Remember the old quip, “like bees to honey”? Wouldn’t it be nice to have that constant stream of targeted clients just continually marching to your door (or e-door)? Well it is possible and yet some have missed the fact that it takes a concentrated, aligned, repeatable and repeating strategy in order to make this happen. For some reason, a good number of marketers and business owners are still flinging a single promotion against the wall to see what sticks and then moving on to the next big idea, list, trade show, etc, etc.
We’re constantly hearing that it takes five to seven touches or exposures for a sale to take place and yet in reality this seems to be ignored. Think about it, are you building that factor into your new business development?
Back in my ad agency days we of course dealt in ‘campaigns’. Typically a series of ads that was aimed at the target consumer to touch them a number of times and move them to action. Well $50 million ad buys aren’t the only place for campaigns. Regardless of your target and size of business, taking the time to develop a process whereby you contact them with specific, relevant, ongoing touches is your “honey” for the bees.
But here’s the key, take the focus off of you or your product/service, and put it on what your target needs and wants. If you understand that, you’ll see that the more value you bring them through your touches, the more of them will become clients. (Watch part 2 of this blog post for how to find out what they want.) Touching a target seven times without providing anything useful to them in the form of relevant information is simply spam (or direct mail that goes in the trash immediately, or phone calls that go unanswered).
So, assuming you have done the pre-work to define a targeted client or consumer base (you’ve done that right?), the critical steps to attracting their business become:
- Find out their wants/needs, pain points, problems.
- Develop a campaign (anywhere from 5-10 touches) around giving them answers to their problems so they begin to see you as a resource. This begins to position your business as the expert in the field AND you start to be seen as almost a partner, and then as a necessity, not a luxury.
- Close the sale. Asking for the business becomes a lot easier and the odds are now in your favor since many potential clients will have self-selected based on your campaign and you’ve begun to build the Know-Like-Trust factor.
Interestingly enough, I had a man complain that it would take so much time to do all of that. Hmm. My only response is that the goal is to make relationships and therefore sales right? You’re either going to be putting time and money into jumping around doing one-off promotions, and then doing the next one, and the next, OR you’re going to spend that time and money being targeted and building a positioning for your company that allows you to develop loyal relationships with clients and consumers. Bees to honey.
