#136: Why You Need to Deploy an Attraction Marketing Strategy

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. As a quick reminder, you can find details shown us for this episode@b2b launcher.com forward/episode1,3,6. And those notes include, as always, a summary of our discussion as well as links to resources mentioned during the show. If you've been following me for a while, you know that I talk a lot about prospecting for clients. In fact, most of my podcast episodes and articles about landing clients, how to get clients, are focused mainly on unprospecting as the method for doing that, for getting that result. And prospecting is absolutely key, there's no doubt about that. And the reason I spend so much time and resources teaching that is that when you need work, you can't just sit around waiting for that work to just kind of magically come to you. You need to find it, you need to find it now. And many of my listeners are often in situations where they, that's the case. They either don't have enough clients or they're trying to figure out how to, how to smooth out the ebb and flow of the work. And many times when they need advice is when, when they're desperately or they're getting to a point where they're going to need to find some more clients. So that's where the advice comes from. That is the reason behind why I talk so much about this and why I write so much about it. But sometimes I fear that this focus on landing work today I need work now, takes the focus away from an incredibly important aspect of marketing your business, and that's attraction marketing. So attraction marketing, as the name implies, is getting prospects to come to you as opposed to just knocking on doors yourself. So let's talk about the dynamics of each of these two methods because there's an interesting contrast here. So let's talk about attraction marketing first and let's start with the benefits or the pros of attraction marketing. Well, prospects come to you. They by coming to you. Depending on how you do this, they typically self qualify. I mean, just by the act that they're, the fact that they're making an inquiry means that everything else being equal, they probably are a qualified prospect to a certain extent. Right. Because they wouldn't be inquiring about your services. They wouldn't be downloading something from your website if they weren't a particular potential client. And there are exceptions, of course, or people who just kind of snoop it around. But for the most part, you know, a group of, let's say, 100 prospectors, a certain percentage, a very high percentage who could be potential clients. And in some professions, it's really the only way to really market your services. For instance, you've, you've heard some of, you've heard Derek Lewis, my friend and colleague who ghostwrites business books for a variety of authors and consultants and experts, and he's found that attraction marketing is really the only way to attract the kinds of clients that he needs. That's his main, in fact, his only business, building approaches through attraction marketing. He's tried the prospecting, he's tried the outreach, in other words, and it has not worked. And he talked about in a previous episode why that was the case. Coaches like myself, so people who provide coaching, services, training services, in many cases, I would say in most cases, knocking on doors is just not practical or effective. You really have to rely on attraction marketing. The other benefit is that with attraction marketing, you're in a position of strength. Prospects come to you. Think about how the dynamics change when prospects are coming to you instead of you knocking on their door. And this is one that we'll talk more about that in this episode. But this is one that a lot of people don't think about often, which is the fact that you end up with a large pool of prospects to work with over the long haul. And that's if you do it right with attraction marketing as opposed to direct outreach or outbound prospecting. And finally, one of the advantages is you can turn attraction marketing into a machine, if you will, that works for you day and night. So you don't necessarily need to be actively knocking on doors. You can set up a system where prospects come to you, they self qualify, they make an inquiry, they download something from you happening 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, the disadvantages of attraction marketing is that you do not have total control over who responds to you, right? So people are coming to you. That's, that's something that you, you do have the luxury of with outbound prospecting where you can pick, you can hand pick prospects to approach, but with attraction marketing, you don't have that. Most leads who end up inquiring or downloading something from you will not be ready. So it's only going to really pay off for you if you have a good follow up system and lead nurturing system in place over the long haul. If you don't, it can still work. But you're wasting a huge amount of the benefit that you're getting from attraction marketing. We'll talk more about that in a minute. And then the other disadvantage of attraction marketing is that it does take time and resources to set up that machine. So in order to build this infrastructure, it does take some time. There's a lot of moving parts and you know, you got to invest some resources in setting this up. It's just not going to happen on its own. So let's talk now about the other way you can find clients and that's prospecting. So you can, with prospecting, target a very specific group of prospects that you personally hand pick, which is nice. So you have, you're able to select them, you're very targeted, you know who you're going after. There are no surprises. You can also dial it up or down in terms of your efforts based on your workload and the health of your pipeline. So if you have a lot of work right now, you can really slow down or shift your prospecting into something it's not necessarily going to bring leads in the door. And when the pipeline is starting to dry up, you can turn that back up. Those are the really top two advantages I would think of outbound prospecting. Now let's talk about the disadvantages. Disadvantages is it does take time, discipline and courage. I mean, knocking on doors for obvious reasons takes time, takes time to research prospects, takes time to contact them, takes time to follow up, and it takes discipline to do all that. One of the biggest things that I hear from freelancers in all disciplines is Ed, I have good intentions. I just don't get it done. I don't get it done or I don't get it done consistently or nearly as consistently as I should. And then courage ties into all this, right? It does take courage to get out there and reach out to prospects. And for some people, that takes quite a bit of courage. For others is really not a big deal, but they still have to step outside their comfort zone a bit. And then the other disadvantage of outbound prospecting is that the prospect is in the position of strength because you're the one pursuing them as opposed to them pursuing you. So it really changes dynamics of the initial interaction with a prospect. Now there's no right or wrong. I, I'm a big believer that you need both. Again, most of what I write about and talk about is outbound prospecting, because that tends to me be kind of the immediate need that a lot of freelancers have. But really, you should be thinking long term. And if you want to have a healthy business over the long haul, you need a mix of both. You need a lead generating machine that works 24, 7, delivering what's hopefully a somewhat steady stream of good prospects to you and also in doing so, generates a larger pool of prospects you can follow up with over time and turn into clients. And I say larger pool because as I mentioned earlier, only a handful of those you generate will actually need someone right now. So that machine, if you do it right, can help you build that pool and then allow you to nurture and stay in touch with those prospects who aren't ready today until they are. And then you need a targeted outreach effort that enables you to hand select prospects and then again dial up or down your efforts based on your current or expected situation. Now, let's shift gears a little bit because I want to talk about this idea of generating that larger pool of prospects that you can follow up with. And this is a very important concept. I don't really see a lot of people writing about this or hear people talking about this in podcasts, at least in our freelance community. So I really want to hone in on this so you understand why this is such an important concept. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of any kind of marketing, and I'm talking about prospecting and client attraction, is that most prospects aren't ready to hire you today. So in other words, if you take a bundle of, say, 100 prospects, just so we have an even number there, only a handful, as I mentioned earlier, are ready to discuss actual work with you today. And that's exhausting, isn't it? You know, especially with the outbound stuff, you know, you're knocking on a ton of doors or you put in all this effort into hopefully generating some traffic and converting some of that traffic and leads, and only a handful of people actually need someone now or very, very soon. Well, it's not unusual. Okay, so you're not alone. There's nothing wrong with you. Everyone struggles to find prospects who are ready and willing to engage today. And that's not just in the world of creative services. I see this all the time in virtually any business to business, market or environment. So from medical devices to software, manufacturing, consulting, advisory services, heavy equipment, I mean, you name it, that's just the reality of the situation in terms of leads and lead readiness. And we talked about that recently in episode 130 of the podcast where I talked about the importance of nurturing those not yet ready leads over a period of months or even years. And the point is that when you're marketing a considered purchase, only a certain percentage of the target market is actively looking for, for what you sell. Now I did mention one study and I wanted to actually bring a couple others in there because I want to show you some numbers and then kind of come up with a rough average. And you'll see where I'm going with this here in a minute. So according to research by business development agency Vorsite, only 3% of qualified prospects are actively searching for someone who provides your services. Okay, only three out of 100. So what about the other 97? Well, out of those 97, about 40 will probably have a need for your services sometime in the next few months. So I say 40 because we're dealing here with a whole number just to make it easy. 40, 40%, however you want to look at it. And these are not your, these are your not yet ready prospects, I should say. So three are ready. Let's just take a bundle of 100, three are ready, 40 will probably have a need sometime in the next few months, and then the rest, which is about 57 of them, will not be looking anytime soon. So that's the study by Vorseit. Now, the first time I ran into this dynamic, which I found fascinating, was actually an in depth study by Connor's Business Information of more than 40,000 inquiries generated by ads and press releases. And here how the, here's how the numbers shook out. Basically 11% of leads purchased within three months of inquiring about the product or service that they were interested in. Okay, now when you think about it, that's not far off from the 3% that Vorsite quoted they found in their, in their research. 3%, 11%. And I say not far off because the point is that it's still a very, very minimal number of people. 17% purchased within four to six months, 25% purchased within seven to 12 months, and 47% took more, more than one year to buy. Okay, so that's Connor's business information. 40,000 inquiries. That's what they found. The one I want to really Highlight is at 11%, only 11% purchase within three months of inquiring about that product or service. Now there's another one that I wanted to actually two more that I wanted to bring in. One is a lead conversion study that was done by a service that handles millions of inquiries across all different kinds of industries, and they specialize in trade shows. So back in the day, and it's been a while since I've been in a trade show, so a lot of this is actually automated these days. Long time ago. I say a long time ago in Internet years, 15, 20 years ago. The way that most marketers at a trade show track their leads is they would hire a company to do a lot of this. And of course, people who walk by the booth, they would capture that lead. But many times, either at a trade show or in industry publications, there would be these little cards, these punch cards. And if you're interested in learning more about a particular product or a particular company, you would just punch out the little areas or dots corresponding to that company or to a product, and it'd be like a whole sheet of them. And many times they were in a postcard size, and you would send it out. You either punch it out or you just fill it in like a Scantron kind of thing. And what that magazine or that trade show would do is they would take that information, figure out, okay, this customer is looking for information on these three products. And then they would forward that inquiry to those companies that they wanted to know more about. And this process would take weeks. I never understood why that was the case, but it take weeks. And then finally, you would get it as the vendor, and then you would contact that company and send them a brochure or catalog or what have you. So it's interesting. This company handles, again, millions of inquiries across all kinds of industries. And they found that 50% of people who inquired about a product or service bought that product or service within 18 months of inquiring about it, but only 15% bought within 90 days of inquiry. So that means that 85% of the value of a group of leads today, again, we kind of think of this as a group of a hundred, a bundle of 100. So 85 out of those hundred of a group of leads today is in that period of time that starts 90 days from now, not anything sooner. Okay, so let's go back and recap real quick. These guys found only 15 out of a hundred are ready to buy or actually bought within 90 days of inquiring. Connors found 11%. Vorsite found 3%. And there's one other quick one which I found a few months ago, and that's marketing donut. And that's. This is more recent data. They found that 63% of people requesting information on your company today or in your services will not purchase or will not hire you for at least three months. And 20% will take more than 12 months to buy. So 63% will be at least three months. Now, the point of all this, most prospects, regardless of the industry or what they buy, are not ready to buy today. In other words, you have to treat any kind of marketing, both prospecting and lead generation, as a long game because it takes a lot of time, effort and energy and resources to generate that bundle of leads. And if all all you're focused on is who's ready today. And let's face it, many of us, that's really the main concern. You're spending a ton of time and resources on just a handful of ready now leads, if you will. You're much better off maximizing the return on that effort and energy by taking a longer term view and then adjusting your strategy so that you can capitalize on every possible win. And for the sake of simplicity, let's just take a rough average of the studies I've talked about here. The 3%, 11%, 15%. So let's say we're roughly talking about, let's just average it out. 10% of who are ready now. That's a nice even number. 10% of people who inquire, people who say they might be interested, are ready today, ready to hire you today. If you understand that, then let's take that one step further. Your job is to start a conversation with prospects who are ready now. In other words, the 10% and then stay in touch with the other 90% until those who will eventually buy identify themselves. Okay, so let me say that again. Your job is to start a conversation with those who are ready today so that 10% and then stay in touch with the other 90% until those who will eventually be ready identify themselves. And then that leaves you with the other group, which you're not really sure how many of them will just never buy. But you can't just assume that the rest will never buy. You just have to assume that there's a good chance that out of the other group, a good amount of them. And again, if you look at the Vore site numbers and some of the other ones I give you, at least 40% will end up hiring someone who does what you do over the long haul. And the most efficient way to kickstart this process is by deploying a methodical client attraction strategy, one where you leave a series of breadcrumb trails that lead the right kind of prospects to your website, and then also gets as many of these prospects as possible to identify Themselves. So when I say breadcrumb trails, what am I talking about? Okay, so these are the Think of them as a traffic generation systems, traffic generation vehicles, social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Keep pointing to valuable relevant content on your website. Your own blog can be a breadcrumb trail because it can be found out there. If you continually update with good content, it can be found guest posting. So posting in a blog or other publication that your target market, your prospects actually read can be a great way to leave breadcrumb trails to your site. LinkedIn publisher it's another underused strategy for a lot of freelancers. You can take that same content and then go ahead and publish it in LinkedIn and expose it to a whole new set of eyes. Most of them are still going to be your first degree contacts, but many of those first degree contacts aren't seeing the content on your website. So you're trying to increase the probability that we'll come across your thoughts and ideas medium. It's a great company, great organization, it's a platform that allows you to go ahead and publish your content and again, it can be repurposed content you've already written and published in your blog and again increase the chance that a new set of eyes will actually come across it. YouTube. So repurposing your written content into just very simple screencast or even talking head content, if you wanted to go that route, can be another way to increase the chances that other people who would have never heard of you and your services will find you. Being a guest on very targeted podcasts that your audience might be listening to is another method. Search engine optimization. Now you know this is not about gaming. The system is simply about producing quality, relevant content. And again, everything we've been talking about will improve your search engine optimization, meaning the chances that someone, when they're doing a search on Google, will find you for the types of services that you offer, speaking or being volunteering to be a part of a panel. Again, you're exposing yourself, your message, your ideas to different people who may not have heard of you before. That's another great breadcrumb trail. Smart networking and passing out business cards at these events, not in a, you know, kind of a mass, let me dump a bunch of business cards to this group. Smart networking to me, and we've talked about this in the blog before, is all about going deeper with very targeted organizations. So rather than trying to network in 48 different places, this is about picking one or two very targeted organizations where your prospects actually hang out and going deeper many times With a designated role, you're volunteering, being part of a committee, being part of the board, helping to plan and organize the events. The idea is, with breadcrumb trails, you're essentially planting seeds in various strategic places, not to use mixed metaphors, but you're really leading people to your site. And you're not doing it haphazardly. You're being very focused. You know exactly where to start those trails, where to plant those seeds so that the right people come to your site. The idea is not like maybe in a consumer blog, to drive as much volume as possible in terms of traffic. The idea is to be very selective, quality over quantity. So you leave a breadcrumb trail and several breadcrumb trails to your website where prospects can find out more about you. And better yet, you lead people to a page on your website where they can download a relevant and useful piece of content in exchange for giving you their name and their email address. That piece of content is often called a lead magnet or a buzz piece, and it accomplishes a number of very important things. First, it gives the prospect something of value. Also, by requesting the lead magnet, they've essentially raised their hand. In other words, they've identified themselves as someone who might be a prospect for you. The great thing is now you have their email address, you have their contact information so you can follow up with that prospect. And finally, by doing it this way, it enables you to showcase your knowledge and expertise, which is the seed of building trust with a prospect. So by adding value to them, by showing them that you know your stuff, you are showcasing that knowledge and expertise and building trust. Now, just so you can better understand kind of this idea of that building a bigger tool of qualified prospects, of good prospects, through inbound prospecting, through attraction marketing, and how that compares to outbound prospecting, let's look at a table. And I have a copy of this table in the show notes bwlauncher.com episode 1, 3, 6 and I urge you to take a look at it. I'll describe the table here and I'll compare the numbers, but it's really powerful when you see it there in front of you. What I'm doing is I'm comparing different stages of getting a prospect, from being completely unknown to contacting them, to engaging in a conversation, to turning some of those into clients and then following up and turning some others into clients over the long haul, just to kind of compare what the results might be. And this is a hypothetical situation, but it's really based on. It's based on reality. And it's based on my experience and the experience of others who do this all the time. So let's compare attracting leads through a lead magnet that someone can download on your website as opposed to attracting prospects by actually knocking on doors by doing outbound prospecting. So the first row that you'll see on the table is page visitors or prospects contacted. So page visitors would be relevant for a lead magnet scenario where you are driving some very qualified traffic to your, to your website, to a page on your website where they can download this piece of content. And prospects contacted is pretty self explanatory. You're actually reaching out to prospects. And I have the same number. Just so we compare apples to apples on the table, I have 100 for attraction marketing and 100 for prospecting. All right, so let's go to the next row. All right, how many requested the lead magnet? Let's just say that 10 out of those hundred, 10% requested the lead magnet. That's a very conservative estimate. I wanted to go with some conservative numbers here to be fair with the prospecting, obviously that doesn't apply. So there's no number there. The next row. All right, which one of these prospects had an immediate need? So those who downloaded the lead magnet, let's just say that one of them had a need kind of in the short run. And with prospecting, let's assume the same one. Prospects, One prospect had an immediate need. Next row, the next step. How many turned into clients within 90 days of first contact? So let's use the same numbers. Let's say that out of the lead magnet, the one who had an immediate need turned into a client within 90 days. And same with prospecting, the one who had an immediate need turned into a client within 90 days. All right, what about staying in touch longer term follow up? Well, here's where things start to divert a little bit. This is interesting. So when you use the lead magnet approach, you're using attraction marketing. In a classic scenario, you've had a bunch of people, in this case 10 people request a lead magnet. One of those turned to a client. Now I'm going to, just for the sake of simplicity, say that nine others, the other nine you're staying in touch with over the long haul. Right? So one out of the ten turn into a client. The other nine you're just following up. Some responded say I'm interested but we don't have a need right now. Others didn't respond. You're still following up with them. With prospecting, the reality is that most of us just that. That's it. One, one of them had an interest. That's pretty much where you stop. You didn't go back to that same list and knock on those doors again. So I have a zero there. So let's go to the next step. Okay, well, if you follow up with prospects, how many of those prospects, and in the case of Lead Magnet, there were nine of them. How many of those nine that you were following up with turn into clients within 12 months? Remember the results of the studies. If you stay top of mind, there's a good chance that you'll be able to turn some of those not yet ready now, not ready now into clients in the future. So in the Lead magnet scenario, a third. So three out of those nine could very well turn into clients within a 12 month period if you follow up the right way. With prospecting, obviously the answer is zero. Most of us are really following up. We just go. When we do get one who's ready, we pretty much stop there. We keep going down the list, but we don't go back to the original people we contacted who either said no or who didn't respond. So when you compare the numbers, here's what we have. Total clients generated, four lead magnet. The lead magnet approach. Four one that you generated within 90 days. Three that you generated later because of good follow up with prospecting. Out of the 100, you ended up with one who had an immediate need. No additional follow up. Total clients generated 1. A 4 to 1 ratio. Again, hypothetical example, but very realistic situation. And what makes a big difference is with attraction marketing, you end up with a bigger pool of prospects to work with. Right, because out of the 10 who requested the lead magnet, one became a client, but you now have nine others you could follow up with. That's huge. You don't have that with the outbound prospecting. This gives you an opportunity to build trust and credibility with those nine until they're ready to engage with you. I cannot overemphasize that point. Having a bigger pool of prospects to work with, not just prospects, but actual leads, because that's really what they are. They've raised their hands and indicated direct or indirect interest in your services by downloading that Lead Magnet. This is one of the best ways to maximize the return on investment of your marketing efforts. Not only that, but take another look at the first line, the effort row. So in the Attract via Lead Magnet column, we're talking about 100 visitors that you've attracted to your Lead Magnet offer page. The same row in the Prospecting column shows that you've knocked on 100 doors. Now let me ask you, which one of these took more effort driving 100 visitors to a page organically or knocking on 100 individual doors? I think the answer is pretty clear. Driving 100 visitors to a page in an organic way because you've left breadcrumb trails. They're the ones doing the work. You did the work initially to put that content, those content, those breadcrumb trails out there. But they're the ones who made the effort of going to your site and downloading, requesting that lead magnet. With outbound prospecting, you had to knock on each of those doors individually. So it makes sense to have some kind of lead magnet strategy in place. But the reason most freelancers don't do this is that they don't have a system in place to make it happen. And the simple marketing automation that enables us, the heaviest lifting of this whole process is getting someone to raise their hand. And that's really key, right? To get someone to go to that page and actually request that lead magnet. That's essentially they're raising their hand and showing interest in what you have to offer. That is the hardest part. Once you do that, it's easier to get those folks to start a conversation with you and for some of them to eventually buy. So again, going back to the numerical example, out of the 10 who download the lead magnet, that was the hardest part of that process. Once you have those 10, starting a conversation and following up with, with, with those 10 is not that difficult. That is not, it's a longer term effort. But really the biggest, the hardest thing is to generate those 10 leads. So your job is to continually leave breadcrumbs from strategic locations, again, very targeted locations, where your prospects hang out, where they might see you, where they might read this information and then follow the trail all the way to your page on your website where you offer them a lead magnet that's relevant, useful and somehow tied to what you do. And then that page triggers your lead generation machine. In other words, the engine that enables you to get a prospect's contact information, deliver the lead magnet and then follow up in a non threatening way in order to identify those who are ready to engage now and those who will need longer term nurturing. So here's the bottom line. Prospecting is great, absolutely is. It's an essential strategy for most of us. But without an attraction marketing system in place, you're missing out on a proven and systematic way to generate quality prospects, one that can again work for you. 247 and help position you as the obvious choice. Now, as simple as this sounds, this process I just described has many moving parts. In fact, it has so many moving parts that solo professionals will often avoid the whole thing or they'll give up halfway through building it. I see it all the time. I've seen writers spend months writing and producing just a very basic lead magnet, mostly because they weren't really sure how to do it right or they struggled with analysis paralysis. What should I write about? Oh, that's not going to be good enough. They were already halfway through it. You know, I don't know. This is stupid. It's a negative self talk. And that's just a lead magnet. Once they get into deploying the technology to make that lead generation system work, that's yet another rabbit hole, another stumbling block that can take months of on and off tinkering. One of the things my team and I have had to get really, really good at over the past five years is designing and deploying these systems as a business coach and as a trainer. Prospecting for clients is not really an option for me. It doesn't work well, as I mentioned earlier, for the services I provide. So I have to rely 100% on attraction marketing. And over the years I've gotten really good at it. Just to give you an idea, over the past year alone, my team and I have written and produced more than 36 lead magnets. And I'm not saying that to brag, I'm just saying that to just show you that this is something we've had to by necessity become very good at doing, at executing and doing well. And I've built a team of professionals who are amazing at deploying our attraction marketing efforts. It's taken a while to build that team, to develop the standard operating procedures, all the processes to get this machine well oiled and working properly. And that got me thinking recently. You know, we've developed this competency in house as a team, we're excellent at it. Why not offer this expertise to my tribe? Why not help some folks design and fully deploy their own lead generation machine, if you will. That way they can focus on what they do best and then allow us to take on some of the pieces of the process that cost so much heartache and procrastination for most people. So that's what we're doing. I'm right now looking for a few established writers, copywriters and marketing professionals who see the value in having a powerful attraction marketing system in place and who would rather let someone else do it for them. Someone who's already done this many, many times before. They already have the skill set and who has the proven track record deploying these systems. Now this is an experiment. I'm looking to try this out with a few people and I'm specifically looking to create some exciting success stories we can all brag about. That way, if I offer this service again, we'll have some awesome case studies to showcase. If this sounds interesting, send me an email@edblauncher.com put leads in the subject line, just the word leads all caps in the subject line and I'll reply with all the details. So that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope this got you thinking in a different direction and that you have some ideas already for how you can deploy some attraction marketing in your business. This has been Ed Gandia. Have an awesome day.

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