Educating Your Prospects Effortlessly

Part of being able to run a successful marketing system is finding ways to automate your marketing processes. One very powerful area for automation is educating your prospects.

Educating prospects is a vital step that many small businesses struggle with.

Struggle #1 – Your ideal prospects don’t even know they need your product or service.
Struggle #2 – Your ideal prospects can’t seem to connect the dots between their problem and your product or service as a solution
Struggle #3 – Your ideal prospects each have very different problems that can be solved by your products or services by using them in different ways.

Our answer to these issues many times is the “Product Dump”.

The Print or Web Dump – “Here is our gazillion page BROCHURE”
The Verbal Shotgun Approach – “Our product or service does this, this, this, and did I mention this”
The Boring Presentation Approach – “And here on Slide 100 we show you how our product/service can do this?

Here is a more effective solution to not only overcome the product dump, but also stay top of mind with valuable prospective leads.

Automating Your Education

Have you ever heard of an autoresponder? Unlike email software, autoresponders are built very much like an email, but are sent to a lead at scheduled times after that lead has been added to a system?

Let me explain through the following example:

You meet Mary at an event and she is a perfect prospect for you business. But you can tell that she doesn’t understand how your product or service can benefit her. You want to send her 6 emails over the next three months to demonstrate the power of your solution.

You would like an email to go out the same day you enter her email address into your system that is personalized by name and tells her how much you enjoyed meeting her. It may even explain to her that she is the ideal type of person you like to work with and that you feel that your products and services may be beneficial to her at some point in the future. Therefore, you would like to send her some information from time to time to demonstrate your solutions, if that is okay with her.

Assuming it is okay, then perhaps 1 day later you send an email that explains WHY a solution is even necessary for Mary’s problem and examples of where doing nothing could be detrimental.

1 week later, you might send a third email that introduces a particular solution and invites Mary to demo it, trial it, etc.

1 month later, you want to send another with a case study on the solution and point out another valuable solution.

1 month after that, you point out another feature and perhaps a testimonial

And finally another month later, you make another offer, or perhaps invite Mary to an event. You check in on her interest level and and find out if the information you are sending is valuable. If yes, then from here on in, maybe she moves over to your enewsletter or hard copy publication for regular updates from the company.

Autoresponders like those offered by aWeber or iContact allow you to set up the content for these emails just once and then set up a schedule, so that your identified prospects receive them automatically. This mini education campaign can now work in the background while you work on other aspects of your business.

Give it a try and stop the ONE-HIT product dump. Your prospects will thank you.

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