Internet marketing experts estimate that at any given time only a fraction of the market is interested in the product or service you are selling.  The problem is if you don’t know who they are or when they plan on buying, how can you earn their business?  Here are some things you can and need to do.

1. Implement a marketing strategy using a lead nurturing system

What I am referring to here is a series of direct or e-mail campaigns that serve one purpose, and that is to ensure that your company, your product and the value you offer is consistently in front of potential customers for months on end.  Marketing people refer to this as “the rule of seven” which simply means that people may not recognize your offering until they see it seven times.  So many companies make the mistake of sending a single message. If the prospect does not respond they move to a new list, convinced the first one was no good.

2. Make sure your message delivers value to the prospect

Stop selling for a minute. Special holiday discounts or offers for “free anything” don’t make sense.  In fact they can irritate the buyer.  I get these all the time; buy now and get 50% off. I don’t even know what they are selling so why would I have any interest – discount or no discount.  Instead offer something you would have an interest in reading.  If you wouldn’t click on it why would you expect a prospect to?

3. Try to differentiate yourself from your competition

Some people call this “thought leadership” which is nothing but a fancy title for being smarter than your competition. Present ideas that are outside the box, ideas that inspire creative thinking for both you and the potential prospect. If your message is educational or intriguing and gets them to think about what they read, chances are they will remember you.

4. Don’t stop marketing

People seem to think marketing is a part time job. Send a mailer and you are done.  It’s not. Let’s go back to what we said earlier – You may not know the right time when a prospect will decide to buy, but as long as your product and service is consistently in front of them you can bet that when they do decide to buy you will be on the call list.

Creating an automated marketing program without the proper tools can be quite the challenge.  The good news is that there are several very good CRM software programs that can automate this process and make life easy for you.  In part two of this paper, I will discuss the automation process and how CRM software has matured and is delivering value for marketing professionals.

This article is sponsored by Commence Corporation, a leading provider of web based CRM software.

Image by Federico Raviele on Flickr under Creative Commons license.