This isn’t 2003, so why are you still marketing like it is?
Have you ever received an email that you didn’t ask for? An email that was so obvious an attempt to solicit you, sent to your personal inbox, without your permission?
How did that make you feel?
A lot of business owners are hypocrites because when they receive spam they are upset, and then a day later they are spamming people themselves.
The following online marketing strategies can be used with any inbound lead generation vertical. As an Entrepreneur who has built a Company in Raleigh, NC, here is what I’ve discovered:
There are two methods to marketing your business online.
Chase or Attract
Chasing Business Online
You can chase after people by spamming their emails with drip campaigns, messaging their inboxes on Facebook/LinkedIn, and chase after them aggressively. If you are marketing your business like this you may be turning people off, and losing credibility. It’s intrusive, it’s aggressive and it’s the short game.
There was never permission given to these individuals to email consumers, or to spam them with listing updates. It’s a shortcut, and it’s an invasion of privacy.
With that being said, this strategy can still work for the short term. It will max out. If you want to risk your business playing a short term game than this strategy will work for you. There are a lot of cons with this approach. You risk losing a lot of unrealized opportunity because you’re going to annoy a lot of people along the way.
Facebook is now giving people permission to turn some of their friends ‘off’ without unfriending them by unfollowing them.
Attracting Business Online
The other method is to attract business. This method requires a lot more effort, creativity, and patience. It’s a long-term play, and you need to begin with the end in mind. It’s not going to happen overnight, and you are NOT going to make as much money in the early stages as those who are chasing, at first.
The skills you learn from attracting people to do business with you will help you grow exponentially, whereas the people who chase, have lost a lot of unrealized opportunity.
Attracting people to your business is going to require you to be out in front of them at the exact moment they need you. You can do this by building, publishing, and sharing valuable content that is going to help consumers. Create a great experience for them whenever they see your brand name.
It’s up to you to create a great business, and only you know what your end goal is.
How do you Attract Leads?
You build valuable content that helps consumers, and you’re right there for them at the moment they need you. You give, give, give and expect nothing in return. If you have given enough, you have earned the right to ‘ask.’
It’s important for you to understand the results I achieved so you know that I’m not making this up:
It takes time. After 6 months I had nothing to show for all the content I built from blog articles, YouTube videos, infographics and more. Other people were having a lot of success around me, and they started at the same time as me. Veterans told me to get back on the phones and start selling. I almost did.
I stuck it out, instead. Now, every day over 1,000 people are using my website to search homes for sale in Raleigh. There is no forced registration, in fact, we are one of the few websites that do not force consumers to give us their information. This has been part of the reason we have grown to 30,000 monthly users in less than 18 months. People keep coming back, because they enjoy using the website.
Unforced Registration
Listen, if you have a website and you are constantly in someone’s face asking them to sign up, they are not going to want to use your site. It’s intrusive and creates a bad experience.
When you click on a YouTube video and you have to wait 15 seconds for the ad to finish before you can watch the video, how do you feel? They are wasting your time, right?
YouTube has earned the right to market to people in this fashion because they provide so much value. This is what you need to do as well. Earn the right to market to people.
Thirty thousand people per month are on my real estate website searching homes for sale in Raleigh. A year and a half ago, I didn’t have a website. Nearly 5 people per day give us their information willingly, because we earned their trust. A year ago no one gave us their information willingly.
The website you build is going to grow overtime, and it takes a lot of hard work and patience – start with your end goal in mind.
Whether you use YouTube, Facebook, or any other online marketing methods to attract people to your business it’s going to begin at 0. Exponential growth starts small by nature.
Final Thoughts on Marketing yourself Online
When people choose to do something, it’s their idea, and this is a much stronger bond than when they are forced to do something.
Your end goal needs to be clear before you start your business because everything you do needs to be with a purpose towards that goal.
Be patient, work harder than everyone else, and when everyone else is taking a day off it’s your opportunity to push ahead of them.
“A dream without a plan is just a wish” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This post was originally published in the YPN Lounge at Realtor.org, you can read the original here.
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