Lacy Boggs“I just feel like something is missing.”
That’s what a potential client told me on the phone recently. She was already blogging regularly, getting pretty good traffic to her blog, lots of likes and shares on Facebook — but it wasn’t translating into sales for her.
She felt like she’d done everything she was “supposed” to do to blog for her business, but something was missing: that integral piece of strategy that connects blogging to selling.
In other words, she wasn’t planning her blog post content to support her sales cycles.
What is a sales cycle?
In the most basic terms, a sales cycle is just the period of time in which you sell a product or service. It might look something like this:
- Start hinting around that you’re developing a new product
- Announce that you’re developing a new product and when it will launch
- Launch the new product (shopping cart opens)
- Promote heavily while product is available
- Last promotion before shopping cart closes
- Repeat
Now, that’s if you’re using a launch cycle, which are so popular on the Internet. But sales cycles also apply to businesses with evergreen products and services. A great example of a business with strong sales cycles is a tax professional. She knows that from January – April, she’s going to be CRAZY busy helping people do their taxes. But there are probably also other parts of her service she can promote at other times of year.
I worked with a personal stylist recently, and because of the way the fashion world works, she could easily predict that she would have strong sales in the spring and the fall, when new lines come out. But we could also build additional sales cycles for her — maybe shopping the sales in the summer and winter, organizing closets in the spring and fall, planning for special occasions like weddings in June and holiday parties at the end of the year, and so on.
Once you understand what your sales cycle is, you can easily build your blog posts to support and promote that cycle.
How to use your blog to launch a product or service.
The big thing to remember is that MOST people are not going to buy something straight from your blog. So the blog is the first step in your marketing “funnel.”
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