Five Days to Getting More Customers
– with Henry Evans Day 5
“Setting Up An Automated Marketing System”
We go back to my commercial real estate days in the mid 90’s.
Fresh out of college, I eagerly dig in to learning about real estate transactions and quickly find out that, like most businesses, the key to this business was not doing the actual work.
The work was not hard at all! Do some research on available space and then negotiate a lease.
As I quickly realized, the real trick to that business (and most other businesses) was getting more customers.
We had no system to do this.
Our “system” consisted of walking around to office buildings where I worked and asking receptionists for the “decision maker”. (which very rarely succeeded by the way)
And cold calling business owners to see if they were thinking about moving.
This was not an Automated Marketing System and it did NOT work very well.
We ended up getting most of our new customers from referrals and it seems we were always chasing the prospects instead of the other way around.
What would have been ideal was if prospects were calling us instead of the other way around.
But that wasn’t happening for us.
What we should have been putting together was a system that predictably and affordably provided new quality prospects on demand.
Knowing what I know now and having set up these kinds of systems, I would have moved to a 2 step lead generation system that got my ideal prospects contacting me.
Think about this example.
Imagine if you are a business owner and you feel like you’re paying too much for your lease.
Your phone rings at 5:30pm and you decide to answer it:
1. It’s someone looking to see if you are going to be moving your office who wants to sell you a lease in a new building
OR
2. It’s someone offering a free report called “Pricing Trends in Commercial Real Estate and How TO Lower Your Rent… Guaranteed” who is offering to ship a copy to you free, without selling anything.
Which one is going to be more interesting to you?
The second one of course!
This is the jist of doing lead generation advertising. Come up with a widget or a lead generation offer that is extremely enticing to your ideal prospect. Ideally you want it to be irresistible to your ideal prospect.
Then, when you offer it to them, you know have the opportunity to follow-up and get their business.
Look around and you’ll see all sorts of smart companies doing exactly this.
One of my favorite example is Tempur-Pedic mattresses. They sell very expensive, foam mattresses for 1000’s of dollars. However, instead of going immediately for the sale of this product, they instead offer a free sample, information kit. (see below)
This is an ideal way to get a list of interested folks who take a baby step towards being a customer by requesting more information about your product or service.
I wish you lots of success with your Want to know more specifics on the type of lead generation offer you should use? I cover that and a whole lot more in the HDE Academy, Marketing Mastery Module. Click here to find out more.
Warmest Regards,
Henry Evans
President, Timezone Marketing
Author, The Hour A Day Entrepreneur