We are kickstarting what will hopefully be a long-standing series at YAROOMS: Meeting Room Hacks - articles on unorthodox ways of improving various things that pertain to meetings. Things like rapport, preference, attitude and so on.
This episode borrows from the strategy of an advertising executive whose name escapes us at the moment.
To catch a bigger fish…
His problem was jumping from one client-tier to another, higher one; from a mid-size client to one the size of Coca-Cola. This ad man and his company were courting such a big client and had agreed to host a meeting to discuss how they could work together (and get some work). Remember, most of their clients weren’t famous - and though their advertising was good, tight budgets meant little media coverage. The ad exec knew that if they were to close any kind of deal, they’d have to expose their future client to as much of their work as possible. Prior to the meeting.
…choose your bait carefully
They were thus faced with a new problem - getting their ads in front of the client’s people without asking their current clients to overspend on media (that was not possible) and without paying too much themselves on extra placements. This was a long time ago, the internet didn’t exist and great exposure could still be achieved with print and out of home advertising.
The agency needed to cover most of the town in their ads to stand any chance of having their work noticed. Or maybe not. What they did do was buy all billboards surrounding their offices.
Then, the internet came into play
And this is where the hack we’re suggesting gets interesting. You could use some extra exposure before an important meeting. Your company could benefit from a client walking in confident in your services, a client with a positive attitude towards your offering.
You do this with well-practiced sales pitches, with an open mind and kind words. You do this by caring about their business, by focusing on their bottom-line. But you also do it by leveraging your past work - the results you obtained for your other clients, many of them in adjacent markets: testimonials are the embodiment of customer satisfaction.
Here is, then, what we suggest:
- Create a Facebook Ads account (if you don’t already have one)
- Develop a series of simple ads - beautiful images with your logo and a strong headline on them describing your relationship with one of your clients; leave the testimonial for the Ad’s description, Facebook does not allow more than 20% of an image to be covered by text.
- Familiarise yourself with the Facebook Ads Power Editor
- Create a Facebook Pixel
- Install said Pixel on your website
- Create a series of webpages where you will post information relevant to the client you will be having a meeting with (a particular portfolio-set, a big document download page or something along those lines)
- Go back to the Power Editor and create a Custom Audience based on visitors to that page; you might need to involve your colleagues and ask them to visit the page if you expect less than 20 people to get to it
- Create your Facebook ad Campaign and choose your new custom audience as a targeting method
- Hit publish and let your future clients see your testimonials
- (optional) Tweak your campaign and limit the viewing frequency to something like 2 or 3. This way, your prospects will only see your ads 2 or 3 times, so they shouldn’t feel followed or harassed by an aggressive marketer.
