone who loves to add value anywhere she can, she offered to place outbound prospecting calls for the owner of the company to help set up meetings with prospects. Essentially, she was cold calling for her employer and it was working.
The owner was delighted that she had this uncanny ability to schedule meetings for him with usually difficult-to-reach C-suite corporate prospects, whereby his other staff members weren’t able to do this. She loved doing it, became very good at scheduling these sales calls and eventually decided to leave her job to open up her own business teaching other companies how to get their sales teams to successfully set up more sales meetings with prospects by using her cold calling system and unique process.
The problem was, she didn’t have a client. So, she hired me, and I taught her how to do a few things to get clients. Right away, she landed a copier-dealer company as her first client. She was thrilled, especially since the sales team started experiencing an unprecedented spike in new meetings scheduled with C-level prospects.
Within four months of us working together, she was making $10,000 a month. Soon, she asked me, “Okay, Fabienne, what’s next? What other types of clients should I go for?”
My answer: “You don’t.”
“Kate, you are crushing your results with this type of business technology client. Instead of going for another industry altogether, let’s use the existing success with this one type of client, and reach out to other copier-dealers in New York and say, ‘Hey, if I can do this for your competitor, I can also do this for you. Are you interested in hearing more?’”
At first, she cold called (of course), pitched and eventually worked with the majority of the New York business technology dealers. She closed one, then another, and then another. Word spread within the New York business technology niche. It was as if she had become the Business Technology Sales Whisperer.
Referrals eventually came in for her to do business with regional sales teams, and based on our marketing coaching, she increased the minimum size of the sales groups she would work with from three to twenty-five. This allowed her to get paid more as she was paid by the number of delegates. She was using the same amount of time, but leveraging that time by working with many more people, thereby making more.
It continued to work. We knew we were onto something, so we decided to go further with this.
I told her, “Kate, let’s go vertical with this industry and have you saturate and own all things related to cold-calling within the business technology space. Let’s have you be omnipresent so everywhere they turn, they only hear about you. Let’s focus on signing up all other copier-dealers in New York and then regionally, and ultimately, nation- ally. Let’s have you be the biggest fish in the pond so they are no longer interested in working with anyone but you, meaning, you are the only logical choice in their eyes. Let’s shoot for omnipresence.”
That’s when I could hear her smile over the phone. She knew she could do it.
Eventually, the large national and international companies got wind of Kate and started asking her to come speak at their annual conferences and hired her for their national sales trainings.
And that’s exactly what took Kate from $0 to five figures a month, to Six Figures within one year, and toward ultimately making more than $80,000 a month (Seven Figures a year) within a few short years, with very low overhead. She had learned to leverage her marketing by saturating one very specific niche and becoming a superstar within this niche.
The same thing happened recently to Terri, a practice management consultant for oral surgery clients. Terri had a low six figure consulting practice when she joined the program. I shared Kate’s story with Terri and we went about dramatically increasing her visibility in the oral surgery field, rather than expanding too quickly into the general dentistry field.
As you can imagine, everyone knows everyone in a niched field such as oral and maxillofacial surgery. When one surgeon told another about the results he’d gotten from working with Terri’s company, she was easily hired. And this happened again and again.
But to greatly expand her reach, visibility and exposure, we didn’t just depend on word of mouth. She focused on becoming omnipresent in this niche with regular email marketing, speaking at all the annual oral surgery conferences, contributing to an important book in the industry, producing direct-mail campaigns, and more, with a focus on being known by all as the ultimate expert in her field.
And this strategy worked.
People now come up to her at conferences and they know about her; they talk about her on the bathroom line not even knowing that she can overhear them. To Terri, this is funny because she has always been more introverted, not really a seeker of the spotlight, and generally not one you would consider to fit the traditional “rock star” archetype. But that’s who she’s become, because she leveraged her marketing to focus on saturating one particular industry, becoming the big fish in a relatively small pond.
And that’s how Terri went from making just over $100K in her business, to a million a year in revenues, just thirty-six months later. Oh, and going from almost no vacation to six weeks of vacation per year. To be inspired, you can read Terri’s full story (and watch her video account of this).
For you to experience similar results in your own business, I recommend shifting your mindset so that you avoid being all things to all people. Trying to appeal to many niches at once can be rather expensive and very time-consuming. Instead, the riches are in the niches, where you commit to leveraging your marketing so that you dominate a single niche, like Kate and Terri have done so successfully.