teach
I think we’ve agreed that as far as attracting customers to your freedom business is concerned, the aim is for each and every one of them to become an advocate for your business. An advocate being someone who will not only buy from you exclusively, but someone who will also promote your business to others without being asked.
When you think like this about business it more or less helps you to build a fence around your customers as the way you treat them to achieve this level of loyalty is something they won’t get in too many other places. There remains however, the small matter of attracting people out of the primordial soup that is the general public and into contact with your business in the first place. How do you do that?
Well, as we touched on yesterday, the first step isn’t to try to get them to buy something. No, the first thing is to help them with something; show them what a reliable and warm, cuddly person you are. And the best way I’ve found of doing that for people who are otherwise strangers is to teach them something they want to learn.
So if you’re a web developer, teach them about good design principles or the latest thinking in responsive web design.
If you sell bee keeping equipment, teach them how to get started in bee-keeping.
Sure some of them might be smart enough to just go and do it themselves, but they are the kind of people who would have done that anyway. The majority of people coming to a hands on event will be easily converted to customers on some level, even if they just need little bits of help and a not full service. If your teaching is remote or online, then the conversion rate will be lower, but still valuable if you do it right.
Steven Pressfield is an accomplished fiction and non fiction author, but he spends a lot of time and effort on helping aspiring authors to make it in the writing game.
Seth Godin is one of the world’s most accomplished marketers, but he spends an inordinate amount of time on teaching and helping others and his books are aimed at helping others to do better marketing.
Examples that show that maybe teaching can become a good sideline too.
Your aim in offering to teach perfect strangers something about you’re own specialisms and skills is to simply get their email address or other contact details. If you do this properly you can consider yourself to have permission to keep in touch with them and this is where your cunning plan to turn them ultimately into advocates for your business begins.
Photo Credit: vancouverfilmschool via Compfight cc
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