When considering your marketing and sales strategy, ask your yourself a question – why should your market care about you?

People buy when they have a need. Outside of those who buy quickly, Sellers always seem to be concerned with 2 things:

1. Follow up until they do buy
2. Drive them to your website

While these are actually good ideas, most times they are not done very well. Let’s break it down…

Turn Prospecting into Sharing

Most times that a seller follows up, they are basically saying, “Are you ready to buy yet?“. Endless calls and emails are sent with very little or no results. All this does is continue to flood your market with annoying and unwanted messages. The main goal in following up with any prospect is to offer them something they value – and the most sensible thing to offer them is information.

How? Use some simple tools like Google Alerts to search for articles and information that your market can benefit from. Send them links, but don’t don’t sell to them – just share information. This strategy can work very well for individual sales people to connect with their prospects. BTW – your prospects are part of your network too… so treat them like it. Give them referrals, helpful information and things they can use.

Your Website – Why Should They Care?

For a larger, organizational approach strategy – give your market a place to go for information. Consider again – unless someone had an immediate need to buy, why else would they ever visit your website?

Your website can be a place for people to learn and share information. By building this idea at the core of what your website is, you will be positioning yourself as a thought leader, a resource, an organization of value. By using blogs (like this one on WordPress), and creating opportunities for your market (with tools like Twitter, Delicious, Groups on Linkedin…) to learn more about your industry and current topics, you are giving them something they can really use and that is what will bring them back. What you are really doing here is positioning your brand into the conversation that is already going on – and that is a very valuable way to build engagement and awareness.