Graham McGregor: Are you marketing to a warm audience?

There is a difference between 'chasing' and 'attracting' clients. Photo / 123RF

One of the key things I've learned in marketing is the difference between 'chasing' clients and 'attracting' clients.

When you 'chase' a client you often focus on trying to gain one new client at a time.

When you 'attract' clients you focus on attracting a warm audience of dozens or more potential clients to start with. You then nurture and add value to this warm audience of people and easily turn a number of them into paying clients.

I've tried both approaches over the last 40 years and in my experience 'attracting clients' is a lot more enjoyable for both you and your clients.

It also seems to work far better as well.

The way you attract clients is you focus first on building a 'warm audience' of ideal potential clients for your services.

Then you focus on converting a number of people in this warm audience into paying clients.

Let me give you a real life example on the value of building a warm audience:

In March 2011 a good friend encouraged me to grow my marketing business by attracting large numbers of potential clients.

At that point I had a small number of good marketing clients and around 279 people who received a monthly ezine I wrote on marketing.

(In other words, outside my clients and my ezine subscribers I was virtually invisible.)

I decided to build a warm audience of small business owners who were interested in using proven marketing strategies to grow their sales and profits.

I created a helpful resource called 'The Unfair Business Advantage Report' which contained interviews I did with over 30 top sales and marketing experts from 5 countries.

Each expert shared one strategy that a business owner could use to grow sales and profits quickly and give their business an "Unfair Business Advantage" as it were.

I began offering this resource on a new website and within a few months I had business owners in over 19 countries register to receive it.

Now I had a warm audience of several thousand business owners that I could communicate with.

So I began sending the people in my warm audience helpful information on sales and marketing.

I also offered them a number of my marketing services and programmes.

To my delight I started receiving payment for my marketing programmes and marketing services from people all around the world.

As a result of offering a helpful resource that added high value I created a warm audience of thousands of business owners who knew me, liked me and trusted me.

And over the last few years this has resulted in many more of the people in this audience becoming happy marketing clients.

So how do you build a warm audience for your services?

It's very simple.

Offer something that adds high value to your target market.

Offer this in exchange for their name and an email address.

My favourite way of adding high value is to offer a 'how to' guide that helps someone to
improve their business results.

I had great success using my 'Unfair Business Advantage Report' to build a warm audience
of small business owners in many different countries.

At that point I was focussed on working with a range of different types of businesses for my
marketing services.

Today my focus is on working with businesses that offer an expensive service over $10,000.

Which is why I've written the 106 page 'how to' guide called 'The Expensive Service Marketing Solution.'

This guide contains 21 strategies that businesses who sell an expensive service can use to attract
ideal new clients and turn them into raving fans for life.

In exchange for providing this helpful 'how to' guide at no charge I get the names and contact
email addresses of business owners in a number of countries who offer an expensive service.

So I'm now building a warm audience of businesses that I can begin to communicate with.

You may like to take exactly the same approach.

Create a 'how to' guide that adds value to your target market.

Then offer this guide to that target market.

You'll then create a warm audience to market to.

"Make your marketing so useful, people will pay you for it." Jay Baer

Action Exercise:
What 'how to' guide could you offer that would quickly attract dozens of potential clients for your business?

Graham McGregor is a Marketing Advisor and helps businesses who offer an expensive service to quickly attract ideal new clients. You can download his brand new 106 page marketing guide 'The Expensive Service Marketing Solution' at no charge from www.TheExpensiveServiceMarketingSolution.com