Marketing - conversations or transactions?

If you read anything about marketing these days you'll find a lot of talk about "conversations" with your prospective buyers. And in the context of social media that might be literally the case.

However, as mentioned in previous articles, there's more to marketing than just social media conversations. What we're trying to achieve is a sale, and to get there you'll need to perform a series of non-monetary transactions.

The first transaction is the one where you get someone to give their contact details to you. In the "olden days" we used to send people a flyer that described a "deliverable" in brief - something like a "pocket guide to..." or a booklet on "the ten steps to guarantee success in...". The flyer had a form which people returned, and we sent the "deliverable" through the post. Quaint? Well yes and no.

This principle lives on though the world of the Internet, with deliverables often being in the form of PDFs. But it's still a transaction that's going on. The marketer offers something that their target market is likely to find useful, and the individual gives up their contact details in exchange for the information.

Of course the benefits of performing these transactions online include cost-effectiveness and speed, though consideration should be given to a prited deliverable - this is something that, if useful will get left on desks thus providing wider "advertising".

As your contact finds your content more useful they can be encouraged to give up further information about themselves and their buying intent. This self-qualification is a great way to reduce cost of sales.

A carefully constructed campaign of transactions like these offers a funnel of self-qualifying sales leads. Get in touch if you'd like to find out more.