The Cure for the Common Cold Call
I won’t wait. I’ll tell you right off that the cure for the common cold call is permission. Understand permission and your entire outlook about marketing will change along with your bottom line.
Are you familiar with the phrase Permission Marketing?
If you’re trying to sell anything today (including your ideas), you should be.
The opposite of the common cold call (interruption marketing) is the least expensive, and most effective kind. It’s called permission marketing because it’s the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.
You can’t force anyone to pay attention to you anymore. All you can do is entice.
It works like this.
- You offer your prospects an incentive (like free information via your newsletter, blog, white paper or TV ad) to volunteer to pay attention to your marketing. This incentive may also be a prize for entering a contest or sweepstakes, a discount coupon, or perhaps it’s membership to a select group such as Visa cardholders, or golf club members. And it might even take the form of an actual free gift. All you ask in return is permission to market to these people. Nothing else.
- Using the attention offered by the prospect , offer more specific information, webinars, seminars, shows, workshops, training, etc., over time, teaching the consumer about your product or service.
- Reinforce the incentive to guarantee that the prospect maintains the permission
- Offer additional incentives to get even more permission from the consumer.
- Over time, leverage the permission to change consumer behavior towards profits
Nothing good is free, and that goes double for Permission. Acquiring solid, deep permission from targeted customers is an investment.
Once you’ve embarked upon a permission marketing campaign, you can spend less time marketing to strangers and more time marketing to friends. You can move your marketing from beyond mere reach and frequency and into the realm of trust.
Permission Marketing cuts through the clutter and allows a business or organization to speak to prospects as friends, not strangers. This personalized, anticipated, frequent, and relevant communication has infinitely more impact than a random message displayed in a random place at a random moment.
Indispensable Marketing takes a process approach to developing and installing your small business marketing.