Want Your Prospects Undivided Attention Article originally from September 1st, 2017 FPC Newsletter
Written by Charles Webb
Want Your Prospects Undivided Attention…Get Their Home Address
Over the past few years I’ve witnessed the digital “Gold Rush” phenomenon take hold and move business owners into a frenzy to disregard everything they know and head west. I can assure you there are plenty of shovels being sold but little gold is being mined.
The digital world is certainly here and will continue to disrupt the way we communicate, including marketing, so…get used to it. In fact, you best become informed or you will lose out on many opportunities. Becoming informed and incorporating digital marketing does not mean you should discontinue what has always worked. Making the choice to rely 100% on bringing new clients in from social media, email campaigns and webinars will likely bring additional challenges with it, namely a decrease in new prospects.
Let me explain. The most important thing you can do when it comes to attracting prospects is to Get Their Attention! Once you do this, you must keep it. If your prospect has the opportunity to become interrupted, they will. Once their attention is off of you and how you can help them, they are likely not to return. Sure, you can continue to follow up with them and pull a few back in, but if you’ve left them online, they will continue to be entertained by alternative solutions.
What does this mean? The “guru” digital marketers teach marketing, following up, funnel sequences and nurturing campaigns all online. As long as your prospect remains online, they will be up for grabs by anyone that can get their attention. It’s a very busy mess in the digital world. Just think about all the email campaigns you’ve been thrown in. Do you actually read all of these follow-up pieces? It’s only getting worse as more and more people are learning these tactics and jumping on the band wagon. Information overload and lost prospective clients follow.
Here’s the solution. If you want to bring your prospects into your herd, you have to pull them out of the herd(s) they’re in. Very few, if any, of your competitors are getting their home address and nurturing with hard copy. The mail ain’t going away anytime soon and no one is paying attention to this perfect place for you to stand alone and earn their trust. By the way, you’re just as likely to get your prospects home address to send a free gift (lead magnet) than their email these days. Once you have it, set your follow-up sequence to play and start giving your prospect valuable information that leads them to trust you and eventually take action.
This information can be in the form of a monthly health Report that includes key topics of their interest, case study of the month, tips of the month and CTA (call to action). You may want to send a weekly series that spell out key pillars in your system that help your prospect better understand why your clients get results. Have options to come to a presentation, get on a Discovery Call, or an orientation and tour of your office.
Here’s the catch. This takes effort as you will be sending out real mail compared to digital. However, you can be assured you will have a much higher probability of them actually reading it as compared to digital, which is very easy to just delete. If the subject matter is of their interest, you now have the opportunity to give them a more complete message, one that will have a bigger impact. By the way, the whole myth on “Got to keep your message short” is just that…a myth. Yes, there are places where I have to keep it short in the initial lead capture, but once they raise their hand, the more content the better. The only time this does not hold true is when the copy sucks. It’s kind of like reading a really good novel. As long as the writer keeps you engaged, you keep reading. If you’re trying to move your prospect to take action and fully trust you, give em good content.
The beautiful thing here is that once you have the follow up content completed and it’s testing well, meaning prospects are accepting your CTA, you can set it on auto pilot for several months before changes may be necessary. Compare this to the constant work that must go into digital campaigns such as new blogs, new videos, new messaging, content for all your different platforms. There really is a much higher demand for work hours here that should be calculated and accounted for when looking at cost per lead and customer acquisition.
In summary, you should become familiar with digital marketing and incorporate it into your lead generation. Most importantly, never ever stop using hard copy.