Hello everyone!

Thanks for joining today’s workshop, “Generating Leads II – The Basics.” Today’s workshop is the fifth in a series of education and training sessions which we will provide to you over the course of the year. Last month, we discussed generating new client leads using Google’s AdWords^TM program (Link). We hope that these workshops will help enable you to effectively scale your TA business. As you know first-hand, the TA business cycle is an iterative and ongoing process. In our workshops, we will provide training and tips on important topics spanning the entire TA business cycle, from planning your TA business strategy to retaining your clients after a sale.

TA Business Cycle

1. Planning Your TA Strategy

2. Generating Client Leads

3. Qualifying & Closing Leads

4. Selling Client Product

5. Retaining Clients

To ensure you are aware of future workshops, please sign up for the TA News Group (Link). Also, for more TA education, please visit our new TA Education & Training hub at Link.

In our February workshop “Generating Leads I – The Basics,” we talked about email marketing, using flyers, and developing your referral network to generate new client leads (see workshop link at bottom of this page: Link). In today’s workshop on lead generation, we will discuss several additional best practices for generating leads.

1. Using PR

2. Participating in Events (e.g., charity auctions)

As always, we will post some prepared content, but we encourage you to share your own learnings with others during this workshop. Also, please feel free to jump in with questions along the way.

Cheers!

Katie & Walt

1. USE PR

Public Relations is one of the most important, and often cost-effective, client lead generation tools that you have at your disposal. Through a PR campaign, you can connect with your existing customers or your local community. You can broaden your reach to people who wouldn’t otherwise be addressed through your normal marketing channels (e.g., your storefront marketing, TA flyers, email communications, etc.). Best of all, you can often get the publicity for free! The media are always looking for interesting stories, so you need to just make it easy for them to find you. Here are some ideas for getting started on developing your PR campaign.

Determine Your Goals for Your PR Campaign

Before you start, be sure that you define what it is that you are trying to accomplish with the PR campaign, as this will drive the messaging of your campaign and how you execute it. For example:

• Are you introducing the launch of your business?
  
• Are you trying to generate new client leads?
  
• Are you establishing your expertise among your peers, the press, or potential customers?
  
• Are you building your brand and/or image within your community?

Define Your Target Audience

Based on the goals that you establish, you will then need to identify the people who ideally should be “hearing” your message. Which particular segment of the population are you trying to target (e.g., geographic region, gender, interest group, etc.)? There are many different types of media channels, so you’ll want to keep your end audience in mind as you determine which venues you will pursue (e.g., newspaper, trade publications, radio, television, conferences/seminars, church/school newsletters, etc.). Build a targeted media list of the publications that cater to the people you want to reach and may have an interest in your story, and then determine which people you should be talking to at those publications.

For example, journalists typically cover specific beats, such as small business, specific corporations, Web services, telecommunications or wireless, etc. Before picking up the phone or sending an email, get familiar with the reporter and the publication by keeping close track of the stories the writers have recently written. If you are educated on the articles that a particular journalist has written, as well as the subjects they tend to cover, you will have greater success in placing a story.

Develop Your Story

Next you need to develop your story and key messages. Given your goals and target audience, what information do you need to communicate to your audience? Identify the most important message you want to communicate, and be sure that your final story clearly reflects this point.

In addition, make sure you ask yourself why your story would be of interest to your local media. It is essential that you link your news with your local community and clearly explain how your service will benefit potential customers. Your services of selling goods on eBay must address a problem that clients or customers hope you can solve, or that you helped them to solve. This puts your product in a business context and therefore gives it a far greater chance of being interesting to the media.

For example, you can leverage the results of a recent TA vs. garage-sale event with Peter Walsh for your own local story. Last month, Peter Walsh—organizational expert, author of “How to Organize Just About Everything,” and co-host of TLC’s “Clean Sweep”—conducted an experiment with two Chicago families. One family conducted a traditional yard sale, while another family sold their items on eBay using a Trading Assistant.

The results were incredible! The family who held the garage sale earned ~$400 after all expenses, while the family who used a TA recovered ~$2,100 for comparable items after all costs. One other point worth mentioning to the press – the work involved for the TA family was significantly less than the garage sale family (hours v days). Peter was featured on more than 25 morning news TV programs where he spoke about the Trading Assistant Program and the Chicago event. You can leverage this story in your own PR to speak to how you can help others recover more money with less investment of time on the client’s part.

To view an interview on the Chicago event with Peter Walsh, click here: Link

Plan Your Approach & Make Your Pitch

• Understand how and when a reporter wants to be contacted. When you first speak with the reporter, ask them how they would prefer to receive future communications from you. Some reporters want phone calls, others prefer email. Contacting reporters inappropriately or at the wrong time – such as on deadline – can lead to damaged relationships.
  
• If you believe you have an interesting and unique story, be creative in your pitch. Think of new and interesting ways to get the story in the reporter’s hands. For example, offer to sell an item for them as a test of your services.
  
• Before sending out a press release, compress your announcement into a core pitch letter that outlines your key message points. Similar to the press release, your core pitch letter should be brief and easy to read.
  
• Different types of media will want information on different aspects of your story, as well as different supporting materials. All media will want to know what’s new and different about your story and all will likely want to interview you and your customers, but they may pursue different lines of questioning.
  
• You can pursue several media channels with your story, such as print, radio, or television. There is no downside to pursuing several of these channels, other than splitting your time across multiple efforts. You may experience greater pick-up of your story with local newspapers. In addition, you may get more coverage on your story via print (e.g., more in-depth article), in comparison to television (e.g., brief story or sound bite).
  
• To view some guidelines for how to most effectively present your story to local newspapers, TV and radio stations, you can download the TA PR Toolkit from the TA Toolkit at Link (you’ll need to log in with your TA id to view the materials). Specifically, check out the document “Pitching Local Media.”

Hi everyone:

We'd love to hear your questions and comments. Don't be shy

Deirdre
eBay Community Development

pga -

Glad you're finding the information helpful! There's more to come...

As far as best practices on retaining clients, we won't be specifically covering that in today's workshop, but we will cover that topic in a future workshop. However, at a high level, the key to client retention is to keep top of mind with your past TA clients (e.g., via emails/newsletters, offering coupons on your services, etc.).

Again, stay tuned for future workshops when we cover this topic more in-depth!

Thanks!

Katie

Now, on to our next topic...

2. PARTICIPATE IN EVENTS

Events provide another good opportunity to generate awareness of your TA business, and connect with potential TA clients. Example events that you may want to participate in include:

• Charity Auctions
  
  • Host charity auctions for schools, churches, athletic teams, or other local non-profit groups. We’ll review how to do this in more detail here shortly.

• Speaking Events
  
  • Gain exposure for your TA business by volunteering to speak to local community organizations and clubs (Kiwanis, Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, senior centers, local industry or trade organizations, etc.)
    
  • You can speak on a variety of topics, ranging from how to sell on eBay, to how the local community can help the environment and reduce e-waste by reselling idle or unused computers and consumer electronics on eBay
    
  • For more information on how you and your community can reduce e-waste, please see the eBay Rethink Initiative site at Link and specifically the TA Rethink Toolkit Link

• eBay Education
  
  • Become an Education Specialist and get paid to teach others how to sell on eBay. Moreover, there inevitably will be people who attend your classes and decide they don’t want to sell on eBay themselves, which presents a perfect opportunity for you as a Trading Assistant.
    
  • Learn how to become an Education Specialist at Link

Conducting Charity Auctions with eBay Giving Works

Charity auctions are a great way to generate excitement around a charitable cause and your TA business! Since 2000, the eBay community has raised more than $40 million for charity on eBay. Recently eBay has also made some changes to the eBay Giving Works program (Link) that make it easier to participate in charity auctions than ever before.

You decide whether to charge or waive your TA fees when you sell items for charity. When you donate 100% of the final sale price of an item to a charity, eBay will donate insertion and final value fees on successful listings to the non-profit selected in the listing (sellers not charged these fees). If reserve or other feature fees are used, the seller will be charged these fees.

As part of your agreement with the non-profit, you may want to ask permission to include the TA logo and a link to your TA profile on each charity listing (e.g., “This charity auction was managed by XYX Trading Assistant”). If the non-profit is going to be conducting any advertising or PR for their charity auctions, you can ask whether you can be mentioned in their marketing or press releases (e.g., “ABC Charity would like to thank XYZ Trading Assistant for donating their auction management services”).

Working with local schools and churches are a great way to get started with charity auctions. Here are two ideas to get you started:


1. Complement an existing fundraiser with some eBay auctions. You can leverage the existing marketing for the fundraiser to help drive traffic to your listings.

2. Create an event. For example, you can tell people to drop off their items for donation on a specific day, and all proceeds will benefit Charity XYZ.

pga -

Still more content to come - we just finished the portion of the workshop dedicated to PR best practices. Now, we're going to focus on leveraging events--like charity auctions--to help drive leads and publicity for your business.

Katie