What is the best way to get clients?

What is the best way to get clients in the door?

• I'm a small custom drapes business that just started a few months and has been having trouble finding clients.

• Answer:

  My favorite example of feet-in-the-door tactics is Wall Drugs of South Dakota. It started out as a tiny drugstore in the middle of nowhere, but near a major highway. They put up signs all over the approach highways (this is near the Badlands national park and various other tourist attractions in a catchment area of thousands of barren square miles). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Drug What did the signs say? "Free Ice Water" That's right, free water. That got 'em flooding in. Of course it was silly. Every highway-side business usually provides water to customers through a water fountain or something. But this worked beautifully. Today, Wall Drugs is a sprawling mall-sized complex that has dozens of stores inside in bazaar style. Their roadside signs have evolved to all sorts of other quirky lines. The billboards are so entertaining, you could have a traffic accident trying to read them. They still do the free ice water thing (basically little plastic cups by the soda machine). They have locally famous donuts. The lesson in this approach to marketing is that it isn't about what you sell. It's about making yourself part of the story of the journeys taking place around you, that you wish would route through you. In this case, water pit stops for road-tripping tourists is an obvious one. What are the stories relevant to your drapes business? How do those journeys evolve? At what point can you get them to detour through your store? Are we talking journeys like moving homes? Starting a family? Where do these journeys take place? What free or loss leader items that fit those journeys can you advertise on the billboards along those journeys (metaphorically speaking)? As the saying goes, you only sell two things: happiness or solutions to problems. In what ways are drapes happiness? In what ways are the solutions to problems? What are the related happiness-seeking and problem-solving journeys? When you look up material on this sort of marketing problem online, you'll get (frankly) a whole lot of time-wasting advice that fail to appreciate this essence of the marketing challenge. You'll get a lot of offers to help with the process pieces.  Like "start a blog" or something. These things are easy. You can probably figure them out without help, and hire competent people where you need to. The hard part is to frame and answer the core marketing questions that revolve around journeys, happiness, problem-solution, stories etc. There is a lot of textbook stuff around this (branding, positioning, brand narratives etc.), but much of it can be ignored if you really, really know what you're selling. If you really, truly, deeply understand drapes, you don't need any help at all. The answer to every question can be found in your understanding of drapes. Any external help you seek will be a crutch to overcome the limitations in your knowledge about drapes. When you truly understand drapes, they'll either sell themselves, or you'll understand why they cannot be sold at the rate you want. You may not want to turn into a sprawling and diversified Wall Drug, but even if you just stick to drapes, you can get there. A great example of such a focused one-trick-pony business is Billy Goat Chips from St. Louis. They only sell in the St. Louis area, but I happened to find some in a Washington, DC cafe, which had special-ordered them. They were so unbelievably spectacular that on a road trip later, I made a 200 mile detour just to get those chips (actually the same road trip where I later went to Wall Drug). http://billygoatstl.com/ Ponder your drapes my friend. Sit and stare at your drapes and think hard until tears come out of your eyes. As a famous poet said, you can see the world in a fiber of drape. Wait, maybe he said grain of sand. Can't recall. Your marketing problems will solve themselves. If not, you can write the definitive book about drapes.