If we’ve learned anything over the last decade it’s that the stock market is volatile and difficult to predict with precision. Even Warren Buffet can’t tell you exactly when a stock will go hot or drop like a rock.
Which is how the whole concept of dollar cost averaging came to be.
According to Investopedia.com, it’s a technique of buying a fixed dollar amount of a particular investment on a regular schedule, regardless of the share price. More shares are purchased when prices are low, and fewer shares are bought when prices are high.
Dollar-cost averaging lessens the risk of investing a large amount in a single investment at the wrong time.
That’s how you need to think about your marketing efforts as well. Rather than trying to guess when a potential buyer might be ready to buy, you need to be marketing every day, so that when they’re ready, you’re right there.
Even if you sell a season-specific product or service, that doesn’t let you off the hook. It may dictate that you ebb and flow your marketing—but it doesn’t mean you stop or restrict your presence. With social media and SEO/content marketing, there’s no off-season. An article that’s posted on your website in March may be the search result that drives a sale in November.
Think of your marketing efforts as constant lead nurturing. It’s all about building solid relationships through consistent conversations with your target audience, acknowledging that while you don’t know when they will buy, you know some of them will buy sooner or later.
Here’s a quick overview of how you can build up a lead nurturing program.
Generate leads
You can’t market if you don’t have anyone to talk to. You’re going to want to generate leads on a macro and micro level. Some tactics, like social media and offering something for free on your website, tend to draw big numbers and many of those leads aren’t really quite the right fit. But that’s okay, because you haven’t expended a lot of money or time to attract them.
You’ll also want to generate some more targeted leads. To do this, first you need to define your sweet spot customer. Then create a lead scoring tool, which will let you objectively assess leads and sort them accordingly.
Create a drip campaign
Lead nurturing is all about regular contact. Now that you know who your sweet spot customer is, what kinds of information would be helpful to them? Note: I did not say what kinds of things could you sell them. This is about you offering value over and over again. Make me smarter, more efficient or better at my job and I will be indebted to you. Try to sell me something all the time and I will disconnect.
Related Article: Become a Marketing Master
You don’t have to offer them a 20-page white paper each time. It can literally be a nugget—a single idea or suggestion. In fact, they’re more likely to keep reading what you send if you do keep it bite-sized.
Test, track and tweak
The beautiful thing about most drip campaigns is that they’re so trackable. You will be able to test headlines, the types of content you’re sharing, day of the week and a host of other variables.
Let the data help you fine tune your program and keep in mind, even if it needs a lot of tweaking, you’re still ahead of 95% of your competitors who are still trying to time the market!
Don’t expend energy trying to figure out when to market. The answer is now.
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