2. Choosing Your Approach
There are two key ways to approach potential clients. Both are effective and acceptable; you just have to decide which best suits your style, ability and preference.

Take Frank Perdue and Martha Stewart. The late Perdue sold chickens, while Stewart teaches you how to cook a chicken. Either you can build a campaign to persuade people to buy your services, or build a campaign that explains what your services are, why listeners/readers/viewers should care and how they’ll benefit. Frank vs. Martha, in other words, is sales vs. education.

I chose the Martha route (minus prison) because our firm would rather be known as educators than as salespeople. This also explains my radio and television shows, books, seminars, newsletters, website and social media activities.

But we must acknowledge that Frank was highly successful, too, proving that the sales approach does work. (If TV ads didn’t work, there would be no late-night infomercials.)

3. Choosing Your Platform
The platform—where you will display your message—is vital. You obviously want to reach the most qualified leads for the lowest cost. So which is better: an ad on the radio or in a newspaper? To convert different audience sizes and ad costs into comparable data, the media industry offers two key statistics: CPM and AQH. CPM is cost per thousand (“m” is derived from the Latin for thousand); AQH is the average number of listeners or views per quarter-hour. Like unit pricing in a supermarket, these data will let you easily compare the costs of using different media outlets. Every platform provider will readily provide you with this data, and if they can’t or won’t, skip them—just like you’d reject a mutual fund that refused to publish a prospectus.

Advisors who ignore CPM and AQH make expensive and shortsighted mistakes. I recall an advisor who once told me he paid $200 for an ad at one media outlet, rejecting another offer that would have cost $800. Because he hadn’t looked at the CPM and AQH, he failed to realize that the outlet he selected was costing him three times more to reach each qualified lead than the other would have cost.