Content Crooner

photo credit: Vít Hassan

As much as you’d like for your prospects to be born ready to buy your product or service that’s not always the case.

Whether it’s a $5 e-book or $5,000 dollar business consultation service, prospects need to be massaged into the right mindset to buy.

Where advertising relies on a much more direct call to action, marketing is the masseuse that loosens them up for the purchase. It also establishes enough value and prepares them enough so that they are likelier to become a lifetime client instead of a one-and-done deal.

Develop a Checklist for Your Marketing

One of the first things you need to do is plan your marketing strategy before you begin marketing!

Although this sounds like an unnecessary dose of common sense, there are all too many businesses that fall prey to the kid-in-a-candy-store phenomenon. They quickly pluck at the shiniest marketing items and then gobble them down. You must have a solid plan of approach before you begin or you’ll eat your entire budget in no time at all.

• You can address this issue by developing a checklist. This will help you make sure that you’re covering all the important points of your product and service, which will provide the foundation for a thorough marketing campaign. Think of it as a pyramid, with all your marketing pieces building up to the apex.
• You must also determine which hot buttons your marketing will address. Do I have any marketing efforts in place that address people’s financial woes? What about my marketing helps create time freedom for people? What can I do to make life easier for people? What is a paramount fear in today’s society and what about my offer can assuage that fear?

Chunky or smooth marketing?

Break it into chunks! Don’t overwhelm your prospects with every single detail regarding your offer. You may not like the idea of omitting anything, but you may lose your prospects if you give them too much to digest at once. Break up your product or service into several main points and then create individual marketing pieces to address those main points. You can then accompany each main piece with a brief hint at some of the other benefits in the concluding paragraph. Invite your prospects to click on a link to your main website, to complementary marketing pieces or to articles that cover those additional benefits.

You’ve not only provided easily digestible information, you’ve also set the sales funnel into motion and created an active prospect by getting them to click through. With each and every click that a prospect makes (e.g. from article to article, article to website, webpage to webpage) their trust in your offer grows and it becomes easier for them to make the purchase than to back out.

Chunky Marketing Example

Provide specific solutions to someone’s questions or concerns through article submission and you’ve now teed up your product or service—you’ve given people the information they were looking for. And the creative and information-based content of quality article submissions fearlessly initiates first contact for your business without the usual harshness associated with a cold call. Article writing allows you to plug a single feature and benefit in one marketing piece and maintain a nice chunky consistency in your marketing.

Developing an entire army of informative and persuasive articles for your prospects combats doubt and eliminates sales-stopping uncertainty. Article submission? Check. Prospect’s mind clear for purchase? Check. Now you’ve created a warm lead before someone has even seen your website or talked to you or one of your reps.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!