[Quick tip: If you own – or run – an agro-based/allied business, the ideas in this article can REALLY help you. Trust me. I LOVE farmers – and would NEVER steer you wrong :-))]
Are you responsible for creating marketing awareness, and generating sales leads for your company? If yes, then building a mailing list needs to be your number one priority.
Why?
Because most times only people interested in buying will take pains to join such a list. Success in therefore likely to boost sales dramatically (and possibly take your career to the next level)!
However, You Must Do It Right, To Ensure The Right People Sign Up
You want to sell your products and services don’t you? Well then you must do something to make them give up at least their email address – so you can contact them again after their first contact with you.
Note here this “contact” may not only happen online. It can – and does often – happen offline as well. So do not close your eyes to the opportunities to “direct” such contacts to marketing material that’ll make them join your list!
But You Must Be Careful to Attract The Right People
Make sure you only use bait that attracts people likely to be willing to pay for what you sell!
It sounds obvious, but the truth is not everyone gets this part quite well. You see, you must develop a marketing instrument that touches on something that interests them, which is related to what you sell. Then somewhere in there, you offer access to even more – maybe some special ground breaking report or white paper. That what will make them feel a need to come over and signup to get it.
Now, one of the most effective “marketing instruments” with which to propagate the above kind of offer is a website.
On the website, you could have a blog and/or a web based newsletter. Through one or a combination of the foregoing (which are components of what I call a Web Marketing System), you can easily publish and distribute useful and interesting content for your target audience to read.
The key will however be to remember that what you’re doing is just a means to an end – AND NOT AN END in itself!
The profitable end you seek will always be to make as many of those who stop long enough to read your stuff, decide to join your mailing list – swelling it’s membership. To make that happen, you will regularly have new bodies of useful information and education packaged in different forms. Some will be directly access free articles. Others will be members-only articles or PDF reports/other documents that a prospective reader has to signup to get. Some could be available for a fee.
Ultimately, you want to have a situation where over time you are able to build your own community of potential buyers for your products and services. And you’d be able to periodically make them sales offers, while still serving them useful, free information via a your broadcasts.
One kind of downloadable document that can be used – in an article – to get people to join your list is called an “Educational Commercial” or “Edumercial”.
A good example of an Edumercial is my new report on “Using MS Excel® Solver for Least Cost Feed Formulation“.
The following are key objectives you will aim to achieve using an Edumercial:
1. Establish you/your company as an authority on the subject e.g. Shea Butter (if that’s what you sell)
2. Generate enquiries from potential buyers of your Shea Butter range of products
3. Stimulate interest in reader’s minds to tell their networks and contacts about you.
4. Generate visits from people fitting your target audience profile to your website to get more useful information
5. Make your website, and brand/name get picked up – MORE OFTEN – by Google and other search engines when people do searches related to Shea Butter.
6. Save you money, time and effort in promoting your products and services BEYOND the limits of your current marketing reach/influence and impact.
7. Gradually help you collect contact details into a MAILING LIST of potential buyers/sales leads, so you can send notices of new useful stuff you publish and/or announce sales offers of your products.
A mailing list of trusting buyers will not only come ready to pay, but will also tell others about anything you tell them in your email broadcasts.
Hopefully you see what is possible here.
Try to offer marketing content mainly from your blog – NOT just your website
Be sure however, to channel blog RSS feeds to the site. That way people who land on the website will still see the useful titles and click to the blog.
Except your website is already blog based, you may need to do this – especially you use a static html website. The reason is that a blog comes ready-to-use with the instruments for content syndication and archiving that Google/readers want.
And it also makes the process of updating content online quicker, and easier. You can install your blog within minutes, from your website’s CPANEL at NO COST. Just tell your website manager – or if you want, I can help (email tayo at tksola dot com).
You need not spend money on blog design – in my experience based opinion.
Thousands of professional templates are available for FREE, which can be perfectly customized to suit your needs. Later on you can get a paid one, if you wish. Just don’t let that stop you from getting started.
What is crucial is that you aim to generate content to publish regularly on it that will help you build a community of followers, many of who are likely to be in buy-mode by the time they read your stuff and see your good quality products.
Take a look at the number of sales enquiries still being generated from a single interview a Shea Butter expert from Abuja did on this post at NaturalNigerian.com.
And the orders were coming in from all over the world – because most people had been unable to find a RELIABLE source of 100% PURE Shea Butter.
See how this approach of giving useful information away free in the right place, to the right people can generate massive rewards?
As long as you also offer reliable quality of products and services, you can get similar attention from potential buyers. And it will make your company get more “name recognition” both online and off, locally and internationally.
Tips for Generating Your Content
Even if you’re writing from experience, read up on the subject periodically.
This will enable you enrich your articles with additionally interesting information. Where appropriate put in all the references you consulted. No matter how minor. It’s important to acknowledge the sources one reads. Make sure you do NO copying or plagiarizing.
Sometimes I simply write by drawing from past or present experience/observation.
But normally, the standard way I generate content is that I first read lots of material on the subject. Then I sit down and think of a useful angle to write from, that has not been covered by any of the sources I read.
And I try to make sure what I end up with adds useful value to the existing body of information. All of that is done using my own words. That way, my final write-up is free from any duplicate content.
Note that it’s always best not to create the impression you’re trying to “sell” in an edumercial! (Read through my Educational Commercial on Feed Formulation)
That tends to turn readers off. They must believe you’re offering the useful information to help them as a real public service.
That gesture, on its own, will make you appear as a more credible provider to go to as a result!
It’s a bit counter intuitive, but IT WORKS quite well for generating quality sales leads!
Try it. You will not be disappointed. And neither will your bosses/employer!