Looking for a way to engage prospective clients—and to get them to give you an idea of how interested they really are in your products or services? Make them a free offer. Give them something of value at no charge—in exchange for their contact information.
If you sell high-ticket items, or something that has a long sales cycle, there’s a good chance that your prospective customers aren’t going to make their purchase online. What they will do online is gather information. And the bigger (and more involved) the purchase, the more information they’ll want to gather. One way to separate casual browsers from qualified leads is to offer them in-depth information—and see who is willing to give you their contact information in order to get it.
That’s where an e-book, a special report or a white paper can be a great offer. It’s your chance to provide more detailed information in an easy-to-digest, non-threatening and cost-free format. It’s something we do at TMR on a regular basis (and here are some examples of what we offer).
Ah, but where do those e-books and special reports come from? You can create them from scratch. Maybe you’ve got someone in the office who can pull together a five- to 10-page e-book that you can offer to potential clients. But what if you don’t have the staff for that? Or what if that feels overwhelming?
There’s an easy way to pull together a helpful, interesting e-book. Review your past blogs. Pull out the ones that were read the most. Look for the common themes, and string them together into a longer document. If you look at some successful business authors (Guy Kawasaki comes to mind), this is how they end up with some of their best-selling books. They repurpose their blog content.
What if you don’t have a backlog of blogs from which to draw? Offer a compelling case study you’ve done. If you don’t have case studies, repurpose a PowerPoint presentation you’ve done and turn it into an e-book.
The point is you probably have good material that’s just sitting around. Review it. Freshen it up. Re-work it and re-package it and offer it to your potential customers. Offer them something that will help them move toward a decision. Just make sure it’s not a veiled sales pitch. Give them something of value (your knowledge and information) in exchange for something of value (their contact information and indication of interest). Take advantage of the resources you already have on hand!
