Small Business Lead Generation
You should have this goal for your product or service. What information will help set the buying criteria in your favor? No matter what you sell, data makes your information work harder. Also, it needs to be said that the more complex your product or service is the better the opportunity to appear as an expert. If you come from the place of truly wanting to serve your buyer, then being a market expert-not just a product expert-means being more knowledgeable than any of your competitors. This is easy to do as most of your competitors will be more concerned about selling product than about positioning themselves as experts.
If you really want to serve your buyer, then you must be a market expert and not just a product expert. This is simple since most of your competitors will be more concerned about selling product than about positioning themselves as experts. In cases where I have personally run companies using these strategies or helped clients do the same, we have literally slaughtered our competitors.
Here are two more examples of Education based marketing. I worked with a company that sold research aids to tax experts such as accountants and lawyers. They were focused on product data: They would say,” Here’s our research aid and here’s what it does.” I changed their focus to market data: “The IRS now requires you to take these 22 steps in your research. These are steps you can’t possibly bill to the client, as no client will pay for all this. So what you can do instead is use our products. These products speed up this process.” Market data made the product data much more important.
I had another client that sold calendars ranging from Pam Anderson to puppies. We did studies and found that per square inch, bookstores were outselling large retailers by forty percent more volume. Here’s why: Bookstores were putting calendars right by the cash registers. So, if you are standing in line to check out you see a calendar on cars such as Mustangs.
Your boss loves Mustangs so you buy him the calendar. Mass merchant stores were putting the calendars in the back by the stationary department. They weren’ t selling nearly as many calendars. By showing this date to more and more stores, this client increased sales 20% in a single year whereas they had not had an increase in sales for four years prior to using this market data to motivate better positioning of the calendars.