The fact of the matter is that most of the people that are coming into contact with your business are not ready to buy now.
They aren’t saying NO, they are saying maybe. Not now, maybe later.
Unfortunately — most business don’t have processes in place to stay in touch with these people until they are ready to buy.
Do you have a process to “bleed” a marketing message on prospects until they become a YES.
How Big Bucket Bleeds
As tiny business owners, we sometimes make the mistake of copying the methods of our corporate competitors — Big Bucket, Inc.
Big Bucket, Inc. bleeds on its prospects through advertising. They put a branded jingle, logo, tagline, etc in front of their prospects as frequently as possible. And it costs big bucks.
Big bucks that tiny business owners don’t have.
How A Tiny and Mighty Business Owner Bleeds
Savvy tiny business owners have realized that the Internet has made it possible to “bleed” a message on their prospects for almost no bucks at all.
Here is the process good tiny business marketers have been implementing for almost a decade now:
Step 1 – Identify the market
Step 2 – Identify the needs of the market
Step 3 – Create text, video, audio or image content that solves those problems and builds community.
Step 4 – Ask for permission to continue the conversation via email, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, webinars, etc
Step 5 – Consistently create content that solves the communities problems and distributing bleeding the content through these free channels.
Step 6 – As prospects move from MAYBE to YES, they convert into customers.
Why Call It Bleeding?
Steps 5 is easier said than done. This is a process that takes place over months and years rather than days and weeks.
Building a community takes consistent creation of content. Prospects are “What have you done for me lately?” folks. They don’t care what you did last week, they want to know what you did for them this week.
You have to stay top of mind. The frequency that you are getting messages in front of your prospects is directly tied to the effectiveness of your bleed marketing.
Big Bucket, Inc. gets it done by pumping gobs of dollars into traditional advertising mediums, you will get it done by pumping gobs of time and energy into valuable content creation and distribution.
What are your thoughts? How do you stay in touch with prospects that are not interested right now? Do you need a Band-Aid for your current marketing process (couldn’t resist a lame joke, could I?)
Image courtesy of Zen
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Russ, I use Highrise to keep track of all of the ‘deals’ I have going – from people that fill out a form on my website to people that show up at one of my speaking engagements. The biggest issue I have, even with something as great as Highrise, is that if I don’t log in and go through them on a regular basis, they still end up falling through the cracks. I’ve asked my vampire-loving wife to keep me bleeding on these prospects, and I keep notes of every time they reply or show interest. If they don’t, they go back ‘on the pile’ until the next followup round.
@St Louis SEO — Interesting Will, I had never heard of this tool. I also know that you use social media and email to continue to “bleed” on your prospects and existing customers.
It’s a terrific tool from 37 Signals. Here’s my affiliate link
http://highrisehq.com/?referrer=WILLHANKE
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